Yes, she thought, that had to be it.
The idea that he had failed to escape his worries, even here, dismayed her. She felt a stitch of sadness. And so when she climbed back into the Land Rover—the one that this time did not have Charlie Patton riding shotgun—she took David’s hand and squeezed it, ever the faithful, dutiful, and loving wife.
* * *
.?.?.
Katie was aware that her fingers were in pain—she had tried to scratch at Cooper’s face, to claw him—and somehow they had bent back. He had thrown her off him as if she were a kitten and pulled his pistol from his holster, and she put her arms across her face as she rolled in the dust because she knew he was about to shoot her, but then she heard that automatic again, and Cooper yelled, a thunderous roar. She looked up, and he was holding his right hand with his left, and she could see the blood waterfalling from his palm where once there had been fingers. He’d dropped his pistol, and she crabbed to the weapon and picked it up. She’d held pistols before on movie sets, but never one that was loaded. Not even one that was loaded with blanks. So, while the literal weight of the gun didn’t surprise her, the idea that this was a revolver with bullets gave it a heavier, more ominous feel.
She turned around now and there was her brother, standing with the assault rifle, and in his swollen face and half-shut eyes she saw incredulity. Shock. Glenn, the Russian who’d been guarding them, was on the ground too, maybe nine or ten feet away, and he was dead. She could see the way a line of bullets had cut a swath like a bandoleer across his abdomen and chest, turning his khaki shirt red and creating a stream of blood from which a dung beetle was running away like a child from a tsunami. The man’s eyes were still open, lifeless and glazed.
Billy ordered Cooper to sit down, but the Russian didn’t seem to hear him: he was too focused on the obliteration of his right hand. And so Billy yelled louder this time, demanding he sit down now, and he fired the gun aimlessly, discharging a couple of bullets with the tiniest squeeze of the trigger, at least two of which punched holes in the side of the Land Rover. This time Cooper listened. He sat. And it was then that Katie saw Terrance. His body was half on and half off an anthill the size of a steamer trunk, his life seeping from him in bloody brooks running downhill into the grass from his side and his stomach. She scurried over to him and rolled him onto his back and rested his head in her lap and then, as she and her older brother surveyed the carnage around them—the dead and the dying, and more real blood than all the fake blood she’d ever seen on a set—she wept.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Carmen Tedesco
“I think the animal I want to see most is the warthog. I once saw a movie with a couple of baby warthogs playing in a little watering hole, and they were like puppies,” Carmen told us. Imagine: one week you are Katie Barstow’s maid of honor in Beverly Hills, and the next you are on a safari in beautiful, magical Africa, watching warthogs frolic in the Serengeti mud. Carmen Tedesco is one lucky lady.
—The Hollywood Reporter, October 1964
The acacia offered as much shade as the baobab, and there were no animals lounging beneath its canopy or perched like acrobats upon its branches. The grass was cool, and it would be a fine spot to wait and watch the baobab burn. She had no idea how long the fire would last, but she had to hope it would send tendrils of smoke into the sky for hours. Or that the fates were going to smile on her now, and a search plane would be in the area at the precise moment when she needed one most.
The walk here had tired her, which she supposed had mostly to do with how little she’d eaten or drunk, how weak she was from her wounds, and the stress from the likelihood that she was going to die out here. After all, she hadn’t walked very far: she had always been able to see the baobab. But even the rifle felt heavy on her shoulder or in her arms.
Now she started back, wondering how in the world she would be able to bring Reggie to the acacia. And then, if somehow she could accomplish that task, scavenge sufficient brush and grass to ignite the tree. It just didn’t seem possible. And so she thought of that expression, one foot after the other, and told herself that, for now, she would make it back to the baobab and rest there for a few minutes. She could do that. She counted her breaths as she walked and tried to remain alert. She fantasized she was such a good shot that she could bring the rifle to her shoulder and shoot those fucking vultures that were waiting for Reggie—perhaps for Reggie and her both—to die. But that was childish. They were just being vultures, and if she were one of them, she’d probably be salivating over that pair of dying mammals, too. Hyenas and humans. What a feast.