James Axler – Trader Redux

One in a million , said the tiny, scared voice inside Doc’s head.

Now he could hear the cougar’s rhythmic breathing, overlaying a faint sound of purring, like a distant buzz saw. Doc looked at the creature, finding that the animal’s great yellow eyes were widening, seeming to draw him into their amber depths. It suddenly came to him that the cougar was deliberately hypnotizing him, like a snake with a petrified rabbit.

“I think not,” he whispered, finding that some of the dryness had gone from his mouth.

The noise of his voice registered with the crouched beast. Its sharp ears flattened along its skull, and the purring ceased. But the twitching of the muscles along the back and thighs redoubled, and the cat’s great jaws opened a little wider, enabling Doc to make out the gleam of moonlight on needle-sharp ivory.

Doc tried to remember everything he’d ever read about attacks by big cats. Often they brought up the powerful hind legs to disembowl their prey. Or they would use their front paws to slap at the victim, their claws ripping away chunks of flesh like a butcher’s cleaver. But a cougar of this size could easily take a full-grown man’s skull into its mouth and crunch it like ripe apple. Doc shivered.

“It is not death itself that I fear,” he murmured, “but the manner of my passing.”

The cougar growled softly, deep in its throat, at his words. And Judas stirred in its sleep. Doc lay between the two animals, and he hadn’t a scintilla of doubt that the cougar would take him first. The noise of his slaughter would rouse Judas, but the mule would be equally helpless against a predator of that size.

“Sorry, Judas,” Doc said.

He actually managed to smile at the thought that his famous last words would be addressed to a vile-tempered mule and wouldn’t be heard by human ears, to lie forever, unrecorded in the endless dirt.

The cougar opened its jaws wide and Doc winced, closing his eyes in anticipation of the charge. There was the foul stench of the carnivore’s breath, but no movement.

The cramp was insufferable and Doc could no longer stop himself moving. He wriggled to one side of his sleeping bag, groaning with the relief that the change of position brought him. Lying partly on his side, he found that his right arm was freed from the confines of the heavy bag.

“By the Three Kennedys!” The cougar watched curiously as the old man wormed his hand into the dirt at his side, until it encountered the cold weight of the LeMat.

For the first time since he’d been tugged from sleep, Doc glimpsed the feeble candle-glow of hope. If he could bring up the blaster, cock it, aim it and fire

Even a gigantic mutie cougar could bite broken teeth against the 63-caliber shotgun round.

He risked another sideways glance.

The predator responded by changing its own position, moving into a menacing crouch, the hind quarters rising in the air, the back legs braced to pounce. The tail was still moving, more and more slowly.

Stopping.

Doc’s brother, Cyril Tanner, had once owned a small tabby kitten, which had ended its days crushed under the wheels of a brewer’s wagon. Doc had often watched it hunting sparrows, or readying itself to leap on a trailed length of cotton in Cyril’s trim apartment. He noted the way that its scrawny tail would move slower and slower, until, just a second before the attack, it would stop.

With the fluid ease of the professional shootist, Doc sat up, leveling the Le Mat and squeezing the trigger. The mutie cougar was actually in midspring at the moment that the blaster fired, its jaws open, front paws stretching out toward its helpless victim.

Doc had a splinter of a second of frozen horror to realize that he had missed. The great weight of the cougar landed on top of him, kicking and growling, one flailing hind paw knocking the Le Mat spinning from his hand.

There wasn’t even time for a snatched prayer.

The old man’s brain was enveloped in a vast shroud of black velvet that sucked him into its darkness.