Hunter's Run

by George R. R. Martin

  “Good thing, yeah,” he said, and smiled.

  Chapter 21

  Morning found Ramón aching and tired. Through the boughs above him, the sky was gray. The breeze smelled heavy with rain. The other man had risen before him and was boiling a handful of honey grass. Ramón yawned mightily, then rubbed his eyes. His elbow itched, so he scratched, feeling the hard knot of scar where the machete had bitten. It was almost its familiar size and hardness. He plucked the sleeve of his robe down to cover it.

  “Storm coming on,” the other man said. “Gonna be pretty wet by tonight.”

  “Better get moving, then,” Ramón said.

  “I was thinking we could hole up. Find someplace dry to wait it out.”

  “Good idea. How ’bout Fiddler’s Jump? Dry enough there.”

  “We got days before we can even think of seeing people.”

  “We’ve got more of them if we screw around like a couple of schoolgirls trying not to get our hair wet,” Ramón said. The other man’s gaze hardened.

  “Fine,” the man said. “That’s the way you want it, we’ll do that.”

  After they ate breakfast, the honey grass tasting rich and heavy as wheat after the boiling had burst the grains, Ramón and his twin mapped out the path that made the best sense. Unsurprisingly, they shared the same basic idea. The other man objected to a few of Ramón’s suggestions, but that was more for the sake of the objection itself.

  “We’ll have to clear some of the brush. Maybe a sapling or two,” Ramón said. “You want to give me the knife, we can share the shit work.”

  “I can do it,” the man said.

  “Your choice.”

  When they reached the raft again, Ramón used the vines with which they’d pulled it from the river to make a simple yoke. When pulled from the side, the floats acted more like runners, and dragging it was easier than lifting the full weight. The man walked ahead, clearing what he could, or went back to the raft itself to lift it over the rocks and bushes with which it became entangled. The sun sloped unseen toward the top of its arc. The Enye ships peeked through the rare break in the cloud cover. The work was backbreaking, but Ramón pushed through the pain. His spine was screaming, his feet felt on the verge of bleeding, his shoulders were rubbing raw where the yoke rested, but it wasn’t like he was cauterizing the stump of his own lost finger. If he was capable of that—and, judging by the man, he was—pulling a raft through the woods shouldn’t be worth thinking about.

  And as the hours passed, he found the burden growing more bearable. The endless ache in his muscles became less a sensation and more an environment. The other man darted back and forth, clearing the path ahead, lifting the raft and pushing it past the tighter spots when he went behind. Ramón didn’t speak much, just leaned into his task. He sensed that his twin was coming to respect him. He knew how much that would gall the man, and it put an extra strength in his back. He thought of Christ bearing his cross while the Romans beat him and the crowd jeered. The raft had to be lighter than that, and it wasn’t his own death waiting when he reached the water, but instead his salvation. He had no room for complaint.

  The third time he stumbled, he barked his shin on a rock. The gash didn’t hurt, but blood slicked his skin. He cursed mildly and started to rise to his feet. A hand on his shoulder stopped him.

  “Take a break, ese,” the man said. “You’ve been busting your hump all day. It’s time for lunch.”

  “I can keep going,” Ramón said. “No trouble.”

  “Yeah, okay, you’re a badass. Got it. Put your fucking leg up and I’ll go find us some food.”

  Ramón chuckled, then shrugged off the yoke and rolled onto his back. The sky was darker now, closer than a cathedral’s ceiling. He heard what might have been distant thunder or only a heightened awareness of the blood in his own ears. The man shook his head and turned away. Ramón smiled.

  It was strange, not knowing whether or not he liked the man who was himself. He’d never seen how he was from the outside. Smart, resourceful, tough as old leather, but wound tight around his fears and ready to blame everyone but himself. All that insecurity and rage fizzing inside him, ready to explode at the slightest provocation, strutting around like a bantam cock, staring down whoever was nearby. This was what he had always been. Only it took becoming an alien monstrosity to see it.

  But there was a dignity to the man, in spite of his flaws. And a surprising strength of will. He’d engineered Maneck’s death. He’d sealed the stump of his missing finger when most men would have tried to live with the open wound, and the fact that he wasn’t dying of fever right now was a testament to his wisdom. He was even capable of a kind of weird compassion. Keeping Ramón from pushing on now. Lying about Lianna so he wouldn’t sound weak. What was he really like? All the pieces of the man’s personality seemed at odds with each other, and they also seemed to fit.

  The only thing that didn’t make sense to him, even now, was staying with Elena. He couldn’t see why his twin would do that. He understood why he would have, but this other self could surely do better. Even if they were the same man.

  He didn’t remember dozing off, only waking when the man shook his arm. Ramón slapped a hand over the scar at his elbow almost before he opened his eyes. The man was squatting beside him, two fat jabali cubs in his hand. Ramón sat up, his body protesting.

  “Where did you get those?” he asked.

  “I got lucky,” the man said. “Come on, I’ve got a fire started. You can talk with me while I clean these poor pendejos.”

  Ramón levered himself up to sitting, and then stood.

  “Tomorrow, I’ll cook,” he said. “You did breakfast and lunch both.”

  “Go ahead,” the man said. “You want to make some food, I’m not going to stop you.”

  Ramón sat close to the fire, watching the man gut and skin the little animals. The wood hissed and popped, the flame fluttered with a sound like wings when a gust of air blew through it. It would take them another couple of hours to reach the lower riverbank. He wondered if it would be raining by then, and which of them would spend the night in the lean-to. Pushing himself as hard as he had would win the man’s respect, but probably not so much as that.

  “You from Mexico?” the man asked.

  “What?”

  “Mexico. On Earth. That where you from?”

  “Yeah,” Ramón said. “Oaxaca. Why?”

  “Just thinking. You look like a mejicano. You’ve got that kind of face.”

  Ramón stared at the fire, willing the man to talk about anything but how he looked. Either the man picked up on it, or he hadn’t been that concerned with the subject to start.

  “What’s it like, being a cop?” he asked instead. “You like it?”

  “Yeah,” Ramón said. “I like it. It’s a good job, you know?”

  “Looks shitty to me,” the man said. “No offense. But all the time, you have to take guys who are just trying to get along, and bust their balls. And why? Because the governor tells you to? So what? I mean, who’s the governor? You take away his power and his money, and you think he’s going to act any different than the folks he’s coming down on?”

  “Yeah, well,” Ramón said, trying to think how a cop would answer. “The governor’s a snooty Portugee prick. That’s true. But it’s not all like that. Yeah, part of it’s colonial bullshit. Checking licenses and permits and shit. But it’s not just about that.”

  “No?”

  “No,” Ramón said. “There’s also the real bad pendejos. The guys who sneak into church, piss all over the altar. The ones who mess with children. I deal with those assholes too.”

  “Guys who stab ambassadors, you mean?” the man said, his voice cool.

  “Fuck that. I mean bad ones. The kind that need killing. You know what I mean.”

  The man looked up. There was blood on his hands, red and darkening. Ramón saw something in the man’s face—something unexpected. Pain. Embarrassment. Regret. Pride. Something.
>
  “There’s all kinds of crazy bastards out there,” Ramón said, still pretending to be a policeman. “Most of the time, we don’t care about people just getting on with their lives. But there’s rapists. There’s the guys who just want to kill people for no reason. And there’s nothing worse than someone who hurts kii.”

  “Kii?”

  “Children,” Ramón said, surprised at himself for the slip. “Kids who are too small to defend themselves. Or even know what’s going on. There’s nothing fucking lower than that. That’s why I’m a cop. And people know it, you know? People know that on one side, there’s them, and then on the other side, there’s me.”

  Ramón broke off. He didn’t know what he was saying anymore. The words, the thoughts. They were all jumbled in his head. The Enye crushing tiny alien things; the European; Mikel Ibrahim taking his knife; the feeling of being Maneck and watching its people die. Maneck was right. They shouldn’t laugh. There was nothing to laugh about. If she just hadn’t laughed.

  “You okay?” the man asked.

  “Yeah,” Ramón said. “I’m fine. I just…I’m fine.”

  The man nodded and turned back to the carcasses, holding them over the fire. Letting the fat liquefy, the muscle tissues sear. The scent of rain was growing stronger. They both ignored it.

  “I could have been a cop,” the man said at last. “I’d have been good.”

  “You would have,” Ramón agreed, wrapping his arms around his drawn-up knees. “You’d have been great.”

  They were silent, the only sounds the hissing of grease as it dripped into the fire and the constant rustling of leaves. The man turned the carcasses, setting the other sides to brown.

  “That was a good call, back there. When we were trying to get to shore. I didn’t even see that pinche rock. But you, ese. You headed right for it. We’d have gone over for sure if you hadn’t.”

  He was giving Ramón an out; a way to change the subject. Even without knowing what it was that was bothering him, the man knew it was a kindness to steer away from it, and Ramón clutched at the chance.

  “It’s all about flow,” he said. “Knowing how it looks when there’s something disrupting it. It just feels different, you know.”

  “Whatever it was, you did a fucking man’s job of it,” the man said. “I couldn’t have.”

  Ramón waved the compliment away. If this went on too long, they’d cross the line into patronizing. He didn’t want that. Right now, for this moment, he liked the man. He wanted very much to like his twin, and the cabrón wasn’t often very likable.

  “You’d have done the same if you’d been steering,” Ramón said.

  “Nah, man. I really wouldn’t.”

  And it struck Ramón that that might be true. Being inside Maneck’s head might have taught him something about being a river. About flow. Just because he and the other man had started off the same, these last few days had been different for both of them. There was no reason they should be identical now. They’d had different experiences, learned different lessons from the world. He hadn’t lost a finger. His twin hadn’t had the sahael digging into his throat.

  You are not to diverge from the man, Maneck’s voice rumbled in the back of his mind. But how could he help it? The world looked different, depending on where you sat.

  They ate, digging into the cooked flesh with their fingers. The meat was hot; it burned his fingers a little. But it tasted like the finest meal he’d ever had. Hunger did that. The other man seemed to feel the same. He was grinning as he stripped the still-pink flesh from the bones. They talked about other things, safer ones. When the time came to start again, the man picked up the yoke.

  “You go on ahead, clear the path,” he said, shrugging the vine into place on his shoulders. “I’ll haul this piece of crap the rest of the way.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Ramón said, but his twin waved the objection away. Ramón was secretly relieved. His body felt beaten half to death the way he’d been abusing it. But still, there was a problem. “I can’t do it, man. You’ve still got the knife.”

  His twin scowled, pulled the blade from his field pack, and held it out, handle-first. Ramón nodded when he took it. They didn’t say anything more about it.

  Clearing brush turned out to be almost as arduous as hauling the raft. Every step seemed to require hacking away some bush or sapling. And the knife was growing dull with use. Twice, sudden sheets of rain descended, pattering on the leaves and Ramón’s shoulders, but the little squalls didn’t last. When the storm did hit—if it hit—it promised to be rough. But perhaps the runoff would speed the river.

  It was just before dark when they reached the water’s edge. Ramón tried for a low whoop, but it came out sounding sarcastic. The man grinned wearily. They surveyed the damage their transit had caused. One of the floats had lost a few ties and needed rebinding. The structure of branches that made up the bulk of the raft had suffered, but not so badly that Ramón felt moved to repair it.

  “Give me the knife,” his twin said. “I’ll strip a little bark, tie that cane back together. You get a little firewood, and we can launch this motherfucker again. Leave tonight, maybe outrun this weather.”

  “Good idea,” Ramón said. “But you sure you don’t want to get the firewood? It’s easier than stripping bark.”

  “I don’t want to take another fucking step,” the man said. “You do it.”

  Ramón handed back the knife in answer. His twin smiled as if some tacit agreement had just been made with the weapon’s return. Ramón pulled himself back into the trees to the sound of the other man scraping steel against the whetstone. It was a fast-growth forest here, soft wood that rose quickly and collapsed. No centuries-old copperwood here. Just black-barked idiotrail and the spiral-trunked godsarm oaks. It would be easy to find fallen branches and double handfuls of moss analogs to use for tinder. The question was how many trips back to the raft he wanted to make before they set out.

  If it was raining upstream—and it was clearly raining upstream—the runoff could raise the level of the river anytime. It might already be running high. If they were lucky, the extra runoff might cut over some of the bends and give them a straighter path to the south.

  Lost in his calculations, Ramón didn’t realize what he was looking at until he felt the fear start his heart beating hard and fast. There, in the soft ground, were fresh prints as wide as his two hands together. A four-lobed paw with deep-dug claw marks. Chupacabra. Somewhere nearby was a fucking chupacabra!

  He dropped the branches held in his arms, and turned to run back to the river, but he hadn’t made it halfway before he skidded around a stand of close-knit godsarm oaks and found the beast itself, glaring at him with what seemed like equal parts hunger and hatred. The mouth hung open, the thick, split tongue lolling out of it. Its teeth were yellowed and sharp as daggers. Ramón froze, and the black, rage-filled eyes met his. He braced himself for death, but the thing didn’t attack. Even then, knowing something was wrong, it took the space of five fast breaths together before he noticed the flattening in the animal’s neck ruff, the fleshy, ropelike thing buried in the chupacabra’s neck. A sahael.

  He let his gaze move past the chupacabra to the form looming behind it. Beaten, battered, slashed across its chest and legs, Maneck still stood at its full, towering height. Its wounded eye had gone black and oozed a noxious ichor, but the uninjured one remained the hot orange Ramón remembered. The alien’s arms waved for a moment, gently as kelp under the sea. When it spoke, its deep, half-sorrowful voice was perfectly familiar.

  “You have done well,” it said.

  Chapter 22

  “What the fuck?” Ramón said through a tight throat. “You’re dead! You died!”

  The alien shifted its head. The quills rose slightly and fell again.

  “What you say is aubre. I am not dead, as you can see,” Maneck said. “Your task was to engage in flow as the man would. You have done so in accordance with your tatecreude. My o
wn function was compromised for a time, but has now returned to its proper channel.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “The river flows south. You are constrained by the river,” Maneck said. “This is a strange question.”

  “But we were traveling faster than you. We could have been on the other bank of the river. You couldn’t know we’d be here.”

  “I could not reach you farther down the river than I could go. I could not reach you on the river’s opposite bank. Therefore I went where I could go that you could as well. You suggest things that are not the case. This is aubre. You must cease to express aubre.”

  The chupacabra emitted a low growl, its body shifting and restless, but constrained. There were scorch marks along the beast’s side where Maneck had shot it; the fur had burned away and left wide streaks of reddened, blistered flesh. Maneck had given, it seemed, as good as it got. The sahael pulsed twice, the bruised flesh engorging like a worm’s. Ramón felt a passing ghost of sympathy for the chupacabra. At least when he had suffered the thing in his neck, he’d understood what was happening. He wondered how many times Maneck had punished the chupacabra before it had understood that it was no longer its own master. And how many tricks the alien had been able to teach it.

  “So,” he said, with a bravado he didn’t feel. “What’ve you got planned now? You can’t just kill the poor fucker.”

  Maneck paused again.

  “You are not accurate,” it said. “The man must not know of us. The illusion of his knowledge will be corrected. You have proved yourself an apt tool. That will be expressed. The man is by the water now? We must approach him quickly.”

  “They’re here,” Ramón said. “The eaters-of-the-young. Those are their ships overhead. What if they’re watching? What if they see you?”

  Maneck seemed to hesitate, but it might only have been Ramón’s overwhelming desire that made it seem so. The alien head bobbed.