Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

Based on the name, Rufus had been expecting Thordis to be built like an Olympic shot-putter, but he was wrong. She did have the expected level of blondness, and if anything was going a little overboard on sun protection. But she was maybe five feet five and built more like a badminton player. In birdlike fashion she constructed a nest of luggage and throw pillows at one end of a couch after she had exchanged pleasantries with Rufus. She did stuff on her phone for five minutes before pulling her enormous sun hat down low over her cheekbones and nodding off.

Inevitably then, Carmelita, who had the more delicate-sounding name, was a bit of a bruiser. She wore a tank top that exposed tattoos consisting predominantly of simple black rectangles covering large parts of her arms. She had long black hair in a braid. As a courtesy Rufus went out to her plane to see if he could help wrangle Nimrod’s box, but it was plain at a glance that Carmelita could deal with it and didn’t want him anywhere near her eagle. So he ended up towing her bag while she looked after the Nimrod containment system. “Box,” while not wrong, hardly did it justice. A return trip to the plane’s luggage hold was needed to fetch a large equipment case presumably containing other necessities of the falconer’s trade. Rufus heaved that into the back of his truck while Thordis and Carmelita loudly and happily greeted each other. Both had kept Rufus at arm’s length. He didn’t take it personally.

When those two had come down a bit from the emotional high of seeing each other, and Rufus had got everything squared away in the back of his truck, they got into an interesting dance around the seating arrangement. The truck had a back row of seats accessible via small doors, both of which Rufus had left open in a manner that he hoped they would construe as inviting. Carmelita hopped right in and made herself at home, but Thordis—to the extent her facial expressions could be read under the reflective aviator sunglasses, spandex sun cowl, broad-brimmed hat, and half an inch of zinc-based sunscreen—deemed it maybe insensitive for the two guests to sit in back and be chauffeured. So she claimed that sitting in back might cause motion sickness and took shotgun instead. Rufus stayed impassive throughout. Making nice with these two was going to have a lot in common with how he had cultivated his relationship with Bildad. He just had to be cool and let them observe him. Which they did quite a bit of, during the drive. He could always tell when someone had googled him and pulled up the old newspaper stories.

On his way in to the airstrip this morning he had swung by the ranch office and picked up a fifth-wheel travel trailer that was supposed to be the lodgings of Thordis and Carmelita until better arrangements could be made. This jounced along behind them as the roads got worse and the mountains got closer. As a conversationalist, Rufus never got out of first gear until they came in view of the mine head and Bildad came strolling out to investigate. Thordis turned out to be a horse person. Apparently horses were a big deal in Iceland. So everything literally came to a stop as Bildad shoved his face into the back of the truck looking for hay, and jostled Nimrod’s box. Carmelita urgently wanted out so that she could make sure Nimrod wasn’t in a bad situation, but Thordis had to get out first because of how the seats and the doors worked. And Thordis had eyes only for Bildad. So after some delay the final leg of the trip was as follows: Thordis escorting her new best friend Bildad, followed at a distance by Carmelita carrying Nimrod on her arm—this involved a special glove—and finally Rufus in his truck idling along in low gear and towing the trailer toward a site he had taken the liberty of picking out that would keep it out of the midday sun while remaining far enough away from Rufus’s trailer to give the ladies a feeling of privacy. Earlier those two had engaged in a minor public display of affection and then turned to look at Rufus to see whether he would spontaneously combust. He had given them the Bildad treatment. It seemed to have had the same reassuring effect. Which was all well and good, but Rufus could have used a bit of reassurance himself as his formerly isolated hermit’s retreat had suddenly acquired a horse, an eagle, and two ladies.