Hunter's Run(41)

"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 own 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.