Hunter's Run Page 19

  As it happened, his twin emerged from the forest an hour or so before nightfall. He had what looked like half a bushel of iceroot leaves bound to his back with ivy and an improvised stretcher of branches trailing behind him, loaded with sticks the right size for burning. Ramón had to admit it wasn’t a bad load for a man with a broken hand and no knife. The other man dropped his burden at the riverside, squatted, and cupped handful after handful of water up to his lips. High above, the Enye ships hung in the sky.

  “Looks good,” Ramón said.

  “Yeah,” the other man said, weariness in his voice. “It’s okay. May need a way to keep the firewood from rolling off, though.”

  “We can do that.”

  The other man looked at the raft and rubbed his cheeks with his palm. Ramón came to stand at his side.

  “Solid,” the man said. “Good design. Kind of small, though, eh?”

  “Didn’t figure we’d both be in it at once,” Ramón said. “One of us is going to be steering. Sleep in shifts. That kind of thing.”

  “What if it rains?”

  “Then whoever’s steering gets wet,” Ramón said. “Or else we both crawl out of the rain like we’re humping each other.”

  “We get wet, then. Right. You got the knife?”

  He held out his hand. Ramón dropped the leather grip into the man’s palm.

  “Thanks,” his twin said, then spun and brought the tip of the blade to Ramón’s throat. The man’s eyes were narrow and furious, his mouth in a wide grin that had nothing to do with pleasure. It was the expression the European had seen; Ramón was sure of it.

  “Now,” the man said through clenched teeth. “How about you tell me what the fuck you really are?”

  Chapter 19

  “I don’t…I don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” Ramón said.

  The other man dug the knifepoint into Ramón’s neck. Ramón felt the urge to step back, away from the blade, but he fought it. Showing weakness now would be an invitation. He forced himself to stay calm, or as calm as he could.

  “You’re no fucking banker,” the man said, spitting the words out. “You build like that. You know how to sharpen my knife. What kind of banker knows that?”

  “I told you,” Ramón said. “I spend a lot of time—”

  “Out at the ass end of nowhere? Yeah, because that makes a fucking lot of sense. And you just happen to come up here. A month ago. And no one gives a shit that you’re gone? No one sends out a search party? That sound likely to you? And your beard. You telling me that’s a month’s growth on your chin? Or did the aliens give you a razor to clean up with while you were there? Your hands. You’ve got calluses on your fingers. That from data entry?”

  Ramón looked at his hands. The hard, yellowed flesh was starting to come back a little. He balled his fists. The man’s grip on the knife got stronger, the pressure against Ramón’s skin hurt a little.

  “You’re paranoid, ese,” Ramón said. His voice was steady and strong. He tried to gauge his chances of wrestling the knife away. If he threw himself back, out of the man’s reach, he could get a few seconds. And the man was going to be fighting offhand. But Ramón’s twin was scared and angry and crazy as a shithouse rat from what he’d been through these last days. Ramón gave himself a-little-worse-than-even odds.

  For a half second, he wondered what the man would do if Ramón told him the truth. Kill him? Run away? Accept him as a brother and move on? Only the last one seemed laughable.

  “And then you asked about the El Rey!” the man shouted. “What the fuck do you know about the El Rey? What the fuck are you?”

  “I’m a cop,” Ramón said, surprised as soon as he heard his own words. But it was clear. It was the story he had already spent days telling himself. All he had to do was turn it around. “My name really is David. The European ambassador got killed. There were some people in the crowd who said you were there. And the knife man, he matched your description.”

  His twin nodded, encouraging Ramón on as if he were confirming his suspicions. Which he probably was, if only because he was making it all up. Ramón swallowed, loosening the knot in his throat. As soon as he could, he went on.

  “Then you take off. Skip town. The constabulary think it’s a little weird, so they send me out to track you. I have spent a lot of time up north. It’s why they picked me. So I find your van blown up like you had a bomb in there or some shit. I start poking around, looking for maybe your arm or something. The next thing I know, there’s this flying box thing. It’s just hanging there. I go to take a look, and then bam! These big-ass things with quills on their heads take my clothes, they take my badge and my pistol, put me in this fucking baby-shit outfit and start marching me around telling me I was supposed to find you.”

  “And so you did it,” the man said, stepping an inch closer, the metal of the blade digging into Ramón’s flesh, stinging like the sahael. “You followed their orders like a dog!”

  “I tried to go slow at first,” Ramón said. “I thought maybe I could buy you time. You know. You get back to the city, you can tell people what’s happened, send help. But then we found that camp. We were too close on you. The only thing I could do was wait and hope you were smarter than the pinche aliens. And you were. So here we are.” And then, because he couldn’t help himself, “You would have done the same thing in my position, man. Seriously.”

  “I didn’t kill the asshole European,” the man said through clenched teeth. “It was someone else. I didn’t fucking do it.”

  “Ramón,” Ramón said, and shook off a moment of vertigo at using his own name in this way. “Ramón, you saved my ass from those demon pendejos. As far as I’m concerned, you were at my house the night the ambassador got himself cut up. The whole time.”

  In the silence between them, Ramón heard the distant chimes of a flock of flapjacks, like church bells. The blade wavered, but Ramón didn’t move. A thin flow of blood tickled his collarbone. The knife had broken the skin. A confused, distrustful expression came over the man’s dark eyes.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I owe you,” Ramón said, putting as much sincerity into his voice as he could without sounding weak.

  “Guy got killed,” his twin said. It was an objection.

  Ramón shrugged. If he was lying, he might as well lie big.

  “You know Johnny Joe? You know who he is?”

  “Johnny Joe Cardenas?”

  “Yeah. You know why he gets away with so much?”

  “Why?”

  “Because we let him. You think we don’t know how many people he’s killed? Thing is, he works for us.”

  The man rocked back an inch. The blade was no longer touching Ramón’s neck. Maybe sixty-forty in his favor now. Ramón kept talking. That was the thing; keep the two of them speaking.

  He had to make it a talking fight.

  “Johnny Joe’s a snitch?” the man asked. He sounded stunned.

  “For the past six years,” Ramón said, trying to remember how long Johnny Joe had been in Diegotown. The man didn’t seem to think the number implausible. “Keeps us informed on what’s going down. And no one suspects him because who the fuck would believe it? He’s a thug. Everyone knows the governor wants him hanged. No one thinks it’s all bullshit and he’s calling us every Sunday like he’s our fucking girlfriend.”

  “I’m not a snitch.”

  “Not saying you are,” Ramón said. “What I’m saying is this: São Paulo? It doesn’t have laws. It has cops. I’m one of them, and you helped me. Whatever happened at the El Rey, it was someone else. That way we’re square.”

  “How do you know I’m not innocent? What if I really didn’t do it?”

  “If you didn’t do it, then I’m gypping you big-time,” Ramón said, and grinned. His twin wavered for a moment, then a smile plucked at his mouth too. The knife blade lowered. The man stepped back.

  “It’s my knife. I’m keeping it. It’s mine.”

 
“You want to hold on to it, that’s cool,” Ramón said, trying to sound reassuring, the way cops did when they were talking you down. He’d heard the tone a few times, and it wasn’t hard to fake. “I understand you’d want to keep the weapon. That’s not a problem. After all, we’re just two guys on the run from a bunch of goddamn aliens, right? Doesn’t matter which one of us has the knife, because we’re on the same side.”

  “If you fuck me over…” the man said, and left the threat hanging. Because, Ramón thought, really, a cop decides to break his word to you, exactly what could you do? Take him to a judge and see who got believed?

  “If I start fucking people over, Johnny Joe and all the other pendejos like him will lose their shit,” Ramón said. Grave. Authoritative. Like a cop. “It ain’t worth it. I tell you you’re clean, man. That makes you clean. But any reward we get for turning in those alien fucks, we split it. You and me. Right down the middle.”

  “Fuck that,” the man said. “I saved your ass. You were walking bait. I get three quarters.”

  Ramón felt his belly loosen. He was clear. The crisis was gone, and nothing left but a little posing and haggling. “Sixty-forty,” he said. “And you didn’t kill anyone. Ever.”

  “I’m getting gypped,” the man said.

  “So’s everyone. We’re the cops, remember?” Ramón said, then smiled. The other man coughed out an incredulous laugh, then smiled himself. “You want to start getting these leaves in place, so we can get out of here and back to someplace they’ve got plumbing?”

  “Fucking cops,” the man said, but now it was a joke. The man was half-drunk with relief. And why shouldn’t he be? Ramón had just forgiven him his sins.

  They worked until the light failed. The little lean-to was half-ready; a bed of leaves made and the covering laid down with the leaves arranged in overlapping rows so that any rain would run down the top and into the water instead of dripping through. Ramón called the halt; his twin would have kept going all night, he guessed, just to prove something. And yet, as they walked the short path back to their little camp, he could tell that the relationship had changed. Clueless banker lost in the wild was one thing. Policeman and granter of pardons was another beast entirely. Ramón built a small fire and the other man unloaded a double handful of sug beetles, suicide nuts, and the bright green berries that Ramón had never found named in the planet’s taxonomies and that tasted like cheap white wine and pears. It wasn’t a feast, but it tasted good. Afterward, Ramón drank water until his belly felt full. He’d have to piss in the middle of the night, but for the moment, it fooled his body into feeling sated.

  His twin lay back beside the fire. Ramón saw the man’s fingers twitching, and knew he was wishing he had a cigarette. The thought immediately made him want one too. How long, he wondered, before the nicotine stains grew back, yellowing his fingers and teeth? How long before the teasing fan dance of identities he was doing for the other man stopped working and the truth came out? Maybe the right thing was to leave now, go into the wild and avoid his twin, the governor, the police, and the Enye entirely.

  He’d thought about living off the land many times before. The idea of fading away into the forest had seemed more plausible when it was a fantasy, or else something he could do with a good, solid van that he could lock up at night. Or if he at least had his pinche knife back.

  There had been stories from the first wave of colonists of men who had gone feral; moved out into the forests and steppes, deserts and tide pools of the planet and never came back to civilization. Some of them might even be true. Colonies didn’t tend to pull people who loved their old lives on Earth. There would be a percentage who hated life here too; men and women who’d hauled their sorry personal failings all the way from Earth. Ramón wondered if he was one of those. Except that he wanted to get back now. So he wasn’t feral yet. And as long as his fingers kept twitching toward a cigarette case that was days behind him and across a river, he would never wholly abandon the cities.

  “Why’d you become a cop?” the man asked, his voice already slurred by exhaustion and impending sleep.

  “I don’t know,” Ramón said. “It seemed like the right thing at the time. Why’d you become a prospector?”

  “It was better than being on a work gang,” the man said. “I’m pretty good at it. And there was a time I needed to get out of town, you know? Get kind of lost for a while.”

  “Yeah?” Ramón said. He was tired as well. It had been a long day in a series of very long days. His body felt heavy and comfortable.

  “There was this guy,” the other man said. “Martín Casaus. We were friends for a while, you know. When I first got here. He was one of those guys hangs out by the orientation centers and tries to make friends with new people since no one who knows him here likes him.” The other man spat. “He called himself a trapper. I guess he even killed things sometimes. Anyway, he got this idea I was after his woman. I wasn’t either. She was a fucking dog. But he got it in his head that I was trying to cut him out.”

  Lianna. Ramón remembered her, the night at the bar. The deep red wallpaper, like drying blood. He’d gone to her, sat at her side. She’d still smelled of the kitchen—frying oil and herbs, hot metal and chili. He had offered to buy her a drink. She’d accepted. She’d taken his hand. She’d been gentle about it. Tentative. He’d had enough to drink that he was a little fuzzy in the head. Martín’s fantasies of her—of opening her blouse, of whispering filthy, exciting things into her ears, of waking in her bed—had intoxicated him as much as the drink.

  “I didn’t give a shit about her,” the man said, chuckling. “She was a cook. Kind of dumpy, you know. Ate too much of her own stuff. Martín, though. Fuck. He was crazy about her.”

  Lianna’s room had been in the back—a separate building grown from cheap chitin out behind the cantina with a little bathroom, a shower, but no place to cook. The LEDs spelling out LOS RANCHEROS had filled the room with dim, harsh light. He’d undressed her to the sound of Portuguese fado music on the music feed, the singer crooning about love and loss and death, a song whose words he heard again now. It had been a beautiful song. In spite of the mild night air, Lianna had had goose bumps. He remembered the gooseflesh on her arms. Her thighs. Her breasts. She’d been shy at first. Feeling guilty about having him there. And then less so. And then not shy at all.

  “So Martín gets it into his head that I fucked this girl. Now, he wasn’t seeing her. Hadn’t spoken more than maybe a dozen words to her his whole life. But he thinks he’s in love. So he gets crazy. Jumps me with a sheet metal hook. Almost kills me.”

  Afterward, he’d run his fingers through her hair as she slept. He’d wanted to cry, but hadn’t been able to. Even now, the memory growing in like a vine in his brain, he couldn’t say why he’d wanted to do that, what mixture of lust and sorrow, loneliness and guilt had moved him so much. Part of it was that he’d betrayed Martín. Only part of it, though. Lianna.

  “So I figure, you know, as soon as I’m healed up, maybe I should get scarce. I put a down payment on a van from this place I’d been working that was about to go tits-up. I got some old surveying software from the widow of a guy I knew that died. Took off. It just went on from there. You know how that goes.”

  “I do,” Ramón agreed. “You ever see her again?”

  “The dumpy cook girl? No, man. Why bother, you know?”

  She’d snored a little, just a wheeze in and then out. She had a cheap poster of the Virgin of Despegando Station over her bed, the bright blue eyes and robes glowing in the near dark. Ramón had thought he was in love with her. He’d written her letters but deleted them before he hit SEND. He couldn’t conjure up what he had put in them. He wondered if the other man remembered what they said. If not, the words were gone forever.

  He hadn’t told that story in years. If he had, he would have talked about her exactly the way his twin had, just now. Some things you just don’t say to people.

  “You got quiet,” the man said. �
�You thinking about that Carmina? She had you whipped, mi amigo. I could hear it when you talked about her.”

  A sneering tone had crept into the other’s voice, and Ramón knew he was on dangerous ground, but he couldn’t keep himself from asking, “How about you? You got a girl now?”

  “I got someone I fuck,” the other said. “She’s got a mouth on her sometimes, but she’s okay. I don’t mind fucking her. She’s pretty good in bed.”

  Time to take a chance, push it a little. “You love her?”

  The other man froze. “That’s none of your business, cabrón,” he said in a hard voice.

  Ramón allowed himself to lock eyes with the other man for a heartbeat, then said gruffly, “You’re right. Sorry.” Not rising to the insult. Backing down, but in a way consistent with his tough-cop persona. Not craven enough to arouse the other’s ire.

  After a moment of silence, Ramón said, “Let’s get some sleep, eh? Long day tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” the man said, his tone sour. “Sure.”

  But, as Ramón had hoped, the subject of who he loved didn’t come up again.

  Chapter 20

  They launched the raft around noon the next day, the morning spent in final preparations and unsuccessful hunting. It was more cramped. The fire pit sat at the back, where one of them could both tend it and steer with the oar. The lean-to ran lengthwise along one side. It unbalanced the raft a little, but if Ramón had put it in the midline, he wouldn’t have been able to see ahead and steer. Of course it blocked part of his view no matter where it sat. And as a counterbalance, he’d put a pile of wood for the fire on the other side, not so near the edge that it was likely to get soaked.