Hunter’s Run

‘I’ll do it!’ Ramon shrieked. ‘I said I’d do it! You don’t have to do this to me! I’ll help you!’

The cable touched the hollow of his throat.

Ramon felt a sensation like the touch of dead lips, a double pinprick of pain, a flash of intense cold. An odd quivering shock ran up and down his body, as though someone were tracing his nervous system with feather fingers. His vision dimmed for a heartbeat, then came back. Maneck lowered him to the ground.

The cable was now embedded in his neck. Fighting nausea, he reached up and took hold of it, feeling it pulse in his hands. It was warm to the touch, like human flesh. He pulled at it tentatively, then tugged harder. He felt the flesh of his throat move when he tugged. To rip it free would obviously be as difficult as tearing off his own nose. The cable pulsed again, and Ramon realized that it was pulsing in time to the beating of his heart. As he watched, it seemed to darken slowly, as if it were filling with his blood.

He saw with horror that the opposite end of the cable had somehow linked itself to the alien that had held him, blending into its right wrist. Maneck. He was on a leash. A hunting dog for demons.

‘The sahael will not injure you, but it will help to resolve your contradictions,’ the thing in the pit said, as if sensing his distress but failing to understand it. ‘You should welcome it. It will help to protect you from aubre. Should you manifest aubre, you will be corrected. Like this.’

Ramon found himself on the floor, though he did not remember falling. Only now that the pain had passed could he look back at it and realize that it had been the worst pain he had ever experienced, as a swimmer turns to look back at a wave that has passed over his head. He didn’t remember screaming, but his throat was raw, and it almost seemed as if the echo of his shriek was still reverberating from the chamber walls. He caught his breath, and then retched. He knew that he would do whatever was required to prevent that from happening again, anything at all, and for the first time since he woke in darkness, Ramon Espejo felt truly ashamed.

I will kill you all, Ramon thought. Somehow, I will cut this thing out of my throat, and then I will come and kill you all.

‘School yourself,’ the pale alien said. ‘Correct aubre, and even such a flawed thing as yourself may achieve cohesion or even coordinate level.’

It took Ramon some time to realize that this gibberish had been a dismissal: a stern but kindly admonition, hellfire threatened, the prospect of redemption dangled, and go forth and sin no more. The sonofabitch was a missionary!

Maneck lifted Ramon back to his feet and nudged him toward a tunnel. The fleshy leash – the sahael – shrank to match whatever distance was between them. Maneck made a sound that he couldn’t interpret and apparently gave up gentle coaxing. The alien moved briskly forward, the sahael tugging now at Ramon’s throat. He had no choice but to follow, like a dog trotting at its master’s heel.

And you, mi amigo, Ramon thought, staring at Maneck’s indifferent back, will be the very first to die.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Back through the tunnels they went, through cavern after cavern, through rhythmic noise, billowing shadow, and glaring blue light. Ramon walked leadenly, like an automaton, pulled along by Maneck, the tether in his neck feeling heavy and awkward. The chill air leached the heat from his body, and even the work of walking wasn’t enough to keep him warm.

As he stumbled along, in the privacy of his mind, Ramon searched for hope.

How long would it be before Elena noticed his absence? Months, at least. Or she might think he’d gone off again, down to Nuevo Janeiro without her, to file his reports and collect his fees and keep his money for himself. Or run off on a drunken spree with some other woman. Rather than start a search for him, she was more likely to work herself into a blind rage and go fuck some hairy prospector from a bush bar or rum shack in revenge. Likewise, Manuel Griego would expect him to be in the field for three or four weeks at the least. Ramon silently berated himself for talking about hunting and his fantasy of disappearing into the Sierra Hueso to live off the land. Manuel might assume he wasn’t coming back at all, especially if he suspected (as he probably did) that Ramon knew that the cops were after him.

The only ones who would look for him was the law, and the law would have followed him with public execution in mind.

There was no one. That was the truth. He had lived his life on his own terms – always on his own terms – and here was the price of it. He was on his own, hundreds of miles from the nearest human settlement, captured and enslaved.

If he was going to get out of this, he would have to find his own way out.

Maneck tugged at the sahael and Ramon looked up, aware for the first time that they had stopped. The alien thing pushed a bundle into his arms. Clothes.

The clothes were a sleeveless one-piece garment, something like pajamas, a large cloak, and hard-soled slipper-boots, all made from a curious lusterless material. He pulled them on with fingers stiff from cold. The aliens were obviously not used to tailoring for humans; the clothes were clumsily-made and ill-fitting, but at least they afforded him some protection against the numbing cold. It wasn’t until his nakedness was covered and warmth began to return to his limbs that his teeth began to chatter.

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, Ramon 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 Ramon himself might sit, legs pulled up to his chest.

Ramon 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 wire-like substance, then hobbled his legs, before turning and sitting down before the controls. Maneck touched a pushplate, and the box rose smoothly into the air.

Acceleration pushed Ramon’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 Ramon’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, Ramon 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 Ramon, and, lifting him like a rag doll, dragged him from the box, carried him a few feet away, and dropped him to the ground.

Ramon 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, Ramon 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 Ramon 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 Ramon’s mind fully accept the fact that he was its captive, alone and at its mercy in the wilderness.

That simple knowledge hit Ramon 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 Ramon 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 Ramon 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, Ramon thought once again. There was very little anger in it. Only a deep, animal certainty. Somehow, I will kill you.

Maneck hauled Ramon 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 Ramon fell.

As Maneck reached for him the third time, Ramon 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 Ramon curiously in an oddly birdlike manner. The cool orange eyes peered at him closely, unblinking.

‘I need food,’ Ramon 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. Ramon, 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?’ Ramon 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 Ramon 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. Ramon 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 Ramon’s arms and legs. Ramon 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 Ramon 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, Ramon 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 Ramon 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 Ramon up, and supported him while he limped and stomped in a slow semi-circle 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.’ Ramon 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, Ramon 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 Ramon 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. Ramon could almost think that the thing sounded sorrowful. ‘We will begin here.’