Hunter's Run Part 3

Sick dread squeezed his chest. His camp. The thing was clearly searching for something, and Ramon hadn't done anything to conceal the white dome of the bubbletent or the van beside it. There had been no reason to. The thing might not see him down here in the underbrush, but it would would see his camp. He had to get there-get back to the van and into the air-before the thing from the mountain discovered it. His mind was already racing ahead-would his van outpace the flying white box? Just let him get it in the air. He could fly G e o r g e R . R . M a r t i n see his camp. He had to get there-get back to the van and into the air-before the thing from the mountain discovered it. His mind was already racing ahead-would his van outpace the flying white box? Just let him get it in the air. He could flyit low, make it hard to spot or attack. He was a good pilot. He could dodge between treetops from here to Fiddler's Jump if he had to . . .

But he had to get there first.

He fled, raw panic pus.h.i.+ng away the last shreds of caution. The demonic white box was lost from sight as he reached the edge of the scree and dove into the underbrush. The bushes and low scrub that had seemed thin and easily navigable when he'd been walking were now an obstacle course. Branches grabbed at him, raking his face and ripping his clothes. He had the feeling that the flying thing from the mountain was right on top of him, at his back, ready to strike. His breath burned as he sprinted, legs churning, back toward the van.

"I didn't see anything," he gasped. "Please. I wasn't doing anything! I don't know anything. Please. I dreamed it!"

When halfway back to the van he paused, leaning against a tree to catch his breath, the sky was empty. No ghostly box hung in the air, searching for him. He was surprised to find that his pistol was already in his hand. He didn't recall drawing it. Still, now that he did think of it, the weight and solidity of it were rea.s.suring. He wasn't defenseless. Whatever that f.u.c.king thing was, he could shoot it. He spat, anger taking the place of fear. Maybe he didn't know what he was facing, but it didn't know him him either. He was Ramon Espejo! either. He was Ramon Espejo!

He'd tear the alien a new a.s.shole if it messed with him.

Buoyed by his bravado and rage, Ramon started again for the van, one eye to the skies. He had cleared more ground than he thought; the van was only a few more minutes away. Just let him get it in the air! He wasn't going to stop to video anything, not with that thing out there sniffing for him. But he'd bring back a force from Diegotown- the governor's private guard maybe. The police. The army. Whatever was in the hill, he'd drag it out into the light and crack its sh.e.l.l. He wasn't afraid of it or anyone. He wasn't afraid of G.o.d G.o.d. His litany of denial- Please! I didn't see anything! Please! I didn't see anything! -was already forgotten. -was already forgotten.

45 He reached the meadow that contained his camp just as the alien reappeared overhead. He hesitated, torn between das.h.i.+ng for the van and diving back into the brush.

It was close enough that Ramon could size it now; it was smaller than he'd thought-perhaps half the size of his van. It was ropey; long white strands like the dripping of a candle making up its walls.

Or its face. As it swooped nearer, Ramon felt a knot in his throat. It was too close. He would never be able to reach the van before it came between them.

Perhaps it's friendly, Ramon thought. Madre de Dios, Ramon thought. Madre de Dios, it had it had better better be friendly! be friendly!

The van exploded. A geyser of fire and smoke shot up out of the meadow with a waterfall roar, and tenfin birds rose screaming all along the mountain flank. The shockwave buffeted Ramon, splattering him with dirt and pebbles and shredded vegetation. He staggered, fighting to maintain his balance. Pieces of fused metal thumped down around him, burning holes in the moss of the meadow floor.

It was shooting at him! Through the plume of smoke, Ramon saw the thing turn, flying five meters above the ground, swooping toward him again. The bubbletent went up in a ball of expanding gas, pieces of torn plastic tumbling and swooping like frightened white birds in the hot turbulence of the explosion.

Ramon caught only a glimpse of that. He was already in frantic motion, running, swerving, tearing through the brush. He could hear his own gasping breath, and his heart slammed against his ribs like a fist. Faster!

He felt the alien craft coming up behind him more than he saw it. With a despairing cry, Ramon whirled, fired three times at the looming thing as fast as he could, then turned and fled again. A tree detonated as he pa.s.sed it, splinters biting into his face and legs. He heard a high whine coming close, getting louder, dopplering up the frequencies. A shockwave knocked the air from him, and he lost hisfooting. He fired the pistol again as he fell, without knowing where he'd aimed or if he'd hit anything.

Something hit him. Hard. His consciousness blinked out, like a suddenly snuffed candle.

When he woke, he woke in darkness. . . .

Part Two

Chapter 5.

In the darkness-immobile, unbreathing-Ramon found his memory growing clearer and clearer. The way Griego had shrugged.

The rattling mechanical roar of the chupacabra chupacabra float. The European's blood; pale in the red light and black in the blue. The taste of the stone dust. The taste of Elena's mouth. Details that had been vague grew clearer until, by concentrating, he could hear the voices, feel the cloth of the s.h.i.+rt he'd worn. All of it. The thing from the mountain had taken him and had done something to him. Imprisoned him in this vast, empty blackness through a process he could not imagine and for reasons he couldn't guess. The silence and the emptiness changed the nature of time. There was no longer a sense of duration. float. The European's blood; pale in the red light and black in the blue. The taste of the stone dust. The taste of Elena's mouth. Details that had been vague grew clearer until, by concentrating, he could hear the voices, feel the cloth of the s.h.i.+rt he'd worn. All of it. The thing from the mountain had taken him and had done something to him. Imprisoned him in this vast, empty blackness through a process he could not imagine and for reasons he couldn't guess. The silence and the emptiness changed the nature of time. There was no longer a sense of duration.

He couldn't say how long he had been there or whether he had slept.

He could no more judge his own sanity than point north; without context, ideas like madness and direction were meaningless.

The movement, when it came, was so slight that Ramon could believe he had imagined it. Something nudged him. A current moved against his skin; an invisible current in an invisible sea. He had the feeling of being turned in slow circles. Something solid b.u.mped his shoulder, and then rose up against his back, or else he sank down upon it. The syrupy liquid streamed past him, flowing past his face and his body. He thought of it as draining away, though he could as easily imagine being lifted up through it. The flow grew faster and more turbulent. A deep vibration shook him: boom boom. Then again, beating through flesh and bone: boom, boom. boom, boom. A blurred, watery light appeared above him, very dim and immensely far away, like a star in a distant constellation. It grew brighter. The liquid in which he floated drained, the surface coming nearer, like he was rising from the bottom of a lake, until he finally breached it, and the last of the liquid was gone. A blurred, watery light appeared above him, very dim and immensely far away, like a star in a distant constellation. It grew brighter. The liquid in which he floated drained, the surface coming nearer, like he was rising from the bottom of a lake, until he finally breached it, and the last of the liquid was gone.

Air and light and sound hit him like a fist.

His body convulsed like a live fish on a frying pan, every muscle knotting. He arched up like an epileptic-head and heels bearing his weight, his spine bent like a bow. Something he couldn't see flipped him onto his belly, and he felt a needle slide in at the base of his spine.

He vomited with wrenching violence-thick amber syrup gouting from his mouth and nose. And then again, sick, racking spasms that expelled even more, as if his lungs had been filled with the stuff.

I will live, Ramon told himself. Ramon told himself. It's no worse than being sick from It's no worse than being sick from too much muscat. I can live through this. . . . too much muscat. I can live through this. . . .

Another long needle dug into his neck. A cold fire sprang to life where the thing had pierced him; he felt the salivalike secretion running down his sides, then heat, like boiling water pouring into him.

What have you done to me? Ramon tried to scream. Ramon tried to scream. What did you What did you put in me? put in me?

Suddenly, violently, his heart came to life-and, with a terrible shudder, he began to breathe.

51 The air he gulped cut like gla.s.s, and his heart thundered in his chest. The world went red. Pain drove away all thought, all sense of self, and then slowly abated.

Another wave of the sickness shook him. He voided his bowels, weeping with pain and shame when he wasn't coughing. It seemed to go on for hours, but the moments of peace between spasms gradually grew longer, and it seemed as if some of the strength was beginning to come back to his arms and legs. His heart ceased to race like a bird trying to free itself from a net. Tentatively, he sat up.

He was sprawled naked on the bottom of a metal tank not more than ten feet square. So much for his measureless midnight ocean!

The walls were too high to see over, and the lights-blue-white and bitter-were too bright to see past and make out the ceiling beyond.

He tried to stand up, but his muscles were putty. It was bitingly cold.

He settled against the metal floor and s.h.i.+vered, feeling his teeth start to chatter. He tried lifting an arm, but the impulse was slow to reach his flesh, and the limb swayed drunkenly when it rose. Strong smells that he couldn't identify burned his nostrils.

A thing like a snake reared up above the rim of the tank-thick as a strong man's arm, it was a dead gray color, like old meat, and segmented like a worm's body. Pulsations seemed to travel along its length. Ramon saw it hesitate, as if considering him, and then stretch down toward him. Three long, thin tendrils split off where the head should have been. The gray snake brushed aside Ramon's clumsy parry and seized him by the shoulder. Ramon struggled weakly. But his strength was gone, and the snake's grip was as cold and pitiless as death. Another snake stretched down and wrapped itself around his waist.

The snakes lifted him smoothly out of the tank. He tried to scream, but the sound he made was more like a cough. He was high in the air now, above what seemed to be a vast, high-domed cavern full of noise and lights and motion and alien shapes. The cavern swarmedwith activity that Ramon could not resolve into recognizable patterns, having no referents for it. His nose and mouth were filled with a biting, acrid odor, something like formaldehyde.

The two snakes set him down on a platform near one wall of the cavern, the surface solid but spongy, like a great dark tongue. He collapsed as soon as they released him, his legs too weak to bear his weight. He waited on his hands and knees, staring into the terrible bright lights, panting like a trapped animal, suddenly longing for the timeless darkness he'd left behind.

It was dimmer here, in the angle of the wall and the cavern floor.

Inchoate shapes moved ponderously in the shadows; as they came forward, they were finished and fleshed by the light, but Ramon still could not make them out. His mind kept fighting to resolve them into the familiar aspects of humanity, and-terribly, terrifyingly- they would not. They were too big, and shaped wrong, and their eyes were a bright, glowing orange.

A needle slid out of the end of a hovering gray tentacle, thrust quickly into Ramon's arm, too quickly for him to move or protest.

Another p.r.i.c.kly wave of heat pa.s.sed through him, and he suddenly felt much stronger. What kind of injection had it given him? Glucose? Vitamins? Perhaps there'd been a tranquilizer in it as well; his head was clear now, and he felt more alert, less frightened. He drew himself up to his knees, one hand instinctively covering his crotch.

The shapes had stopped a few feet away. There were three of them, all bipedal, one bigger than the others. Ramon could see them more clearly now. His mind accepted them by treating them as frauds; he thought of them now as men wearing grotesque costumes, and kept looking for some unconvincing detail that would betray the disguise.

Intellectually, he knew better, of course. They were not men in costume. They were not men at all. They were aliens, and not of any race he knew. Ramon had sailed among the stars on one of the great galley s.h.i.+ps of the Silver Enye, and once he had glimpsed three of 53 53 the furred, six-legged H'zhei on the back streets of Acapulco, exotic creatures that looked like a cross between a cat and a caterpillar. The Turu he had seen only on video, and even there they made his skin crawl. These aliens were not Turu, not Enye, not Cian, not members of any of the Great Races. They were not part of the universe as he knew it. They did not belong. A hundred questions, accusations, and pleas fought in his mind. Who are you? What do you want? Please Who are you? What do you want? Please don't kill me. don't kill me.

At least they were humanoid bipeds, not spiders or octopi or big-eyed blobs, although something about the articulation of their limbs was disturbingly odd. The smaller two were perhaps six and a half feet tall, the larger one seven feet, which made even the shortest of them far taller than Ramon. Their torsos were columnar, seemingly of uniform breadth at hip and waist and shoulder, and surely they must weigh more than three hundred pounds apiece, although somehow the dominant impression they created was one of grace and suppleness. Their skins were glossy, s.h.i.+ning, but each had its own distinctive coloration: one was a mottled blue and gold, the second a pale amber, while the largest one had yellowish flesh covered with strange, swirling patterns in silver and black.

All wore broad belts hung with unknown objects of metal and gla.s.s, and nondescript halters of some ash-gray and l.u.s.terless material. Their arms were disproportionately long, the hands huge, the fingers-three fingers, two thumbs-incongruously slender and delicate. Their heads were set low in a hollow between the shoulders, and thrust a little forward on thick, stumpy necks, giving them a bel-ligerent and aggressive look, like snapping turtles. Crests of hair or feathers slanted back from the tops of their heads at rakish angles.

Quills protruded from their shoulders, the napes of their necks, and the tops of their spinal ridges, forming bristly ruffs. Their heads were roughly triangular, flattened on top but bulging out at the base of the skull, the faces tapering sharply to a point. And the faces were facesout of nightmare: large, rubbery, black snouts streaked with blue and orange, trembling and sniffing, mouths like raw, wet wounds, too wide and lipless, and small, staring eyes set too low on either side of the snout. Orange eyes, hot and featureless as molten marbles.

Staring at him.

They were staring at him as though he was a bug, and that fanned a spark of anger inside him. He got to his feet and glared back at them, still shaky but determined not to show it. Ramon Espejo knelt to n.o.body! Especially not to ugly, unnatural monsters like these!

"Which one," he croaked, coughed, and began again. "Which one of you pinche pinche motherf.u.c.kers is paying for my van?" motherf.u.c.kers is paying for my van?"

The aliens didn't react to his words. The large one reached out a strangely articulated arm-a motion that reminded Ramon of seaweed stirred by some gentle oceanic current. Ramon frowned as the alien curled what he had to think of as its fingers back toward itself once, twice, three times. The thing paused and then repeated the movement. There was something studied about the motion, as though it had been learned by rote, as though its natural equivalent might be without meaning for humans. A low, thudding boom came from deep below them; a mountainous heart that beat twice and went silent. Ramon glanced around him. The alien repeated the curling gesture.

"You want me to come close to you?" Ramon demanded. The great thing's snout twitched, and the quills on its head rose and fell.

Again, the strange curling motion. Ramon suddenly recalled a jour-nalist who had come to So Paulo from Kigiake whose only word of Spanish had been gracias gracias. The alien was the same-a single gesture repeated for every occasion; employed ubiquitously.

The alien turned away, took a few inhumanly graceful strides, then s.h.i.+fted its torso back toward Ramon and gestured again. Follow Follow me. me. The other two aliens were still as stone except for the restless twitching of their snouts. The other two aliens were still as stone except for the restless twitching of their snouts.

55 "I get taken captive by aliens, and they're too stupid to talk,"

Ramon said, bravado and anger filling him. "Hey, you. Pendejo. Pendejo. Why the f.u.c.k would I follow you, eh? Give me a good f.u.c.king reason." Why the f.u.c.k would I follow you, eh? Give me a good f.u.c.king reason."

The alien stood motionless. Ramon spat, the sputum vanis.h.i.+ng as soon as it struck the black tongue-like platform, which seemed to absorb it with a slurping noise. Ramon shook his head in disgust; in fact, there didn't seem to be anything else for him to do but follow.

He came forward slowly, his footing unreliable on the disturbingly wet, velvety ground, which gave under him with every step, looking warily all around him, wondering if he should try to run. Run to where, though? And some of the objects suspended from the alien's belt were almost certainly weapons . . .

Ahead was a door cut through the naked rock of the cavern wall, into which the alien disappeared, looking back once again to make its favorite gesture.

Trying to wear his nakedness like a suit of clothes, Ramon followed the alien into the darkness. The other two beasts fell in close behind.

Chapter 6.

Afterward, Ramon could not clearly remember that trip. He was led through tunnels barely wide and tall enough to allow the alien to pa.s.s. The tunnels slanted steeply up and down, and doubled back on themselves, seemingly at random. The rock was slightly phospho-rescent, providing just enough light to let him see his footing. He refused to look behind at the following shapes, although his nerves were crawling like worms.

The silence was heavy here in the belly of the hill, although occasionally a faraway hooting could be heard through many thicknesses of rock. It sounded to Ramon like the noise d.a.m.ned souls might make crying unheeded to a cold and distant G.o.d. Sometimes they pa.s.sed through pockets of light and activity, rooms full of chattering noise and rich, rotten smells, rooms drenched in glaring red or blue or green illumination, rooms dark as ink but for the faint silver 57 57 line of the path they followed. Once, they stood motionless for long moments in such a room, while Ramon's stomach dropped and he wondered if they could be in an elevator.

Each chamber they pa.s.sed through seemed more surreal than the last. In one, things that looked like oversize spiders lay in a clump in the center of what looked like a sluggishly moving pool of glowing blue oil. Another high-ceilinged chamber teemed with aliens, swarming over terraced layers of strange objects on the cavern floor.

Equipment, perhaps, machines, computers, although most things here were so unfamiliar that they registered only as indecipherable blurs, weird amalgams of shape and shadow and winking light. Far across the cave, two giant aliens-similar to his three companions but fifteen or twenty feet tall-labored in gloom, lifting and stacking what looked like huge sections of honeycomb, moving with ponderous grace, as unreal and hallucinatorily beautiful as stop-motion dinosaurs in old horror movies. To one side, a smaller alien was herding a flow of what looked like spongy mola.s.ses down a stairstep fall of boulders, touching the flowing ma.s.s occasionally with a long, black rod, as if to urge it along.

It was too much to take in. Ramon's conscious mind was spinning too fast in desperate attempts to make sense of what he saw. The nightmare walk became an interminable series of incomprehensi-bilities. A great gray tentacle reached out from one wall, caressing the alien before him, and then dropped to the ground and slithered away like a snake. A scent like cardamom and fried onions and rubbing alcohol filled the air and vanished. The deep throbbing booms that he had heard earlier filled the air at intervals that seemed to have no pattern, though Ramon found himself slowly learning to antic.i.p.ate them.

Away from the chambers, in the tunnels, it was close and dark and silent. The lead alien's back gleamed pale and faint in the phosph.o.r.es-cent glow of the rock, like a fish in dark water, and, for a moment, itseemed to Ramon as if the markings on its flesh were moving, writhing and changing like living things. He stumbled, and instinctively clutched the alien's arm to keep from falling. Its skin was warm and dry, like snakeskin. In the enclosed s.p.a.ce of the tunnel, he could smell the alien; it had a heavy, musky odor, like olive oil, like cloves, strange rather than unpleasant. It neither looked behind nor paused nor made a sound. The three aliens continued to walk on imperturbably, at the same steady pace, and Ramon had no choice but to follow after them or be left alone in the chilly darkness of this black alien maze.

At last, they came to a stop in another garishly lit chamber, Ramon almost walking into the wide back of the alien in front of him. To the human eye, there was something subtly wrong about the propor-tions and dimensions of the chamber: it was more a rhombus than a rectangle, the floor was slightly tilted, the ceiling tilted at another angle and not of uniform height, everything subliminally disorient-ing, everything off, off, making Ramon feel sick and dizzy. The light was too bright and too blue, and the chamber was filled with a whispering susurrus that hovered right at the threshold of hearing. making Ramon feel sick and dizzy. The light was too bright and too blue, and the chamber was filled with a whispering susurrus that hovered right at the threshold of hearing.

This place had not been made by human beings, nor was it meant for them. As he entered the chamber, he saw that the walls streamed with tiny crawling pictures, as though a film of oil was continuously flowing from ceiling to floor and carrying with it a thin sc.u.m of ever-changing images: swirls of vivid color, geometric shapes, mazy impressionistic designs, vast surrealistic landscapes. Occasionally, something recognizable would stream by: representations of trees, mountains, stars, tiny alien faces that would seem to stare malignly at Ramon out of the feverdream chaos as they poured down to be swallowed by the floor.

The alien who'd escorted him gestured him forward. Gingerly, Ramon crossed the chamber, feeling uneasy and disconcerted, unconsciously leaning to one side to correct the tilt of the floor and putting his feet down cautiously, as though he expected the chamber to pitch or yaw.

59 In the center of the chamber was a deep, circular pit, lined by metal, and at the bottom of the pit was another alien.

It was even taller than Ramon's guides, and much fatter, the lower part of its body bloated to four or five times the circ.u.mference of the other aliens, and its crest and quills were much longer. Its skin was maggot-white, and completely free of markings. White with age? Dyed white as an indication of rank? Or was it of a different race? Impossible to say, but as the alien's eyes turned upward, toward Ramon, he was seized and shaken by the force behind its gaze, by the harsh authority it exuded. He noticed, with another little shock, that the creature was physically connected to the pit-things that might have been wires or rods or cables emerged from its body and disappeared into the smooth metal walls, forming an intricate cat's cradle around it. Some of the cables were black and dull, some were luminescent, and some, glossy red and gray and brown, pulsed slowly and rhythmically, as if with an obscene life of their own.

The hot orange eyes considered him. Ramon felt his nakedness acutely, but refused to bend to this alien's will even to cover himself.

The great pale head s.h.i.+fted.

"Noun," the alien said. "Verb form. Identifier. Semantic place-holder. Sense of ident.i.ty."

Ramon stared at the alien, fighting to keep surprise from his face. It had spoken in Spanish (Ramon also spoke some English and Portuguese and French, as well as, of course, Portuglish, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d lingua franca of the colony), and quite clearly, though its voice was disturbingly rusty and metallic, as though it was a machine. How in h.e.l.l had it learned a human language? "What the f.u.c.k are you saying?" Ramon said. "By Holy Jesus, what do you want?"

"Idiomatic vulgarity. Religious fear," the alien said, and then, with something that sounded like disappointment, "Unflowing." The great beast s.h.i.+fted in its web of wires and cables, its swollen abdo-men rippling as if with a life of its own.

Ramon felt his gorge rise. "What do you want from me?"

"You are man," the beast intoned.

"Yes, I'm a f.u.c.king man. What did you think think I was?" I was?"

"You lack tatecreude tatecreude. You are a flawed thing. Your nature is dangerous and tends to aubre aubre."

Ramon spat on the ground. The arrogance of the harsh, unused voice and the steady gaze of those orange, unblinking eyes made him angry. In times of stress-when he had lost his first van in a drunken bet, when Lianna had finally left him, when Elena threatened to throw him out- Ramon's rage had never deserted him. Now it returned, flus.h.i.+ng him with heat and certainty. "What are are you, you creatures?" he said. "Where do you come from? From this planet? Somewhere else? What do you think you're doing, attacking me, keeping me here against my will? And what about my van, eh? Who's going to get me a new you, you creatures?" he said. "Where do you come from? From this planet? Somewhere else? What do you think you're doing, attacking me, keeping me here against my will? And what about my van, eh? Who's going to get me a new van van?"

Suddenly, the absurdity of the situation struck him. Here he was, in an alien hive, locked away in the middle of a mountain, surrounded by demons. And he was b.i.t.c.hing about his van! He had to fight down the urge to laugh, fearing that once he started he would be unable to stop.

The alien was staring at him wordlessly. "If you want to talk, talk sense," Ramon rasped. Anger gave him a sense of power and control that he knew was at odds with the truth. Any small thing that kept his mind his own, however, was precious. "You don't like what I am, you can show me the way out of this s.h.i.+thole."

The great pale alien seemed to take a moment to consider Ramon's words. Its snout lifted as if it was tasting the air. "Those are sounds, not words," the alien said after a long pause. "Discordances outside proper flow. You must not speak in meaningless sounds, or you will be corrected."

Ramon s.h.i.+vered and looked away; his rage had ebbed as quickly as it had flared, and now he felt tired, chilled by the alien's imper-turbability. "What do you want from me?" he asked wearily.

"We do not 'want' anything," the alien said. "Again, you speak 61 61 outside the way of reality. You have a function: therefore, you exist.

You will exercise that function because it is your purpose to do so, your tatecreude tatecreude. No 'wanting' is involved: all is inevitable flow. You are man. You will flow in the pathways in which a man would flow.

As he is of you, our path to him will be carved clean. You will fulfill your function."

The creature's voice seemed to be growing clearer as it spoke, as if every word brought it a greater understanding of Ramon's language.

He wondered how long he'd have to talk to the thing before it took on a Mexican accent and started cussing. "And if I do not function as you wish?" Ramon asked.