Divinity Road Read Online Free PDF

upwards, draws it back and forward, returns it to the position. He aims again, his finger finds the trigger and he squeezes.
    A second failure. Then a flash of déjà vu, and he remembers about safety catches, turns the gun over in his hands until he locates it and slides it to the off setting. He raises the gun a third time, taking aim again. The trigger feels stiff under his finger and for a second, as he squeezes, he thinks there’s still something wrong.
    The blast is deafening in the stillness of his seclusion. The kick of the weapon is shocking, far more vicious than he’d expected. His shoulder feels battered, pummelled, he knows there’ll be bruising, another injury to his poor broken body.
    And the blast, too. How can something so sublimely elegant make such a thunderous, hellish noise? His ears are ringing, he’s deafened. He looks down at the rifle and marvels at its potency. A painful experience, yes, but heady, too. The rifle’s strength and the sense of protection it offers are intoxicating.
    He looks up and sees that he’s missed the vulture, but that they have all panicked, taken to the air, circling. Even as he takes this in, the first one, emboldened by hunger, swoops back down to resume his feasting. For a few minutes, consumed by a compulsion to shoot that he justifies as a need to test out the firearm, he fires at the birds, reloads the magazine, fires again. His eardrums feel shattered, his shoulder begs for relief. Gradually, the firing mechanism becomes familiar, though his shooting is no more accurate, and for every vulture he hits, five more seem to appear. He realises that he’s fighting a losing battle, that he’s become the sole spectator of a ghastly, gruesome picnic. He cannot see in any detail what the vultures are doing, but pictures the pecking and ripping and tearing. He feels his stomach heave in revulsion.
    I can’t stay here. I’ve got to move.
    What about your rescue? What about the woman?
    He stands up and for the first time looks away from the debris, the sloping plain and up the other way. The kopje stretches ahead, steep and rocky. It’s difficult to gauge how high it is, he can’t see the summit from his position at its foot, but it now feels like a place of safety, a vantage point away from the carnage, the stink, the gory horror that is unfolding.
    I can’t do any more for the woman. I’m not even sure she’s still alive. At least in the tent she’s safe from scavengers. Her only hope’s a rescue team. Her fate’s in their hands, not mine. Anyway, I’m not going far, just up the kopje. I can keep an eye on her from there.
    He picks up his backpack, adds the box of bullets to a side pocket and hauls it up onto his shoulders. Finally he grasps the rifle in both hands. He takes a few steps up the slope, then changes his mind. There’s something in his canvass holdall, something he had forgotten that he knows he must take, so he puts down the bag and rifle and scrambles back to the fuselage wreckage. He finds his bag, throws out his clothing, shoes, a soapstone statue given to him as a farewell gift less than twenty-four hours ago, extricates the sketch pad at the bottom, returns to his backpack and slides it inside. Now he’s ready.
    He pauses only once more before he begins his ascent. There, at the foot of the hill, his eye is caught by a brightly coloured object, a small plastic keg. He picks it up, notes that according to the front label it’s supposed to contain two white handheld flares for night-time distress signalling and two orange smoke signals for day-time emergencies. But the canister feels too light and he sees at once that the top has come loose and the contents have gone astray. He scans the vicinity for the missing flares, reasons that they could be anywhere or nowhere, winces with irritation. He’s aware how crucial the distress signals could be but feels too exhausted to start a new search. He tosses the keg behind him.
    Ten minutes of steep