The Lioness(77)

“We’ll be exhausted that first night. We will have just been on eleven flights.”

“Are we really discussing when we’re going to have sex next month? You’re going on a safari, Felix! You’re going for free! You’re getting first-class accommodations—”

“Not first class on the flights from Paris to Nairobi.”

“You are such a child sometimes,” she told him, but she kept her voice playful.

“I guess.” He folded the map once and then twice. It was a small map. “But if I really wanted to see lions, I’d just go to the zoo. And when you see lions at the zoo, you don’t have to worry they’re going to charge you and eat you.”

“Oh, please. These days, a safari is like a long, elegant picnic. Nothing’s going to eat you and no one’s going to shoot you.”

“You’re sure?” He wasn’t actually frightened. He just didn’t want to go and was being obstinate and silly.

She put down her coffee and massaged his neck and his shoulders, kneading the muscles there. “I’m positive,” she reassured him. “And when we get back to the hotel in Nairobi, you’ll be so glad you went.”

“And Peter Merrick will be there,” he said, rolling his head, his voice mellowing. She knew, even without seeing, that his eyes were closed. “And Reggie Stout. And Katie. So, it won’t be a total waste of time. Who knows? Maybe we can drum up some work. Or get a good story about us in the trades.”

“Yes,” she said sarcastically. “That’s why we’re going all the way to Africa. So the Hollywood Reporter or the Los Angeles Times will write about us.”

“Well, if they do, it will sure as hell make it worthwhile. As long as we don’t get eaten. Or shot. We wouldn’t want the story to be about that.”

“No,” she agreed, leaning over and kissing the top of his head. “We wouldn’t want that.”



* * *



.?.?.

Had she really told Felix that no one was going to get eaten? No one was going to get shot? She had. God, she had. They’d really made jokes about such things.

She looked over at Reggie, and saw that his chin had fallen against his chest. She’d put his safari hat back on his head, despite the fact that a part of the brim had been eaten. They’d moved to the opposite side of the tree so the smell of the dead hyenas wasn’t quite so pungent and they didn’t have to watch the vultures pick their bodies apart. It seemed the jackals were keeping their distance from the carrion because of the proximity of the humans, but the vultures—five of them devouring the two hyenas—didn’t seem to give a damn anymore, so long as the people remained still on the opposite side of the great baobab.

Just in case, on the off chance that there was a plane out there, she decided she had to start a fire. Otherwise, they were invisible from the air. Yes, a fire might alert their kidnappers, too, but she and Reggie were both dead if they didn’t get help. She supposed a little plane could land easily here. They were west of the forests that climbed up toward the Great Rift. Far away there were hummocks, some the size of the studio warehouses back in Burbank, but the two of them were hunkered down amid a baobab and a couple of acacia trees. This earth? It really was flat. It was flat and thirsty.

It was noon now, and she had the rifle across her lap. They had no cartridges for the pistol. Reggie had apologized that he hadn’t searched the wrecked Land Rover more thoroughly, but she’d reminded him that he’d salvaged it pretty damn well. She’d called him a pirate to try and make him laugh. A scavenger. He’d smiled and murmured that a peg leg and a hook for a hand were about what he had; he’d added that it was she, however, who’d earned the eye patch. That had been maybe an hour after dawn.

“I’m going to start a fire,” she said to him. It was really just a way to see if he was awake. Even if he thought it a bad idea, he wouldn’t stop her. Still, to do nothing was merely biding their time before the grim reaper—who usually wasted no time out here on the savanna, but was pitilessly slow moving now that they were wounded and sick—came for them. But he didn’t say anything, and she found herself watching him carefully to be sure he was breathing. He was. Thank God. She didn’t see any new blood discoloring the gauze on his arm.

She pushed herself to her feet and surveyed the grass. She wasn’t sure how to build a fire. Two of the nights on the safari, the porters had pulled smudge pots from the lorries and used them instead of crafting a pyre from toothbrush trees, acacia, and strangle figs. But she didn’t have a smudge pot. She didn’t have kerosene. She had a lighter (two, as a matter of fact) and whatever brush she could find.

Which was when it hit her. Their baobab was dead. It was a considerable tree. If she could get it to ignite, it would burn like that fucking funeral boat at the end of The Vikings. The ship with the corpse of Kirk Douglas’s character. Of course, that boat had been set ablaze by dozens of cliffside archers, and there’d been that gorgeous sail that caught fire. (Actually, she knew, it had been set ablaze by pyrotechnicians and a special-effects guru. But the archers had been a nice touch, what her father-in-law liked to call “a movie moment.” Classic and magic.)

The gamble was that if no one spotted the fire, they’d both be spending the night here on the ground. In the open.