Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Rufus stopped his truck just in time to avoid hitting the alligator that was running after the pigs. He was marveling at this creature, which was long enough to block both lanes of the highway, when he heard a loud noise to the left. He looked over to see a small jet, landing gear skimming the runway. Blood erupted from a collision between it and one or more hogs, and the entire plane slewed to the right and came down wrong and hard on its front gear.

After that it was just a long tumbling skidding disaster. A whole section of fence went down. Rufus gunned his truck across it and came as close as he deemed prudent given the possibility of fire. He was half out the door when he saw the alligator run right by him. He reached back in and pulled his Kalashnikov down from the gun rack in the truck’s rear window. He had carried it halfway to the plane before it occurred to him to wonder what shocked observers in the control tower would make of a brown man with an assault rifle prowling around a jet crash.

But more pressing matters than that held his attention for a few minutes. When the gator was dead and the wounded man’s bleeding leg tied off, he turned his back on the scene and walked over to where Snout was lying on his side on the runway. Hind legs paralyzed, evidently. Blood coming from his anus and from his quivering nostrils.

Four hundred kilograms if he weighed an ounce. Maybe the cops would weigh him later and publish official stats.

Snout was dazed, eyes half closed. He still had that old pattern of spots on his muubi .

His nostrils twitched as he caught Rufus’s scent. His eyes came open and he tossed his head. But Rufus was too smart to be within range of those six-inch tusks. Anyway, this gave Rufus the impetus to do what needed doing, which was to fire four 7.62 mm slugs into Snout’s brain.

He was still standing there weeping when the blond woman from the jet crash walked up to him and said, “Are you all right, friend?”

Once it became clear that the people with the knives were solely interested in harvesting meat from the dead pigs and the alligator, the queen’s team evacuated the plane and began to collect the luggage. Some of this had hurtled into the cabin through a broken door and the remainder had tumbled out the rear of the plane after the tail section had ruptured. Willem and Alastair helped Johan, the concussed co-pilot, get out of the cockpit and then out of the plane. Lennert got clear of the wreck by hopping on one leg. This seemed like a very bad idea for a man who had suffered such a grievous injury, but fuel had been leaking from a ruptured wing tank near where he’d been reclining, and he had been thinking about possible implications.

Not far away, a large pickup truck was parked atop a flattened section of airport fence. Its owner, the tourniquet-savvy man with the Kalashnikov, was up to something a couple of hundred meters away, back on the runway where the initial jet/pig impact had taken place. A minute earlier this man had predicted, in colloquial English, that no fire trucks would be coming to their aid because of perceived security risks. Thus far his prediction had been borne out by events, or lack thereof. Sirens were audible but none were getting louder.

The queen’s top priority, now that all members of her team had got to a safe distance from the plane, was to get Lennert and Johan to a hospital. The only capable vehicle she could see nearby was this man’s pickup truck. So she was going to talk to him. As she strode across churned turf in his wake, she saw a second, similar vehicle pull up and park next to his. This one had a cartoon of an alligator painted on its door. A woman got out of the driver’s seat. This woman seemed primarily interested in the man with the Kalashnikov, and not in the sense that she saw him as a threat. She was looking after him.

That somehow emboldened Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia to walk right up to the man even after he had discharged four rounds at point-blank range into the face of a fantastically enormous boar reclining on the tarmac.

Then he carefully removed the magazine from the weapon, cycled the action once to eject the remaining round from the chamber, and threw it on the ground. He was sobbing.

In his emotional state it took him a moment to respond to her greeting. While waiting for him to settle down, she looked around and noticed that Amelia—now her acting security chief—had followed her all the way out here. She was still gripping her pistol with both hands, keeping it aimed at the ground, focusing her gaze primarily on the sobbing man but also glancing around from time to time for incoming swine, alligators, and knife-brandishing scavengers.

The queen looked over toward the pickup trucks. The woman who’d gotten out of the second truck was headed toward them, walking as briskly as she could manage given that she was of grandmotherly age and, like most Americans, overweight. “Amelia,” she said, “go and ask that woman if she can take Lennert and Johan to hospital. She is friendly.”

“How do you know that!?” Amelia demanded. Then, remembering her manners, added, “ Uwe Majesteit .” Her parents had immigrated to Rotterdam from Suriname. She had grown up poor and tough, she had thrived in the military, and she was fastidious about manners and hierarchy.

“Don’t address me that way here.”

“What should I call you then, mevrouw ?”

The question hung there as a new thought was occurring to the queen, which was that she and her team had just entered the country illegally.

Presumably there would be some face-saving way to patch it all up. But until the matter had been sorted out properly, it might be wisest if they did not go around advertising the fact that she was who she was. The tabloids would have a field day with this. They would never accept that the crash had been unavoidable. Instead they would make the queen out to be a foolish person, in over her head, unqualified.

And that was before they even sank their teeth into the question of why she was coming to Texas in the first place.

“Saskia.”

Amelia raised her eyebrows, but reluctantly obeyed the order, leaving “Saskia” alone with the sobbing boar-killer. She holstered her pistol at the small of her back and ran toward the woman from the pickup truck. Amelia covered ground fast.

About then the man finally pulled himself together and turned toward Saskia. He pulled his T-shirt up away from his flat belly and used it to wipe tears and sweat from his face. This made Saskia want to do likewise. She was suddenly conscious of how sweaty she had become in the short time she had been out of the plane. She wasn’t wearing a lot of makeup but she wondered how bad the damage would be if she were to make a similar gesture. Fenna could always fix it later, if she would only stop being such a baby about the plane crash.

The man turned his head to one side and stuck his tongue out in a way that reminded her of New Zealanders doing their haka dance. She wondered if he might be a Pacific Islander, at least in part.

Having got that out of the way, he turned toward her.

“Ma’am.”

“Thank you for helping my friend. We are going to get him to hospital. We will get your knife back to you.”

The man glanced past Saskia, took in the scene. “Mary’s fixing to help you. Gonna be fine. Y’all need anything else?”

It seemed a remarkably generous and open-ended offer from a man in such a condition. Saskia looked sharply at him to see whether he was being sarcastic. He would not meet her gaze, but his eyes strayed briefly toward the dead boar. “I got no purpose now,” he explained. “Gotta fix on something.”

“Well, for example, would you know how to get us out of here?” Saskia ventured. It might have been better if she had worked in some extra phrasing such as hypothetically or in principle, supposing we were to request it but this was how it came out. “We can pay you.”