Hunger Makes the Wolf

by Alex Wells

  This would be the test to see how well that groundwork had been laid, Shige supposed. This planet was unknown to him, and the situation. Could fear of the unknown and such bizarre superstition really run so deep? “Mr Green?”

  The Weatherman looked up, and Shige carefully focused on the air just past his right ear. “Time?” he whispered hoarsely. His broad smile was visible even peripherally.

  “They’re ready for you. They’ve got quite a party waiting.”

  Mr Green stood like a spider unfolding its legs, coiling the string neatly in his palm as he did so. The loops he tucked into his breast pocket. “It’s so nice to meet people,” he breathed.

  Shige opened the door and made to exit first. Mr Green’s cool, bony fingers on his shoulder stopped him. He yielded without protest, allowing the Weatherman to plunge out into the hot sun and dust like he might dive into water.

  The roar of voices cut off as Mr Green took his first step onto the station platform. The band continued gamely on, though one of the trumpet players seemed to lose track of the beat entirely. And the Weatherman stretched his arms up and up, reaching toward the sun for a moment, for all purposes like a man who’d just woken. Then he looked around the crowd, nostrils flaring as he sniffed. “Hello,” he whispered. “What have we here?”

  No one had been able – or willing – to tell Shige how the Weatherman would conduct such an exercise. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no archival footage of the previous witch hunt, only written records that were a dry recitation of names, locations, classifications that he still didn’t entirely understand. Shige took out his own metal-backed notepad and began to write his observations. He was known to be the secretary, after all. This was what he did. And it let him take a mental step away from what he did know would happen.

  Mr Green moved through the crowd, people bending and stepping to get out of his way; he walked by most as if they weren’t there at all. He let his hand trail in the air over the hair and faces of the miners, like a boy leaning from a boat to skim his fingers over the surface of a pond.

  Mr Green stopped short as his fingers passed near the face of a young woman. “What have we here?” he said, the words a barely audible growl. His fingers shot forward, gripping the lower half of her face hard enough to leave deep white dents in cheeks and chin. Many people took steps back, though the girl’s family still hovered nearby. An older woman with iron-gray hair cropped close to her skull – probably the girl’s mother – wrung her hands while a man close to her age held tight to her sleeve.

  Then, of all strange things, the Weatherman reached his other hand around to take up her mousy hair, comb it in half roughly with his fingers, and twist the halves in an approximation of braids. “No, no, not right,” he said. Then he refocused on her, looking into her wide, horrified eyes as silence peppered with dismayed murmurs flowed outward through the crowd. Mr Green smiled like the warping of half-melted wax. “You can hear it, can’t you?”

  The girl’s face went gray around the edges, but she made a faint nod, the flesh of her face bunching against Mr Green’s fingertips. She stared unblinking into the Weatherman’s eyes, her own going from clear white to strained and bloodshot.

  “It’s beautiful, but you mustn’t be fooled.” Mr Green drew the girl forward until they were almost nose to nose. “Tell me what you did. You can trust me.”

  “I heard the dust storm,” she whispered. “It sang to me.”

  “And then you killed people with the storm. Very naughty of you,” Mr Green said, sounding almost sad.

  The young woman shook, her shoulders jittering, the tremors quickly running down her arms to her hands, clenched into white-knuckled fists. “No. That isn’t what happened.”

  Mr Green shook his head and let go of her. “It’s all right. I’m here to make you better.” Two security men dragged the girl away; she went limp as they grabbed her, like a puppet with no strings. Then he continued forward into the crowd, as if she had vanished from his view entirely.

  Shige knew the protocol for this. From his position, a few steps behind, he loudly announced the orders Ms Meetchim had given him: “Everyone she has touched as well. They are all contaminated. Family and close friends.” It was important that the people hear this guideline as well.

  It was easy enough for the guards to locate those people; the crowd cringed away from them. Most silently turned their backs. “I lost my brother to that storm,” a woman hissed venomously, and gave the gray-haired woman a vicious shove toward the guards.

  Into the train the young woman went, carried by men in green. More herded her family behind her, springloaded batons idly swinging in the hot air. Mr Green, smiling beatifically, continued to walk through the crowd.

  He stopped abruptly, his head tilting as if he caught a sound beyond the normal range of hearing. The tip of his bright red tongue traced his lips in a quick flicker. Then he turned, looking over his shoulder as if he expected someone to be there. Another “witch” perhaps?

  The few people brave enough to press in or unfortunate enough to be shoved to the fore by their neighbors backed away, looked down as his gaze skated over them.

  Without a word, Mr Green strode back in that direction, spread-fingered hands clutching at his chest.

  This, Shige decided, couldn’t be normal at all. “Mr Green?” No acknowledgment. There was nothing to do but follow, the guards at his heels.

  Mr Green walked in a straight line, even cutting through a house, scrambling over a dining table and sending dishes scattering to become shards on the floor. Shige skirted those delicately, not willing to quite close the distance between them. There was no knowing how the Weatherman would react.

  At the town wall a little mewl of frustration escaped Mr Green’s throat. He paused for a moment, scrabbling at the poured synthcrete with fingernails so short they were almost non-existent, then turned to follow the wall. His hands fluttered like papers on the breeze, searching for some gap through which to escape.

  Visions of losing the Weatherman out into the desert now dancing in his head, Shige tried calling to him, “Mr Green! Mr Green, please stop. It isn’t safe for you to stray from the train station. People will worry. Mr Green!”

  Mr Green either did not hear him or did not care to respond, too taken with whatever had his attention. At the gates, he battered against the inset door with his fists, strange, bubbling growls coming from his throat.

  “Sir…” a guard began.

  Sedation, Shige thought. But did they have anything that would actually sedate the Weatherman? Had they even prepared for this contingency? Was this the reason they weren’t allowed outside unsupervised? But all the reports he’d read of Mr Green before indicated that he had been outside Newcastle, had even been out into the dune sea in answer to his own curiosity, and nothing untoward had happened. So this was… interesting. A calculated risk. Maintain the safety of the shell of Mr Rolland, or risk and see what might come of it? He didn’t know enough about the Weathermen – that was one of his major assignments. He made the decision in a split second: “Open the door before he hurts himself.”

  The door swung wide, revealing the expanse of hardpan outside of the town. At the crest of the closest dune that crept toward the walls, a pale man stood. The wind tugged at the hem of his gray duster, at the bones dangling from a skull that topped his staff. Mr Green took a few stumbling steps through the doorway and then stopped in his tracks, eyes fixed on the man.

  The clear sky tasted of lightning. The guards at the gate backed up another step, covering their ears. Something that was not a sound, but rather a vibration of the bones, a flutter of the heart, filled Shige’s head. A strange, spicy scent filled his mouth, his nose. The wind whipped into a higher pitch, kicking a cloud of dust into the air.

  Mr Green broke into a staggering lope that carried him into the sand. He ran with his arms outstretched, like he intended to wrap his arms around the pale man, pull him into an embrace. Shige followed, making no effort to cl
ose the distance. As he ran, he dug the pen-sized datcor out of his pocket; technology this sophisticated didn’t generally work outside of Newcastle, but with Mr Green nearby, it was worth a shot. He set it to record as he caught a flash of wide blue eyes, pupils shrunk down to a pinpoint, and then the pale man shouted, flinging his hand at Mr Green. Dust spurted up between them. The man’s staff darted through the dust cloud and struck Mr Green’s hand with a sickening crack.

  Mr Green screamed like a dying rabbit. At the sound, the guards scrambled away from the gate, pelting toward him, though their run was strange and drunken, rifle barrels waving unsteadily.

  The wind cleared out the worst of the dust, revealing Mr Green, one hand shielding his eyes and the other clutched against his chest. Dust coated his hair, dulled the color of his suit to a muddy gray. His shoulders trembled, but he also smiled, wide and childlike. “You hide, then. I’ll seek. And I’ll find.”

  A native – he remembered Gregson’s use of that phrase all too clearly, and with sudden clarity, he knew that was what he’d seen. A native, something that called the Weatherman to distraction, and could vanish beneath the sand in a heartbeat without a trace. Shige breathed out an unsteady sigh as the datcor sparked in his hand.

  * * *

  “And the guards found no sign of this… interloper after he had vanished?” Ms Meetchim asked, looking up at Shige from under her eyebrows as she turned the pages of his report.

  “No, sir.”

  “And the decision to let Mr Green outside the walls was…?”

  “Mine, sir.” Shige had rehearsed this the entire train journey back to Newcastle. He’d also made the decision to postpone the finish of the witch hunt until Mr Green could be examined by his medical team. To his relief, the Weatherman had come out of that examination with nothing worse than a few plasters on his hand and a bright red lollipop. “I thought perhaps one of the so-called witches had gotten outside of the walls.”

  Ms Meetchim made a noncommittal noise, but he calculated that the answer satisfied her.

  “I was able to recover a few images and clips of sound from the ruptured memory of my datcor,” he offered, trying to inject the right note of hopeful eagerness into his voice. Let him be the underling striving to impress his boss, on a new world with fresh opportunities.

  She looked up sharply. “Where?”

  “I’ve put them in your secure file.”

  He observed her keenly as she moved the blotter aside to access the display in the desk’s top and bring up the images. Most of them were dataloss blurs, but there was one reasonably clear image of the pale man. He knew the moment she had reached it, because she sat back as if slapped. “You showed these to no one else?” she asked sharply.

  Shige had spent his time with Ms Meetchim learning the subtleties of her expressions. She had an excellent poker face, but he’d had equally excellent training at his mother’s knee, and it told him that she recognized the pale man, somehow. “Of course not. I assumed it would be for your eyes only.”

  “And you made no copies?”

  He pulled his expression into one of sincere shock. “Of course not!”

  “Good.” She deleted the files with a sweep of her hand. Even more interesting. “For now, you will forget this incident. But if you encounter this… man again, pull Mr Green out immediately and call for backup. Understood?”

  His own copies of the images and sounds were secure, soon to be moved off site. He’d have to wait an interminable time to get the images to a Federal Union contact who could run them through the recognition database, but that could wait. In the meantime, he had a new angle to approach his own subtle investigation into the TransRift files. Meekly, Shige bowed his head. “Of course, sir.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Through the evening and into the night Hob led her little party out toward Rouse, then swung wide before the rocks were more than a black line on the horizon. They picked up the train tracks that ran to the town and followed them for several hours out into the canyonlands and the sand sea that halfway filled them. Only when the horizon was just beginning to lighten did they divert to take shelter in the lee of a nearby butte.

  Between dry bites of field rations, Hob laid out her thoughts. “We ride double, get two of us onto the train. Shouldn’t be too much trouble, since a freight train won’t be that fast near the canyons. And it won’t have guards standing out on it, not during the day.”

  “’Cause ain’t no one stupid enough to attack a train in the middle of the day,” Geri said. “Gonna fry like bacon in the pan when you hop the car.”

  “Well, some might.” Hob grinned. “We get dropped off and the riders hang in a blind spot while we check the cars until we find whichever one’s got the medical stuff. We take what we want, toss it out along the tracks for pickin’ up later. Once we’re done, the riders come up beside the train and we do some fancy stunt jumpin’.”

  “By your use of ‘we,’ I assume you’ll be one of the two,” Coyote said. “And the other will be…?”

  “You. We’re the two lightest, so it’d be easiest for us to make the jump, I reckon, and Freki and Geri can muscle the bikes steady if it comes to that.” She bared her teeth. “And you’re a goddamn showoff.”

  Coyote held his hands up in a sign of surrender. She’d almost bet he was silently patting himself on the back, for all he tried to look dismayed.

  “Why not just uncouple the car?” Freki asked.

  “We might have to do this again, and for somethin’ bigger,” Hob said. “Why get ’em on the defensive now? If we do it right, they won’t even know we were there until they check the manifest and find what’s missing.”

  “And then they’ll most likely assume that the theft was done at the last station,” Coyote said.

  “Ain’t been anyone ballsy enough to do a train job in a while. Luck ’n’ laziness will see us through.” The skeleton of the plan seemed good enough. Together, the four of them fleshed out the details, then took turns napping in the shadows of the small butte when the sun came up.

  * * *

  Coyote shook her awake with a hand to the shoulder. He got Freki and Geri after her, and wasn’t nearly as nice to them; both got nudged in the hip with the toe of his boot.

  Hob stood and shook out her clothes, doing her best to ignore the sand that had found its way into her shirt and boots. “I don’t hear nothin’.” She eased over toward Freki’s bike. Given the choice, she’d rather eat whole roaches out of the dunes than sit behind Geri.

  “That’s because I had my ear to the track. Sound of the train carries better at a distance like that. It’s coming.” The shrill, breathy sound of a whistle rolled across the dunes, bouncing off the little butte that had sheltered them. Coyote grinned. “As I said.”

  “Then we’d better get goin’.” Hob jammed her helmet on her head, waited for Freki to get on his bike, then climbed on the back after him. Her knees near poked into his armpits; she’d outgrown riding on the back after her first growth spurt. Freki didn’t complain, just told her to hold on tight as they whipped out from the shadow of the butte.

  The train was a silver snake in the distance, metal skin blinding bright even with the helmet’s polarizers switched on. It started off small enough that she could have blocked it out with one finger, but grew rapidly, sleek and dangerous and unnatural as it cut through the sand. The engine was shrouded in a dust cloud, fountains of particles spewing up on either side, plowed out of the way by the blade mounted on the front.

  “You want to jump first, Coyote, or you want me to do it?” she asked over the radio channel – sound was clearer these days, less static. The garagemaster must have finally gotten the upgrades done that he’d been jawing about for ages.

  “You go ahead first. That way you can catch me up in those long arms of yours if I miss.”

  Hob laughed. “Have it your way.”

  The air took on the rumble of metal on metal, the train towering up as high as a house as they swep
t in. The feel of the tires went from soft to firm as they hit a patch of hardpan. Hob clutched at Freki’s jacket as he whipped the bike into a hard turn, putting them parallel with the rails. He eased back on the throttle, letting the train creep past until they were even with the last car.

  Maybe it would’ve been smarter to start in the middle and work cars in both directions, but broken bones sounded better to Hob than getting turned into ground meat between wheels and rails.

  “Good as it’s gonna get,” Freki said.

  “Sounded like a much better idea afore we got here,” Hob muttered. She set her feet firmly on the pegs, fisted the shoulders of Freki’s coat in her hands, and stood. The motorcycle went a little wobbly, but Freki wrestled it back under control, hands gone tight on the grips. She narrowed her field of view to the ladder on the car’s side, thought herself through jumping, catching hold of it, getting her boots jammed into the rungs. She refused to see the ground whizzing by below. Being scared would only get her killed. “OK, jumpin’ in three… two… one!”

  She jumped.

  If she’d ever felt graceful for a moment in her life, it was this one, stretching out between the motorcycle and the train car. Then one hand closed over the ladder, the other over air, and her heart nearly stopped in her chest as she slammed into the side of the car, helmet making a loud crack as it hit one of the ladder rungs. She hung on with every ounce of strength, boots scrabbling against the smooth metal side, hand feeling for the ladder. For one frozen moment she felt herself slipping, the metal rung twisting from her fingers.