Prime Pickings

by Richard Raley

  “Why ain’t it making any noise?” Eorge Hackson had himself another question.

  Yechter stared down at it, eye to eye. The Eater’s eyes were probably as big as his whole body, but standing up high on a hovership out of its jaws they could be equals. Wasn’t nothing the Eater could do to him and wasn’t nothing Yechter was supposed to be able to do to an Eater this size. Guess Grandad would call this an impasse.

  It looked anything but cold. Its armor had a haze surrounding it, steam wafted from inside of its mouth. Looks like it’s holding in a piece of the sun, just waiting to let it loose when it dies. Rumor was . . . Eater corpses stayed warm for months. Godless science-man creations, what were the fools thinking? Worrying about fixing your problems but not thinking about what your solutions could do . . . Yechter figured he was in the same spot thanks to Eorge Hackson.

  “They don’t talk with their mouths, they talk with their heads. Like our radio. Don’t make much noise at all,” Yechter murmured, watching as the Eater’s eye blinked by the foot. “Don’t talk either really . . . don’t understand us, they just want to eat us.”

  “What we doing, Chief?” Noana asked him.

  Yechter licked his lips. You bastard . . . you couldn’t give me one more day? One more day and I would have left with what I had and called it a miracle. But this . . . just enough in scavenge to make people wonder where we got the stuff and create trouble for us, but not enough to buy our way out of the scavenge game. “What you think, Jonny?”

  Jonny was a little man. About as little of a man as Noana was big for a woman. His hands were always dirty with grease and he was wiping them with a rag dirtier than they were. “Not my place, Chief.”

  “You’re Head Fix.” Yechter knelt down by the side of the ship and the Eater’s head lowered with him. Only one of them. “So have yourself an opinion on the matter.”

  Jonny was interested in his own feet. They were as close to his head as they always were. “Set it on fire with some fuel?”

  “Granddad tried it once. Just pissed it off and the thing follow ‘em for two years wherever they hovered. Was such a nightmare they broke down and hired a settleman to build them an Eater bomb.”

  Jonny perked up. “What’s an Eater bomb?”

  A grim smile found Yechter’s face as he scratched at his beard, ruminating over the situation. “You bury it . . . then the Eater walks over it, blows ‘em up from the inside, but it’s a pain-in-the-ass to pull off and we don’t got one, do we?”

  Jonny perked down. “Don’t know what to do then, Chief.”

  “Keyet?” Yechter asked.

  The man was almost as big as Noana, dark-skinned even for a scavenger. “I ain’t no Head, why you bringing me into this?”

  “Hoping one of you are a genius so I don’t have to do my job, that’s why.”

  Keyet didn’t think long. “Shoot it?”

  Nope, Eorge Hackson isn’t the only one with a little stupid in him. Yechter refused to even answer to the thought of shooting through Eater armor . . . not feeling like pointing out that if it was so easy, they’d have killed them all by now and would live on the ground like the humans of old.

  No way to do it, not without Granddad’s secret and you don’t spread a secret, do you? And that’s why I’m standing here . . . ruminating, trying to find myself a way without it. Still making me problems, old man . . . still laughing at me from your water-grave. “Any ideas, Eorge?

  “Set it on fire and then shoot it?” the boy said in more of a question than a hypothesis.

  Yechter spit over the side of the ship at the Eater. Thing still hadn’t moved a bit. It just waited. Maybe they’re smarter than we give them credit for. Maybe it knows it has ‘pliances I want. Maybe it knows it can wait me out. “Noana?”

  “You know what you have to do.”

  “I do. Like I said . . . just hoping for a genius to pop up and save me.”

  “On this ship?”

  Damned me, making choices like this. “Jonny, go down to the engine and tell Pal I want the ship raised an extra twenty feet.”

  Jonny headed off. That left four. Best it stayed below that number. “Keyet, go on down the main corridor and calm everyone down, tell them it’s under control but I want them in room until I’ve decided how to handle it.”

  Keyet frowned. “You gonna take a try at it?”

  Yechter stared down at the Eater and the Eater stared right back, head swaying on its neck, daring him to come on down, get brave like Vicet Rownac. Twenty ‘pliances and only one rogue Eater. “I’m thinking about it, now get going.”

  Keyet headed off too.

  Leaving just three. A Chief, a Hunt Head, and a Stupid. Against an Eater. And that might be scary . . . would be scary for any tribe but this one. Yechter looked over Eorge Hackson’s gulping wide-eyed face. Worth the price if I have to pay it. He turned to Noana. She studied his face too, knew the expression there. She didn’t question, just nodded. She knew what was at stake, knew they were sitting on prime pickings never to be seen again. Couldn’t just let one Eater ruin it. “Use one of the birds from yesterday.”

  “Aye, Chief.”

  *

  “How’s a dead bird going to help?” Eorge Hackson asked when Noana returned carrying said plucked bird in an extra-large foil-bag carefully in both hands like she didn’t want to drop it at any cost, shuffling her big feet tight against the deck metal. “It distract it or something? How that going to help? It’s huge, man! Look at all that metal! Mag-rifle won’t go through that.”

  “Shut up, Eorge,” Noana told him. “Please.”

  “But—“

  “I won’t say please again . . .”

  “—Right.”

  “Already dose it?”

  “Ennif was awake,” Noana explained, pushing the foil-bag over to the side, “she said she knew what was up and told me to double the dose to be sure . . . do they like bird? I’ve never done this before, Chief . . .”

  Even Yechter had only done it once before. Killing an Eater . . . dangerous task that, dangerous task for more than one reason. Every Chief and Head Hunt knew the way on the Ceanmaste since Granddad figured it out. Wily bastard, he was. It was Yechter’s dad who passed it along to him with a warning to keep it tight, that the way to kill Eaters couldn’t spread. The thinking behind the why was sound Yechter admitted . . . Granddad again, with logic.

  “They like any meat. It’ll do.” Yechter watched as the Eater sniffed at the air, big child-size nostrils aching as they smelt for the bird, and smelt more for what the bird had been injected with. “Tip it on over.”

  The bag didn’t even reach the ground, snatched right out of the air like a man popping a peanut, so small it looked. A pinkish tongue, wet with saliva darted out, licking snout before it disappeared again.

  Eater, Eater, always hungry, Eater, Eater what’s in your tummy? Settlement kids sung that rhyme, Yechter had heard it. Big scary Eaters keeping them walled up in their self-made prisons. They were scary . . . Noana’s predecessor Chuk would tell you that if he wasn’t what’s in the tummy of one of them . . . but worth trapping yourself?

  Noana and Yechter waited, mag-rifles pulled down from their shoulders, held in their hands. Eorge Hackson looked like he might pee himself. Too bad, Yechter thought again, too bad a stupid boy like him instead of a smart boy had to see. Have to do it. Can’t abandon pickings like this. Boy will just have to pass Granddad’s test . . .

  Minutes went by in silence before the Eater showed the first sign: the smallest trimmer in its legs. “There we go,” Yechter growled.

  “Wha?” Eorge Hackson asked.

  Noana only nodded. “Like you said.”

  “Like I said,” Yechter agreed.

  Below them the Eater began swaying, eyes all sleepy like. It moved from one side to the next, with tired legs and even more tired neck, the whole long thing dancing like some snake ready to strike—but ready to strike at nothing real.

  “What it doing now?” Eorge H
ackson whispered franticly.

  The Eater answered with a gurgle from its giant mouth just before it swayed all the way over on its back, whole body lying flat. Whole unarmored body lying flat. “See the heart beat?” Yechter asked, pulling his own mag-rifle up and putting his eye near the sight.

  “That bit of chest thumping?” Noana asked, doing the same.

  “That’s it.”

  “One shot?”

  “If it’s perfect,” Yechter explained, making sure to take aim, “but being as it’s you and me we’ll team it up and fire on three.”

  Edged to the side of the ship’s top deck, the Eater was over two-hundred feet below them. A little wind. The buzz of the hover engines. Both of them stood with their knees locked, barrels vertical, Eorge Hackson watching on.

  “Ready,” Noana said.

  Yechter waited a bit more for his own aim to feel right, then he counted down. “Three . . .

  “Two . . .

  “One . . .”

  A pair of zips.

  Below them the Eater surged up to its feet, thunder coming to life or the like—drugged or not, awake. Carbon heavy blood of green dripped from its chest, leaving a trail as it dug at the earth to run off. It was scared . . . made for the dense forest around the city ruins, bellowing loud, blood trail increasing in size. Out of sight, there was another thud of its body hitting ground.

  “Chief . . .” Noana whispered.

  “Yeah?”

  “It dead?”

  “Yeah . . . it dead.”

  “We killed an Eater?”

  “Yeah . . . we did.”

  Noana lowered her mag-rifle along with Yechter. “Why I feel worse about what I just did than with the deer?”

  Yechter leaned on his mag-rifle, gazing out on the forest where the Eater was dead and gone, out of sight and out of mind. Piece of luck that, would have had to haul it otherwise, pretend we killed it . . . lot better no one knowing Eaters can even die. “I asked my daddy the same . . . he told me it’s cause the Eaters are our enemies, not our food.”

  “Smart man, the old Chief.”

  “Wish he still had the job at times like this.”

  The forest and the whole cityscape were back to normal, save for that trail of green blood. “Know what you mean,” Noana said.

  “But . . . but . . .” Eorge Hackson had developed a stutter apparently. “But . . .”

  “I know!” Yechter growled at him.

  “You killed an Eater!”

  “I said I know!”

  “But . . .” Eorge Hackson waved in the general direction of the forest. “If you can kill one, why don’t we kill ‘em all then?”

  Test time, Yechter thought, less happy about it than killing the poor Eater. “Because it’s a secret for emergencies, got it?”

  “But . . . if we can kill ‘em all then there wouldn’t be emergencies,” Eorge Hackson pointed out in a pure use of ol’ fashion reason.

  Yechter shared a glance with Noana. When she shook her head, he knew he was going to have to be direct with this one. “Look, boy, there’s lots of Eaters, it would take all the hover tribes working together for years to kill all of them, and after all that work and hardship and life-risking, what would it really mean? A world with no Eaters in it?”

  The boy seemed rightly confused. “We could live on the ground, right? Like all the ancient people did. We wouldn’t have to scavenge and the like.”

  “Wrong! What would happen . . . is that then the settlemen wouldn’t need us to go out and collect scavenge because they could live on the ground without hiding all fearful-like then,” Yechter explained, “They wouldn’t need us. They would stop giving us food and fixing our ships. They would wipe us out with all their technology. We need the Eaters around to live, got it, boy? That means no settleman can ever hear about what just happened or we all get exterminated along with the Eaters, got it? That means keep your mouth shut, got it?”

  Eorge Jackson didn’t got it. He stared at the crumbled houses all around the Ceanmaste, stared at what life was once like, thinking about what life could be like again without Eaters around causing problems. “It don’t have to be like that with the settlemen . . . we could live on the ground with ‘em . . .”

  Yechter sighed. Things I do for my tribe. “Do it, dear.”

  Noana grabbed poor Eorge by the arm and flung him off the side of the ship before he could even protest.

  Test failed, Yechter thought when he heard a splat below. Eaters might attack us, boy, but Eaters are what give us our edge over the settlements . . . can’t risk it, can’t try to change if it might make things worse than they are.

  “Damn waste,” Noana said, looking down at where Eorge had his accident.

  “We scared the Eater off with the mag-rifles, lucky shot in its ear,” Yechter decided, voice and face hard. “Boy tripped, of course. Damn waste is right, but if he was smart he would have got the way our world worked. His daddy will understand . . . Pal was there for the last one of these as a kid. If he don’t understand . . . well, we’ll handle it I guess . . .”

  Noana shook her head. “I was talking about the mag-rifle he had on him . . . it broke in the fall . . . those things ain’t cheap.”

  Yechter didn’t have comment for that. His eyes were only for the cityscape underneath his ship. All them houses, all them cars, all the old world dreams to scavenge through and try to make a better life for his tribe. Prime pickings, he thought.

  THE END

  About the Author

  Richard Raley was born and raised in Fresno, California and even still lives there on account of the city being an evil vortex you can’t escape. He grew up on Star Wars, Transformers, Legos, and Everquest—he never escaped them either. He released The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady, the first novel in The King Henry Tapes in September 2011. Keep an eye out for more Eaters and King Henry Tapes updates at:

  http://richardraley.blogspot.com

  www.twitter.com/richardraley

  richardraley@gmail.com

  If you loved this novelette or even liked it then please take the time to give it a positive review on Amazon.com and Goodreads.com. You wouldn’t believe how much that helps us Indie authors out!