Neal Stephenson - Reamde

When he was good and ready, he turned back around and followed the jihadists’ muddy footprints out of the trees and into the open plateau of the old mining camp.

A solitary man was walking toward him, a couple of hundred meters away, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He was moving with the weary, hitching gait of a man who knew he ought to be running but simply could not summon the energy. Occasionally he spun around and walked backward for a couple of steps, much as Richard had done just a few minutes before when he had been worried about the cougar. Unlike Richard, he was also scanning the sky. And indeed, now that Richard was out in the open, he noticed the sound of at least one helicopter.

The man turned forward again and froze, staring directly at Richard. It was Abdallah Jones.

Richard considered reaching around behind his back and drawing the revolver, but even with its long barrel and large caliber, it was useless at this range. No point, then, in letting Jones know that he was armed. Using the staff to ease his descent, he dropped to one knee. He and Jones were now looking at each other through a haze of scrub brush. Jones was bringing up his rifle: a Kalashnikov. Richard dropped to both knees, then to all fours, then scurried to a different position just as a few exploratory rounds hummed through the air above him and pelted into the mucky ground behind.

It was difficult to move in this way without making the brush wiggle, which would give Jones a way to track where he was. And in any case he was leaving a mashed-down trail that Jones could simply follow until he had a clear shot. Richard, looking behind him, saw that trail and noted its embarrassing width and, even here, heard the voice of a Furious Muse reminding him that he needed to lose weight. Zigzagging would break the trail up into short segments and make it more difficult for Jones to just drill him in his fat ass while strolling along in his wake. But it would also slow him down. So he very much needed to find proper cover and to take shelter there and force Jones to expose himself.

Calling to mind the last prospect he had enjoyed before he’d noticed Jones, he recalled a tumbledown log cabin that ought to be about fifty yards away from him now. It was not terribly far from the edge of the woods; and he could get into the trees with a short, very painful sprint from where he was now. He crawled, therefore, toward the woods, pausing occasionally to listen, hoping to get a fix on Jones’s location.

Which Jones obligingly provided by calling out: “Who’s your sneaky little friend, Dodge?”

Richard got to his feet and sprinted toward the woods, then dove as soon as he began to hear gunfire. Actually “sprint” was an awfully optimistic way to describe his movement; for Richard, it meant simply that he was moving as fast as he possibly could. Several rounds passed nearby, or so he judged from the weird sounds that seemed to be tearing up air molecules in his vicinity. From the place where he landed, it was a short belly crawl through mud into the trees. There he felt safe in getting up to a crouch and moving along through the forest until the old log cabin was visible just a stone’s throw away.

He could see Jones, tracking him at a leisurely pace through the part of the camp where he’d been running, diving, and crawling just a few moments earlier. Jones’s attention, quite reasonably, was directed mostly forward into the woods. But he kept turning to look back in the direction from which Richard had emerged into the camp a minute before. Richard took advantage of one such moment to hop out from cover and “sprint” perhaps half of the way from the tree line to the cabin, keeping an eye on Jones as he was doing so. Eventually Jones noticed him and brought the Kalashnikov around. Richard then dove again and belly-crawled the rest of the way to the cabin with rounds from Jones’s rifle humming through the air. If Jones had been carrying unlimited ammo, he could have laid down a lot more fire, and almost certainly hit Richard. But he seemed to be conserving his rounds. Which was a good thing. But it did cause him to wonder what had gone wrong, for Jones, in the last few hours. Why was he backtracking, alone, with depleted ammunition? What had been happening at Prohibition Crick this morning?

Once he had reached the safe side of the cabin, Richard got to his feet and shambled wearily into its front door and, in the sudden darkness, tripped over something soft that turned out to be the dead body of Erasto. Flies were already getting to it. Where did flies come from in situations like this?

Controlling a powerful urge to throw up, Richard patted the corpse down looking for weapons. But someone had already done this and relieved his departed comrade of everything except one ammunition clip for a pistol that was no longer here.

Richard knee-walked over the rotting remains of the building’s collapsed roof to a vacant window, popped his head up for a moment, and withdrew it. Jones had altered his course and was walking directly toward the cabin now, holding the rifle up at his shoulder, ready to fire.

“Another Forthrast holed up in the ruins of another log cabin, waiting to die,” Jones said. “You people are consistent, I’ll give you that. Unfortunately I don’t have an RPG, like the one we used on your brother’s place, but the results are going to be the same: a pile of dead meat in a ruined shack.”

Richard, as a younger man, might have been powerfully moved by this sort of talk. As it was, he was largely ignoring the meaning of the words themselves and using them mostly as a way to keep track of Jones’s position. He had pulled out the revolver, checked its cylinder, verified that it was loaded with the full five rounds. He got his thumb on its massive hammer and drew it back until it cocked.

“You see,” Jones said, “when you make the mistake of letting me get this close, the grenade doesn’t need to be rocket propelled.”

Richard was sitting on the floor beneath the window, gazing up into the shaft of light coming in through it, and saw an object fly in, bounce across the opposite wall, and tumble to the floor—which was actually the former roof. It bounced and came to rest almost within arm’s reach. Richard rolled toward it. His hand closed around it at the same moment as his conscious mind was understanding what it was: a grenade. It would have been clever, he later supposed, to toss it back through the same window at Jones, but the easy and obvious—and quick—throw from here was out the cabin’s vacant doorway. So that was where he threw it, and he was relieved to see it disappear from direct shrapnel line of fire beyond the poured concrete front stoop. It went off, and for a few seconds afterward, Richard’s life was all about that.

But only for a few seconds. He had waited too long, been too conservative; he had escaped the effects of that grenade only through dumb luck. He got to his feet, a little unsteadily, not just because of the ankle but the brain-stirring effect of the blast, and stood with his back to the wall next to the window. Through the opening he could see a narrow swath of what was out there, but Jones wasn’t in that swath. Getting the revolver out in front of him, he pivoted around his good foot and presented himself in the window opening long enough to get a wide-open view outside the cabin.

Jones was at about ten o’clock, and lower down than Richard had been expecting, since he had apparently thrown himself down to await the results of the grenade. He was just clambering to his feet, and when Richard caught his eye, he made a sudden sideways dive toward the cabin. Richard swung the revolver laterally, trying to track the movement, but his elbow struck the frame of the window at the same moment as he was deciding to pull the trigger. The revolver made a sound that would have seemed loud, had a grenade not just gone off, and a bullet drew a trace through weedy foliage about a foot away from Jones’s head. Jones was bringing his rifle up to return fire, but Richard was already withdrawing from the window. He pulled back so quickly, in fact, that he lost his balance and tumbled onto his ass.