Who Hunts the Hunter

by Nyx Smith

  The striped being whirls again, pointing the gun.

  “Don’t shoot,” Bandit says, lifting his hands.

  “Where is Lab Sixteen?” the being snarls.

  Bandit points."That way.”

  74

  What is it? Tikki scowls. The two-leg wears a long dark coat like a duster and holds a wooden flute. He smells like a magician and yet he does not attack her. Instead, he does something and then suddenly the approaching guards are disarmed and sprawling. When she turns back to face him, he lifts both hands in a gesture of surrender.

  To judge by his smell, the magician has no feelings about her one way or another, except maybe a vague curiosity.

  “Where is Lab Sixteen?”

  He points down the corridor."That way.”

  Does she dare turn her back on him? Does she have any choice? She must trust him or kill him and, incredibly, without really being threatened, he seems to be helping her.

  Tikki turns and runs. The guards shout and stagger to their feet as she nears them, but do nothing to impede her. She grabs one of their guns from the floor and continues ahead. Now she’s got two guns and that gives her odds to play with the next time some two-leg tries to get in her way. She needs odds like that because she’s tired—her reserves are wearing thin. She needs sleep, real sleep, and enough meat to gorge herself. She’s taken too many hits, too many explosions, in too little a time. She can’t keep going like she’s been going.

  A door comes up marked by two big numbers: One-Six. She looks at the combination lock on the wall beside the door.

  How does she get in?

  Without warning, the door snaps aside. The human male who steps toward her abruptly stops. His eyes flare wide. His smell turns to fear."No,” he says.

  Tikki thrusts the hard metal barrel of one of her guns across the male’s throat, shoving him back through the doorway, then drops one gun to seize him by the throat and thrusts the other gun in his face.

  She knows this two-leg. He’s one of the humans who visited her in the room with no windows. He left his smell on her fur.

  “Please!” he gasps.

  Fear swells into terror. Tikki feels her fangs lengthening, fur rushing over her face, and then she smells the cub."WHERE IS IT?”

  The two-leg shouts, jerking as with surprise.

  Tikki snarls, but by then she already has the answer to her question. The smell in the air turns her head toward the rear of the room. Beyond a sea of technical equipment and boiling, bubbling fluids is a cage. In that cage is a red and black-striped body, and it’s pounding the cage’s mesh, crying, snarling, desperate and afraid. Not dead, not even bleeding. Alive!

  Tikki drives the barrel of the machine pistol across the two-leg’s head, shoves him back off his feet, then turns— snarling her menace—toward the rear of the room. More two-legs in white coats shout and scream and rush frantically out of her way. She reaches the cage and smashes at the locking mechanism till the door pops outward.

  The cub lunges into her grip.

  75

  For a moment, Ben Hill is conscious only of the pain throbbing through the left side of his head and the cool, flat hardness of the floor against his right temple.

  When he lifts his head, the pain is intense. Colors strobe in front of his eyes. He hears people screaming and shouting, things crashing, a sudden rush of slapping, pounding footsteps. As his vision clears, he sees the brief stretch of Off-white floor between him and the door to the hallway, and the black shape of a gun, lying barely two meters away.

  It occurs to him that he might need that gun. Striper has escaped confinement. She is wild with animal fury. Fear motivates him forward, crawling, then up, on his hands and knees. The lab seems very quiet as he takes the gun in hand.

  Shakily, he gets to his feet, leaning against a lab bench, then a table. He sees at a glance that his colleagues and lab assistants have all fled. The figure at the rear of the room looks only partly human, covered with fur about the head and shoulders.

  When she turns, Ben sees that she holds a child in her arms, a human child, of four or five years of age.

  But that can’t be. It’s Striper, it must be Striper and her cub. The sight is strangely fascinating. They’ve had both mother and cub for how long now, and, until now, neither has transformed into a human-like shape. Neither has shown the least hint of that ability. Why now? Striper presumably has some reason, but what of the cub? Does it simply take its cue from its mother?

  Striper says, “Are you going to shoot me, man?"

  “Mannnn!” the child echoes, growling.

  And the small head turns, and the child’s face comes into view. It looks half-animal, half-demon, lips curling, fangs bared.

  Its eyes glint with the light.

  Ben feels chills rush up his spine. He realizes now more than ever that he is facing a form of intelligence that bears only a superficial resemblance to the human kind. He is facing a born predator, a creature or creatures that perhaps assign no value to life, only to survival. The notion scares the hell out of him. He lifts the gun in his hand a little higher. Involuntarily, he sneezes."I ... I can’t let you leave,” he stammers."You or your cub. I’m sorry.”

  Striper says, soft and low, “Get in my way and you die.”

  The child snarls, “Diiieee!"

  “It’s not ... not my decision!”

  Striper puts the child on its feet, takes its hand, and comes walking up the center aisle from the rear of the lab. Her eyes bore into Ben’s eyes; the gun dangles at her side. The child glares and growls, its features twisted with vicious fury and hate. Mother and child pause barely two steps away. Both seem oblivious to the gun pointed at Striper’s chest. Ben feels his arm growing weak, sagging, slumping downward. It’s no good.

  But suddenly someone’s grabbing his wrist, twisting the gun out of his hand. To his astonishment, he sees it’s Germaine, now shrieking, “SHE KILLED MY SON!”

  “What? Germaine! NO!”

  “MURDERER!”

  It hardly takes a second. Ben does not see who fires first. He glimpses the feral violence gripping Germaine’s features, and the sudden vicious rage that possesses Striper’s face. He hears a series of reports: the barking of a handgun, a rapid rattling like a machine gun. Germaine staggers, blood splashing her chest, and topples over backwards. Striper turns, twisting, crouching, sheltering the child, bending over it, even as her head snaps toward her shoulder and the side of her head becomes a gory mass streaming down her neck.

  Striper crumbles. Germaine lies sprawled, unmoving. Ben staggers back, slumps to his knees, bends forward, gags, and vomits. Through it all, he hears Liron Phalen’s voice, urging, persuading, telling him what he must do.

  76

  The steps of the stairway are a dull muddy blue. The railing is silvery chrome. The second-floor landing is empty. Bandit pauses by the door on the landing to listen, then pulls the door inward, and steps into a hallway much like the one on the ground floor: lighting panels in the ceiling, gray and yellow tiles along the walls, muddy blue floor. Bandit pauses as a faint shimmering appears in the air before him. On the astral, he sees the small raccoon-like form of his watcher.

  “He’s still in there, Master."

  “Good."

  In fact, there is quite a lot that’s good about the situation. The clanging alarm bells may pose a distraction to Phalen. The alarm also seems to have sent people running for the main lobby. There should be no bystanders hanging around to get hurt.

  A short way up the hall is a small sign that sticks out from the wall. It reads, “Dr. Liron Phalen, Director.” Bandit considers how to get past the printscanner, then watches as the door clicks and slides open.

  “Come in, my dear shaman,” a voice says.

  Not good. Not the way Bandit wanted to start things. He surveys the hallway astrally, but perceives no way by which he might have been detected. That’s troubling. Is he about to confront an initiate so far advanced that his skills exceed anythi
ng Bandit can comprehend? Bandit supposes that’s possible, but there’s no backing out now. He steps through the open doorway and immediately crouches, darting to his left, and pointing a finger.

  The room is like a small study: bookshelves, chairs, a leather couch. Phalen stands at the rear of the room behind an old desk. He looks briefly to his right as a bang and a crash and the quick-razor snarl of an alley cat sounds from the corner of the room; but, then, Phalen merely smiles.

  “Come, come,” he says casually."We have no need for artful ruses. I believe you’re called Bandit. I’m Dr. Liron Phalen. We’re both gentlemen, I’m certain. Let us discuss our differences like men who’ve devoted their lives to the pursuit of arcane knowledge. I’m sure there is much we can both learn. May I offer you a cup of tea?”

  Bandit lifts the Mask of Sassacus to his face."You will obey me.”

  The power of the Mask reaches out instantly, crossing the astral terrain to enwrap Phalen’s aura, a blazing comet-head of power. The force of will Phalen immediately hurls against the power of the Mask comes back to Bandit in the form of a dull throbbing ache inside his head.

  “Now ... Vorteria,” Phalen says in a voice that sounds pained."Quickly, my dear.”

  A radiant white figure descends out of the ceiling: Phalen’s familiar. Vorteria. She settles between Bandit and Phalen, interposing a pulsing shield of life energy to divert the power of Bandit’s spell. Divert it, then break it. The power flashes and fluctuates, splashing around the shield like water around rocks.

  A clever strategy, but Raccoon is ready.

  Phalen shrugs off the tendrils of the Mask’s power and begins conjuring a spell, something that mounts slowly and steadily, gathering the power of the astral. Bandit snaps his fingers. The windows behind Phalen explode into fragments. Cups and saucers shatter. Books leap from their shelves. Books and window fragments and broken crockery rain across Phalen’s end of the room, gathering into a whirlwind, bypassing the familiar completely, and forcing Phalen to cease spellmaking and hastily throw up another shield or risk being cut to pieces.

  “Vorteria!” Phalen cries out sharply.

  A confused expression crosses Vorteria’s features; she turns, looking behind her. Abruptly, she reaches across the astral to surround Phalen with her shield.

  Bandit opens his palms, and whispers.

  The figure that appears beside him is about the size and shape of a dwarf. It appears to wear natural tan leather, from its heavy, fringed shirt to its beaded moccasins. A raccoon cap sits on its head. Its long gray beard gives its face an aged character, which seems highly appropriate for a venerable being like a hearth spirit.

  “Let spirits contest with spirits,” Bandit murmurs.

  “Yessireee.” The hearth spirit thrusts out an arm, forefinger extended. Power surges across the astral.

  “Master!” Vorteria exclaims.

  But by then Vorteria has dropped the shield protecting Phalen in order to protect herself. Life energy flashes and crackles. Hearth spirit and familiar spirit wage war with the very life force of their own existence, and the contest promises to drag out long, for the two seem evenly matched.

  Bandit darts around the familiar in order to face Phalen directly, and moves directly into the path of the spell Phalen has been preparing.

  Not good.

  The power hits him like a floodtide, surrounding him, weighing in on him, particularly in the area of his head. At once, his head begins to feel like it’s being attacked by twelve mad dwarfs swinging warhammers. It’s very distracting. The spell seems intended to confuse his mind or possibly to crush his will. It’s powerful, too. Bandit guesses that Phalen isn’t familiar with any of the explosive, fireballing, shock-wave-producing, pyrotechnical spells one sometimes encounters in the streets. Good thing.

  Bandit staggers back a few steps. The weight of the spell is making it hard to think. Hard to figure what to do. He must know some way of countering this spell. Something clever. Quick.

  Before time runs out.

  77

  The maze of tunnels comes to an end at a narrow passage that seems chopped out of bedrock, and that passage ends after about twenty meters. Brian exhales heavily, guessing this is finally the end, wondering if he and Art are lost, but then he notices Art looking up.

  “Here we are, kid,” Art says.

  “Yeah? Where’s here?”

  “I’ll give you one guess.”

  The rocky ceiling is less than a meter overhead. Directly above Art’s head, chopped out of the rock, is a squarish recess containing a squarish door or hatch.

  Art pulls something from his pack, and turns to face Brian."Know how to set one of these?”

  The item in Art’s hand is saucer-shaped, twenty centimeters in diameter. The broken block lettering along the rim, reads, ARMTECH SAD-190. There’s also a warning about explosives being the province of qualified personnel. Brian asks, “You got a detonator?”

  Art pulls one from a pocket. It’s about the size of a pack of cigs. Armtech DD-7 preset for thirty-second delay.

  “Just lemme ask you one question.”

  Art compresses his lips, frowning, then says, “Sure, kid. One question. Shoot.”

  “These creatures we’re blasting. I don’t know what the frag they are, and maybe I don’t wanna know. That’s not my point. My point is that I’m working for the Department of Water and Wastewater Management, and I ain’t seen a water main in at least a couple of hours. I’m not even sure if we’re still in Manhattan. What I wanna know is ... how do you figure these things with the red monster eyes pose some kinda threat to the metroplex’s water supply?”

  Art scowls, then jabs a finger at Brian’s face."You got any idea, kid, how those creatures got the way they are?"

  "Not a fraggin’ clue.”

  Art jabs the finger a little closer."Let’s suppose they’re infectious. Suppose they make new ones by infecting ordinary people. Now suppose they infected everybody in the plex? What then?”

  Brian wonders about that, and says, “Then I guess it wouldn’t matter if they fragged with the water supply or not.”

  “Exactly,” Art says."There’d be no water supply. There’d be nobody left to keep it running.”

  Brian hesitates."Then we’d be out of a job.”

  Still scowling, Art nods.

  “Does the union know about this?”

  Art glares, hands Brian the Armtech shaped-charge and detonator, then makes a cradle of his hands. Brian slings his weapon, gives Art his foot and thrusts upward, lifting one knee onto Art’s shoulder. The Armtech charge comes with a gelatin base that sticks to almost anything. Brian strips the plastic shield off the gelatin, positions the charge on the hatch just above his head, then presses the charge into place. The detonator sticks to the charge by a similar gelatin base.

  “We ready to blow?”

  “Do it,” Art growls.

  Brian pulls on the timer cord, then hops back to ground. He and Art jog back along the passage. The explosion is deafening.

  When they return, there’s a hole in the ceiling about a meter across and no sign of the hatch. Brian gives Art a boost up through the hole. Art turns back and pulls him up.

  That puts them in a dark, dry, dusty place that looks like a basement. Lots of crates and boxes piled around in stacks. Cobweb-laden shelves divide the space into aisles. Brian gets a sort of hinky feeling creeping up the back of his neck that maybe he and Art aren’t alone anymore. Is that rustling noise he hears the sound of his own breathing, or is something moving in here, moving all around the basement, maybe inside some of those crates?

  Art signals mil-style. Grenades. There, there and there. Five-minute delay. Brian gestures in reply. Interrogative. Negative! Art answers with a stabbing motion of his hand. Just do it!

  Well, all right.

  Brian pulls three grenades from his web harness and sets them beside the crates Art indicated. Five-minute delay. When he looks up, Art’s motioning him forward, across the bas
ement, around a corner, then up a flight of stairs.

  The stairs lead into the ground floor of a richly furnished house. Brian realizes it’s a house and not a condo as he and Art move rapidly from room to room, as he gets glimpses through exterior windows, as he realizes the spaces here are bigger than in any condo he’s ever seen, except on Corporate Lifestyles. Maybe the creatures they’re hunting have infected some big wiz corporate exec. It’d have to be a real prime mover for the slag to afford an actual house.

  Another flight of stairs leads them to a pair of ornate wooden doors. Art pauses in front of them, then turns down the upstairs hallway. He signals. Action imminent!

  The door at the end of the hall swings open. They dart into a bedroom like a Victorian hologram: cascading drapes, onyx furnishings, huge canopied bed. Next to the bad stands a tall elf woman in a white medtech uniform. In the bed lies something inhuman.

  It’s like a dead man, or a dead woman. The skull is totally bare of hair and any of the fleshy features that make a human face. It’s like a skull with sunken eyes, a hole for a nose, blackened teeth, no lips. The arms and hands lying on the bedcover are skeleton-thin and as white as bone. The sunken eyes glare a fiery red.

  “Shick!” Brian shouts.

  “NOW, KID!” Art hollers.

  They open up on full auto. The elf medtech seems to faint. The thing in the bed twitches and jerks and screams and then everything flashes white.

  78

  The scream of terror and pain comes to him clearly across the astral terrain and instills in Liron Phalen a horror that shakes his consciousness to the core.

  Watcher spirits come streaking toward him.

  “Master!” they cry."Intruders!”

  “Vorteria!” Liron exclaims."My wife! GO!”