Neal Stephenson - Reamde

From over near the cabin, he heard the drone of a small engine starting up.

He stood to see Jones astride an all-terrain vehicle. Jones spent a few moments figuring out the controls, then got the thing turned around and headed around the side of the house, trying to make it out to the road.

SOKOLOV WAS IN worse pain than he’d ever experienced, and he reckoned that he might lose the leg before this was all over. Had even considered pulling out his knife and self-amputating. Other than that, however, he was not doing that badly. No bullets had struck him. He had not suffered serious trauma during the collapse of the sleeping porch. The actual deck of the porch, which had thudded into the ground right next to him—a blunt guillotine blade that would have pinched him in half, had he landed wrong—had formed a pocket; all the logs and other debris that had rained down on top had been held up above the ground by its planking, which had been crumpled and compressed but not altogether driven into the ground.

So he was fine. He just couldn’t move. The heap of logs provided several large apertures through which he could look out and view his surroundings, and he had experimented with aiming the rifle through these. But no targets had presented themselves.

Until, that is, he heard the ATV starting up.

He could not actually see the ATV—his view in that direction was blocked by a sizable chunk of the cabin’s roof—and so he assumed that this was Jake, come back to reclaim his vehicle.

It idled for a few moments. The driver revved its motor and put it into gear, then began to ride it around the side of the cabin, circumventing the debris pile in which Sokolov was trapped.

Through a gap between logs Sokolov caught a brief glimpse of the driver’s head. Jones.

He thrashed around, sending a shocking wave of pain up his leg, and twisted into a position from which he could fire the rifle through another gap. He expected that Jones would be passing by very soon.

Which Jones obligingly did, and Sokolov pulled the trigger a few times as the vehicle came into view.

The engine stopped with a mechanical crunch, and Jones cursed. Unfortunately the vehicle’s momentum had carried it out of Sokolov’s sight. He heard Jones climbing off and unlimbering his Kalashnikov. The end of the weapon’s barrel appeared for a moment, silhouetted on the edge of Sokolov’s aperture.

But the gunshots that he heard next were not Kalashnikov rounds fired from nearby, but pistol shots from a greater distance. Not just one, but two pistols firing round after round.

TOTALLY EXPOSED AT the base of the rubble pile, harassed by poorly aimed rounds from faraway pistols, unable to seek cover in the log heap because he knew that an armed man was lurking back in there, Jones rolled to his feet and broke into a run, heading away from the cabin, back the way he had come. When it became obvious what he was doing, Yuxia broke from cover and went charging after him, screaming curses and firing the pistol wildly until it was out of ammunition. But by that time, Jones had disappeared into the forest at the base of the hill.

A FEW MINUTES after Seamus and Yuxia left him behind, Richard forced himself to get on his feet and begin hobbling up the trail. He had swallowed as much ibuprofen as his system could handle and he had swaddled the sprained ankle in strips of fabric cut from Jahandar’s garments. A long tree branch, trimmed and whittled, served as a walking staff. The high road—the climb up to the top of the big flat rock, followed by the long traversal of the talus slope—would be many hours of misery for a man in his condition. But there was another way of getting to Jake’s, a low road leading along the edge of the forest, through the old abandoned mining camp and then around a spur of the mountain into the valley of Prohibition Crick. It seemed much the better choice. So he split off from the trail shortly before it pierced the tree line, and hobbled south through the woods. He had feared that this would turn into an endless, toiling death march, but once he found his stride, he began to make reasonably good time—not a hell of a lot slower than if he hadn’t sprained his ankle.

The first leg of the journey, from the trail to the old mining camp, presented some difficult going in places. At one point, he was forced to range up and down a slope looking for the easiest place to traverse it. In the end, he found the spot by noticing a trail that had been pounded into the ground by several people who had gone before him. It was obvious from the freshness of the traces and the litter left behind that he was now following literally in the bootprints of Jones’s contingent of jihadists. Once he worked his way through the difficult bit, which involved a certain amount of scooting along on his butt, keeping his staff planted to prevent him from avalanching down the hill, he came out into a stretch of more level ground that, if memory served, would lead eventually to the mining camp. Here the jihadists’ trail spread out, as they had formed a broad front while reconnoitering the level ground. Richard chugged along freely in their wake, planting his staff with each stride.

His mind wandered. He now dared to believe that everything was going to work out okay, that Zula would have made it safely to Jake’s by this point, and that he would get there soon. That Jones would slip away into the Idaho/Montana wilderness, or else be captured, and that life for the Forthrasts would return to normal. Which got him to thinking about all the email, all the tweets that would be waiting for him, all the things left undone. And as part of all that, it occurred to him to wonder what Egdod was up to. Because, come to think of it, Richard had been logged on as Egdod when Jones had severed his Internet link. Egdod would have reverted to his bothavior, which in his case would mean trudging for thousands of miles across T’Rain, trying to get back to his mountaintop palace. This would, to put it mildly, draw lots of notice in that world. He wondered how many high-level characters had showed up to attack Egdod, and whether any of them had succeeded in bringing the old man down. He tried to recollect what the landscapes looked like between Carthinias and Egdod’s home zone. He envisioned the aged wizard wading through swamps, trudging doggedly across deserts, scaling mountain ranges, and walking through forests.

Kind of like Richard was doing. Egdod, of course, carried a wizard’s staff, just a simple stick, no fancy carvings or jewels. Just like what Richard was carrying now. Egdod’s beard was long and white, where Richard’s was just a couple of days’ gray stubble. And Egdod, of course, had no need to carry a huge, looted revolver in his waistband. Hell, Egdod didn’t even have a waistband. But despite all of those differences, Richard still found something hugely enjoyable about the fact that, at the same moment, both he and Egdod were wandering alone across their respective worlds, seeing everything close up in a way that they rarely had a chance to. Getting back in touch with the terrains from which they had sprung, autochthonously, early in their lives.

And possibly beset by unknown enemies. Richard, in his reverie, had quite forgotten to keep an eye out for the mountain lion. He executed a slow pirouette around his staff, just to see if anything was hunting him. But of course the whole point of being hunted was that you didn’t know it was happening. He stood still for a minute or two, just listening, just being aware of the place. Enjoying the moment. Because very soon this part of his life would be over, and he’d be descending into the valley of Prohibition Crick the way he had done on that autumn afternoon in 1974 with a bearskin on his back. Except that instead of finding a hidden smuggler’s cabin, he would find a nice modern cabin with Internet, full of people who would all want to talk to him.