Hunter's Run(44)

His twin was breathing like he'd just run a four-minute mile; his hair clung to his scalp like lichen on a stone, and his mouth was a pale grin surrounded by blood from his broken nose. Teeth like yellowed bone. Ramón tried to catch his breath, but the pressure from the man's foot prevented him. He felt the grin on his own face.

"You got something to say before you die, monster?" his twin demanded.

"Sure," Ramón said, then fought to inhale. "You know what? Ramón?"

"What?"

Ramón wheezed out a laugh.

"You don't like yourself very much."

Time took the strangely powerless and dreamlike slowness that accompanies moments of horror and trauma. Ramón took pleasure in tracking the reactions as they made their way across the man's face; surprise followed by confusion, confusion by embarrassment, embarrassment by a rage that towered over Ramón like summer thunderheads dwarfed the mountains, and all of it in less than two beats of his racing heart. The blade drew back, prepared for the strike that would open Ramón's throat. As he raised his arms against it, Ramón thought of the marks on bones and skin that came from dying men's attempts to fend off steel with flesh; this was how those marks were made and there was nothing more he could do now than show whatever imagined coroner ever looked over his mortal remains that he'd put up Hell's own fight.

Ramón was screaming, pure animal rage drowning out fear and the hopelessness of his effort, when the loose vine reared up from the water like a pale serpent; wires sparking and hissing in the place where its head would have been.

The man jumped back. The killing stroke became an awkward parry as the sahael lunged at him. Ramón rolled until he was almost at the raft's edge, then looked up.

The sahael had wrapped itself twice around his twin's leg, once around his belly, and was pressing its maw toward the man's neck. Ramón's twin had both hands gripping the sahael, struggling to hold it away from himself. The muscles in the man's arms were bulging and quivering; Ramón half expected to hear the bones snap under the strain. It only took a moment to realize that if the man had both hands on his new attacker, he must have dropped the knife.

Yes, there. In the ruins of the lean-to, the blade caught the flash of lightning, and before the thunder could crackle and detonate, Ramón was scrambling forward, hand outstretched. The worn leather grip felt warm in his palm.

The man was shrieking something, the same syllables over and over. It took Ramón a moment to realize that he was saying kill it kill it kill it kill it. He didn't pause to think, he simply moved, his body knowing what it intended. He lunged forward, the knife in his right hand, and punched it hard into the man's belly. Then twice more, to be sure. They were pushed together like lovers before Ramón pulled himself away, the man's bearded cheek rasping against his own, the man's breath panting against his face, rich with the earthy smell of decay. For a second, he could feel the man's heart hammering against his own breast. Then he stepped back. The man's face had gone white, his eyes as round as coins. That same look of surprise on his face, the look he'd seen on the European's face; this can't be happening to me, not to me. The sahael, as if repelled by the blood, dropped from Ramón's twin to land in a coil at their feet.

"Pinche puto," the man said and dropped to his knees. The raft shuddered. Sheeting rain mixed with the blood pouring down the man's face, belly, and legs. Ramón stepped back and squatted. The sahael shifted, as if considering each of them in turn, but it made no move to attack. "You're not me," the man gasped. "You're never going to be me! You're a fucking monster ."

Ramón shrugged, not arguing. "You got anything else you want to say? Talk quick."

His twin blinked as if he was crying, but who could see tears in all the rain?

"I don't want to die!" the other whispered. "Please Jesus, I don't want to die!"

"No one does," Ramón said gently.

His twin's face shifted, hardened. He gathered himself, raised himself up a bit, and spat full in Ramón's face.

"Fuck you, asshole!" the other rasped. "Tell them I died like a man!"

"Better you than me, cabrón," Ramón said, ignoring the spittle running down his face.

                       
       
           



       Chapter 24

Ramón's twin sank down, his eyes focused on the angels, or on whatever it was dying men saw; something Ramón couldn't see, anyway. His mouth went slack, and blood rushed through his lips and down over his chin.

Was there the faintest of tugs as the other died, as whatever bond was between them broke? Or was it just his imagination? It was impossible to say.

Ramón rolled the body to the edge of the raft and pushed it into the water. His twin's corpse bobbed once, twice, and then slid beneath the water. He wiped the dead man's spit from his face with the back of his palm.

The storm was pushing the little raft one way and then another, and Ramón couldn't say how much of his nausea was from the unpredictable spinning and shudders of the craft, how much from the death of his other self, and how much from the loss of his own blood. The sahael snaked across the raft, its pale flesh reminding Ramón of a worm now more than a snake. Its wires sparked, but did not turn to him.

"We got a problem, you and me?" he asked, but the alien thing didn't respond. He hadn't known that Maneck could send the sahael out to operate on its own; or perhaps Maneck was controlling it from a distance somehow. Either way, it was more versatile than he'd thought. Maneck must have launched it after them as soon as he'd freed the chupacabra from it.

Ramón let out a long sigh and considered his wounds. The cut across his side was serious, but it hadn't gone so deep that he had to worry about a collapsed lung. That was good. His leg, he discovered, had also been pierced at some point. He remembered something from the beginning of the fight. It was a little hard to recall the details. The wound bled freely, but it was superficial. He'd be fine.

He could feel the adrenaline dissipating. His hands were shaking, the nausea growing worse. He was surprised to find himself weeping, and more surprised than that to find the tears had their source not in exhaustion or fear or even the release that came after a bad fight. The sorrow that possessed him was profound. He mourned his twin; the man he had once been. His brother and more than brother was gone, and gone because he himself had killed him.

Perhaps it had been fated to end this way; the colony had room for only one of them. And so either he or his twin had had to die. His dreams of slipping away, becoming a new man had been just that. Dreams. And now, like the body of the man he'd killed, they slipped away. He was Ramón Espejo. He had always been Ramón Espejo. He had never had a real hope of being anyone else.

He unwrapped the sodden robe from his arm slowly. His awareness of the pain was growing. His pierced side was the most pressing issue. He could hold the robe against it, maybe stanch the bleeding. He wondered whether it would help if he wrung the cloth out first. He tried to guess how far he was from Fiddler's Jump and medical help. And what, he asked himself, would they find when they looked at him? Had Maneck and his people left any surprises for the doctors?

Even awash in his grief and uncertainty and pain, some part of Ramón's mind must have anticipated the attack. It was no more than a flicker in the corner of his vision; the sahael lashed out at him, thrusting spearlike. He didn't think. The blade was simply where it needed to be at the instant it needed to be there, the human-made steel impaling the alien flesh just inches below the wires at the thing's head. Ramón's heart didn't race. He didn't even flinch. He was too tired for that.

The sahael let out a long, high whine. A spark blackened the tip of the knife where it protruded through the thing's thin body. Snakelike, the sahael thrashed, pulling Ramón one way and then the other with its throes. He drove the blade's tip into a branch, pinning the sahael to the wood. The flesh below the blade was pale and thrashing violently. The wires and mucous membrane that had once burrowed into Ramón's neck were lolling like a dead thing.

"If you get back," Ramón said, then forgot what he was doing. His flesh felt as heavy as waterlogged timber. A few breaths later, he remembered. "I did Maneck's job for him, but I'm Ramón Espejo, not someone's goddamn dog. You get back, you tell them that. You and all the rest of them can go fuck yourselves."

If the sahael understood him, it gave no sign. Ramón nodded and muttered a string of perfunctory obscenities as he jerked the knife free and shoved the snakelike body off the raft. It sank into the water; only the head was visible as it bobbed away through the rain, first dim, then grayed, then gone. Ramón sat for a moment, the raindrops tapping his back and shoulders. A roll of thunder roused him.

"Sorry, monster," he said to the river. "It's just  …  what it is."