My only other alternative was to jump down to the ground, where I estimated I would last about five seconds.
I might last only slightly longer than that where I was, I thought as I leaped through the air again and landed on the next truck. I could hear the lobox's claws clicking and scraping on the steel behind me. It had gotten up to the roofs, and it was gaining on me. Fast.
One more leap, and I was on the roof of a semi parked right next to the Big Top. I sprang out into the air, arms extended full length, and my fingers caught the hard edge where a support cable ran horizontally along the length of the tent, beneath the canvas. I pulled, feet scraping on the canvas, and managed to haul myself up and over the cable, onto the incline leading up to the top. Immediately, instinctively, I rolled to my left.
The lobox landed right next to me-and would have landed on me if I hadn't rolled away. The claws of both its front paws punctured the canvas, and I knew I was finished. I was like a novice rock climber in sneakers on an ice sheet trying to escape from an experienced, fully rigged mountaineer; there was no way I could scramble up the steeply inclined canvas fast enough to escape the lobox, which had built-in pitons on all its feet. I flinched, every muscle in my body knotting as I waited for it to pull itself up the rest of the way, get its hind feet under it, and then proceed to use me for a quickly disposable scratching pole. I was close enough to it to see that it had a new dark stripe on its coat, this one running vertically down off its left shoulder, perpendicular to the black stripes running down its back on either side of its spine. But the stripe on its shoulder wasn't natural; it was dried blood from the gunshot wound I had inflicted on it. Not that wounding it had done me any good; as far as I could tell, getting nicked by the bullet hadn't slowed the beast down one iota and had probably only served to make it more determined to get me. I stared back into the all-too-human golden eyes; they were only inches from mine, and they seemed alive with an all-too-human glow of triumph.
I'd been beginning to feel like the Road Runner, the big difference being that it looked like Wile E. Coyote now had me, and I would really bleed, hurt, and die.
Then there was the sound of ripping canvas. Incredibly, the head of the lobox began moving in the opposite direction, away from me. Its ruff, which had been folly expanded, slowly fell, and I let loose a burst of hysterical giggles as I realized what was happening; the creature's saber claws were so sharp that they couldn't hold their owner's weight in the fabric, as thick as it was, and they were slicing like razors through the canvas.
The triumphal glow in the golden eyes had changed to what I swore was a look of astonishment, chagrin, and frustration as the broad-ribbed torso inexorably slid backward toward the edge of the tent defined by the support cable.
"Take that, you fucking overachieving furball," I said, still giggling hysterically as I shifted my weight and kicked the animal in the side of the head.
The creature uttered a very unloboxlike yelp and, to the sound of ripping canvas and the click of claws on steel cable, disappeared over the edge of the canopy.
Of course, it wasn't that I didn't have other things to worry about: there was the crack of a gun, and a bullet tore into the canvas three feet to the right of my head. I glanced to my left, saw two gray-suited gunmen standing in an open area of the roped-off field, well out beyond the four rows of semis. One man, presumably the one who had already taken the potshot at me, was aiming again, using both hands.
The second man grabbed the first man's wrist, forcing the first man to lower the gun. Words were exchanged, and then they both broke into a run toward the main entrance to the tent and disappeared from sight. I presumed that it had occurred to at least one of the men that it might prove tacky, if not downright difficult to explain, if a patron of World Circus were killed by a stray bullet in the air, and so they were going to come at me in another way. They certainly had plenty of options; I wasn't about to jump to the ground and try to run away while there was a stray lobox down there licking its oversize chops at the thought of my doing precisely that.
The only direction I had to go was up. I rolled over on my hands and knees; gripping the hard edge of a guy cable running upward just beneath a fold in the canvas, I scrambled up to the very top of the tent, where the center mast, a wooden pole nearly a foot in diameter, thrust up through a steel-reinforced circle in the canvas, almost four feet in diameter, where dozens of guy wires and ropes were anchored to concentric steel rings attached to the center mast. I lay down on my belly and, gripping the uppermost steel ring, peered over the edge of the circle onto the layout and doings below me.
Directly beneath me was a maze of ropes crisscrossing one another, pulleys, trapeze rigging, and a number of platforms holding lighting and sound equipment. The position of the lights made it impossible for anyone on the ground inside the tent to see me, but I could see down well enough.
The ground was about a hundred and twenty feet below me, and I was almost directly above the great curtain separating the performing area from "backstage." The section where the lobox's claws and the bullet had torn through the canvas was well away from the audience seating area, and it seemed nobody inside the tent had noticed all the commotion outside. Far below, everything looked to be business as usual. The enormous, double-walled steel cage had been thrown up around the ring, awaiting the entrance of the tigers. Mabel, with Luther astride her head, was halfway through her star turn, going into one of her pachyderm pirouettes at the far end of the tent.
While I was pondering just what it was I planned to do next, I had the good fortune to glance behind me just in time to see one of the ubiquitous men in gray suits reach the top of a ladder that had been set up against the vertical drop of the tent. Our eyes met, and as he started to reach inside his suit jacket for his gun, I waved and blew him a kiss just before reversing my hand grip on the steel ring and rolling forward, down through the opening. If the man wanted to follow me, assuming he didn't mind shooting me in front of a few hundred spectators, I would see how he enjoyed doing his act a hundred feet above the ground. I ended up on the rear edge of a wide wooden platform, just behind a bank of spotlights.
I moved along the platform a bit further, away from the opening above me, then squatted down and again looked down at the audience below, the rigging that surrounded me. Deja vu. I was back in the Big Top, high up in the rigging, where I had so often performed as a young man so many years before. I was amazed at how comfortable I felt, still, so high above the ground.
There was a pleasant tension in my muscles, almost as if they anticipated hurling me through space once again.
Easy does it, I thought; those tingling muscles of mine no longer had the tone they once had when, nearly two decades before, I'd swung around the perimeter of the tent on trapezes and guy ropes. Still, to get out of this one, I was going to need a goodly amount of Mongo the Magnificent’s old circus skills. I could only hope that a few of those skills were left, still alive and kicking in my muscle memory.
There was trapeze rigging about twenty feet to my right, but to get to it I was going to have to negotiate a tangle of guy wires, ropes, and electrical cables.
I leaped for a taut rope above my head, caught it, then began swinging hand over hand toward the relatively secure platforms, bars, and ropes of the trapeze rigging.
Mabel was the first to notice my presence. I was about halfway through my hand-over-hand journey at the very top of the tent when she suddenly stopped in the middle of a pirouette, abruptly turned in my direction, lifted her trunk, and trumpeted. Even from as high up and far away as I was, I could see the look of consternation on Luther's face. Then he looked up, saw me, and his jaw fell open.