"Reamde" [.]

[fiefoe]

Of course it has to end in an N-way shoot-out.

• a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood.
• But he did now notice a curious fact, which was that the bottom rung of the ladder—the heavy thing that had made it all unroll—was a black pump-action shotgun.
• “Birth and death,” Chet said. “The poles of human existence. We’re like meridians, all beginning and ending in the same place.
• “Spectacular” meant “easy to see from a distance,” and insurgents did not like being seen.
• the angle of repose, which was the slope that a heap of particulate matter naturally adopted over time; it explained the shape of an anthill, a mound of sugar, a pile of gravel, or a mountain of scree.
• “Is this where Zula went?” she asked him. “I hope so. But Jones and the others probably followed her.” “And now we are following them.” “And Jahandar is following us.” “If that is true,” Yuxia said, “I hope Seamus is following Jahandar.” She seemed enormously comforted by that idea, so Richard held his tongue rather than speculate about the mountain lion that might be serving as the death train’s caboose.
• Before today had been undertaken by a foolish boy, in over his head and surviving by dumb luck. Whereas any operations he might carry out in the future would be ill-advised excursions by a man who was over the hill, past his prime.
• He envisioned the aged wizard wading through swamps, trudging doggedly across deserts, scaling mountain ranges, and walking through forests. Kind of like Richard was doing.
• It came to him then that he was overthinking this. This was a shoot-out. Nothing could be simpler.
• The finding was that Sokolov’s height, weight, leg length, and shoe size were a close match for John’s,

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