Go on, boy. Git.

He remembered the creature leaping away when it came out of its coma, full of juice, crackly with life.

He laughed crazily.

They sure tried to hang my head on a wall.

Then Bob looked up and there it was. Late, it was drinking late. Maybe so deep here in the swamp there were no men and so there was no fear. Bob didn’t know. He just heard the rustle of twigs snapping, saw a flash of color.

It was some sort of ugly spotted pig. Bob watched it emerge from the dapples of the trees maybe seventy-five yards out. It was ugly as an outhouse on a hot day, and yet when Bob saw it he almost cried for the second time in his life, the first being when he was alone at nine and had gone off onto the hill after Major Benson had come to tell them his daddy was dead out near Fort Smith.

But Bob didn’t cry. He made ready to shoot.

The damned gun was new; suddenly it felt different than his old Colt automatic, as if it were fighting him. Squeezing his left hand around the right, printing down on his right thumbnail with his left, his elbows locked between his pressing knees as he sat in a modified isosceles, fighting the tremors of exhaustion that nuzzled through his wrists and tried to betray him in their treacherous way.

Front sight. Front sight. Front sight.

That was it. That was the key, the rock upon which the church was built. You had to see the front sight with a pistol, and let the target be a kind of hazy blur in the far distance. Otherwise, nothing good happened at all.

Front sight, front sight, front sight.

In the notch of the rear sight, a frame, he saw the huge red wall of the front. There was only front, rock steady, big as Gibraltar or Mars, Bob bending into it with every last thing, and the pig a kind of soupy blur, its details lost in the distance, just a splotch of movement against the stability of the greenery.

He hoped that damn cop had zeroed it well. He hoped the water hadn’t deadened the primers or ruined the powder in the case.

Bob was so poured into the shot he didn’t hear the noise at all or feel the recoil, as the big pistol whacked back. What he saw was the pig speared through the spine by the lead, which, entering its tough hide, ruptured; it hit and broke the spine.

The animal squealed as death closed it down, then a spasm of fury rocketed through it. It tried to climb to its now stunted and shaky legs but, having a broken spine, was unable to direct the last part of its body to obey. Then, with a last quiver, it went quiet.

Bob got himself up. Still woozy, still soaked, he felt death in his own limbs, stalking through his body, hunting him. But he walked onward, dazed, kept sane only by the smell of the burned powder that his nose picked up in the riotous odors of the swamp, a familiar thing onto which he could lock. He wobbled to the pig, then collapsed as he reached it.

It weighed about forty pounds. It was about three feet long. It smelled of manure and offal. Its snout was curiously delicate, as if designed by an angel; its lashes, fleecy at the closed slots of its eyes, were also delicate, like a child’s.

The bullet hole was an ugly blister over the shoulder, but there wasn’t a lot of blood seepage. It hadn’t come out, unlike the bullet Payne had put into him, which is why he had lived and the pig had not. Served Payne right for using something tiny like a nine. Payne had broken the one true moral law of hunting: use enough gun.

Some day, I’ll use enough gun on you, Payne.

Swiftly he got out his Case XX, still secure in the watch pocket of his Levi’s, thanking God for a good Case knife that would hold an edge all down the many years and thanking God also for his own stubborn ways that made a small knife as much a part of daily dressing as boots and socks.

Turning the dead animal so that its soft belly was finally exposed, he had a moment of crisis. Felt as if he’d fallen out of his own body there for a second. A wave of hallucination crashed over him. He forgot everything. But then it came back and he found himself with the knife and the dead animal and he butchered it swiftly.

Bob wanted the liver, which he found, a treasure amid the gore, and ripped it out, feeling it hot because it was so soaked in oxygenated blood.

The liver was richest in nutrition and tastiest this side of a fire. Bob tore off a bite, stunned at the intensity of the flavor and the sense of richness; it made him dizzy it was so powerful. He ate some more, chewing ravenously, amazed at how hungry he was; how desperately he needed it. He ate and ate until the liver was gone.

I am alive, he thought.

Then he heard the roar of a chopper, and dropped. A Huey sped low above the riverbank, blowing the trees left and right as it hurtled along.

They’re looking for me, he thought, with a wave of regret at the complications of his life. Then he picked up the carcass, slung it over his back and headed deeper into the swamp.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Dobbler always found Shreck’s occasional absences frightening. The customers here at RamDyne were tough guys, like cops or soldiers, or if not tough, they were distant, techno-nerd types, and both groups looked upon the large, soft psychiatrist with an attitude characteristic of their professions: either contempt or indifference, depending. So the doctor tended to sit in his grubby little office when Shreck wasn’t around to act as his sponsor in this strange world.

The RamDyne offices – offices wasn’t exactly the right word – were located amid the cargo terminals and warehouses of Dulles International Airport, just south of Washington, D.C. They were a shabby warren of jerry-built light-industrial units sequestered behind double Cyclones that wore double spirals of razor wire, guarded viciously by armed men. The sign next to the guardhouse at the sole entrance said only BROWN EXPORTS, without corporate logo or escutcheon. It had a prosaic, unexceptional quality to it, and the guard who always looked fiercely at Dobbler, as if he never recognized him after a full year on the payroll, went with the outfit’s bunker mentality.

Dobbler’s office was a dingy closet unbecoming an assistant professor at a junior college in Idaho; with concrete floors and surplus wardroom furniture, it looked like the office of a doomed teacher who never would get tenure and would live forever on the hook of his department chairman’s whim. Everything in it was junk, from the sagging bookcase to the desk scratched with strange initials to the ancient safe for confidential documents. It even had bars at the window, an irony not lost on Dobbler. The fluorescent light was imperfectly calibrated, and threw shadows no matter how you sited yourself in it, that is, when it wasn’t flickering wanly.

But it wasn’t as if Dr. Dobbler had the worst office; Colonel Shreck’s, in another building, was equally crummy; it was just a bit bigger, with a moth-eaten sofa near a window that yielded a vista of cargo planes taking off or landing. It didn’t even have a bigger safe, but exactly the same beat-up model as Dobbler’s. The doctor often wondered if it had the same combination!

Dobbler now sat in his office, trying to focus on the problem before him. He found the silence ominous, as if a spell had been cast by the freakish escape of Bob Lee Swagger. And that, in fact, was the problem Dobbler now faced.

The last words from Shreck had been simple.

“Doctor, go back over the documents. Tell me where this asshole went.”

Dobbler answered tentatively, as he always did.

“Y-you don’t think he’s dead?”

“Of course not. Now, I’ve got to go out of town for a few days,” said Shreck. “Try and let me have a report when I get back. I have the utmost confidence in you.”

Before Dobbler the material fluttered in and out of focus.