Hunter's Run Read online

  The whole thing was a manipulation from start to finish. And it seemed to work. When Ramón explained how he needed to be away from civilization, that the comfort offered by friends was as painful and humiliating as being mocked, the man nodded to himself. And when the tale was finished, he didn’t comment on it. He wouldn’t. It wasn’t the sort of thing men did.

  “Sleep in shifts?” the man asked.

  “Sure,” Ramón said. “Probably better that way. I’ll take first. I’m not tired.”

  It was a lie. He was deeply weary, but he’d had the period of unconsciousness that was almost like sleep after he’d pulled himself from the river. The other Ramón hadn’t even had that. And anyway, it was best to do the sorts of things that a banker from Amadora would do to ingratiate himself to his rescuer.

  The man shrugged and held out his field knife. Ramón hesitated for a moment, then took it. The slightly sticky feel of the leather grip, the balanced weight. It was familiar, and yet different than he remembered it. A moment’s consideration told him that it was his body that had changed; he’d never held it without calluses on his hands. The other man misread his expression.

  “It’s not much,” the man said. “It’s all that we’ve got. Won’t fight off a chupacabra or redjackets, but…”

  “No trouble,” Ramón said. “Thanks.”

  The man grunted, lay down, and turned his back to the fire. Ramón tested the heft of the knife again, growing used to it in his new hands. These unlikely companions he traveled with—men and aliens—seemed to be pretty comfortable handing him knives. Maneck had done it because it knew it was safe. The man had done it because he assumed Ramón was an ally. It was a mistake he would have made himself. Obviously.

  Ramón peered into the darkness, careful not to let the light of their modest cook fire blind him to the shadows, and considered his options. The man had accepted him, for the time being. But it was a long way to Fiddler’s Jump, and if what Maneck had said was true, Ramón would grow to more closely resemble his old self before they got there. Sooner or later, the man would figure out that something was wrong. And even if he didn’t, Ramón didn’t know what he’d do when they got back to the colony. A judge would be hard-pressed to accept that he was the real, legal Ramón Espejo. And the Enye might well decide that he should die along with Maneck’s people. Nothing good would come from two Ramóns walking out of the bush together.

  The smart thing to do would be to kill the man. He had a knife, his twin was snoring and wounded. One quick slice to the neck, and the problem would be gone. He’d make his way south, resume his life, and the other man’s bones would never be found. It was what needed to happen.

  And yet, he couldn’t do it.

  Under what circumstances do you kill? Maneck’s question echoed in his memory. Ramón settled down for the long, slow hours of his watch and found himself less and less able to answer the question.

  At first light, they went back to the work of building the raft. Ramón retied the cane floats, his two hands cinching them tighter than his twin could manage. They considered how many branches they’d need to finish the structure. It was a quick, easy negotiation. Ramón and the other man approached the problem the same way, came to the same conclusions. The only real difference was in his twin’s refusal to give over a larger share of the work. It made sense that the uninjured man should bear the heavier load, but his twin was bent on putting the soft-handed Amadora banker in his place, and Ramón recognized the impulse clearly enough to know there was no point arguing.

  By noon, they had enough raw materials to put the raft together. Ramón fashioned a rough harness from two cut branches and a length of bright blue panama ivy and used it to haul the cane and the branches down the short path to the water. The man allowed him that much, bringing the armful of stripped bark and iceroot leaves instead. Ramón figured it meant his twin was feeling tired.

  The sandbar was smaller than Ramón remembered it, but just as cluttered with debris. Without consulting the man walking behind him, he pulled the load to the bank just downstream. The bar created a still place in the waters. The eddy was a good place to test their raft before they launched themselves out into the unforgiving flow.

  Ramón shrugged off the harness and squatted on the bank. In the still water, he could see himself reflected, and his twin standing behind him. Two men, similar, but not yet identical. Ramón’s growing beard was softer and lighter. His hair hung closer to his head than it had before, changing the shape of his face a little. Still, they might have been brothers. Since he knew to look for it, he could see where the moles on his twin’s cheek and neck were echoed by minute discolorations on his own. The scar on his belly twinged.

  “Not bad,” the man said, and spat thoughtfully into the water, the ripples disturbing its soft mirror. The raft was going to be big. The lower gravity of São Paulo lent itself to fast-growing trees, and rather than take the time to cut the long saplings twice, they’d used them all at their full height. It wasn’t luxury, but there would be easy room for them both. “We should put some shelter on it, though.”

  “Like a cabin?” Ramón asked, looking at the collection of sticks before him.

  “A lean-to. Something to sleep in, get out of the weather. And if we got enough wood, we can add a fire grate, too. Line the bottom with iceroot leaves, fill it a couple hands high with good sand, and we can keep warm on the river.”

  Ramón squinted at the man, then upriver, back toward where Maneck and the chupacabra had done battle. He tried to guess how long he’d been in the water, how far he’d swum. He couldn’t be sure. It had felt like a long time, a huge distance. But he’d been on the verge of death, so his impressions probably weren’t all that good.

  “Let’s put those on farther down the river,” he said. “I want to get away from here first.”

  “You scared?” the man jeered. His tone was taunting, and Ramón felt anger and embarrassment surge through him. Ramón could see the frustration in the other man, the anger always simmering under the skin, ready to be fanned awake, the desire to strike out and make himself feel better by hurting someone, and felt its twin in his own breast. He’d have to tread carefully here, or they’d end up in a fight neither could afford.

  “Scared to face down a pissed-off chupacabra with a field knife and a stick?” he said. “Anyone isn’t scared of that’s stupid or crazy.”

  The man’s expression hardened at the insult, but he shrugged casually.

  “There’s two of us,” he said, turning half away from Ramón. “We could take him.”

  “Maybe,” Ramón said, letting the obvious lie stand. They could no more take down a chupacabra than flap their arms and fly to Fiddler’s Jump. If he pressed it, though, they’d end up fighting about it. “Thing is, what if the alien won?”

  “Against a chupacabra?” the man asked, incredulous. It was easy to summon up the bravado to say they could kill the beast, but hard to stretch the imagination far enough to think that Maneck might win against the same odds. Ramón kept his expression somber.

  “It was looking pretty even when I got out of there,” he said. “The alien had a gun of some kind, and it shot the chupacabra at least twice; maybe that weakened it. I wasn’t going to hang around to find out how it ended, you know? Besides, if the fucking alien is still alive and still has that gun, we don’t want it catching up with us.”

  “Fine,” the man said. “If it makes you feel better, we’ll head downstream for a day or two. We can pull in somewhere, add a lean-to and a fire pit. Maybe check the cane, make sure it’s still tied tight enough.”

  That was a dig. The man was still smarting over Ramón insisting that he could tie the floats better with two hands than his twin could with one.

  Once Ramón would have risen to the bait, taken offense, maybe pushed it into a fight, but not now. Fine, pendejo, Ramón thought. Dig at me all you want. I know how scared you are too.

  “Good plan” was all he said.

  Las
hing the branches together and binding them to the cane floats was long work, but not difficult. Ramón found himself falling into a rhythm—setting the wood in place, tying it on one side, then the other, then in the center where it crossed another branch. One, two, three, four, then start again. He fell into the work, abandoning himself to the sheer physicality of it. His hands and feet, unprotected by calluses, hurt and blistered. He ignored the pain; it was just part of the package. If the other man could cut away his own stump of a finger bone, Ramón could sure as shit stand scraping up his palms a little.

  His twin kept pace as best he could, but the crippled hand slowed him badly. Ramón could feel the frustration rising in the man as he struggled not to be shown up by a pinche banker. As the sun dipped toward the treetops on the opposite shore, Ramón noticed, with some satisfaction, that the other man’s bandage showed the bright red tinge of new blood.

  At the end, they laid the iceroot leaves over the branches, tacking the broad, leathery fronds together until they were like a carpet. Not wholly waterproof, but enough that they wouldn’t be getting their asses wet with river water all the way south. The raft wasn’t much to look at. There was no rudder, and only an improvised paddle to steer with at the stern. It wasn’t more than two and a half meters square; it was a decent size for a wrestling match, but as a way to travel, it would be pretty damn close quarters. Still, all it had to do was stay on top of the big river long enough for them to float down to Fiddler’s Jump. And when they dragged it out into the lagoon, it floated high off the water, and when they both clambered on, it felt solid and secure.

  “Not fucking bad, David,” his twin said. “You did a man’s job of it, eh?”

  “We did all right,” he agreed. “You want to get out of here?”

  And as the words left his mouth, they heard a sound—the distant, gurgling cry of a chupacabra. It sounded as if it were in pain. Ramón’s belly went tight, and the other man’s face was pale.

  “Yeah,” his twin said. “We might as well get going.”

  Ramón paddled them out from behind the sandbar and nearer the center of the river where the current was fastest. The other man squatted at the raft’s edge, looking back. Neither the beast nor Maneck emerged from the forest, and the screaming call didn’t come again. Ramón, settling back to steer, couldn’t help feeling they’d had a near miss. Another night on shore would have ended badly for them. Maybe even another hour. It was a good fucking thing that his twin had tried so hard to keep up. A good thing that Ramón hadn’t been able to bring himself to kill the man in the night. One man would never have been able to finish the raft alone in time.

  But the sound of the predator—even if it was in pain—also filled him with a strange melancholy. If the chupacabra lived, then Maneck was dead. The athanai of his cohort had been killed attempting to protect his people from the violence that had tracked them across stars and centuries. And the creature who had frustrated Maneck’s tatecreude? A jumped-up little monkey from the badlands of Mexico who’d stumbled on the hive while running from the law, and who even now didn’t have any idea what the consequences of his discovery would be. At least Maneck had died trying. Died fighting. There was some honor in that, even if it had failed its people. In an odd way that surprised and disquieted him, he found he almost missed Maneck, now that it was over, now that he was free. And in spite of all the pain it had visited upon him, in spite of the hatred he’d felt for the alien at times, Ramón couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret and sorrow at the thought of its terrible death.

  “Still, better you than me, monster,” Ramón said under his breath. “Better you than me!”

  Chapter 17

  The first night was the worst. The river was placid so far north, so the only dangers were logs and debris floating invisibly in the dark water, aquatic predators like bloody mormons and carracao, and the cold. They were under no power, so unless the rocks or debris were stuck in the bed of the river itself, chances of a damaging collision were slim, and they were too far north to be in the range of most river predators. That left the cold.

  Once the sun slipped behind the western trees, the river seemed to suck all the warmth from the air. Ramón was wearing the alien robe; warm enough, but too small to cover his legs and arms both at the same time. The other man, however, had sacrificed his shirt and the lower legs of his trousers to bandages and traps, so they’d agreed that the man should take the one-piece alien garment. He was curled on the iceroot leaves, wrapped tight and still shivering. There was no call to sleep in shifts. The light of a near-full moon was too bright and the chill too uncomfortable to allow for anything like sleep. Ramón considered pulling in to shore for the night, but he didn’t suggest it. His twin would only take it as a slight, and the man never made the suggestion himself. Besides, Ramón knew they were both anxious to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the chupacabra. Ramón wondered how far a chupacabra’s range was. Fifty kilometers came to mind, but he didn’t know where he got the figure from. By morning, it would be safe to pull to the side. But perhaps they could move to the western shore, just to be sure.

  “Hey, David,” the other man said. Ramón blinked back to full consciousness, only now aware how near he’d come to dozing.

  “Yeah?” he said, and coughed. He hoped he wasn’t getting a cold. That would be just his luck.

  “You ever spend time in Diegotown?” the man asked.

  Ramón fought to focus his mind, looking over at the man. His twin was sitting up now, legs hugged to his chest. His frown cut deep lines in his face. He looked both brutish and desperately uncomfortable, but it was clear enough he’d been watching Ramón for a while.

  “A little,” he said. “Why?”

  “I think I’ve seen you someplace before. What kind of things do you do in Diegotown?”

  “Business, mostly,” Ramón said. “You might have seen me around the governor’s palace. You spend any time there?” He knew damn well he didn’t, so the other man’s shrug was expected. Ramón felt the urge to echo the movement—it was the natural thing; the motion most familiar to his flesh. It took an effort to shake his head and smile instead. “There was a bar I went to a few times,” Ramón said, not knowing why he was choosing the embellishment until he’d already begun. “The El Rey. It was down by the river. You ever go there?”

  “No,” the other man said harshly. “I’ve never heard of that one.”

  “Huh,” Ramón said. “Maybe I got the name wrong. It had wood floors. And the guy who ran it was named Michael or Miko or something like that. I got sick in the alley out back. There was one of those shifting LED lights. I remember that.”

  “Don’t know the place. Maybe you’re thinking of a bar in some other town.”

  His tone made it clear that the conversation was over, but in case Ramón hadn’t taken the hint, his twin shifted, turning his back. Ramón permitted himself a smile and a shrug. He wasn’t surprised the man had lied. If he’d met a stranger in the wild, he’d have been wary of the subject too. It was a good conversation stopper.

  And yet there was also regret. His mind kept returning to the time before the fight, like a tongue exploring the hole left by a missing tooth. Killing the European, he had that like he was seeing it on a screen. But how exactly had things gone that far? He remembered a pachinko machine. There had been a woman, her hair straightened to make her look Asian, at the European’s side. He knew that the woman hadn’t been there because she knew or liked the man; being with him had been some kind of work thing. But he didn’t know how he knew that. He remembered her laugh—tight, short, frightened.

  How would he have explained to Maneck that laughter could be more than what was funny? The alien wouldn’t have understood that the same thing that people did when something was funny could also be a way to express fear. To cry for help.

  Ramón grabbed the thought, trying to follow it back to some more solid recollection, but it swam away, just out of his reach. Only his twin k
new it, and Ramón had no way to ask.

  They didn’t speak again until shortly after dawn. Ramón and his twin agreed to move the raft across the river and hug the western shore until they saw a good stand of cane. They could make the pit out of anything thick enough to hold the dirt and sand that kept the fire from burning the raft itself, but using cane would be the easiest way to make a lean-to. And judging from the stars, the cane might start getting scarce if they went much farther south.

  They found a decent spot by the middle morning, and Ramón gently paddled them to a landing. The impact of the bank caused the other man to stumble slightly, but the raft held together just fine. Ramón checked all the cane floats, to be sure, but none of his knots had come loose.

  The other man cut cane for the rest of the morning while Ramón rounded up food. It would have been easier with a pistol, but there were a few sug beetles to be found and he managed to trap three fat, mud-colored things that looked like a cross between crayfish and eels. He didn’t know what they were, but the rule of thumb was that the poisonous animals were brighter colored, so the eel-things were more likely to be edible than not. Still, he might let the other man try them first.

  When he found his twin, the man was squatting on the ground, his head hung low. The field knife was in his hand and pinked by the cane juice; it looked less like blood than some sort of cherry sauce. The pile of cane on the shore was smaller than Ramón had expected. Ramón cleared his throat hard enough to be heard over the water, and the man’s head rose. The black eyes squinted at Ramón for a moment before his twin lifted his chin in greeting.

  “Hey,” Ramón said. “I got some things. They’re probably good to eat. You seen these before?”

  His twin shifted his focus to the eel-things.

  “No,” the man said. “But they’re dead. So let’s cook them, eh?”

  “Right,” Ramón said. “You okay, man? You look tired.”

  “Didn’t sleep,” his twin spat. “And before that, I was running for my fucking life with nothing but what I had on for a few days. And before that, I had my hand fucking blown up.”