“Jim Hilton used to call us the beanpole twins,” said Kyle.
“Wonder where the old devil is now? Wonder how many of us will make it back to Calico next month?”
“I wouldn’t shed floods of tears if Mr. Pompous gets wasted on the road.”
“Jeff?”
Kyle nodded. “Right.”
“He’s not that bad.”
“He’s not that good.”
“I wouldn’t mind him.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Chicken-fried with duchess potatoes and a side salad.”
KYLE DOZED in front of the blazing fire. Steve wandered through the house, eventually settling with an expensive shortwave radio. It had been kicked under one of the smashed beds, but it didn’t seem too badly damaged. A drawer in the basement workshop offered some batteries.
He carried it back with him and sat down by the blazing logs, using their dancing golden light to examine the radio.
The sudden burst of crackling static jerked Kyle awake. “On duty right… Shit! I didn’t know where I was. Thought I was back on the Aquila.”
“Nobody out there,” Steve said, punching the small silver buttons to take it all around the dial.
“Wasn’t that… Stop.”
“What?”
“Take it back a little. Thought I heard a voice or something.”
The hissing came and went, surging like invisible waves from the ether. Steve moved the controls more slowly and carefully.
The clock showed one minute past five in the afternoon.
Suddenly a faint voice emerged from the static. “Tempest on…” Then the background noise drowned out the voice.
“Find it again,” said Kyle excitedly. “Find it, Steve.”
“Shut up a minute. Using the fine seek-tuner control on it.”
“Probably that madman from… Barstow, wasn’t it? One we heard from space, raving on about Earthblood stuff.”
“Ah, the green light’s come on, showing someone’s transmitting. But it’s on bastardly low power.”
“Tempest… anyone… teenth. On hour… ry hour… lice on fif….”
Then it faded right away, and nothing Steve tried would bring it back again.
“Batteries are way down.”
“Think that was Zelig?”
Steve laid the radio gently among the litter of household items. “Could’ve been. Could’ve been Wile E. Coyote for all I know.”
“It surely—”
Kyle stopped speaking, his head swiveling toward the broken French windows that faced the snow-topped peaks to the west.
“Yeah,” breathed Steve. “I heard it, too.”
“Company?”
Both men crawled quickly across the room to grab their guns.
They waited in case the faint scratching sound was repeated.
“GOING TO CALL IT ‘Jaguar,’ I think,” said Steve Romero.
“Jaguar?”
“Or ‘Tiger,’ maybe ‘Puma.’ That’s the best name for it. No, ‘Panther.’ Yeah. Goes with its black color, doesn’t it?”
The cat was surprisingly plump and well fed. It had walked confidently in when Kyle opened the broken glass doors onto the back garden. Making a distant mewing sound, it had picked its way through and around the piled rubbish on the floor with an incredible delicacy then sat calmly in front of the fire and started to groom itself.
It hadn’t raised any objection when Steve knelt by it and started to stroke it. The head went back and the purring intensified. The slit green eyes narrowed with pleasure.
Now it was sitting on Steve’s lap while he tried to think of good names for it.
“‘Cannibal’ would be good,” offered Kyle.
“Why?”
“How’d you think it looks so sleek? Like they said about Alferd Packer when he’d eaten his hunting buddies. ‘Him too fat.’ Cannibal.”
“Never. I’ll call him ‘Panther.’ That’s settled. All right?”
Kyle stood up and stretched. “No. I got a better idea. Give him here a moment.”
Steve lifted the contented animal off his knee and let Kyle take it.
“What’re you going to call him? This better be real good.”
Kyle gently stroked the soft black fur, then held its head firmly in his right hand and gave it a swift, savage, sickening jerk, breaking the cat’s neck, killing it instanteously.
“I’m going to call it ‘food,'” he said.
Steve was shocked momentarily, but he couldn’t argue the point. Without food, they’d have trouble going on. They both agreed that it was delicious and tasted remarkably like rabbit.
Next morning they set off to walk the last three miles of their odyssey into Aspen, where Steve Romero finally discovered what had happened to his ex-wife, Alison, and his eighteen-year-old son, Sly.