Holloway looked down. The cases were visible on the ground, a couple directly underneath him but others knocked haphazardly by the branches of the spikewoods below. Holloway would have to reset the trapdoor and then retrieve the cases. That would be a pain in the ass as well as slightly dangerous—there was always the chance of predators—but it was better than having the explosives go off in a fire and turning the entire jungle into a conflagration.
In the branches below him, Holloway caught a flash of white. It looked like Pinto Fuzzy, lounging about. “You couldn’t have tried to put out the fire?” Holloway yelled down to the fuzzy. The creature didn’t answer, but then Holloway really didn’t expect it to.
Back out of the shed and toward the cabin, then.
The cabin, complete with caved roof and gaping wall, was a total loss. The fire appeared to have started here; Holloway suspected the surge from a lightning strike might have caused a spark, probably to the cooler’s or the air conditioner’s heat pump. The cabin had fire suppression equipment too; ironically much of its use was predicated on Holloway being in or near the cabin at the time to operate it. Basically, having paid out substantially for suppressing fire everywhere else at the compound, Holloway skimped on his own living quarters. He assumed it was a reasonable personal risk; outside of his law school hat, there wasn’t much of personal or financial value there. It could all be replaced with an extended shopping trip in Aubreytown.
Holloway looked through the ruins for his hat. He found it on his collapsed desk, charred and melted against his security camera.
That’s one more thing from law school I don’t get to use anymore,he thought. There was nothing for it now. Everything else was likewise black, melted, and crumbled. He sighed and headed back to the skimmer.
First, a test to see if the landing pad could hold the skimmer. It could. Holloway lifted off and landed three more times to be sure. It held. It seemed outside the cabin, the rest of the compound really was structurally all right. That was a small relief. The Aubreytown store had the prefab cabins in stock, but the rest of the compound would have been harder to replace.
That taken care of, Holloway returned to his storage shed and winched his trapdoor back into place. He would then additionally have to fly his skimmer under the platform and redo the supporting bolts and beams before he could set his explosives on top of it again. Holloway did that next, but not before using his infopad to order additional canisters of fire suppressant to replace the ones that were used. They weren’t cheap, but Holloway figured he was coming into some money anyway.
The trip to the jungle floor was next. Holloway wasn’t looking forward to dragging the explosives cases onto the skimmer; individually the cases were no larger than a large travel chest, but their indestructibility made them heavy and the explosives inside weren’t exactly featherweight, either. The one good thing about it all was that now that Holloway knew the trick about blasting the high frequency noise, he could land the skimmer and get all the cases in one go, rather than landing, setting up the emergency perimeter, dragging the one or two cases inside the perimeter into the ship, disassembling the perimeter and doing it again a few yards over. Out of consideration for Pinto, however, who Holloway assumed was still loitering in the branches, he waited until he landed before setting off the high-frequency loop in his sound system.
Fifteen minutes later, Holloway had a blinding headache and was drenched in sweat from dragging cases across the ground in the heat. It was probably the most he’d exercised in years, and he was reasonably sure that between the last time he’d moved this much material and right now, his heart had been replaced by two flabby slices of ham slapping futilely back and forth against each other. He hauled the last of the cases into the skimmer and then slid up against the side of vehicle, panting. As he looked up he saw Pinto, several meters up in his branch, looking down at him almost directly from above.
“Thanks for your help,” Holloway shouted up to the fuzzy. “It was really appreciated.” Again, not that Holloway had actually expected help from the thing. It just made him feel better to say it. Holloway bent over, hands on his knees, and practiced breathing slowly and deeply to help get himself over his light-headedness.
A couple of seconds later a small splash of something landed on the back of his head, followed by a slightly larger splash of something on his neck. He looked up and saw Pinto still staring at him from above.
Holloway grinned. The little bastard was spitting on him. Well, it was better than what a monkey would do, he supposed. He wiped off the back of his neck and was about to wipe the spittle on his pants when his peripheral vision picked up on something. Holloway stopped his hand and brought it directly in front of his face.
Pinto hadn’t been spitting on him.
Holloway looked up again just in time to catch a spatter of blood across the cheek.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, shit.” He wiped his face, got into the skimmer, slapped off the sound system, fired the skimmer’s rotors, and launched the thing straight up.
Holloway landed the skimmer hard, popped it open, and as gently as he could lifted Pinto out of the skimmer and onto the landing pad. The fuzzy lay there, limp and unresponsive. Holloway went back inside the skimmer and grabbed his first aid kit, nearly slipping again as he came out of the craft in a hurry.
Pinto’s abdomen was red and matted with blood. Its back and extremities were not, save for a single rivulet that streamed from its abdomen to its front left limb, which had dangled from the branch above Holloway. Holloway recognized that the fuzzy had been in the same position from the first time he had seen him until he felt the blood on his neck. It was possible the fuzzy had been dead that whole time. Or that it had been alive and Holloway had been jovially yelling at it when he could have been helping it, if he had just paid attention.
Pay attention. Holloway shook away irrelevant thoughts and focused on the creature in front of him. Holloway looked at Pinto’s abdomen and realized there was too much blood; he couldn’t see where it was coming from. He went back into the skimmer and found the water bottle he carried with him in the vehicle. It was about two thirds full. He brought it back to the fuzzy and as gently as he could poured it over the creature, washing away the clotted mess.
The wound made itself evident almost immediately; a hole the width of a finger in the fuzzy’s lower left abdomen. Holloway briefly wondered if it could have been caused by one of the tree spikes, but as he washed the wound he saw something gray and dull inside it. He washed the wound again, clearing away as much of the blood as possible, and saw it again.
It was a bullet.
We’ve marked them for extinction,Sullivan said. Pure and simple.
Holloway seized up, but fought it back and reached into the first aid kit for a gauze pad. He ripped open the packaging and placed it on the bullet wound, pressing firmly but gently to stop the flow of any more blood out of the small creature.
There was no more blood flowing out of the fuzzy. It was dead.
Holloway leaned his cheek to the fuzzy’s mouth, to feel for breath, and stroked the creature’s fur as if to will it back to life with a touch. There was no breath or life. If there had been a time to save Pinto, it had passed, a minute, an hour, or several hours ago. There was nothing Holloway could do but to remain hunched over the creature, silent, hoping to be wrong.
He was not wrong. It took him several minutes to admit it to himself.
When he looked up, he was not alone. Papa, Mama, and Grandpa Fuzzy stood in front of him, watching him grieve over the body of Pinto.
Holloway looked at the three of them blankly, the gears in his brain spinning fast and free before they jammed together with a jolt Holloway felt clear down his spine.
“Where’s Baby?” Holloway asked, to no one of them in particular.
Holloway didn’t know whether they understood him or not. What he did know is that when he asked the question, they all turned to the ruin of the cabin.