Gia cooed from her nest, curling up over her and Alpha's clutch. Alpha growled, swept a glance over the rest of them—daring them to further forestall a successful hunt—and was gone over the ridge.
The pack followed in a hail of running feet. Keeping pace was enough to dominate Szcar's attention as they crossed the plains. Only the big necks and their entourage of little critters were out in the open this early. The horners, honkers, and dome-heads remained in the conifers. The forest canopy was alive with the grazers' mournful chorus as they stirred for another day of eating.
Alpha stopped when they came in sight of the gorge. Orr and Jiff stepped forward. They would be the pouncers today, springing the trap by leaping from cover to spook the honkers and get them stampeding.
The rest of them would separate the other grazers. They would happily eat the horners and dome-heads and anything else if they became weak and separated from their herds, but while together they were strong, and while strong they were dangerous. A lively horner or dome-head was as likely to kill one of the pack as become prey.
Orr and Jiff raced away, flanking the big necks and melding with the mottled green-gray of the plains. Alpha took three others to hide in the outcrop feeding into the gorge. Once Orr and Jiff had sparked the stampede, Alpha would lead them in, funnelling the honkers.
That left Szcar, Rurgh, and Feich to slink from weak dawn sunlight into the dew-speckled gorge. Szcar broke off, scrambling up onto a smooth rocky platform at honker-head height. She would provide the first scare that would cement their mindless flight.
The final and most important job she left to Rurgh and Feich—the job that she had held yesterday, and suspected she would never hold again. They vanished along the gorge, and silence settled.
Usually Szcar would have relaxed, maybe even dozed a while. A hunt often took many hours. The honkers were sluggish until the ground warmed, and often were among the last to emerge onto the plains.
Today there would be no dozing. Szcar remained perched on the edge of the platform, crouched low so that the striated pattern along her flank would blend with the rock. Her muscles ached with the strain of holding her strike position, and her toe throbbed, but she kept taut.
If it took all day, so be it. She wasn't going to be caught out again.
The first alarm calls came before the dew could evaporate, echoing into the gorge in waves, like ripples over a pond. Underfoot, the ground trembled.
Szcar's body trembled as shadows splashed across the gorge's entrance. She closed off her vocal cords—no squeak could be allowed to escape until the right moment. As the light entering the gorge was cut off completely, the signal came from the plains: a screech from Alpha. The first honker appeared, four times Alpha's size, sprinting on its back legs, nasal crest bent back in an unmistakable—and delicious—display of terror. The other honkers were close behind.
Szcar's vigil had put her in exactly the right place: she leapt just as the first pair of honkers passed by, rising up onto her toe claws and spreading her arms. The many-colored feathers under her forearms fanned around her chest, making her seem twice as large. She let fly a screech that was amplified twofold by the sudden blaring pain in her injured foot. The sound returned in echo twice along the gorge. The honkers ducked and raced headlong away from her.
Szcar dropped onto her haunches. She had done well. The svelte shadows of Alpha and Orr appeared at the gorge entrance and locked eyes with her. Orr's eyes said good, good, but Alpha's gaze told her this would be only the first of many reparations.
Szcar climbed down from the platform. Together they prowled the length of the gorge. The pack reformed one at time, spanning between the gorge's width, until they turned the final corner and found the honkers standing ten feet from the cliff edge.
Rurgh sprang from the boulder where Szcar had hidden the day before and spread his feathers. Feich leapt out a little farther along, on the opposite side.
The honkers were stupid, dull things, barely alive. Szcar saw the realization of doom in their eyes: Rurgh to their right, Feich to their left, the pack guarding the exit at their back, and directly before them, hundreds of feet of open air. Between open air and claws, open air won every time.
All three honkers went stomping for the cliff edge. Before any of them could utter another sound they toppled over the edge and were gone.
The pack stilled for a beat. They gathered on the ragged cliff edge with the wind tugging at their bodies and looked down at the three broken giants, burst open on the rocks like trampled fruit.
At Alpha's signal they circled down to the rocks to claim their prize. Orr nuzzled Szcar as he passed, and she gurgled her appreciation. Yet she stayed behind a while, trembling.
You are fine. Move.
She prepared to follow the others when she caught movement in the corner of her eye. She turned to the sharp rocks atop the gorge. Something black and round separated from the outcrop and shot straight up into the sky.
Szcar cried aloud, milling upon the cliff edge, screeching at the thing that was already but a dot in the big blue above.
It's back, it's back. It followed from the desert.
The orb reached the height of the clouds and stopped, hovering for the second time in one cycle of the sun—Szcar's skin tingled with the feeling of being watched—and then it shot away over the plains and out of sight.
* * *
They gathered around the corpses in silence. Szcar contemplated the broken, twisted things upon the rocks. This devastation had been wrought without them raising a single claw. The pack stood in awe and sorrow of its own cunning.
The bones of previous slain honkers lay strewn between crags, some with flaps of skin clinging to them, others so old and weathered that they were indistinguishable from the scree.
Alpha was the first to step forward, wary of signs of life. Sometimes the honkers didn't die. Even torn and twisted, one jerk of their trunk-like legs could turn a member of the pack to dust. Alpha mounted the closest honker and hissed, hesitantly at first, then louder. Nothing.
With that, they set to eating. The kills would feed them for weeks. The danger was big deaths and little critters finding their kill site and taking up residence during the night. They had ways of getting around that: they each kept a stash hidden away.
They spent the morning eating their fill, boring into the carcasses' thick hides. Snarling, they dragged organs free of deflated body cavities and shared the livers and hearts.
Szcar ate sparingly, feigning concern for approaching big deaths to excuse her lack of enthusiasm. She didn't much want to bend down in front of the others. It stretched the skin around her bad foot, splitting the raw flesh. She wolfed down a few chunks so her stomach no longer twisted with hunger and set to prowling the perimeter.
The others didn't pay her any mind. Though at first she tried not to be seen, she soon found herself strutting, trying to catch their attention. She didn't want to be seen, but she didn't want to be invisible, either.
Yet it was as though she wasn't there at all, as though...
I am not pack anymore.
She shuddered. She stood stupefied until the sun shone high overheard and the others had retreated to the shade to doze. By then her stomach was aching from hunger again. With the others lying satiated, there was no harm in eating now. Even if she cried out from the pain, they would scarcely hear it.
Would they care if they did?
She whined and started eating.
* * *
The others stirred as the afternoon wore on. Alpha seemed more aggressive than usual. Szcar caught him glaring at her in the corner of her eye. It was true: the hunt hadn't saved her. So it only bought her time.
She sulked in the shade, panting. Feasting in the midday sun had sapped her strength, but the others were restored and rose at once under Alpha's ministrations. Szcar made sure she was standing, but still Alpha bit her flank as he passed.
It was time to head back to retrieve Gia and the sentries. Th
e prime opportunity for Alpha to strut his stuff. Szcar could already see the look in Gia's eye, the look of victory. But first, to stash some meat. They set to scratching at the honkers' thighs, excavating slabs of muscle and dividing it into manageable lumps. They set off for their individual hiding spots.
Szcar took a small piece, but still she moved at a crawl. By the time she reached the cycad forest beyond the boulder field, the others had vanished. With them gone, suddenly she felt vulnerable. The skin over her unguarded flank puckered.
I am like grazer.
She reached her hiding spot some time later, already worried that she would be missed if she didn't hurry back. Would they even wait for her, or would Alpha use this as a prime opportunity to leave her to cross the plains alone?
Maybe Orr would challenge him. She doubted it. Alpha would kill him sooner than be challenged.
Szcar's hiding place loomed overhead: an ancient tree, buckled and askew. It sported so many branches that it was a simple matter of climbing them like the rocky steps in the gorge. She climbed precariously, pausing often to regain her balance and ease her toe. By the time she crested the canopy and found the lee where she had stored countless prizes before, her head had grown fuzzy.
There was no time to rest. She nudged the meat into a cleft between two knots in the bough and bit some ferns free to cover it. She considered the misshapen bundle, trying to see it as a critter would, and decided it was well hidden. She couldn't mask the smell, but the height always seemed to provide protection—
Shadow splashed over her shoulder. Szcar wheeled. The orb hung a few feet above her head. Before she could react the blue light was upon her, but this time it was a single ray, like the fingers that shimmered where desert met sky, after the sun fell. Instead of hitting her skin, it ceased in midair. The ray moved back and forth, growing until it had sprouted teeth, enormous eyes, arms and legs and claws—a pack member, made of light.
Szcar screeched and resisted the urge to lash out. The thing ceased its metamorphosis and stood quite still, staring at her. It looked like a pack member, but it had no smell, made no sound—Szcar saw no words in its eyes. It was like the pictures of herself she saw in the watering hole, only this one stood high off the ground, shining from the belly of the black orb behind it.
Somewhere in the back of her mind an urgency tugged at her attention, but it refused to step forward.
The light thing turned its flank to her, lifted its foot, and Szcar hissed when she saw the tear on its toe claw. The light thing turned to look her in the eye—there was still no expression, but she knew that it looked right at her, just as she knew the orb looked at her.
Szcar looked down at her body and gingerly lifted her own injured foot, turning her gaze back upon the light thing.
The light thing flickered, flexed the sickle claw on its good leg.
Szcar flexed her own claw.
The light thing bared its needle-like teeth.
Szcar opened her jaws and hissed.
The light thing’s jaws widened and its neck muscles tightened, just as all pack members’ bodies did when they hissed. No sound came, but the gesture was enough for Szcar to hear it inside her head.
Alpha’s screech rolled off the gorge, echoing under the forest canopy. Szcar jerked away from the light thing and snarled, leaping back. The light thing flickered once, then was gone. There was no residual glow, nothing but the vacant space where, a moment ago, another pack member had hovered.
The orb was already climbing into the sky. By the time Szcar turned in earnest, it was a blur of darkness streaking away over the canopy.
Alpha’s call came again. The urgency that had prodded her came flooding forward, and she padded down to the forest floor. Heading back towards the kill site, she couldn’t help but feel that the orb had been playing no game. She had been competing for its favor. A trial, like the young’uns took before they were allowed to join their first hunt.
Did I pass?
She rejoined the others, and they beat tracks across the plains back towards Home Valley.
Gia must have smelled blood on the wind. She stood on the ridge with the sentries, waiting for their return. She had abandoned her clutch. Szcar wasn’t surprised, for the snouts of each pack member, their toe claws, their arms, were covered with slicks of the fallen honkers’ juices.
Alpha approached his bride, strutting, and Gia made a show of circling him, head bent low. She nuzzled his neck as the others looked on, cementing her claim. Then her stance shifted, and at once she was ready to be led to the kill. Guarding a clutch for long days under the roasting sun was exhausting—memories of Szcar's lost clutch tugged at her, and she held in a whine.
Alpha led her away from the ridge, grunting for the sentries to come along. His will communicated at a glance to the rest of the pack, he and Gia disappeared onto the plains.
Orr and Kiff took sentry duty, and the rest of them moved lazily into Home Valley, groggy, their bellies full of honker meat.
Szcar couldn't get the light thing out of her mind. Her feet wanted to run as she approached her own shabby nest.
No rest. No rest.
It would be pointless to lie down. She looked up to the ridge at Orr. She could go to him, stand sentry with him. But no. The others would notice, and when Alpha got back and saw them together, it would only get Orr into trouble.
She lay down with a groan, scanning Home Valley and the sky, hoping the orb would come. It never did, and soon the world went dark as exhaustion yanked her down into an abyss.
* * *
Szcar heard Orr's shrill cry before she was fully awake. Dredged from the depths of sleep-pictures, she was on her feet by the time she had opened her eyes. The others were already running for the ridge top. Limping in their wake, she cried out in protest. The pack ignored her, already gathered in a tight gaggle, hopping up and down; a display reserved for the rare occasions that a big death or a large grazer wandered in sight of Home Valley.
But there was something wrong. Their cries were strange, nonsensical, somewhere between the signals for night-time and big death.
Black Death! Black Death! Black Death!
Szcar pushed into the churning mass of scales and feathers and glimpsed what lay beyond in the desert. The orb sat a big neck’s length from the ridge's base, unmoving. As soon as Szcar reached the front of the pack, the orb bobbed higher off the sand. The small green light upon its crown winked on.
Sees me.
Szcar stepped forward.
The others' racket surged to a raging crescendo, and they leapt twice their own height in impotent frenzy. She paid them no mind, padding forward until she felt a sharp pain in her tail. She looked over to see Orr’s wide, warning eyes, his jaws around her flesh. There was an urgency in his gaze the others' lacked. He stood by her side, imploring.
Back.
When she kept moving he followed a few steps, but as they reached the ridge's base he stiffened and wheeled back to the others. Szcar’s chest ached at his departure. Her foot hovered over the sand, almost faltered, then landed with fresh vigor. She kept moving towards the orb.
The others are afraid. I can show them. They will let me stay.
With Alpha gone, this might be her only chance. If she could win them over, Alpha couldn’t make her go. Not unless he killed her himself. And he wouldn’t do that.
Would he?
The orb awaited. The green light glowed. She came to a stop a few paces away.
The blue ray appeared at once. The formless shimmer of light-like-the-sky morphed into the same apparition of Szcar as before—swollen ankle and all—which cocked its head and chirped soundlessly.
The others' cries peaked again. She could sense the vehemence of their leaping in the corner of her eye, but she didn't look away from the light thing, which lifted its foot and blinked.
Szcar lifted her own foot, blinked in turn.
The orb's green light flickered. The light thing vanished into a haze of blue, which refo
rmed into a smooth stone of equal lengths on all sides. Its edges were sharp, odd, too straight. As she watched, the top of the stone lifted up, revealing a hollow interior. Inside lay a fish.
The stone closed, and from its side the light thing appeared again. It gave a look that said watch and bent over the stone, prodding it with its snout. The stone glowed like fireflies. The light thing stood up, gave her another of those looks, then bent once more and prodded the stone twice in quick succession. The stone glowed twice. The light thing looked at her one more time and then prodded the stone three times. The stone opened, revealing the fish inside. The light thing was on the verge of reaching in to take the fish when it vanished, and the stone sealed once more.
Nothing moved. All eyes had fallen on her.
Szcar realized that either she moved now and proved herself, or everything thus far had been for nothing. She padded closer, jerking her head forward a little at a time until her snout reached the stone. She felt nothing, just air, but her eyes told her flesh met stone.
The stone glowed. Szcar huffed and straightened, looking back at the others. Their leaping had stopped. They each looked on wide eyed, waiting.
She turned back to the stone and prodded it three times, just as the light thing had done. The stone opened and revealed the fish. A sound of longing escaped her jaws. She was bending to retrieve the fish when it vanished and the blue light reformed.
Szcar leapt back.
The orb had robbed her.
Why?
Already the stone had reappeared, flanked by two identical copies. Inside the central stone lay the fish, while the other two were empty. The stones closed and the light thing was back. With its snout it moved the stones back and forth, until Szcar forgot which one was which.
The light thing stood back, looked hard at the three stones, then bent to the one on the left. The stone glowed and opened to reveal the fish.
That look—watch—was aimed at Szcar once again, and the light thing reorganized the stones. The others left the ridge top, standing a little closer, craning their necks. The orb hadn't killed Szcar, and now they were curious.
The Jurassic Chronicles (Future Chronicles Book 15) Page 10
