by John Scalzi
Before Gretchen could retort Enzo put his hand up to quiet them both. "Look," he said, and pointed halfway down the clearing. "One of them is waking up."
"Oh, wonderful," Gretchen said.
The fantie in question shook its head and then lifted it, spreading the tentacles on its trunk wide. It waved them back and forth.
"What's it doing?" I asked Enzo. He shrugged. He was no more an expert on fanties than I was.
It waved its tentacles some more, in a wider arc, and then it came to me what it was doing. It was smelling something. Something that shouldn't be there.
The fantie bellowed, not from its trunk like an elephant, but from its mouth. All the other fanties were instantly awake and bellowing, and beginning to move.
I looked over to Gretchen. Oh, crap, I mouthed. She nodded, and looked back over at the fanties. I looked over at Magdy, who had made himself suddenly very small. I don't think he wanted to get any closer now.
The fantie closest to us wheeled about and scraped against the bush we were hiding behind. I heard the thud of its foot as the animal maneuvered itself into a new position. I decided it was time to move but my body overruled me, since it wasn't giving me control of my legs. I was frozen in place, squatting behind a bush, waiting for my trampling.
Which never came. A second later the fantie was gone, run off in the same direction as the rest of its herd: away from us.
Magdy popped up from his crouching position, and listened to the herd rumbling off in the distance. "All right," he said. "What just happened?"
"I thought they smelled us for sure," I said. "I thought they'd found us."
"I told you you were an idiot," Gretchen said to Magdy. "If you'd been out there when they woke up, we'd be scooping what was left of you into a bucket."
The two of them started sniping at each other; I turned to look at Enzo, who had turned to face the opposite direction from where the fanties had run. He had his eyes closed but it looked like he was concentrating on something.
"What is it?" I asked.
He opened his eyes, looked at me, and then pointed in the direction he was facing. "The breeze is coming from this direction," he said.
"Okay," I said. I wasn't following him.
"Have you ever gone hunting?" Enzo asked. I shook my head. "We were upwind of the fanties," he said. "The wind was blowing our scent away from them." He pointed to where the first fantie to wake up had been. "I don't think that fantie would have smelled us at all."
Click. "Okay," I said. "Now I get it."
Enzo turned to Magdy and Gretchen. "Guys," he said. "It's time to leave. Now."
Magdy flashed his pocket light at Enzo and seemed ready to say something sarcastic, then caught the expression on Enzo's face in the pocket light's circle. "What is it?"
"The fanties didn't run off because of us," Enzo said. "I think there's something else out there. Something that hunts the fanties. And I think it's coming this way."
* * *
It's a cliché of horror entertainments to have teenagers lost in the woods, imagining they're being chased by something horrible that's right behind them.
And now I know why. If you ever want to feel like you're on the verge of total, abject bowel-releasing terror, try making your way a klick or two out of a forest, at night, with the certain feeling you're being hunted. It makes you feel alive, it really does, but not in a way you want to feel alive.
Magdy was in the lead, of course, although whether he was leading because he knew the way back or just because he was running fast enough that the rest of us had to chase him was up for debate. Gretchen and I followed, and Enzo took up the rear. Once I slowed down to check on him and he waved me off. "Stay with Gretchen," he said. Then I realized that he was intentionally staying behind us so whatever might be following us would have to get through him first. I would have kissed him right then if I hadn't been a quivering mess of adrenaline, desperately running to get home.
"Through here," Magdy said to us. He pointed at an irregular natural path that I recognized as being the one we used to get into the forest in the first place. I was focusing on getting on that path and then something stepped in behind Gretchen and grabbed me. I screamed.
There was a bang, followed by a muffled thump, followed by a shout.
Ezno launched himself at what grabbed at me. A second later he was on the forest floor, Dickory's knife at his throat. It took me longer than it should have to recognize who it was holding the knife.
"Dickory!" I yelled. "Stop!"
Dickory paused.
"Let him go," I said. "He's no danger to me."
Dickory removed the knife and stepped away from Enzo. Enzo scrambled away from Dickory, and away from me.
"Hickory?" I called. "Is everything all right?"
From ahead, I heard Hickory's voice. "Your friend had a handgun. I have disarmed him."
"He's choking me!" Magdy said.
"If Hickory wanted to choke you, you wouldn't be able to talk," I yelled back. "Let him go, Hickory."
"I am keeping his handgun," Hickory said. There was a rustle in the darkness as Magdy picked himself up.
"Fine," I said. Now that we stopped moving, it was like someone pulled a stopper, and all the adrenaline in my body was falling out from the bottom of my feet. I crouched down to keep from falling over.
"No, not fine," Magdy said. I saw him emerge out of the gloom, stalking toward me. Dickory interposed itself between me and Magdy. Magdy's stalking came to a quick halt. "That's my dad's gun. If he finds it missing, I'm dead."
"What were you doing with the gun in the first place?" Gretchen asked. She had also come back to where I was standing, Hickory following behind her.
"I told you I was prepared," Magdy said, and then turned to me. "You need to tell your bodyguards that they need to be more careful." He pointed at Hickory. "I almost took off that one's head."
"Hickory?" I said.
"I was not in any serious danger," Hickory said, blandly. His attention seemed elsewhere.
"I want my gun back," Magdy said. I think he was trying for threatening; he failed when his voice cracked.
"Hickory will give you your dad's gun back when we get back to the village," I said. I felt a fatigue headache coming on.
"Now," Magdy said.
"For God's sake, Magdy," I snapped. I was suddenly very tired, and angry. "Will you please just shut up about your damn gun. You're lucky you didn't kill one of us with it. And you're lucky you didn't hit one of them"—I waved at Dickory and then Hickory—"because then you would be dead, and the rest of us would have to explain how it happened. So just shut up about the stupid gun. Shut up and let's go home."
Magdy stared at me, then stomped off into the gloom, toward the village. Enzo gave me a strange look and then followed his friend.
"Perfect," I said, and squeezed my temples with my hands. The monster headache I was on the verge of had arrived, and it was a magnificent specimen.
"We should return to the village," Hickory said to me.
"You think?" I said, and then stood up and stomped off, away from it and Dickory, back to the village. Gretchen, suddenly left with my two bodyguards for company, was not far behind me.
* * *
"I don't want one word of what happened tonight to get back to John and Jane," I said to Hickory, as it, Dickory and I stood in the common area of the village. At this time of night there were only a couple of other people who were loitering there, and they quickly disappeared when Hickory and Dickory showed up. Two weeks had not been enough time for people to get used to them. We had the common area to ourselves.
"As you say," Hickory said.
"Thank you," I said, and started walking away from them again, toward the tent I shared with my parents.
"You should not have been in the woods," Hickory said.
That stopped me. I turned around to face Hickory. "Excuse me?" I said.
"You should not have been in the woods," Hickory said. "Not withou
t our protection."
"We had protection," I said, and some part of my brain didn't believe those words had actually come out of my mouth.
"Your protection was a handgun wielded by someone who did not know how to use it," Hickory said. "The bullet he fired went into the ground less than thirty centimeters from him. He almost shot himself in the foot. I disarmed him because he was a threat to himself, not to me."
"I'll be sure to tell him that," I said. "But it doesn't matter. I don't need your permission, Hickory, to do what I please. You and Dickory aren't my parents. And your treaty doesn't say you can tell me what to do."
"You are free to do as you will," Hickory said. "But you took an unnecessary risk to yourself, both by going into the forest and by not informing us of your intent."
"That didn't stop you from coming in after me," I said. It came out like an accusation, because I was in an accusatory mood.
"No," Hickory said.
"So you took it on yourself to follow me around when I didn't give you permission to do so," I said.
"Yes," Hickory said.
"Don't do that again," I said. "I know privacy is an alien concept to you, but sometimes I don't want you around. Can you understand that? You"—I pointed at Dickory—"nearly cut my boyfriend's throat tonight. I know you don't like him, but that's a little much."
"Dickory would not have harmed Enzo," Hickory said.
"Enzo doesn't know that," I said, and turned back to Dickory. "And what if he had gotten in a good hit on you? You might have hurt him just to keep him down. I don't need this kind of protection. And I don't want it."
Hickory and Dickory stood there silently, soaking up my anger. After a couple of seconds, I got bored with this. "Well?" I said.
"You were running out of the forest when you came by us," Hickory said.
"Yeah? So?" I said. "We thought we might be being chased by something. Something spooked the fanties we were watching and Enzo thought it might have been a predator or something. It was a false alarm. There was nothing behind us or else it would have caught up with us when you two leaped out of nowhere and scared the crap out of all of us."
"No," Hickory said.
"No? You didn't scare the crap out of us?" I said. "I beg to differ."
"No," Hickory said. "You were being followed."
"What are you talking about?" I said. "There was nothing behind us."
"They were in the trees," Hickory said. "They were pacing you from above. Moving ahead of you. We heard them before we heard you."
I felt weak. "Them?" I said.
"It is why we took you as soon as we heard you coming," Hickory said. "To protect you."
"What were they?" I asked.
"We don't know," Hickory said. "We did not have the time to make any good observation. And we believe your friend's gunshot scared them off."
"So it wasn't necessarily something hunting us," I said. "It could have been anything."
"Perhaps," Hickory said, in that studiously neutral way it had when it didn't want to disagree with me. "Whatever they were, they were moving along with you and your group."
"Guys, I'm tired," I said, because I didn't want to think about any of this anymore, and if I did think about it anymore—about the idea that some pack of creatures was following us in the trees—I might have a collapse right there in the common area. "Can we have this conversation tomorrow?"
"As you wish, Zoë," Hickory said.
"Thank you," I said, and started shuffling off toward my cot. "And remember what I said about not telling my parents."
"We will not tell your parents," Hickory said.
"And remember what I said about not following me," I said. They said nothing to this. I waved at them tiredly and went off to sleep.
* * *
I found Enzo outside his family's tent the next morning, reading a book.
"Wow, a real book," I said. "Who did you kill to get that?"
"I borrowed it from one of the Mennonite kids," he said. He showed the spine to me. "Huckleberry Finn. You heard of it?"
"You're asking a girl from a planet named Huckleberry if she's heard of Huckleberry Finn," I said. I hoped the incredulous tone of my voice would convey amusement.
Apparently not. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't make the connection." He flipped the book open to where he had been reading.
"Listen," I said. "I wanted to thank you. For what you did last night."
Enzo looked up over his book. "I didn't do anything last night."
"You stayed behind Gretchen and me," I said. "You put yourself between us and whatever was following us. I just wanted you to know I appreciated it."
Enzo shrugged. "Not that there was anything following us after all," he said. I thought about telling him about what Hickory told me, but kept it in. "And when something did come out at you, it was ahead of me. So I wasn't much help, actually."
"Yeah, about that," I said. "I wanted to apologize for that. For the thing with Dickory." I didn't really know how to put that. I figured saying Sorry for when my alien bodyguard very nearly took your head off with a knife wouldn't really go over well.
"Don't worry about it," Enzo said.
"I do worry about it," I said.
"Don't," Enzo said. "Your bodyguard did its job." For a second it seemed like Enzo would say something more, but then he cocked his head and looked at me like he was waiting for me to wrap up whatever it was I was doing, so he could get back to his very important book.
It suddenly occurred to me that Enzo hadn't written me any poetry since we landed on Roanoke.
"Well, okay then," I said, lamely. "I guess I'll see you a little later, then."
"Sounds good," Enzo said, and then gave me a friendly wave and put his nose into Huck Finn's business. I walked back to my tent and found Babar inside and went over to him and gave him a hug.
"Congratulate me, Babar," I said. "I think I just had my first fight with my boyfriend."
Babar licked my face. That made it a little better. But not much.
FOURTEEN
"No, you're still too low," I said to Gretchen. "It's making you flat. You need to be a note higher or something. Like this." I sang the part I wanted her to sing.
"I am singing that," Gretchen said.
"No, you're singing lower than that," I said.
"Then you're singing the wrong note," Gretchen said. "Because I'm singing the note you're singing. Go ahead, sing it."
I cleared my throat, and sang the note I wanted her to sing. She matched it perfectly. I stopped singing and listened to Gretchen. She was flat.
"Well, nuts," I said.
"I told you," Gretchen said.
"If I could pull up the song for you, you could hear the note and sing it," I said.
"If you could pull up the song, we wouldn't be trying to sing it at all," Gretchen said. "We'd just listen to it, like civilized human beings."
"Good point," I said.
"There's nothing good about it," Gretchen said. "I swear to you, Zoë. I knew coming to a colony world was going to be hard. I was ready for that. But if I knew they were going to take my PDA, I might have just stayed back on Erie. Go ahead, call me shallow."
"Shallow," I said.
"Now tell me I'm wrong," Gretchen said. "I dare you."
I didn't tell her she was wrong. I knew how she felt. Yes, it was shallow to admit that you missed your PDA. But when you'd spent your whole life able to call up everything you wanted to amuse you on a PDA—music, shows, books and friends—when you had to part with it, it made you miserable. Really miserable. Like "trapped on a desert island with nothing but coconuts to bang together" miserable. Because there was nothing to replace it with. Yes, the Colonial Mennonites had brought their own small library of printed books, but most of that consisted of Bibles and agricultural manuals and a few "classics," of which Huckleberry Finn was one of the more recent volumes. As for popular music and entertainments, well, they didn't much truck with that.
You could
tell a few of the Colonial Mennonite teens thought it was funny to watch the rest of us go through entertainment withdrawal. Didn't seem very Christian of them, I have to say. On the other hand, they weren't the ones whose lives had been drastically altered by landing on Roanoke. If I were in their shoes and watching a whole bunch of other people whining and moaning about how horrible it was that their toys were taken away, I might feel a little smug, too.
We did what people do in situations where they go without: We adjusted. I hadn't read a book since we landed on Roanoke, but was on the waiting list for a bound copy of The Wizard of Oz. There were no recorded shows or entertainments but Shakespeare never fails; there was a reader's theater performance of Twelfth Night planned for a week from Sunday. It promised to be fairly gruesome—I'd heard some of the read-throughs—but Enzo was reading the part of Sebastian, and he was doing well enough, and truth be told it would be the first time I would have ever experienced a Shakespeare play—or any play other than a school pageant—live. And it's not like there would be anything else to do anyway.
And as for music, well, this is what happened: Within a couple days of landing a few of the colonists hauled out guitars and accordions and hand drums and other such instruments and started trying to play together. Which went horribly, because nobody knew anyone else's music. It was like what happened on the Magellan. So they started teaching each other their songs, and then people showed up to sing them, and then people showed up to listen. And thus it was, at the very tail end of space, when no one was looking, the colony of Roanoke reinvented the "hootenanny." Which is what Dad called it. I told him it was a stupid name for it, and he said he agreed, but said that the other word for it—"wingding"—was worse. I couldn't argue with that.
The Roanoke Hootenanners (as they were now calling themselves) took requests—but only if the person requesting sang the song. And if the musicians didn't know the song, you'd have to sing it at least a couple of times until they could figure out how to fake it. This led to an interesting development: singers started doing a cappella versions of their favorite songs, first by themselves and increasingly in groups, which might or might not be accompanied by the Hootenanners. It was becoming a point of pride for people to show up with their favorite songs already arranged, so everyone else in the audience didn't have to suffer through a set of dry runs before it was all listenable.
