Jago: 2nd extract
Dakota Scout was in a tight spot.
She’d been in tight spots before, and survived them too, but right now, she knew, that was no guarantee of survival: good fortune doesn’t get paid forward. Quiet and slow she dropped into a low crouch, arms spread, weight balanced like a dancer, ready to flee at a hair’s trigger.
In the deep shadows of the midday sun she was out of sight of the prowlers who were walking across her line of view, maybe ten yards ahead, walking left to right, good eye to bad, vision to blur. She let her peripheral absorb the information, crouching so low to the ground that the gentle breeze blew the grit up into her face.
She waited silent, and completely still, because nothing attracts the human eye like movement, not moving a sliver until they’d disappeared around the corner and out of sight, and then she put down her short, slender hunting spear, wiped her face with the back of a grubby cotton sleeve, and tied back her locks with a leather thong; they were always coming loose. She checked the straps that kept her boots fastened tight to her feet and then she slid the single barrel shortgun from her backpack, hoping the hundred-year-old shells still worked.
Mostly they did.
The prowlers were taking their time, unhurried and careless of the noise they were making, the day was long and hot and they were in no rush. They were making a racket too; they could be silent when they were hunting so, she reasoned, they were being loud for effect: they’d try and spook her into running, scare her into showing herself. Beating, they called it. She turned her head slowly, tracking them as they appeared again from behind a stack of rusting vehicles over by the empty lot next to the low building with the red roof. She was barely breathing; prowlers can smell your breath, they said, and though she doubted that, their own breath being so foul it’d block up the nostrils and tongue of any human being, including their own, she decided she didn’t want to test the truth of that particular aphorism. Afff orrr izzzz mmm, she repeated that word slowly, quietly, a mind-trick, a shake and bake mantra taught her by Jester, focusing on something abstract and meaningless, repeating it slowly to distract her, help slow her heart rate, push away the rising panic, stave off the possibility of doing something reckless through fear, something thoughtless which would get her killed. Because prowlers were killers: they were torturers, rapists, cannibals, they were everything bad you could think of and didn’t want to, they embraced the dark, it was their thing. They were killers first and last. Their breath was the least foul part of them. Afff orrr izzz mmmm.
‘She’s around here,’ a voice said. ‘Old Helpless saw her and came running to tell us.’
‘If she aint, I’m gone cut Old Helpless’ throat,’ another voice said.
‘She’s here,’ the first voice repeated. ‘Helpless has his uses. Besides,’ the smile audible in his voice, ‘I can smell her.’
Afff orrr… there were four of them, all armed with short pikes: one wore a handgun strapped on a belt, two wore pangas, fearsome cutting blades made from spring-steel, reforged and beaten into eighteen inch curved blades, sharpened ‘til the sight of them could cut you to the bone, slice away your bravery ‘til all you were left with was abject crawling fear that made you want to lie down and just die. The only thing a prowler kept clean were his weapons…
izzz mmm… they’d throw the spears, hope to wound her, then either finish her off with the pangas where she lay or, worse, carry her, wounded, back to their camp and have their use of her in ways that were all too imaginable. She’d seen the results of prowler handiwork. And their camp would be nearby, canvas strung over poles, always outdoors because, despite the abundance of empty buildings everywhere around - Jago was full of abandoned buildings - no-one stayed inside if they could help it, the city was haunted they said, and most everyone believed it, though she knew better. They’d have a fire made from whatever they could find and burn, the food a stuck pig, a skewered wild dog, a skillet of rats. Or worse.
She recognized one of them, had spied him through her binocs the day before: tan, heavy-set, slack looking, the manner of an old hand, like he was in no hurry. The other two, a nervy kid with black skin, not much older than her, and another a few years older with white skin and a hat he wore without any style though it looked like he was aiming for something. The fourth she’d seen for barely a moment, he had red hair. Red, Hat, Black and Slack she thought of them. As they wandered behind the building and passed out of sight, in no rush it seemed, she looked around, scoping the surroundings.
She was trapped.
She’d got herself into a snare and no doubt. She was in a small square between buildings, with exits at five and eleven o clock from where she stood; the prowlers had just walked across exit eleven and would probably skirt round in a rough circle, trying to break her tracks, the circle getting wider and wider until they spotted something, some mark she’d left, a scuff or a fingerlength of fresh trodden dirt. They hadn’t realized she was right in the middle of where they first looked, it was too easy, and no scout would ever be caught that easy. Except her. She cursed herself silently. Jester was always telling her she was reckless, ‘cept he was crazy reckless when he wanted to be so he had no right to talk. She wished he were here right now. He had the killing skills to survive, quick like a snake, ferocious and overwhelming like a hungry wolfpack, even on his own, and more merciless than any beast she knew of. All she had was quiet and fast, and that left no room for reckless. Too late to worry now: maybe something to ponder later, if she survived. She scanned the walls around her, heart sinking at the concrete and plate glass that reared up around her, everything scoured by the encroaching desert dust. Higher up, windows were broken, but those closest the ground had survived, which was surprising for a building that leaned sharply to the left, the left half of two floors mid-way up having simply disappeared sometime in the past, leaving a silent gap and a rusted stair-rail reaching up toward nothing. The building buckled over like it had a belly ache. Some of the panes at ground level were bulging, but they held, decades of pressure forcing them outward in a state of perfect tension, bowed but unbroken. They’d pop like a bladder, she thought. Might bring down the entire building. She glanced down, opened the shortgun barrel to check it was loaded, and then she waited.
She didn’t have to wait long.
From somewhere behind her, she heard the crunch of heavy boots on rubble, the panting breath of a man as he clambered over the roots of a wall eighty years gone, she could smell the stink of his breath, feel his sudden movement, maybe heard the grunt of breath or the shush of a coat as an arm whipped, and without thinking she twisted to one side just as a heavy spear struck the ground where she’d stood a moment before, the sound of it a short cough, gouging the dirt, bouncing once and skittering to a halt. She heard someone whistle, the gathering sound, heard him shout ‘She’s here!’ and she didn’t look back but ran straight toward the bowed glass, extending the shortgun one-handed and pulling the trigger; prayed it would work.
And it did.
The window blew out with a bang and a shower of crumbling safety glass that showered her as she jumped, and then she was through, dropping into darkness, rolling as she hit the ground, slamming into something that knocked her sideways but already she was rising in the dark and running. And as she ran through the empty doorways, along dusty corridors, down flights of stairs, deeper into the dark, entering a final room at the foot of the deepest stairwell, a room of scattered furniture, a shaft of light penetrating through the cracks and gaps in the floors above, fading to some sort of blackness at the far end, at the back of her mind she heard a faint echo of Jester’s laugh. And fainter still, like the jingling of bells, the sound of glass falling.
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