James Axler – Trader Redux

It had been grotesquely full, with people hanging out of doors, squeezed through open windows. It was out of the question for Doc to board the packed coaches nearest him. There was a whistle and the train began to move off, shuddering with the load. He heard Emily calling out to him, though he couldn’t see her face in the crowd.

“Don’t worry, my dearest,” he shouted confidently. “Wait for me and I shall be along shortly. Wait for me.”

Then he was awakened by something.

“What?”

The night was still, with a breeze that seemed to spill over the end of the box canyon, out and along to the open plateau beyond. The fire was quite dead, the moonlight gleaming on the pile of soft white ashes.

Judas was lying down, asleep, still tethered securely to the tree by the pool.

Doc’s nostrils twitched. In his Victorian youth he’d often smoked, either small black cigarillos or a meerschaum pipe that he believed made him look grave and mature. Since being dragged into Deathlands he’d totally abandoned the foul weed and had found his sense of smell and taste had both improved by quantum leaps and bounds.

There was the tang of sagebrush; the faint scent of the fire; the indescribable odor of water and wet earth; his own sweat; the film of oil that coated the action of the big Le Mat, lying by his side.

“Something else?” he whispered.

The scent was allusive, bringing back a memory of something from his distant past.

Doc lay still, brow furrowed, allowing his dozing mind to free-associate as it sought the reference for the slightly acrid smell.

A trip out with the family? A dull, damp afternoon in a large city. Perhaps it had been on one of their visits to Manhattan. But where had he smelled that odd, acidic scent? Little Rachel hadn’t liked it. He was sure of that.

“Nasty, Papa.” Her little face screwed up with distaste as she peered in through the bars.

“Bars,” Doc breathed.

A cage?

The zoo!

“The lion house,” he mouthed, feeling his heart leap into his throat with the sudden fear.

For several erratic, jerky beats of the heart, Doc found himself utterly unable to move a muscle. He lay there, staring fixedly at the sky, his breathing fast and shallow, aware that the scent was stronger.

And closer.

Control eased back into his body, and he started to turn his head to the left, infinitely slowly.

The cougar was crouched on its haunches, belly down in the dry dirt, less than twenty feet away from Doc, its golden eyes gleaming directly into his, fixed on him with an unearthly, blankly unemotional stare.

For a few moments Doc found that he’d forgotten how to swallow and breathe. His mouth was sandpaper dry, his tongue feeling eight sizes too large for his mouth. He knew that there was nobody within twenty miles who could come to his rescue. Even so, shouting for help was a physical impossibility.

He tried to judge how big the predator was, but his mind refused to cope with the question. Over the years Doc had seen other pumas, but they’d all been somewhere between six and ten feet in length.

This monster was closer to twenty-five feet, looking from the wedges of muscle across shoulders and back to weigh around half a ton.

The feathery tip of its long tail moved back and forth, just brushing the sand, the noise no louder than the breathing of a sleeping baby.

There was enough light for Doc to be able to see the tremors that ran across the powerful corded muscles, giving warning that the mutie animal was literally trembling on the edge of staging its attack.

Out of the corner of his eye, Doc could see that Judas wasn’t going to save him this time. The mule was still locked away in deepest sleep.

Eternities passed.

Doc had cramps in his legs from the desperate struggle not to move or do anything that might finally trigger the cougar’s murderous assault. As long as he was completely still, there was the one-in-a-thousand chance that the creature might lose interest and simply go away.