Hunter's Run Read online

  His first impulse was to set out for the opposite bank, but seconds after he’d had the thought, he abandoned it. The water was hardly warmer than the ice that had spawned it, and adrenaline would do little to stave off hypothermia. Crossing the river would be suicide. Ramón angled back for the near shore and realized as his arms flailed and clawed at the current that he was in trouble. The fast river flow had pulled him around the bend, but it had also taken him farther from the bank than his own efforts could have. He rose again, treading water and borne along like a cork. He could hear no sound of the struggle. Either the fight had ended or he was far enough away that the sound of it was drowned out by his splashing. He turned his head, blinking hard to clear his eyes, and found the shore. His heart sank.

  Come on, Ramón, he told himself. You’re a tough pendejo. You can do this thing.

  He turned himself toward the riverbank and started swimming as hard as he could perpendicular to the flow. The river plants and streamers of moss below him were his guides as he pushed himself toward the uncertain safety of land. His feet and hands stung and soon went numb. His earlobes ached. His face and chest grew thick-fleshed and rubbery, but he pushed on. He couldn’t die out here. He had to reach the shore. It was his goddamn tatecreude.

  He focused on moving his body—legs kicking, arms and hands scooping at the water. Time lost its meaning. He might have been swimming for three minutes or an hour or his whole life. The chill was deadly, and he could feel it knifing into him. He faltered once, seduced into thinking he needed a moment’s rest.

  He was dead. The only reason to keep trying was stubbornness, and Ramón Espejo was a very stubborn man. Even when he was hardly doing more than floating, he pushed his mouth free of the water and gulped one more breath. And then one more. And then one more. His mind began to fade, and he recalled his dream of being one with the river, of becoming the flow itself. Perhaps that would not be so bad after all. Just one more breath so he could think about it. Then one more.

  It was a sandbar that saved him. The river widened, its eastern half becoming shallow as it broadened. Driftwood rose from the sand like the antlers of some nightmare beast. Ramón found an ancient log standing at an angle from the water. He crawled up its black, slimy side and held it like it was a lover. He was too cold to shiver. That wasn’t good. He had to get out of the water. The river still lapped at his knees, and his feet were numb. Ramón bit down on his lip until he tasted blood, the pain focusing his mind.

  He had to reach the shore. Then get dry, and then hope that the sun would warm his flesh. There was enough debris on the sandbar that he could move from one support to another; it seemed as if anything that went into the water upstream ended up caught here. The danger was that he might slip, fall into the water, and lack the will to rise again. He had to be careful.

  With a deep breath, Ramón pushed his blackwood lover away and stumbled to a small dam of branches that had been laced together with ivy and strips of bark. Then from that to a low stone. Then another slime-slick log. And then the water was no higher than his ankles. Ramón trudged slowly to dry land. He collapsed on the ground, laughed weakly, and vomited up what seemed like several liters of river water. His alien garments were sodden and heavy, the shoes kicked off somewhere in the river. Fingers clumsy as sausages, he pulled the clothing from his skin and lay back naked, trying with the last of his conscious will to angle himself toward the sun.

  It wasn’t sleep that took him, but neither was it death, because sometime later his mind reformed and he struggled to sit up. The sun had moved the width of three hands together, lowering toward the western sky. His teeth were chattering like a badly tuned lift tube. His hands and feet were blue, but not black. The alien robe he had cast aside was dry and sun-warmed. He pulled it on awkwardly and sat, arms around his knees, laughing and weeping. His neck, where the sahael had entered him, felt unnaturally hot. The skin there was smooth as river stone and numb as a witch’s mark. Ramón rubbed his fingertips over the insertion point and let the reality of his situation sink into him. He had made it. He was free. He looked out over the water with a sense of glee and disbelief. He’d done it!

  It didn’t occur to him that the mesh of branches tied together on the sandbar was odd until he heard the sharp intake of breath behind him and turned to see a surreal and familiar sight. The other Ramón stood at the tree line. His chest was bare, his pants ripped into rough shorts. Dark hair rose crazily from his head. His right hand was wrapped in a bandage black with dried blood and his left gripped the old field knife, Ramón’s field pack slung over one sunburned shoulder. Of course. He’d made a raft; the branches out there hadn’t wrapped themselves with bark. And now the flow of the river and the cruel irony of the gods had brought both Ramóns to the same place at the same time, caught up on the same sandbar.

  He rose slowly, unsteadily, trying not to startle his twin. He raised a hand in greeting, fear closing his throat. His twin took a step back, eyeing him balefully.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the man said.

  Part Three

  Chapter 16

  Ramón’s mind was slow to react. He had to answer, but none of the things that came to his lips was the right thing. I’m Ramón Espejo and I’m you and Why should I tell you who I am, pendejo? He felt his mouth open and close, and saw the shock in his twin’s eyes shift to something else, something more dangerous. The other man’s grip on his knife tensed.

  “Aliens!” Ramón spat out. “There’s fucking aliens out there! They took me prisoner. You’ve got to help me!”

  It was the key. The other man’s tension eased a little. His head turned and he looked at Ramón, measuring him, his eyes still radiating mistrust but no longer on the edge of violence. Ramón leaned forward, moving slowly and being careful to do nothing that might startle the other man.

  Ramón looked at him closely for the first time, feeling an odd fascination. After all, in spite of his memories to the contrary, this was the first human being he’d ever actually met! His twin was filthy and unkempt—the light stubble that often darkened his chin was already a moth-eaten beard. Distrust shone in his black eyes. His right hand was wrapped in bloody cloth, and Ramón realized, with a profound sense of vertigo, that in that mess of soiled bandages, a finger was missing. A finger from which he had been born.

  But the other Ramón also looked wrong somehow. He had expected it to be like looking into a mirror, but it was not. The face he was accustomed to seeing reflected back was different than this. It was more like seeing a video recording of himself. Perhaps, he thought, his features were not so symmetrical as he’d liked to believe. Also, the voice was higher than he believed his own to be and slightly whiny. The voice he heard and hated when he heard himself recorded. The other Ramón’s bearded chin jutted aggressively.

  What did he look like in his twin’s eyes? Finer hair. Fewer lines and creases in his skin. No scars, and thin whiskers. He would appear to be a younger man. And if the other Ramón didn’t already feel that he was seeing himself, there was no reason for him to suspect what the aliens had done. Ramón’s advantage was that he knew what had happened, who he was, and all that the other man knew. The other man’s advantage was that he hadn’t half drowned. And he had a knife.

  “Please,” Ramón said, searching for things he could say that would make him seem more plausible. “I’ve got to get back to Fiddler’s Jump. You got a van?”

  “I look like I have a fucking van?” the other man said, raising his arms out at his sides like Christ crucified. “I’ve been running from those fucking things for a week. How is it you came to get loose from them just here and now, eh?”

  It was a good question. They weren’t near the alien hive, and the timing was too convenient. Ramón licked his lips.

  “It’s the first time they took me out,” Ramón said, deciding to keep as near the truth as he could. “They were holding me in a tank. Under a mountain up north of here. They told me there was someone they were hunting. I t
hink they were using me. Seeing what I could eat and like that. I think maybe they didn’t know much. You know. About people.”

  The other man considered this. Ramón kept his gaze away from the knife. Better that neither of them think of it. He heard himself going on, his voice thin and shrill. He sounded afraid.

  “I tried to fight against them, but they had this thing. In my neck. Right here, you can see where it went in. If I did anything they didn’t like, they shocked me. I’ve been walking for days. Please, man, you can’t leave me here.”

  “I’m not going to leave you here,” the other man said. There was disgust in his voice. Disgust and perhaps superiority. “I’ve been running from them too. They blew up my van, but I had a few tricks. Fucked them up pretty good!”

  “That was you?” Ramón said, trying to make his voice sound admiring instead of false. “You’re the one that blew up the yunea?”

  “The what?”

  You only get one slip like that, Ramón told himself. Hold it together, cabrón. At least until you have the knife.

  “The flying box thing. That’s what they called it.”

  “Uh,” the other man said. “Yeah. I’m the one. I saw you, too. I was watching.”

  “So you saw the thing they put in my neck.”

  The other man seemed reluctantly to agree that Ramón’s story had some truth to it. Ramón could see it in the man’s stance when he decided not to kill him.

  “How’d you get away?” the other man asked.

  “Chupacabra killed the alien. Came out of nowhere. The leash came free while they were fighting, and I got out of there.”

  The other man smiled to himself. Ramón decided to let him think they hadn’t seen through his plan with the flatfurs. Better that the other Ramón spend his time thinking how clever he was, and how stupid everyone else could be.

  “What’s your name, anyway?” the other man asked.

  “David,” Ramón said, pulling a name out of the air. “David Penasco. I live down in Amadora. I’m a banker with Union Trust. I was camping by myself, maybe a month ago. They took me when I was sleeping.”

  “Union Trust’s got a branch in Amadora?” the other man asked.

  “Yeah,” Ramón said. He didn’t know if it was true, didn’t know if there was some other memory that hadn’t grown back yet that would rip his story apart, so he plain bare-faced lied it through and prayed. “Has been for about six months.”

  “Sonofabitch,” the other man said. “Well, get off your ass, David. We got work to do if we’re going to get out of here. I got maybe a third of a raft finished. If there’s gonna be two of us, you better get to work. Maybe later you can tell me what you know about those pinche motherfuckers.”

  The other man turned and started walking back into the forest. Ramón followed.

  The clearing was twenty meters or so into the woods, and the man hadn’t bothered to make a shelter or a fire pit. This wasn’t a place to live, it was a construction site. Four sheaves of bamboolike cane lay bound with strips of iceroot bark, the red skin of the cane glittering as it died as if it had been lacquered. Pontoons, Ramón thought. Laced together with thin branches and saplings young enough to be hewn with the serrated back edge of the field knife, they would float. It wouldn’t be anything near watertight—the river would be splashing onto their legs and asses the whole way down if they didn’t have something to cover the raft floor. And the sheaves were too small and too loosely bound. It was damn impressive for some crazed pendejo out by himself with a wounded hand and a demon out of Hell trotting after him, but it wouldn’t get one of them to Fiddler’s Jump, much less two.

  “What?” the man said.

  “Just looking,” Ramón replied. “We’re going to need more cane. You want me to cut it? Just show me where you found it….”

  The man considered the offer with a pinched, sour face. Ramón knew the calculation going on behind those dark eyes. Ramón—or David, whatever his name was now—was going to harvest faster than the injured man himself, but it meant giving him the knife.

  “I’ll do it,” the man said, nodding toward the deeper forest farther from the river. “You go see if you can find some good branches to put between them. And some food, maybe. Be back here before sundown. We’ll try to get this sonofabitch ready to haul down to the water in the morning.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Ramón said. The man spat and stalked off to the south, leaving him alone. Ramón scratched at his elbow where the knot of scar tissue was growing back and turned to walk into the gloom beneath the trees. He realized he’d never asked the man his name. Of course he hadn’t; he already knew. The dread grew in him that the other Ramón would think the omission strange. He had to be more careful.

  The rest of the day was spent dragging fallen branches and wide iceroot leaves back to the campsite and making up the story he could tell his twin. He stopped once to crack open some sug beetles and eat the raw flesh. Uncooked, they were saltier and the meat slick and unpleasant. There wasn’t time, though, for anything more. He tried not to wonder what had happened between Maneck and the chupacabra, which of the two had lost and which was still under the roof of branches, hunting him. It didn’t change what needed doing, so there was no point spending valuable time on the question.

  By sundown, he and his twin had gathered another six sheaves and perhaps a third of the branches that they would need to make the raft floor. The man seemed pleased by Ramón’s wide, soft pile of iceroot leaves as well, though he didn’t go so far as to say it. Ramón boiled a double handful of sug beetles and his twin roasted a cooper’s dragon—one of the small, birdlike lizards that inhabited the low branches. The dragon had an unnerving way of writhing as it cooked, as if the flesh were still living even though both brains had been cut out and the thin, pale blood drained from the body.

  They made small conversation, Ramón careful to ask the man’s name and background. Then they planned for the next day—how to carry the branches and sheaves to the water for assembly, how much more would need to be harvested, whether they needed to strip more bark to use for rope.

  “You’ve done this before,” the man said, and Ramón felt a pang of distress. Maybe he’d come across as knowing too much.

  “I explore a little. When I can. Most of the time, I’m stuck behind a desk,” Ramón said, trying to seem flattered. “Banking. You know. But the money’s good.”

  “You ever do any prospecting?”

  “No,” Ramón said. “Just go out, camp. Look around. You know. Get away from people for a while.”

  The man’s expression softened a little, as Ramón had known it would. He felt a twinge of guilt at playing on the man’s feelings that way.

  “What about you?” Ramón asked, and his twin shrugged.

  “I spend a lot of time in the field,” he said. “Not much point staying in town. It’s a pretty good living, if you know what you’re doing. A good season, I can pull in six, maybe seven thousand chits.”

  That was a gross exaggeration. Ramón had never taken in more than four thousand, even at the best of times. Two and a half was nearer the average, and there had been several seasons he hadn’t managed more than a thousand. The man’s dark eyes seemed to challenge him, so he shook his head, feigning amazement.

  “That’s really good,” Ramón said.

  “It ain’t hard, you know what you’re doing,” the man said, settling back.

  “What happened to your hand?” Ramón asked.

  “Fucking aliens,” the man said, and started to unwrap the blood-stiffened cloth. “I was shooting at them, and my gun blew up. Fucked me up pretty good.”

  Ramón leaned close. In the firelight, it was hard to see how much of the redness was the swollen flesh itself and how much was reflected flames. The skin of the palm looked like taco meat that had been left out overnight. Where the index finger had been was a rough stump, the flesh burned and scarred to an oddly beautiful opalescent silver.

  “You cauterized it,” he said
. His mind went back to the camp where he’d found his cigarette case, where Maneck had revealed to him the story of his doubling. This was why the man had spent so long there. He’d been recovering from the self-treatment of his wound.

  “Yeah,” the man said, and his voice was casual and drawling in a way that Ramón knew meant that he was proud of having done it. “I heated up the knife until it glowed and then used that. Had to. I was bleeding all over the place. There was some bone I had to cut out too.”

  Ramón suppressed a smile. They were tough sons of bitches, him and his twin. He couldn’t help feeling a little proud of himself too, for what the other man had done.

  “Fever?” he asked.

  “On and off,” the man admitted. “No streaks up my arm, though. So it looks like no blood poisoning. Or else I’d be dead by now anyway, eh? So tell me about how you got caught by those devils.”

  Ramón launched into his tale. A little over a month ago, he’d been out camping by himself in the far north. His lover, Carmina, had left him, and he’d wanted to spend some time alone where she couldn’t find him and his friends couldn’t offer sympathy. He’d seen a flying box, gone to investigate, and the aliens had done something—knocked him out, drugged him. He didn’t remember much about that part. Then he’d been imprisoned in a tank until they pulled him out and told him to go hunting. It was a simple enough story to remember, and not so far from the truth that he’d be likely to get caught flat-footed. And the other Ramón would likely sympathize. He talked about the explosion that had ruined the yunea, the forced march, the attack by the chupacabra, and his own escape. He pretended to be amazed when the man explained the strategy behind the flatfur corpses. The delight the other took in his own cleverness started to become annoying. If Ramón didn’t nod or make appreciative noises at the right moment, his twin glared at him.