Hunter's Run Read online

  If the edge of the stone had been more intact, he could have gotten a better idea of how the trigger had been set. It would have been tricky to isolate the movement of the stone from the vibrations of the branch and its flapping banner. He could think offhand of three ways that might have done the trick, depending on the formation of the rock.

  But that wasn’t the critical issue. The important thing was that the blast had been pointing upward. He paced the crater’s perimeter, limping when the wound in his leg sent an unexpected pain shooting through him. The blast pattern was lobed and roughly triangular. He could almost see how it had been done. The branch had been set as a trigger particularly sensitive to the relatively stable stone, but anyone taking the shirt off or shifting the branch itself would have set off the charges as well. His twin hadn’t known what direction the hunters would approach from, and he’d set the blasts meant to make a rough circle. He’d bet everything on the one trap, and it hadn’t been a bad wager at all.

  Ramón squatted, his fingers brushing the dirt more for the simple pleasure of feeling fresh soil than for anything he expected to learn. The ground smelled strongly of the explosives. He wondered what it had been like, setting the trap. Joyous or nerve-wracking? Or both? Fumbling with coring charges and an improvised trigger, and working with a mutilated right hand besides. And it had worked. The yunea was wrecked, Maneck badly injured. The score was even now—blow for blow, van for flying box. Ramón had a feeling bordering on presentiment that his other self out there in the trees was going to win.

  “Hey, monster!” Ramón called. Maneck had not moved from its place at the crater’s edge. Its stillness, so eerie before, now seemed like an indication of weakness. Ramón limped back toward it. “Are you dead? Can you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Maneck said.

  “I’m pretty sure he used all three charges. There aren’t going to be any more like this.”

  Maneck didn’t reply. Ramón spat and scratched himself. The alien shuddered once and lowered its head. The quills lay as limp as wilted ivy.

  “I have failed to fulfill my tatecreude,” the alien said. “I am damaged. The man has progressed. We will return to the others and confer.”

  “We can’t do that!” Ramón said, fearful images of the alien hive filling his mind. He couldn’t return to that, to be trapped in that smothering darkness for the rest of his life; the hunt had to continue, or he had no hope of getting free of this thing. “He’s got to be close. He’s got nothing now. What, he’s going to stop us with a hunting knife and a pair of dirty pants?”

  “I am weakened,” Maneck said.

  “So’s he! You shot his pinche finger off! It’s been festering for days. He’s been running for days. He’s got to be ready to collapse!”

  Maneck went silent. Ramón tried to will the alien on, tried to push something—anger, bloody-minded resolve, duty, thirst for revenge, anything—send it up the bruised sahael and into the thing’s flesh. They couldn’t turn back now.

  “Is it your fucking tatecreude to give up and run back to your fucking mother? Like a coward? Is that it? The man is still out there, still heading for Fiddler’s Jump, only now we know where he’s going. We can get to him. If we limp back, it’s going to take days. By then, he could have gotten anywhere. It’ll be too late to stop him from telling everybody about you!”

  Maneck didn’t reply, so Ramón pressed on.

  “This trap he set? It can’t have been set for very long. Something would have triggered it by accident. No, he’s close. He probably stayed to watch and see if it worked. Even if he was in a treetop someplace, he can’t be more than two or three klicks from here. You can still get to him.”

  Maneck’s head shifted slowly from side to side as if the alien were shaking its head no. A cold dread shook Ramón. It couldn’t end like this. They had to go after the other Ramón. They had to. There had to be something—some way to make the injured alien keep going rather than folding up and running. Ramón’s hands were trembling, his mind whirling like a storm. He had to struggle not to lash out at the thing, kick it, punch it, make it do the right thing. He didn’t consider what he was going to say, and when he spoke, his own words surprised him.

  “What will they think of you? The other ones back under that mountain, your brothers? They know you’re out here. They know why, and you can’t fucking tell me they don’t admire you for it. You want to go back in shame as a failure and see how they look at you then? Fine. You want to know what it’s like to have your own people turn their backs on you? Fine. Let’s go, then. Come on, you great fucking bitch!”

  Ramón did swing a foot then, kicking the alien where its ankle would have been if it had one. The impact was soft and hard at the same time, like kicking a tree wrapped in a layer of rubber. Maneck didn’t react.

  “Go back, then, you sad little devil!” Ramón shouted, his rising blood making his face warm with rage. “Turn around, and let’s march back home and let them see that you’re nothing. That you’re connected to nothing. You aren’t a part of them. Let’s see how you like it that they don’t want shit to do with you anymore. Or keep moving forward, do what they want you to do, and finish this thing! They don’t have the balls to do it. Show them that you do! What’s the worst that can happen? That shit-crazy ratfuck out there could kill us. Is that what you’re worried about? Is going back as a failure better than dying in a fight? Have some balls! Be a man!”

  The alien bowed its head, the quills stirring slightly.

  “I must rest,” it said, its voice low. “But you are correct. To cease to function is aubre. To express my tatecreude is paramount.”

  “Fucking right it is!”

  “I will focus on my own repair for a time. When proceeding will cause no further damage, we will locate the man.”

  “Well,” Ramón said, nodding, relief and pleasure flushing through him. “All right, then! Good you grew some fucking huevos. We’ll track him down on foot. We can do that.”

  “Is he like this as well?” the alien asked.

  “Like what?”

  “You are not coordinated in your thoughts,” the alien said. “Your tatecreude is unfocused, and your nature is prone to aubre. You comprehend killing and will, but not niedutoi. You are flawed at your core, and if you were a kii hatchling, you would be reabsorbed. You attempt to separate and also to rejoin. Your flow is always in conflict with itself, and the violence of this confuses your proper function but also overcomes boundaries that would otherwise restrict you. Is this what the man is like, or are you continuing to deviate?”

  Ramón looked into the alien’s uninjured eye, trying to make sense of what it had said. Flow and conflict, violence and restriction. Belonging and not belonging. Or maybe he was the one who’d brought that up.

  “No, monster,” he said at last. “It’s not deviation. I’ve always been like this.”

  Chapter 12

  After an hour, the alien heaved itself to its feet, with a ratcheting sigh that sounded like a length of chain being dropped through a hole. “We proceed,” it said grimly, and gestured to Ramón to take the lead.

  It took a little more than an hour of pacing slowly around the meadow’s edge to find the other man’s trail. Through the long hours of the morning and into the afternoon, Ramón took point, the sahael trailing behind him to Maneck’s slow, steady plodding. It would have been a harder thing if Ramón hadn’t known the kind of tricks he himself would have employed to create a false trail. Twice they came upon what looked like a mistake on the other man’s part—a muddy footprint leading up onto a stony ridge, a length of roughened ground where he might have lost control as he went down a slope. Ramón guided them past the red herrings easily.

  The nature of the forest changed as they walked. On the higher ground near the mountains, the trees were all iceroot and pine analogs. The farther they moved toward the river, the more exotic the foliage became. Wide-branched perdida willows with black trunks shaped like half-melted women; tower
ing pescados blancos, named for the paleness of their leaves and the oceanic scent of their sap; half-mobile colonies of coral moss with bright pink skeletons peeking out from beneath the rich green flesh. The weariness and the throbbing of his knee seemed to fall away from Ramón as he caught his stride. It felt almost as if he knew beforehand where he was going, where the other Ramón had gone before him. He almost forgot Maneck’s lumbering form walking behind him, matching his path perfectly to avoid catching the sahael on two different sides of the same tree.

  A flatfoot blatted at him as he passed, scolding him with a noise like an annoyed oboe. The thin, gnawed bones of a kyi-kyi lay scattered at the base of a small cliff, pale as the slats of the yunea. The other Ramón was roughly following the creek that had run by the meadow where he’d set his trap. The water was an infallible guide, and though there was no trail beside it, Ramón found they were rarely out of earshot of its chuckling flow. A sense of peace infused him, and he found himself smiling. The sun rose, the temperature inched up. If he’d been wearing a shirt, Ramón would have been tempted to take it off and tuck it into his belt, not because he was overheated but only because the air would feel good against his skin. At last, untypically, Maneck called for a halt. Its skin was ashen gray, and it seemed almost unsteady on its feet.

  “We will rest here,” it said. “It is necessary to recuperate.”

  “For a little while,” Ramón said. “We can’t let him get too far ahead. If he gets to the river…well, if he gets to the river, he’ll have to take the time to build some kind of raft. And with a fucked-up hand, so I guess that could take him a while. But if he does get out on the river, we’ll never catch him. We should have just used your flying box to get downstream. We could have just waited for him to drift by.”

  “This suggestion is of no effect. We did not, therefore there can be no previous shall. Your language violates the nature of time. We must rest, here.”

  It was a good site. The brook pooled here into a tiny lake. The afternoon sun glittered silver on its surface. A low, gray-green ground cover made a wide, soft place to rest. When Ramón lay back, the bruised leaves smelled like basil, like nutmeg, like nothing he had a name for. Maneck trundled to the water’s edge and looked out before closing its eyes. The red, wounded one still had a bright slit where the lid no longer entirely closed.

  From where he lay, Ramón could turn his head and put one eye level with top of the ground cover and see how the patterns of sun and wind on the lake mirrored the waving of the tiny silver leaves. It took him a few minutes to spot the hidden grave.

  It was at the edge of the clearing, near a small waterfall where the lake once again became a brook. A swath of the ground cover stood higher than the surrounding plants. It was no longer than Ramón’s forearm, no wider than his spread hand. He walked to the anomaly, the sahael tugging at his throat. The ground, he saw, had been dug up, the plants removed and then laid back on top of the tiny excavation when it was done. Ramón felt a moment’s unease. It seemed like the thing a man would do—the other Ramón. As if there was something buried here he wanted to hide, but what would that be? There hadn’t been anything in his field pack precious enough to preserve. Maybe a note? Some written record that would expose the aliens? But who would ever find it here?

  With only a moment’s hesitation—might he have forgotten how many coring charges had been in the pack or might the trap in the meadow have only used two?—Ramón dug his fingers into the soft soil. Hardly an inch beneath the surface, he touched flesh. When he pulled his hand back in disgust, his fingertips were red with blood. A flatfur, skinned and raw and buried hardly deep enough to make any difference from leaving the little body openly on the ground. He considered the corpse, and remembered the skins at the other Ramón’s first camp. Whatever the man was doing, it was intentional, and he’d planned it back that long ago, when traps were on his mind. Ramón lifted the thing with a branch broken from the nearest tree. There seemed to be no mechanism associated with it—no sharpened sticks or knives. He might have poisoned the meat, but it seemed unreasonable that he might expect the alien to eat it. What was the man—his other self—thinking?

  Ramón took the dead animal by its thin legs, walked it to the lake, and flung it out into the water. The body sank like a stone. Maneck’s eyes remained closed, its stance still as a statue and as unresponsive. Ramón debated for a moment. He could wake the thing and tell it what he had found, or else keep the other Ramón’s secret. The strange animal offering made him uncomfortable; his first impulse was to talk about it. But if it was part of his twin’s plot to defeat the aliens, perhaps it would be better to hold back.

  Maneck’s eyes flickered open. “I can go on no more today,” it said. It actually sounded apologetic, perhaps even ashamed. “I am too weak. I must recuperate further.”

  “That’s okay,” Ramón said. He felt almost sorry for it. How badly injured was it? Was it dying? “It’ll be dark soon anyway. We might as well camp for the night.”

  Maneck remained quiescent through the rest of the day and into the night. Ramón broke branches and fronds to make himself a lean-to, the sahael stretching to accommodate his movements. When night fell, he roused Maneck long enough to scoop water from a tiny creek and find a double handful of sug beetles. The alien didn’t ask about his change in diet, and Ramón didn’t volunteer any information.

  When the beetles were reduced to their empty, colorful shells, Ramón lay back on the soft ground, looking up into the vast starscape of night. The small fire he’d made to boil water for washing out his wound and cooking had fallen to coals and ashes. In other circumstances, it would have been a perfect night. In the distance, something called—an animal or bird or insect that might never have been seen by human eyes. The sound was high and fluting, and a moment after it came, two more answered it. Another memory filled his awareness. Elena in her apartment. They had had one of their first fights over his habit of camping outside the van. She had been certain that a wild animal would find him and kill him in the darkness. She’d had a friend taken by redjackets, and she claimed to suffer nightmares. He’d been sleeping with her for a month and hadn’t seen evidence of it, but when he said so, she only got angrier.

  The argument had ended with her throwing a kitchen knife at him. He’d slapped her. Afterward they’d screwed.

  Far above him, a meteor streaked across the sky, burning and vanishing in the space of a heartbeat. The Sick Gringo peered down on them from the stars, and, on the horizon, the Stone Man was beginning to rise.

  He knew she was crazy. Elena was the kind of woman who wound up killing herself or her lover or her children, and he didn’t love her any more than she loved him. It was all perfectly clear to him, and also totally unimportant. People, he decided, didn’t come together from love or hatred. They came together because they were the kind of people who fit. She was a crazed bitch. He was a drunk and a killer. They deserved each other.

  Except he wasn’t a drunk when he was here. In the field, he was sober as a priest. He was a better man out here. His mind was growing muzzy and losing itself in sleep when the alien jerked to attention. Ramón sat up.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  “Something is observing us,” Maneck said.

  A chill went up Ramón’s spine. There were enough real monsters waiting out here in the bush that São Paulo featured relatively few myths about duppies and mothmen and mysterious unknown creatures. Ghosts were a different story, though. There were plenty of ghosts here—from the ghost of Ugly Pete, a prospector who wandered the night looking for a replacement for the head he’d lost in a mine accident, to Black Maria, who appeared to men at the moment of their deaths. One cult in Little Dog believed that São Paulo was where the dead of Earth went when they died. So the night here swarmed with ghosts, like moths around a light, and out here in the dark wilderness, that was not a good thing to think about—although, of course, he didn’t believe in such things. Whatever was out there in the dar
k, it was more likely to be a real physical creature than a ghost.

  With that thought, Elena’s terror of redjackets and chupacabras abruptly returned to Ramón, and he rose, moving closer to the huge alien. He closed his eyes for the space of twenty breaths, adapting them to darkness, then scanned the meadow’s edge. It was dark enough that he couldn’t see anything directly. Only his peripheral vision would pick out movement from the gloom beneath the trees.

  “There,” he whispered. “Just to the right of the white-barked tree. In that bush.”

  Maneck did something complex with its arm. A flash of light extended from its hand, and the bush exploded in a ball of fire. Ramón jumped back.

  “Come,” Maneck said, and began moving forward. Ramón hung back half a pace, struggling between curiosity, fear of whatever was in the trees, and unease at his alien captor’s weapon. He had thought the thing was unarmed after the yunea’s crash. It was the sort of mistake that would get him killed if he wasn’t more careful.

  The corpse at the foot of the tree, twisted in sudden agony and scorched black on its spine, was a jabali rojo, something like a boar that had decided to be a fox instead halfway through its evolution; the ornate tusks at the sides of its open, lifeless mouth were better suited for impressing female jabali than attacking men or aliens.

  “It’s nothing,” Ramón said. “It was no danger to us.”

  “It might have been the man,” Maneck said. Was there regret in its tone? Relief? Fear? Who could say?

  When they returned to the modest camp, Ramón lay back down, but found it hard to sleep. His mind worked variation after variation on his new circumstances. Maneck was still well-armed. The other Ramón didn’t have a pistol or any more coring charges. He tried to imagine ways in which he might be able to give his other self an edge—some chance that would make his own freedom possible.