Boyd frowned as he watched the bushes carefully. Scanning the dark green foliage, it seemed that there was something lying on the ground beyond the leaves. Something human. He couldn’t be sure. It had started to snow. Each flake brushed each leaf and made it move so that...
A hand. He could see her hand. Grinning he moved closer, and tightening his grip on the carbine, he raised it to shoulder level.
‘I can see you,’ he said teasingly. ‘Hiding in there. You insult my intelligence, Swifty. I could shoot you from here, no problem. Now throw out your gun and let’s see the rest of you. If I see anything other than your tits pointing at me, I’ll—’
Suddenly there was an explosion of sound and vegetation as if some kind of mortar bomb had landed in front of him. Before he had time even to think or to squeeze the trigger, something huge bulldozed its way through the foliage toward him, roaring like a hurricane. Trees and bushes were literally flattened as if another out-of-control satellite were crashing to Earth.
Boyd was so surprised that he turned and fled, his nerve completely gone. It was an impulse that automatically invited a chase, although not a protracted one. He hadn’t gone more than two or three metres when the huge silverback yeti knocked him down, tearing at his clothing, biting his neck and back.
Boyd began to scream.
Watching the yeti attack from the comparative safety of her rhododendron tunnel. Swift had a sudden and horrific insight into the power and ferocity of the creature she had come to protect. The yeti male was enormous, much larger than she had expected. Rebecca had been a third of the size of this monster — Madonna compared to Schwarzenegger.
The yeti yanked Boyd off the ground and, still holding him by one arm, stamped him down again.
Boyd screamed again as his arm was torn from his body at the shoulder. Swift might have been glad. Instead she felt sorry for him.
Distracted by the sight of blood, the yeti sucked at the fragmented end of Boyd’s arm. Mortally injured, Boyd feebly turned on his belly and tried to crawl away. He managed only half a metre before, with a terrible roar, the yeti fell upon him again. It picked Boyd up like an item of hand luggage, held him high above its head as if it were about to stow him somewhere, and then threw him to the ground, stamping on his torso a second time.
The yeti sat down, grunting loudly. It regarded Boyd with vague disinterest for a moment, then picked him up a third time. But instead of throwing him down again, this time the yeti brought Boyd’s torn and bloody stump of a shoulder up to its huge jaws and jerked its head away, tugging at the flesh of the man’s bare breast. Boyd was still alive, feebly trying to push the yeti’s big head away even as he was being eaten.
Watching with horror. Swift found herself gagging.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she said and covered her face.
When she looked up again, she saw that the yeti had cast Boyd aside and that he had stopped moving. Relief quickly gave way to terror as she realized that the yeti’s big yellowish eyes were now fixed squarely on her.
Thirty-one
‘Do not be amazed by the true dragon.’
Swift remained quite still. There was no point in running. Boyd had proved that. The big silverback yeti had moved with a speed that she found astonishing for so large a creature. She estimated it to be almost two and a half metres tall and as heavy as two hundred and seventy kilogrammes. Attacking Boyd, it had moved like a gold medal Olympic sprinter, flying out of his starting blocks. What was more it had moved bipedally, on legs as big as tree trunks, powering itself forward with arms so hugely muscled they would have made even the largest bodybuilder look puny. Roaring like a tiger and with hair trailing in matted red pennants, the yeti looked as formidable a hominoid as perhaps the earth had ever seen.
She didn’t doubt that the slightest movement would cause the yeti to attack her. The hair on its headcrest was fully erect and the teeth fully exposed. Numb with cold as she was. Swift wondered how long she could force herself to lie there before severe chill turned to frostbite and exposure. Already her fingers and toes were without feeling and it was only the sight of the anomalously even number of fingers on Boyd’s severed hand that stopped her from crying out loud with terror and discomfort.
The yeti sat down and faced her, feeding on Boyd’s arm, occasionally glancing over its Rushmore-sized shoulders, as if waiting for the rest of the group of which. Swift was quite certain, it must surely have been leader.
But it was not the rest of the group that came.
The yeti stood up and to Swift’s surprise she heard human speech. Someone was there with her, in the hidden valley. Someone who seemed to be talking to the yeti. She knew the sound of Nepali well enough to recognize that this was some other language. But it did not seem to be any of the dialects spoken by the Sherpas. And she was quite sure that this was not someone from ABC who was speaking.
For a second she remembered Rebecca’s imitative abilities, wondered if this might not be actual yeti speech, and almost immediately rejected this: The blood to her brain must be freezing.
The next second she saw two human feet, naked like her own. She heard a thin reedy voice, and then a bearded man was kneeling down at the tunnel’s entrance.
‘Everything is all right,’ he said quietly. ‘You can come out now. It is quite safe.’
It was the sadhu. The man she and Jameson had mistakenly tracked when they had first arrived in the Sanctuary.
Swift felt her face smile with relief.
‘Swami Chandare,’ she panted.
‘Are you training to become a sadhu?’ he laughed. ‘Why are you naked?’
Swift shook her head, too cold now to say anything. She felt the swami crawling into the tunnel beside her, turning her over, his hands upon her bare stomach. He wanted her too. Feebly she struck at him with her fist.
‘Calm yourself. I must bring you heat. Listen to me. You must relax. Breathe calmly and listen to me. You must breathe gently and feel nothing but my hands. And hear nothing but my voice. Feel the heat in my hands. Heat coming into your body. Breathe deep and listen to my voice...’
For a moment, she felt quite light-headed, as if she were floating somewhere. Was he hypnotizing her? If he was, she felt no fear. She let herself be stroked by the honied tones of his voice. And by the healing warmth in his hands. The power in his hands seemed to come from some great underground hot spring, so potent it might have been the force of life itself. It was like the anaesthesia offered by the drugs in one of Jameson’s darts, only much, much warmer than anything that might be offered at the point of a needle. She closed her eyes, feeling more relaxed now. Somehow the cold no longer mattered, and for a second she felt fear, thinking that this might be death, but then there was his voice again, calming her, telling her that it was not cold, assuring her that the heat she could feel in her stomach was coming from his hands.
‘...heat coming from my hands. There is no cold. There is only heat from my hands...’
There was heat. A deep, profound heat that seemed to flow out of him like a stream of hot water, warming her belly, her chest, and her arms. An inexorable tingling painless heat spreading through her limbs as if he had simply plugged her into an electric current. Feeling returned to her hands and to her feet. There was not even any pain as sluggish, half-frozen blood began to move in her bluish toes and her fingers. Just a wonderful feeling of well-being that seemed never ending.
‘...listen to me. Awake.’
Swift opened her eyes and stared into the swami’s bearded face. He smiled. His hands were still on her naked body, but she felt no sense of her own nakedness. She felt only warmth. Incredible warmth. The last time she had felt so warm she had been lying on a beach in Santa Monica. Her breath was there in front of her mouth, only without the accompaniment of teeth chattering together. It was freezing cold. And yet she was as warm as if she had still been wearing her SCE suit. The snow under her bare behind actually felt like the softest and warmest sand.