Hunter's Run Read online

Maneck led him down a bright white passageway to another great, high-vaulted chamber. Things the color and size of aphids swarmed across the floor, bumping into each other and into his legs, singing incomprehensible gibberish in high, sweet voices. In the center of the room squatted a bone-colored box like the one that had destroyed his van. As they drew near, Ramón saw that the thing was not solid. Instead, a million tiny strands of dripping white and cream made a webwork of slats that shifted to create an opening and then close it behind them.

  The interior of the box was likewise only half-solid—a wide, low bench that appeared intended for Maneck’s barrel-like form and also a smaller area set into the wall where Ramón himself might sit, legs pulled up to his chest.

  Ramón waited leadenly while Maneck examined the box, leaning in to run its long, slender fingers carefully over the controls. He could feel himself becoming dazed and passive, numbed by weariness and shock—he’d been through too much, too fast. And he was tired, more tired than he could remember being before; perhaps the shot they’d given him, glucose or adrenaline or whatever it had been, was wearing off. He was almost asleep on his feet when Maneck seized him, lifted him into the air as if he was a little child, and stuffed him into the box. He struggled to sit up, but Maneck seized his arms, drew them behind his back, and bound them with a thin length of wirelike substance, then hobbled his legs, before turning and sitting down in front of the controls. Maneck touched a pushplate, and the box rose smoothly into the air.

  Acceleration shoved Ramón’s head sideways, pinning it at an uncomfortable angle. In spite of the terror of his situation, he realized that he was unable to stay awake any longer. Even as they rose toward the high-domed cavern roof, his eyes were squeezing shut, as though the mild g-forces that pulled with mossy inevitability on his bones were also drawing him inexorably into sleep.

  Above them, the rock opened.

  As Ramón’s consciousness faded, drowning him in hissing white snow, he saw, beyond the hole in the stone, a single pale and isolate star.

  A freezing wind lashed him awake. He struggled to sit up. The box lurched to the left, and he found himself looking through the spaces between the woven slats straight down through an ocean of air at the tiny tops of the trees. The box canted over the other way, violently, and the darkening evening sky swirled around his head, momentarily turning the faint, newly emerged stars into tight little squiggles of light.

  They leveled off. Maneck sat behind the box’s control panel unshakably, firm and cold as a statue, quills rippling in the bitter wind. Banking again, they fell at a slant through the air. He couldn’t have been insensible for more than a minute or two, Ramón realized; that was the aliens’ mountain just behind them, the exit hole now irised shut again, and that was the mountain slope where he’d been captured, just below. Even as they coasted down toward the slope, the sky was growing significantly darker. The sun had sunk beneath the horizon some moments before, leaving only the thinnest sliver of glazed red along the junction line of land and air. The rest of the sky was the color of plum and eggplant and ash, dying rapidly to an inky blackness overhead and to the west. Armed and bristling with trees, the mountain slope rushed up to meet them. Too fast! Surely they would crash…

  They touched down lightly in the middle of an alpine valley, settling out of the sky as silently as a feather. Maneck killed the box’s engine. Darkness swallowed them, and they were surrounded by the sly and predatory noises of evening. Maneck seized Ramón, and, lifting him like a rag doll, dragged him from the box, carried him a few feet away, and dropped him to the ground.

  Ramón groaned involuntarily, startled and ashamed by the loudness of his voice. His arms were still bound behind him, and to lie upon them was excruciatingly painful. He rolled over onto his stomach. The ground under him was so cold that it was comfortable, and even in his sick and confused condition, Ramón realized that meant death. He thrashed and squirmed, and managed to roll himself up in the long cloak he’d been given; it was surprisingly warm. He would have fallen asleep then, in spite of his pain and discomfort, but light beat against his eyelids where there had been no light, and he opened his eyes.

  The light seemed blinding at first, but it dimmed as his eyes adjusted. Maneck had brought something from the box, a small globe attached to a long metal rod, and jammed the sharp end of the rod into the soil; now the globe was alight, burning from within with a dim bluish light, emitting rhythmic waves of heat. As Ramón watched, Maneck walked around the globe—the sahael shortening visibly with each step—and came slowly toward him with seeming deliberation. Only then, watching Maneck prowl toward him, seeing the wet gleam in the corner of its orange eyes as it looked from side to side, seeing the way its nose crinkled and twitched, the way its head swiveled and swayed restlessly on the stubby neck, the shrugging of its shoulders at each step, hearing the iron rasp of its breath, smelling its thick, musky odor—only then did some last part of Ramón’s mind fully accept the fact that he was its captive, alone and at its mercy in the wilderness.

  That simple knowledge hit Ramón with such force that he felt the blood begin to drain from his face, and even as he was worming and scrambling backward in a futile attempt to get away from his captor, he was losing his grip on the world, losing consciousness, slipping down into darkness.

  The alien stood over him, seen again through the hazy white snow of faintness, seeming to loom up endlessly into the sky like some horrid and impossible beanstalk, with eyes like blazing orange suns. That was the last thing Ramón saw before the snow piled up over his face and buried him, and everything was gone.

  Morning was a blaze of pain. He had fallen asleep on his back, and he could no longer feel his arms. The rest of his body ached as though it had been beaten with clubs. The alien was standing over him again—or perhaps it had never moved, perhaps it had stood there all night, looming and remote, terrible, tireless, and unsleeping. The first thing Ramón saw that morning, through a bloodshot haze of pain, was the alien’s face; the long, twitching black snout with its blue and orange markings, the quills stirring in the wind and moving like the feelers of some huge insect.

  I will kill you, Ramón thought once again. There was very little anger in it. Only a deep, animal certainty. Somehow, I will kill you.

  Maneck hauled Ramón to his feet and set him loose, but his legs would not hold him, and he crashed back to the ground as soon as he was released. Again Maneck pulled him up, and again Ramón fell.

  As Maneck reached for him the third time, Ramón screamed, “Kill me! Why don’t you just kill me?” He wormed backward, away from Maneck’s reaching hand. “You might as well just kill me now!”

  Maneck stopped. Its head tilted to one side to regard Ramón curiously in an oddly birdlike manner. The hot orange eyes peered at him closely, unblinking.

  “I need food,” Ramón went on, in a more reasonable tone. “I need water. I need rest. I can’t use my arms and legs if they’re tied like this. I can’t even stand, let alone walk!” He heard his voice rising again, but couldn’t stop it. “Listen, puto, I need to piss! I’m a man, not a machine!” With a supreme effort, he heaved himself to his knees and knelt there in the dirt, swaying. “Is this aubre? Eh? Good! Kill me, then! I can’t go on like this!”

  Man and alien stared at each other for a silent moment. Ramón, exhausted by his outburst, breathed in rattling gasps. Maneck studied him carefully, snout quivering. At last, it said, “You possess retehue?”

  “How the shit would I know?” Ramón croaked, his voice rasping in his dry throat. “What the fuck is it?” He drew himself up as much as he could, and glared back at the alien.

  “You possess retehue,” the alien repeated, but it was not a question this time. It took a quick step forward, and Ramón flinched, afraid that the death he’d demanded was on its way. But instead, Maneck cut him free.

  At first, he could feel nothing in his arms and legs; they were as dead as old wood. Then sensation flooded back into them, burning like ice,
and they began to spasm convulsively. Ramón set his face stoically and said nothing, but Maneck must have noticed and correctly interpreted the sudden pallor of his skin, for it reached down and began to massage Ramón’s arms and legs. Ramón shrunk away from its touch—again he was reminded of snakeskin, dry, firm, warm—but the alien’s powerful fingers were surprisingly deft and gentle, loosening knotted muscles, and Ramón found that he didn’t mind the contact as much as he would have thought that he would; it was making the pain go away, after all, which was what really counted.

  “Your limbs have insufficient joints,” Maneck commented. “That position would not be uncomfortable for me.” It bent its arms backward and forward at impossible angles to demonstrate. With his eyes closed, Ramón could almost believe that he was listening to a human being—Maneck’s Spanish was much more fluent than that of the alien in the pit, and its voice had less of the rusty timbre of the machine. But then Ramón would open his eyes and see that terrible alien face, ugly and bestial, only inches from his own, and his stomach would turn over, and he would have to adjust all over again to the fact that he was chatting with a monster.

  “Stand up now,” Maneck said. It helped Ramón up, and supported him while he limped and stomped in a slow semicircle to work out cramps and restore circulation, looking as if he was performing some arthritic tribal dance. At last, he was able to stand unsupported, although his legs wobbled and quivered with the strain.

  “We have lost time this morning,” Maneck said. “This is all time we might have employed in exercising our functions.” Ramón could almost imagine that it sighed. “I have not previously performed this type of function. I did not realize that you possessed retehue, and therefore failed to take all factors into account. Now we must suffer delays accordingly.”

  Suddenly, Ramón understood what retehue must be. He was more baffled than outraged. “How could you not realize that I was sentient? You were there all the while I talked to the white thing in the pit!”

  “We were present, but I had not integrated yet,” Maneck said simply. It did not elaborate further, and Ramón had to be content with that. “Now that I am, I will observe you closely. You are to demonstrate the limitations to the human flow. Once we are informed, the man’s path is better predicted.” It gestured around them. “Here is the last of places the man was known,” it said. Its voice was deep and resonant. Ramón could almost think that the thing sounded sorrowful. “We will begin here.”

  Ramón looked around. Indeed, there were signs of a small, improvised camp. A tiny lean-to hardly big enough to sleep in had been constructed with fresh boughs and tied together with lengths of bark. A fire pit ringed by stone showed ashes where the lawman had cooked something at the end of a fire-hardened stick. Whoever they’d sent after Ramón had spent enough time in the field to know how to survive with what came to hand. Good for him.

  Maneck stood silent by the bone-colored box, the thick, fleshy sahael attached to its arm. Ramón looked at it, waiting to see what strategy the thing would adopt. The alien, however, did nothing. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, Ramón cleared his throat.

  “Monster. Hey. Now we’re here, what is it you want me to do, eh?”

  “You are a man,” Maneck said. “Behave as he would behave.”

  “He’s got tools and clothes, and he doesn’t have a leash on,” Ramón said.

  “Your confluence will be approximate at the beginning,” Maneck said. “This is expected. You will not be punished for it. Your needs will lead you to a matched flow. That is sufficient.”

  “Speaking of needs and flowing,” Ramón said, “I got to piss.”

  “That will do,” Maneck said. “Begin by achieving piss.”

  Ramón smiled.

  “You stay here, then, I’ll go achieve piss.”

  “I will observe,” Maneck said.

  “You want to watch me piss?”

  “We are to explore the banks which bound the man’s possible channels. If this task is a necessity of his being, then I will understand it.”

  Ramón shrugged.

  “You’re just lucky I’m not shy about this kind of thing,” he said, walking to the nearest tree. “There’s some men couldn’t get a drop out, not with you watching them, eh?”

  The ground was rough, and Ramón’s feet were tender. The long bath in the alien gel seemed to have softened away all his calluses. As he relieved himself against the tree trunk, he tried to make sense of the alien’s behavior. The limitations of human flow, it had said. For a being so impatiently concentrated on pragmatic results, Maneck was strangely interested in Ramón’s need to urinate, which ought to have struck it as irrelevant. It wasn’t an activity that seemed important to hunting the fugitive. But it had not known that binding his arms behind him would discomfort him, either. Perhaps the aliens needed him to understand what the habits of a man were. He was more than a hound. Merely by being human, he was a guide for them.

  Ramón stood for a long moment after his bladder was empty, taking the opportunity to turn his mind to strategy. He could not refuse the aliens. The demonstration of the pain his leash could deliver had convinced him of that. But there was a long history of labor protests in which things simply took a longer time and more materials than expected. Slowdowns. Ramón might have to be on the job for these devils, but he didn’t have to be a good worker. He would move slowly, explain the fine points of pissing and shitting and hunting and trapping for as long as Maneck would allow it. Every hour Ramón could waste was another one that the lawman had to make his return to civilization and send help back. How things would unfold once that had happened, Ramón didn’t know.

  He shook his penis twice as long as was truly required, then let the robe drop back down to cover his knees. Maneck’s great head shifted, but whether this was a sign of approval or disgust, Ramón had no way to tell.

  “You are complete?” Maneck asked.

  “Sure,” Ramón said. “Complete enough for the moment.”

  “You have other needs?”

  “I’ll need to find fresh water to drink,” Ramón said. “And some food to eat.”

  “Complex chemical compounds which can be harvested of their potential to facilitate flow and prevent pooling,” Maneck said. “This is mehiban. How will you manufacture this?”

  “Manufacture? I’m not going to make it. I’m going to catch it. Hunt for it. What is it you devils do?”

  “We consume complex chemical compounds. These are ae euth’eloi. Made things. But the oekh I have would not nourish you. How do you obtain food? I will allow you to procure it for yourself.”

  Ramón scratched his arm and shrugged.

  “Well, I’m going to kill something. I’d try making a sling, maybe killing a flatfur or dragonjay, but I’ve got this fucking thing in my neck. You wouldn’t want to take it out of me, just long enough I can show you how this is done?”

  Maneck stood unresponsive as a tree.

  “Didn’t think so, monster. It’s trapping, then. It might take a little longer, but it will do. Come on.”

  In fact, the fastest and easiest thing would have been to gather up sug beetles as he had the other night. He had seen a few even this deep under the forest canopy. Or a half hour of gathering would have gotten him enough mianberry to make a small meal; this far north, you could pick them off the trees by the handful. Feeding off the land wasn’t hard. The amino acids that had built up the biosphere of São Paulo were almost all identical to those on Earth. But that would have been simple, and would have allowed them to move quickly on to whatever the next phase of their hunt would be. So, instead, Ramón taught the alien how to trap.

  His equipment had, of course, been destroyed with his van. If the thought had truly been that he should catch his dinner easily and well, that would have enraged him. Since his intention now was to stall, it only made him peevish. The bastard things had destroyed his van, after all.

  Ramón scrounged through the underbrush for the raw materi
al of a snare: whipvine, a few longish sticks seasoned enough to break but green enough to bend first, a handful of São Paulo’s nut equivalent—a sticky bole that smelled of honey and resin—to act as bait. He was annoyed to find that all this hurt his fingers, which had been as tough as old leather; the syrup bath in which the aliens had soaked him must have melted away the calluses on his hands as well, leaving his fingers ill-prepared for real work. Through it all, Maneck watched in silence. Ramón found himself explaining the process as he went. The pressure of the thing’s unspeaking regard made him jumpy.

  When at last Ramón had the snares in place, he led Maneck back into the underbrush to wait for some unsuspecting animal to happen by. It was unlikely to take long; the animals this far north were naive, unfamiliar with traps, never having been hunted by humans before, and so were easy to catch. Still, he would stall for as long as he could before checking the traps.

  They sat well in among the branches, Maneck watching him with what seemed sometimes like profound curiosity, sometimes like impatience, but was likely an emotion Ramón had never felt or heard named.

  “The food-thing comes to you to be ended?” Maneck said in its sad, sonorous voice.

  “Not if you keep making a fucking racket,” Ramón whispered. “It isn’t as if we’re getting its consent first.”

  “It is unknowing? This is niedutoi?”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Ramón said.

  “Interesting,” Maneck said. “You understand purpose, and killing, but not niedutoi. You are a disturbing creature.”

  “That’s what they tell me,” Ramón said.

  “Under what circumstances do you kill?”

  “Me?”

  Maneck was silent. Ramón felt a stab of annoyance at the thing for spoiling the hunt, even as he reminded himself that it was all a play for time. He sighed.

  “Men kill for all sorts of reasons. If someone’s going to kill you, you kill them first. Or if they’re fucking your wife. Or sometimes men will be so poor they have to rob someone for money. That can go too far. Or if someone declares war, then soldiers go and kill each other. Or sometimes…sometimes you just walk into the wrong bar and start acting like a cabrón where the wrong bastard can hear you, and he kills you for it.”