As he powered up the slope, he realised his tactical error. Instead of running away, he should’ve lunged forward, towards the doughnuts. Damn. There was, however, no chance of going back. Obese and anatomically unworkable it might have been, but the bear had amazingly fast reflexes. Without the element of surprise and the additional element of horrified bewilderment, he’d never have made it past them. He put his head down and made himself run faster, until he reached the top of the slope, where he lost his footing in the soft sand, slipped and fell. Hauling himself to his feet, he looked up and saw –
The humans on the edge of the cornfield were under attack. A dozen enormous jet-black mice, on horseback, were riding round them, shooting from the saddle with carbines. Some of the mice wore red trousers, the others had blue dresses and enormous pink ribbons on top of their heads. The humans were screaming, scattering wildly as the mice pressed home their charge. One or two of them fell and didn’t get up.
Disneyland, Theo thought. Oh shit.
Over to his left he heard a mechanical rattle, the sort of noise you get when you rack the action of an automatic rifle. He turned and saw a horse standing a few yards away. On its back was a huge black mouse, blue-skirted and pink-ribboned. It was looking straight at him down the barrel of its gun.
“No,” he yelled. “Minnie, no!”
The mouse froze. A slow frown creased its incongruously pink forehead. Theo opened his mouth to shout again, but something hit him so hard he was knocked off his feet. The sound wave, moving appreciably slower than the bullet, reached him just before he blacked out.
His head hurt.
He opened his eyes and saw that he was in a cage; wrist-thick bamboo poles lashed together with rope. Very gently he put his hand to the side of his head. His hair was sticky.
Across the room, on the other side of the bars, an enormous duck was sitting on a stool. It wore a blue sailor jacket and a bonnet with dangling ribbons, and it was nursing a rifle. It was looking past him, as if trying very, very hard not to see him.
“Excuse me,” Theo said.
He could’ve sworn he saw the duck wince ever so slightly. Apart from that, it didn’t move, just carried on staring dead ahead as though its life depended on it.
“Um, excuse me. Donald, isn’t it?”
This time, he saw the duck’s hand-like wing tighten on the grip of its gun, and maybe its huge oval eyes widened a little; anyway, they hadn’t blinked once. All in all, he got the impression of a duck determinedly not hearing voices coming from a human in a cage. The plan he’d been working on withered and died. This wasn’t a duck that could be reasoned with.
A surge of pain in his head made him lie back, and he stared at the bare wooden rafters for a while, trying to fight off the panic that was gradually, relentlessly, working its way into his mind. He’d never really thought about death before, except in a vague, objective kind of a way. He was aware that it existed, but so did Omsk; both of them were distant, irrelevant and not particularly attractive, and he had no intention of visiting either of them. The thought that he might die alone, pointlessly, unnoticed, unaided and quite possibly at the paws of viciously predatory cartoon characters would never have occurred to him, and he was entirely unprepared to deal with it.
But then, dealing with stuff had never been his strongest suit; he’d always preferred to run away, and right now he could see no reason to change the habits of a lifetime. The obstacles in his path consisted of a bamboo cage and an armed duck. What, he asked himself, would Einstein have done? Or Niels Bohr?
“Help!” he shouted. “Guard!”
The duck didn’t move.
“Guard!” He paused, then added, “Aargh!”
The upper and lower mandible of the duck’s beak were moving slightly, as if it was muttering something to itself over and over again under its breath. “Help!” he yelled. “Heart attack! I’m dying!”
Slowly, the duck turned its head and stared at him. It didn’t need to say anything; words, indeed, would probably have ruined the effect. “Sorry,” Theo mumbled, “false alarm. I’m fine now.”
The duck gave him another second and a half of the stare, then moved its head away