“I am glad I had so many free waffles,” Yuxia remarked, eyeing Richard.
“I’m running on fumes,” he confessed.
Yuxia didn’t seem to find this very reassuring. Richard straightened up and patted his belly. “Fortunately, I have a lot of stored energy.”
Yuxia gazed clinically at his gas tank.
“In another half an hour or so, we’ll be at a trail. A long climb up many switchbacks.”
“Switchbacks?”
“Zigzags. At that point, you should probably go on ahead. I’m just going to slow you down.”
“Who gets the gun?” she asked.
He thought about this question for a few moments. His brain was tired and working slow.
Then he understood that the question wasn’t meant to be answered. It was an impossible choice. They had to stay together.
Which meant that he needed to get off his ass.
“Thank you,” he said, and forced one foot to pass in front of the other.
“Is this where Zula went?” she asked him.
“I hope so. But Jones and the others probably followed her.”
“And now we are following them.”
“And Jahandar is following us.”
“If that is true,” Yuxia said, “I hope Seamus is following Jahandar.”
She seemed enormously comforted by that idea, so Richard held his tongue rather than speculate about the mountain lion that might be serving as the death train’s caboose.
“I am sooo glad Zula is alive,” Yuxia said, a few minutes later. Richard got the clear idea that she was trying to get his mind off how exhausted and sore he was. “I thought she was dead. I cried so hard.”
“So did I.”
“I asked her questions about her family,” Yuxia said, “but she did not answer very much. Now I get it; she didn’t want the others to hear such information.”
“Smart girl. She didn’t want them to know about me.”
“We found out about you later,” Yuxia said. “Big game man.”
“Yes. I am a big game man.” Being stalked by a big game hunter.
“Tell me about your family,” Richard suggested.
“Aiyaa, my family! My family is sad. Sad, and maybe in trouble.”
“Because of what happened to you?”
“Because of what I did,” she corrected him. “It didn’t all happen to me.”
“When the story comes out,” he said, “it will all be fine.”
“If we don’t get killed,” she corrected him, and picked up her pace so dramatically that he lost her in undergrowth—her camouflage outfit was very effective—and had to break into a jog for a few paces.
“Look, someone left clothes!” she announced a long sweaty while later and tugged on a loose sleeve that was peeking out from beneath a fallen log.
“Zula’s,” he said, catching up with her and recognizing the garment. “She ditched all the stuff she didn’t need. Getting ready for the climb.”
“The climb is next for us?”
“It starts now,” he said, and stepped past Yuxia, bushwhacking through a few more yards of undergrowth until he broke in upon the switchback trail.
During his sporadic, Furious Muse–driven efforts to lose weight, he had been forcefully reminded of a basic fact of human physiology, which was that fat-burning metabolism just plain didn’t work as well as carbo-burning metabolism. It left you tired and slow and confused and dim-witted. It was only when he was really stupid and irritable—and, therefore, incapable of doing his job or enjoying his life—that he could be certain he was actually losing weight. So it was in that state that he began to shamble up the switchback trail. But even in his flabbergasted condition, he was soon able to pick up on a basic fact of switchback geometry that was about to become important. Two hikers who might be a mile apart from each other on the trail might nonetheless find themselves separated by only a hundred yards of straight-line distance as one zigged and the other zagged. Assuming that Jahandar was chasing them—which was what they had to assume—they might have started out with an excellent head start. And he hoped that they had preserved that head start by moving as fast as they were able. And yet the moment might come, a minute or an hour from now, when they might look down, and Jahandar might look up, and they might lock eyes on each other from a range that was easily within rifle, and maybe even within shotgun, distance.
Richard wished he could have bullshitted himself into believing that Jahandar would not be aware of this fact. But Jahandar looked like a man who had spent his whole life on switchbacks, and who well understood their properties.
He saw, then, how it was all going to work out. And he understood that his confusion, his laggardliness, his irritability, were not all due to the fact that he was hungry. This was his brain trying to tell him something.
And if there was one thing he had learned in his ramshackle career, it was to pay close attention to his brain at such times.
His brain was telling him that their plan was fucked.