The Lioness(42)

The vehicle seemed so much smaller to him when it was on its side. The dead seemed to fill it in ways that they hadn’t when they were living. The smell of their sweat—and his—was as pronounced and pungent as the smell of the ocean.

One of the two bags of nuts had been torn open, but he picked most of the nuts off the underside of the vehicle’s roof and put them into the other bag, the one that had not ripped apart in the crash, and brought that to the shade, too. The nuts on the clothing of the dead guard he left where they were. He took the rifle and the driver’s pistol and the toilet paper and the little metal first-aid kit. There was a knapsack that he believed had belonged to Muema, the second guide, and it was hard work to dislodge it from beneath the body of the driver. But he did. He was able to wrench it from where it was pinned behind the man’s back, one of the canvas straps wrapped partly around the steering wheel.

In it he found a map of the reserve, a lighter, binoculars, a compass, and a pack of cigarettes. He grabbed all of that and then emptied the knapsack, including a week-old newspaper and a paperback novel, also onto the underside of the roof, where he would leave it.

For a moment he gazed down at Felix. He’d seen his share of dead faces, and he was never going to categorize any of them as “at peace.” They’d all died violently. Felix was no exception. One eye was open, one closed, and he looked inexorably and inconsolably terrified. Reggie shut the eye that was open and brushed a lock of chestnut hair off his forehead. He tugged off Felix’s wedding ring, unstrapped his wristwatch, and found his wallet in his pants pocket, because he knew that Carmen would want all of that. Then he pulled the folds of the man’s ragged shirt back over his chest, even though the blood on the fabric had already started to dry, epoxying the cloth to the wound, and then rested his arms there.

He noticed near the gas pedal a knife considerably longer and more dangerous than his Boy Scout knife (though that had proven sufficiently lethal a few minutes ago), and supposed it had belonged to the driver. He took that, too. Then he checked the pockets of the dead men, but he found only keys and some Kenyan currency. No wallets and no IDs.

He grabbed his safari hat and the Dodgers ball cap Felix wore in the heat of the day. He didn’t unwrap Carmen’s scarf from the driver’s neck. She could wear her husband’s cap, which was probably better anyway, because it had a bill.

Before leaving the vehicle for the last time, he rolled up the driver’s window. Unfortunately, he couldn’t roll up the open window behind it. The door was too badly dented, and the handle wouldn’t budge. He struggled with it for perhaps a minute, but in the end he gave up. Maybe he was wrong and animals wouldn’t crawl into the Land Rover and either dine on the three dead humans where they were or drag them outside into the well-grazed grass to finish them off there. No, he knew what he knew. By tomorrow morning, the bodies would be mutilated or gone.

When he was through, he returned to Carmen and sat down beside her and studied what they had. Everything except for the rifle and two of the canteens would fit into the pack. Carmen could loop one canteen to her pants, and he could hang the other off his. He would have her carry the pistol. He would tote the rifle.

“Who are they?” she asked. She was no longer crying. He wasn’t sure whether she meant the two men in the vehicle or their kidnappers generally. He decided that how he responded didn’t matter.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know. They didn’t have wallets.”

He opened the metal box that held the first-aid kit. There was a tube of Germolene antiseptic, all sorts of bandages and gauze, tape, small scissors, eyewash, Bayer aspirin, and a bottle of pills from which most of the label was gone. But the little wording that remained led him to suspect it was a prescription antihistamine that was not part of the original kit.

“Give me your hand,” he said, and she obliged. He shook three aspirin into it and watched her swallow them without water. He handed her a canteen, but she shook her head.

“I’d rather save it. Just in case,” she murmured.

“Okay.” He squeezed some of the antiseptic onto his finger and ran it over the gash on her forehead. “Do you think you broke anything?”

“You’re going to set a bone for me out here?”

He held up the tape. “This—and the aspirin—is about as good as it’s going to get.”

“No. I suppose I have some bruises to look forward to. And my eye must be a mess.”

“Not that bad,” he lied.

“You were limping,” she observed.

“My left knee,” he admitted. “And maybe a hamstring.”

“Can you walk?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “But I will tape up my knee and my shin. It might help—and it couldn’t hurt.”

“Until, as they say, you rip off the bandage.”

He smiled at her small joke.

“You rolled up the windows?” she asked.

“Yes,” he lied again. “I did.” He was a deeply honest man, but he knew also that he was a very convincing liar.

She nodded.

And then, finally, they started away from the wreck and the bodies, walking west, the sun overhead. Paralleling them, perhaps two hundred yards away, were three hyenas. Limpers. They were off to the side of Carmen’s face where her eye was swollen shut, and so Reggie hoped that she wouldn’t (or couldn’t) see them.