The creek was shallow—no more than knee deep for someone her size. I waded across, picked up the shoe, located her tracks in the mud on the far side and saw them joined by two other sets of footprints. Bare feet, larger than hers. I began to feel cold and hot inside at the same time.
I went back to the tent, strapped on the belt with the holstered revolver and took the carbine. The carbine held thirteen shells and it was semi-automatic. My first thought was of following the tracks up the hill; and then I realized that this would be more likely to alert whoever the other two people had been than if I drove. If they saw me coming in the panel, they might figure I’d given up the girl and left her. If they saw me coming on foot, particularly with Sunday, they wouldn’t have much choice but to think I was chasing her down.
I packed the gear. It would be hard to replace, maybe; and there was no guarantee we’d be coming back this way again. Then I got into the panel, letting Sunday up on the seat beside me for once, but making him lie down out of sight from outside. I pulled out on the highway and headed up the road parallel to the way I had last seen the footprints going.
We did not have far to go. Just up and over the rise that belonged to the meadow across the creek, I saw a trailer camp with some sort of large building up in front of all the trailers. No one had cut the grass in the camp for a long time, but there were figures moving about the trailers. I drove up to the building in front. There were a couple of dusty gas pumps there, and a cheer-fully-grinning, skinny, little old man in coveralls too big for him came out of the building as I stopped.
“Hi,” he said, coming up within about four feet of Sunday’s side of the car and squinting across through the open window at me. “Want some gas?”
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m looking for a girl. A girl about fourteen, fifteen years old with dark hair and doesn’t talk. Have you seen—”
“Nope!” he chirped. “Want some gas?”
Gas was something you had to scrounge for these days. I was suddenly very interested in him.
“Yes,” I said. “I think I’ll have some gas. And...”
I let my voice trail off into silence. He came closer, cocking his left ear at me.
“What’d y’say?” He stuck his head in the window and came face to face with Sunday, only inches between them. He stopped, perfectly still.
“That’s right,” I said. “Don’t move or make a sound, now. And don’t try to run. The leopard can catch you before you can take three steps.” He didn’t know that Sunday would never have understood in a million years any command I might have given to chase someone.
I jerked my thumb at the back of the panel. Sunday understood that. He turned and leaped into the back, out of the right hand seat in one flowing movement. The old man’s eyes followed him. I slid over into the right hand seat.
“Now,” I said, “turn around. Give me room to open the door.”
He did. I opened the door on that side of the panel a crack. The baggy coverall on his back was only inches away. Vertically in the center of the back, about belt level, was a tear or cut about eight inches long. I reached in through it and closed my hand on pretty much what I expected. A handgun—a five-chamber .22 revolver-stuck in a belt around his waist under the coveralls.
“All right,” I said, picking up the carbine and getting out of the panel behind him. “Walk straight ahead of me. Act ordinary and don’t try to run. The leopard will be with me; and if I don’t get you, he will. Now, where’s the girl? Keep your voice down when you answer.”
“Bub-bu-bu—,” the old man stammered. Sounds, nothing understandable. Plainly, as his repeated offer of gas had shown, whoever lived in this camp had chosen one of their less bright citizens to stand out front and make the place look harmless.
“Come on, Sunday,” I said.
The leopard came. We followed the old man across the drive, past the pumps. The large building looked not only closed, but abandoned. Darkness was behind its windows, and spider webs hung over the cracked white paint of its door frame. I poked the old man with the carbine muzzle, directing him around the right end of the building and back into the camp. I was expecting to be jumped or fired at, at any second. But nothing happened. When I got around the end of the building, I saw why. They were all at the party.
God knows, they might have been normal people once. But what I saw now were somewhere between starving savages and starving animals. They were mostly late adolescents, rib-skinny every one of them, male and female alike barefoot below the ragged cuff-edges of the jeans they wore and naked above the waistband. Every one of them, as well, was striped and marked with black paint on face and body. They were gathered, maybe thirty or forty of them, in an open space before the rows of trailers began. It might have been a stretch of show lawn, or a volleyball court, once. At the end of it, tied to a sort of X of planks set upright and surrounded by burnable trash, paper and bits of wood, was the girl.
Whether she had come there willingly, I do not know. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that she had finally despaired of ever having Sunday love her; and when she met those two other pairs of feet by the creek, she had gone off of her own free will with them. But she was terrified now. Her eyes were enormous, and her mouth was stretched wide in a scream that she could not bring forth.
I poked the old man with the gun muzzle and walked in among them. I saw no weapons; but it stood to reason they must have something more than the revolver that had been hidden on the old man. The back of my neck prickled; but on the spur of the moment the best thing I could think of was to put a bold front on it, and maybe we could just all walk out of here—the girl, Sunday and I—with no trouble.
They said not a word, they did not move as I walked through them. And then, when I was less than a dozen feet from the girl, she finally got that scream out of her.
“Look out!”
For a part of a second I was so stunned to hear her utter something understandable that I only stared. Then it registered on me that she was looking over my shoulder at something behind me. I spun around, dropping on one knee instinctively and bringing up the carbine to my shoulder.
There were two of them, lying on the roof of the house with either rifles or shotguns—I had no time to decide which. They were just like the others, except for their firearms. The girl’s shriek must have startled them as much as it had me, because they were simply lying there, staring down at me with their weapons forgotten.
But it was not them I had to worry about, anyway, because—I have no idea from where—the crowd I had just passed had since produced bows and arrows; perhaps a bow for every five or six of them, so that half a dozen of them were already fitting arrows to their strings as I turned. I started firing.
I shot the two on the roof first, without thinking—which was pure foolishness, the reflex of a man brought up to think of firearms as deadly, but of arrows as playthings—because the two on the roof did not even have their guns aimed, and by the time I’d fired at them a couple of arrows had already whistled by me. They were target arrows, lacking barbed hunting heads, but nonetheless deadly for that. The rest of the ones being aimed would certainly not all have missed me—if it had not been for Sunday.
There was nothing of the Lassie-dog-to-the-rescue about Sunday. The situation was entirely beyond his understanding; and if the two on the roof or the bow-wielders had shot me quickly and quietly enough; probably he would merely have sniffed sadly at me as I lay on the ground and wondered why I had stopped moving. But the girl had screamed—and I must suddenly have reeked of the body chemicals released by fear and fury—so Sunday operated by instinct.
If I was frightened, he was frightened, too. And in wild animals, as in man himself once he is broken down to it, fear and fury are the same thing. Sunday attacked the only fear-making cause in view—the group of archers and their friends before us; and they found themselves suddenly facing a wild, snarling, pinwheel-of-knives that was a hundred and forty pound member of the cat family gone berserk.