Fever Dream Read Online Free PDF Page A

me!
Jason!
”
    His face was slick with sweat, his eyes wide and trembling.
    “Hold that stick. Loosen it if you start going numb.”
    The tracker’s eyes widened. “Memsahib, the lion is coming back.”
    “Just hold that—”
    “It’s coming back!”
Mfuni’s voice broke in terror.
    Ignoring him, she turned her attention to her husband. He lay on his back, his face gray. His shoulder was misshapen and covered
     with a clotted mass of blood. “Helen,” he said hoarsely, struggling to rise. “Get your gun.
Now
.”
    “Aloysius—”
    “For the love of God, get your gun!”
    It was too late. With another earsplitting roar, the lion burst from the cover, sending up a whirlwind of dust and flying
     grass—and then he was on top of her. Helen screamed once and tried to fight him off as the lion seized her by the arm; there
     was a sharp crackling of bone as the lion sank his teeth in—and then the last thing Pendergast saw before he passed out was
     the sight of her struggling, screaming figure being dragged off into the deep grass.

4
    T HE WORLD CAME BACK INTO FOCUS. PENDERGAST was in one of the
rondevaals
. The distant throb of a chopper sounded through the thatch roof, rapidly increasing in volume.
    He sat up with a cry to see the DC, Woking, leap out of a chair he’d been sitting in at the far side of the hut.
    “Don’t exert yourself,” Woking said. “The medevac’s here, everything’ll be taken care of—”
    Pendergast struggled up. “My wife! Where is she?”
    “Be a good lad and—”
    Pendergast swung out of bed and staggered to his feet, driven by pure adrenaline. “My
wife
, you son of a bitch!”
    “It couldn’t be helped, she was dragged off, we had a man unconscious and another bleeding to death—”
    Pendergast staggered to the door of the hut. His rifle was there, set in the rack. He seized it, broke it, saw that it still
     contained a single round.
    “What in God’s name are you doing—?”
    Pendergast closed the action and swung the rifle toward the DC. “Get out of my way.”
    Woking scrambled aside and Pendergast lurched out of the hut. The sun was setting. Twelve hours had passed. The DC camerushing
     out after him, waving his arms. “Help! I need help! The man’s gone mad!”
    Crashing into the wall of brush, Pendergast pushed through the long grass until he had picked up the trail. He did not even
     hear the ragged shouts from the camp behind. He charged along the old spoor trail, thrusting the brush aside, heedless of
     the pain. Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen—and then he burst into the dry pan. Beyond lay the
vlei
, the dense grass, the grove of fever trees. With a gasp he lurched forward across the pan and into the grass, swiping his
     weapon back and forth with his good arm to clear a path, the birds overhead screaming at the disturbance. His lungs burned,
     his arm was drenched in blood. Still he advanced, bleeding freely from his torn shoulder, vocalizing inarticulately. And then
     he stopped, the ragged incoherent sounds dying in his throat. There was something in the grass ahead, small, pale, lying on
     the hard-packed mud. He stared down at it. It was a severed hand—a hand whose ring finger was banded with a star sapphire.
    With an animalistic cry of rage and grief, he staggered forward, bursting from the long grass into an open area where the
     lion, its mane ablaze with color, was crouching and quietly feeding. He took in the horror all at once: the bones decorated
     with ribbons of flesh, his wife’s hat, the tattered pieces of her khaki outfit, and then suddenly the smell—the faint smell
     of her perfume mingling with the stench of the cat.
    Last of all he saw the head. It had been severed from her body but—with a cruel irony—was otherwise intact compared with the
     rest. Her blue-and-violet eyes stared up sightlessly at him.
    Pendergast walked unsteadily up to within ten yards of the lion. It raised its monstrous head, slopped a tongue