Her waving… hurrying for her car… headed for the airstrip… headed for Phoenix.
Wearing a business-suity kind of rig, sure, because she wasn’t going to any Quonset hut mining headquarters out in the desert, she was going someplace where there was a carpet on the floor and the view was from more than three stories up. Going to see the big boys.
Nice legs she had m get-ting on but I am ‘t too old to appreciate a pretty knee… nice, yessir, but—And suddenly it all came together in his mind, not with a click but with a big loud ka-pow, and for a moment, before the cougar uttered her coughing, rising growl, he thought the sound of breaking glass was in his mind, that it was the sound of understanding.
Then the growl began, quickly rising to a howl that started him urinating in pure fear. For a moment it was impossible to associate that sound with anything which had ever walked on the earth. He wheeled, spraying a pin-wheel of piss, and saw a dark, green-eyed shape splayed out on the tiles. Bits of broken glass gleamed in the fur on its back. He knew what it was immediately, his mind quickly putting the shape together with the sound in spite of his startlement and terror.
The mountain lion-the flashlight showed it to be an extremely large female-raised her face to his and spat at him, revealing two rows of long white teeth. And the.30-.06 was back on the stage, leaned up against the movie screen.
“Oh my God no,” Billingsley whispered, and threw the flashlight past the cougar’s right shoulder, missing it intentionally. When the snarling animal snapped its head around to see what had been thrown at it, Billingsley broke for the door.
Cynthia was pouring herself a fresh glass of spring-water when the cougar let go its first cry. The sound of it unwound all her nerves and muscles. The plas tic bottle slipped from her relaxing fingers, hit the floor between her sneakers, and exploded like a balloon water bomb. She knew the sound for what it was-the yowl of a wildcat-immediately, although she had never heard such a sound outside of a movie theater. And, of course—weird but true-that was still the case.
He ran with his head down, tucking himself back into his pants with the hand that had been holding the flash-light. The cougar loosed another of its screaming, dis-traught cries-the shriek of a woman being burned or stabbed, deafening in the closed bathroom—and then launched herself at Billingsley, front paws splayed, long claws out. These sank through his shirt and into his back as he groped for the doorhandle, slicing through scant muscle, flaying him in bloodlines that came together like a V. Her big paws snagged in the waistband of his pants and held for a moment, pulling the old man-who was screaming himself now-back into the room. Then his belt broke and he went tumbling backward, actually landing on top of the cougar. He rolled, hit the glass—littered floor on his side, got to one knee, and then the cougar was on him. She knocked him onto his back and went for his throat. Billingsley got his hand up and she bit off the side of it. Blood beaded on her whiskers like skarn-garnets. Billingsley screamed again and shoved his other hand under the shelf of her chin, trying to push her back, trying to make her let go.
He felt her breath on his cheek, pushing like hot fingers. He looked past her shoulder and saw the horse on the wall, his horse, prancing wild and free. Then the cougar lunged forward again, shaking his hand.in her jaws, and there was only pain. It filled the world.
Then it was a man screaming. Tom Billingsley screaming.
She turned, saw Steve stare at Marinville, saw Mar-inville look away, cheeks leaden, lips pressed together but trembling all the same. In that moment the writer looked weak and lost and oddly female with his long gray hair, like an old woman who’s lost track not only of where she is but of who she is.
Still, what Cynthia felt most for Johnny Marinville in that moment was contempt.
Steve looked to Ralph, who nodded, grabbed his gun, and ran toward the stage-left opening. Steve caught up with him and they disappeared that way, running abreast. The old man screamed again, but this time the cry had a gruesome liquid quality, as if he were trying to gargle and scream at the same time, and it didn’t last long. The cougar yowled again.
Mary went to Steve’s boss and held out the shotgun she had up until then barely let go of.
“Take it. Go help them.”
He looked at her, biting his lip. “Listen,” he said. “I have lousy night-vision. I know how that sounds, but-”
The wildcat screamed, the sound so loud it seemed to drill into Cynthia’s ears.
Gooseflesh danced up her back.
“Yeah, like a gutless blowhard, that’s how it sounds,” Mary said, and turned away. That got Marinville moving, but slowly, like someone who has been roused from a deep sleep.
Cynthia saw Billingsley’s rifle leaning against the movie screen and didn’t wait for him.
She grabbed the gun and sprinted across the stage, going with it held high over her head like a freedom fighter in a poster-not because she wanted to look romantic but because she didn’t want to run into something and risk having the gun go off. She might shoot someone up ahead of her.
She ran past a couple of dusty chairs standing by what looked like a defunct lighting control-panel, then down the narrow hall they had taken to get to the stage in the first place. Brick on one side, wood on the other. A smell of old men with too much time on their hands. And too much jizz, judging from their video library.
There was another animal scream-much louder now—but no more noise from the old man.
Not a good sign. A door banged open not far ahead, the sound slightly hollow, the sound only a public restroom door can make when it’s banged against tile.
So, she thought. The men s or the women’s, and it must be the men’s, ‘cause that s where the toilet is.
“Look out!” Ralph’s voice, raised in a near-scream “Jesus Christ, Steve-”
From the cat there came a kind of spitting roar. There was a thud. Steve yelled, although whether in pain or sur prise she couldn’t tell. Then there were two deafening explosions.
The muzzle-flashes washed the wall outside the men’s room, for a moment revealing a fire extin guisher on which someone had hung a ratty old sombrero She ducked instinctively, then turned the corner into the bathroom. Ralph Carver was holding the door propped open with his body. The bathroom was lit only by the old man’s flashlight, which lay in the corner with the lens pointed at the wall, spraying light up the tiles and kicking back just enough to see by. That faint light and the rolling smoke from Ralph’s discharged rifle gave what she was looking at a sultry hallucinatory quality that made her think of her half a dozen experiments with peyote and mescaline.
Billingsley was crawling, dazed, toward the urinals, his head down so far it was dragging on the tiles. His shirt and undershirt had been torn open down the middle. His back was pouring blood. He looked as if he had been flogged by a maniac.
In the middle of the floor, a bizarre waltz was going on The cougar was up on her hind legs, paws on Steve Ames’s shoulders… Blood was pouring down her flanks but she did not seem to be seriously hurt. One of Ralph s shots must have missed her entirely; Cynthia saw that half of the horse on the wall had been blown to smithereens Steve had his arms crossed in front of his chest; his elbows and forearms were against the cougar’s chest.
“Shoot it!” he screamed. “For Christ’s sake, shoot it again!”
Ralph, his face a drawn mask of shadows in the faint light, raised the rifle, aimed it, then lowered it again with an anguished expression, afraid of hitting Steve.
The cat shrieked and darted its triangular head forward. Steve snapped his own head back. They tangoed drunk-enly that way, the cat’s claws digging deeper into Steve’s shoulders, and now Cynthia could see blood-blossoms spreading on the coverall he wore, around the places where the cat’s claws were dug in. Its tail was lashing madly back and forth.