James Axler – Road Wars

Trader emerged from the door of the cabin, holding a wicker basket. “Got some eggs, bread and potatoes,” he called. “Last us a couple of days.”

Abe was hardly listening, as he looked farther up the ravine. A frail, rusting bridge crossed over the river a little way upstream, and he could just make out what might have been another path climbing up the opposite wall of rock. He shook his head, unable to decide which was the most frightening. Certainly the raft offered the best hope of escape. Once aboard it, if they didn’t drown in the first hundred yards, there was no possible way the posse could catch up with them.

But the vital word was “hope.”

And that hope seemed to have shrunk from small to invisible, just in those racing minutes that Abe looked at the river.

“How about crossing and going up the other side, Trader?” he shouted.

“Why?”

“Safer.”

“No way, Abe. Once rode one of these white-water beauties, when I was sixteen or so. Colorado River. And I fought the Snake and licked it, a few years later. I’m looking forward to going on this one.”

Abe looked disconsolately down at the swollen, green rubber raft, seeing the flimsy paddles, feeling a sense of deep hopelessness.

He heard a loud hissing, as the material punctured and ripped.

Then the sound of the rifles.

Chapter Sixteen

It was like seeing something out of the midnight darkness of a bad dream, something that really happened with appalling speed, yet seemed, at the same time, to be happening with slow-motion crystal clarity.

The sequence began with the scar-faced man’s brutal act of stubbing out his glowing cigar on the tender flesh beneath Rajah’s tail.

Ryan’s hand was actually on the cool metal of the SIG-Sauer’s butt. By the time he’d drawn it from the oiled holster, the buffalo hunter was already down in the dirt and done for.

Despite his increasing senescence and physical weakness, the tiger reacted to the painful affront to its dignity with dazzling speed and ferocity.

Its head came around, jerking the chain out of Ellie’s fingers, and it reared up, one of the big front paws scything at the man’s grinning face. For a moment there was a bizarre resemblance to a reveler at Norleans Mardie ripping off his own grinning carnival mask.

The unsheathed claws stripped the entire scarred front off the buffalo hunter’s skull. The naked frightened eyes glowered for a second from their brimming caverns of bright blood, and the remaining teeth gleamed like pink coral. The veined nose disappeared, leaving a snuffling orifice in the center of the face that welled with scarlet.

The man tried to stand, breath bubbling from his throat, but Rajah wasn’t going to be so easily satisfied. The tiger dug the remains of its fangs into the hunter’s shoulder and pulled him to the ground, embracing him like a lost lover, then bringing up the enormously powerful rear legs. The tiger gutted the helpless man with a single thrusting upward kick, opening up the stomach, gouging meat and muscle off the raw hipbones, spilling the blue-gray intestines in the dirt.

“Fireblast!” Ryan breathed.

“Dark night!” J.B. echoed, bracing the Uzi ready at his hip.

“Here we go,” Nell yelped, letting go of the chain that held Balthazar, releasing the lion to play its part in the screaming carnage.

Rosa sprang forward after her mate, head thrown back, jaws open in a terrifying roar.

The panic among the crowd of spectators had become absolute and total.

Julie slapped at Ryan and J.B. to attract their attention. “Stay here!” she shouted. “Just don’t move and don’t shoot unless you have to.”

PARTS OF THE ORCHARD were awash with fresh blood, the ground sticky beneath the apple tree. There were nine corpses.

One was a little boy, less than two years old, his neck broken by someone trampling on him in the panic rush.

Ryan walked through the carnage, while the Kissoon girls struggled to return the excited lions to their cages. Rajah lay on his side, bleeding from three bullet wounds to his chest and back. Ellie was kneeling by him, cradling the great bristling head in her lap.