Hunter's Run(13)

That simple knowledge hit Ramón with such force that he felt the blood begin to drain from his face, and even as he was worming and scrambling backward in a futile attempt to get away from his captor, he was losing his grip on the world, losing consciousness, slipping down into darkness.

The alien stood over him, seen again through the hazy white snow of faintness, seeming to loom up endlessly into the sky like some horrid and impossible beanstalk, with eyes like blazing orange suns. That was the last thing Ramón saw before the snow piled up over his face and buried him, and everything was gone.

Morning was a blaze of pain. He had fallen asleep on his back, and he could no longer feel his arms. The rest of his body ached as though it had been beaten with clubs. The alien was standing over him again- or perhaps it had never moved, perhaps it had stood there all night, looming and remote, terrible, tireless, and unsleeping. The first thing Ramón saw that morning, through a bloodshot haze of pain, was the alien's face; the long, twitching black snout with its blue and orange markings, the quills stirring in the wind and moving like the feelers of some huge insect.

I will kill you, Ramón thought once again. There was very little anger in it. Only a deep, animal certainty. Somehow, I will kill you.

Maneck hauled Ramón to his feet and set him loose, but his legs would not hold him, and he crashed back to the ground as soon as he was released. Again Maneck pulled him up, and again Ramón fell.

As Maneck reached for him the third time, Ramón screamed, "Kill me! Why don't you just kill me?" He wormed backward, away from Maneck's reaching hand. "You might as well just kill me now!"

Maneck stopped. Its head tilted to one side to regard Ramón curiously in an oddly birdlike manner. The hot orange eyes peered at him closely, unblinking.

"I need food," Ramón went on, in a more reasonable tone. "I need water. I need rest. I can't use my arms and legs if they're tied like this. I can't even stand, let alone walk!" He heard his voice rising again, but couldn't stop it. "Listen, puto, I need to piss! I'm a man, not a machine!" With a supreme effort, he heaved himself to his knees and knelt there in the dirt, swaying. "Is this aubre? Eh? Good! Kill me, then! I can't go on like this!"

Man and alien stared at each other for a silent moment. Ramón, exhausted by his outburst, breathed in rattling gasps. Maneck studied him carefully, snout quivering. At last, it said, "You possess retehue?"

"How the shit would I know?" Ramón croaked, his voice rasping in his dry throat. "What the fuck is it?" He drew himself up as much as he could, and glared back at the alien.

"You possess retehue," the alien repeated, but it was not a question this time. It took a quick step forward, and Ramón flinched, afraid that the death he'd demanded was on its way. But instead, Maneck cut him free.

At first, he could feel nothing in his arms and legs; they were as dead as old wood. Then sensation flooded back into them, burning like ice, and they began to spasm convulsively. Ramón set his face stoically and said nothing, but Maneck must have noticed and correctly interpreted the sudden pallor of his skin, for it reached down and began to massage Ramón's arms and legs. Ramón shrunk away from its touch-again he was reminded of snakeskin, dry, firm, warm-but the alien's powerful fingers were surprisingly deft and gentle, loosening knotted muscles, and Ramón found that he didn't mind the contact as much as he would have thought that he would; it was making the pain go away, after all, which was what really counted.

"Your limbs have insufficient joints," Maneck commented. "That position would not be uncomfortable for me." It bent its arms backward and forward at impossible angles to demonstrate. With his eyes closed, Ramón could almost believe that he was listening to a human being-Maneck's Spanish was much more fluent than that of the alien in the pit, and its voice had less of the rusty timbre of the machine. But then Ramón would open his eyes and see that terrible alien face, ugly and bestial, only inches from his own, and his stomach would turn over, and he would have to adjust all over again to the fact that he was chatting with a monster.

"Stand up now," Maneck said. It helped Ramón up, and supported him while he limped and stomped in a slow semicircle to work out cramps and restore circulation, looking as if he was performing some arthritic tribal dance. At last, he was able to stand unsupported, although his legs wobbled and quivered with the strain.

"We have lost time this morning," Maneck said. "This is all time we might have employed in exercising our functions." Ramón could almost imagine that it sighed. "I have not previously performed this type of function. I did not realize that you possessed retehue, and therefore failed to take all factors into account. Now we must suffer delays accordingly."

Suddenly, Ramón understood what retehue must be. He was more baffled than outraged. "How could you not realize that I was sentient? You were there all the while I talked to the white thing in the pit!"

"We were present, but I had not integrated yet," Maneck said simply. It did not elaborate further, and Ramón had to be content with that. "Now that I am, I will observe you closely. You are to demonstrate the limitations to the human flow. Once we are informed, the man's path is better predicted." It gestured around them. "Here is the last of places the man was known," it said. Its voice was deep and resonant. Ramón could almost think that the thing sounded sorrowful. "We will begin here."

Ramón looked around. Indeed, there were signs of a small, improvised camp. A tiny lean-to hardly big enough to sleep in had been constructed with fresh boughs and tied together with lengths of bark. A fire pit ringed by stone showed ashes where the lawman had cooked something at the end of a fire-hardened stick. Whoever they'd sent after Ramón had spent enough time in the field to know how to survive with what came to hand. Good for him.

Maneck stood silent by the bone-colored box, the thick, fleshy sahael attached to its arm. Ramón looked at it, waiting to see what strategy the thing would adopt. The alien, however, did nothing. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, Ramón cleared his throat.

"Monster. Hey. Now we're here, what is it you want me to do, eh?"

"You are a man," Maneck said. "Behave as he would behave."

"He's got tools and clothes, and he doesn't have a leash on," Ramón said.

"Your confluence will be approximate at the beginning," Maneck said. "This is expected. You will not be punished for it. Your needs will lead you to a matched flow. That is sufficient."

"Speaking of needs and flowing," Ramón said, "I got to piss."

"That will do," Maneck said. "Begin by achieving piss."

Ramón smiled.

"You stay here, then, I'll go achieve piss."

"I will observe," Maneck said.

"You want to watch me piss?"

"We are to explore the banks which bound the man's possible channels. If this task is a necessity of his being, then I will understand it."

Ramón shrugged.

"You're just lucky I'm not shy about this kind of thing," he said, walking to the nearest tree. "There's some men couldn't get a drop out, not with you watching them, eh?"

The ground was rough, and Ramón's feet were tender. The long bath in the alien gel seemed to have softened away all his calluses. As he relieved himself against the tree trunk, he tried to make sense of the alien's behavior. The limitations of human flow, it had said. For a being so impatiently concentrated on pragmatic results, Maneck was strangely interested in Ramón's need to urinate, which ought to have struck it as irrelevant. It wasn't an activity that seemed important to hunting the fugitive. But it had not known that binding his arms behind him would discomfort him, either. Perhaps the aliens needed him to understand what the habits of a man were. He was more than a hound. Merely by being human, he was a guide for them.

Ramón stood for a long moment after his bladder was empty, taking the opportunity to turn his mind to strategy. He could not refuse the aliens. The demonstration of the pain his leash could deliver had convinced him of that. But there was a long history of labor protests in which things simply took a longer time and more materials than expected. Slowdowns. Ramón might have to be on the job for these devils, but he didn't have to be a good worker. He would move slowly, explain the fine points of pissing and shitting and hunting and trapping for as long as Maneck would allow it. Every hour Ramón could waste was another one that the lawman had to make his return to civilization and send help back. How things would unfold once that had happened, Ramón didn't know.

He shook his penis twice as long as was truly required, then let the robe drop back down to cover his knees. Maneck's great head shifted, but whether this was a sign of approval or disgust, Ramón had no way to tell.

"You are complete?" Maneck asked.

"Sure," Ramón said. "Complete enough for the moment."