Beastchild

Chapter Seventeen

When Hulann leaned over David's shoulder to watch the young man programming the train's complex computers on the simple keyboard, the human jumped in the command chair as if struck by a bullet, his entire body convulsing in what must have been, at least, a slightly painful spasm. His face drained to the color of dry sand bleached by the sun, and his eyes were circles stamped out by a die-press. Hulann stepped backwards, shuffling his large feet, then went to the side window to look at the passing scenery.

"I told you that he wouldn't harm us. He's our friend," Leo said impatiently.

David looked sheepishly at Hulann's back; he swallowed hard. "I'm sorry," he said.

Hulann nonchalantly waved a hand to indicate that the incident had been of no import. He could hardly expect a grown man, conditioned by twenty years and more of anti-naoli propaganda, to respond to him as quickly and as easily as an eleven-year-old boy whose mind was still fresh and open to changes of every magnitude. He remembered how reluctant he had been to touch Leo in that cellar when the boy had needed his leg wound dressed. How much harder it must be, then, for one of the defeated race to get accustomed to the presence of one of those responsible for the death of his kind.

"Why don't you sit down?" David asked. "I get jumpy; but it's the truth — when you're parading around behind me like that."

"Can't sit comfortably," Hulann explained.

"What?" David asked.

"His tail," Leo said. "Your chairs here don't have any holes in them to let his tail hang out. A naoli has a very sensitive tail. It hurts them just to sit on it."

"I didn't know."

"So he has to stand," Leo said.

Confused, David returned to the keyboard and finished typing his instructions to the computer. Yesterday, such a short time ago, he had been serene, content to flee from the enemy in his swift-wheeled magic wagon; today, he was ferrying a naoli across the country and was no longer certain he could tell an enemy from a friend. It had begun yesterday when he had watched, from the corner of his eye, what seemed to be a shuttle pacing the train, yet attempting to remain concealed.

Near dusk, he came to a place where debris clogged the tracks and was forced to stop the Bluebolt and examine the disaster before trying to nose through it.

The blockage was a mangled trio of shattered shuttle-craft. On every side, the country was littered with dilapidated and decaying machines. People had congregated here as they had in all the "wild" areas of the world, seeking to escape the burning, exploding, crumbling, alien-infested cities where the major battles roared. But the naoli had come here too. It had only taken a little longer. And in trying to escape at any cost, the shuttle drivers had collided as in this tangled despair. David did not look too closely at the mess, for fear he would see skeletons that had once been drivers, bony fingers clutching wheels, and empty eye sockets staring through shattered glass.

When he finally determined that he could move the wreckage with the engine's cowbumper and proceed on his way, he turned to board the Bluebolt again — and came face-to-face with a naoli!

His first instinct was to go for a weapon, though he had nothing lethal and was not the type to use a gun even if he had possessed one. The second instinct was to run; however, he saw the young boy then, and the boy showed no fear — he did not seem to be stupefied by drugs. Having hesitated this short moment longer, he found it was too late to run. They both babbled excitedly at him, trying to state their case and falling all over each other in their verbal confusion. He listened to them, numb, disbelieving at first, then being won over by the story of the Hunter-Spacer correlation. The naoli had thought spacers were typical of all humans. It was just absurd, just hideously comical enough to be true.

Their shuttlecraft was seriously depleted in power stores and had no way to recharge. They proposed that the three of them ride the Bluebolt since the train could make better speed anyway. They assumed David was going to the Haven — though he found it difficult to comprehend that Hulann's destination was the same.

Now they were into the province of California after a high speed, all night run. They could soon begin a quest for the Haven, for the final safety and a new life — if this Hulann did not betray them.

As the train's computer answered David's programming with brilliant blood letters on its response board, Hulann pressed palms against the side window, as if trying to push the glass away to get a better look at something. His four, wide nostrils were all open, and his breathing was more than a little ragged. Abruptly, his tail snapped and wound snakelike around his bulging thigh.

"What is it?" Leo asked, coming out of the command chair next to David.

"Docanil," Hulann replied. He pointed to the sky, far above them. A coppery speck flitted along the bottom of the high clouds. It was monitoring them, maintaining perfectly matched speeds; that could not be accidental.

"Perhaps he doesn't see us," Leo said.

"He does."

"Yes."

They watched the copper until big muddy droplets of rain spattered the thick glass. In this dark sheath of mist, the Hunter's helicopter was lost to their sight.

The Bluebolt thundered on, hugged the rails as the sky lowered and the clouds appeared to drag by at little more than arm's length overhead. The four heavy rubber wipers thumped back and forth in hypnotic, melancholic rhythm (tunka, tunka, tunka), efficiently sloshing the water off the windscreen and into the drainage scoops.

When Docanil struck, it was too swift to allow even for surprise. Several hundred yards up the track, the familiar copter bobbled out of the scudding clouds, skimmed toward them only inches above the rails. A firing tube opened in its side, and the first of its small power launch tubes spat a fist-sized missile.

Involuntarily, they flinched from anticipated impact and dropped to the floor, clutching at handholds. The concussion almost threw them erect as the missile exploded a hundred feet ahead in a rich wash of crimson. Docanil had not been trying to kill; such a long-range retaliation would not have absolved his humiliation. He had only been trying to derail them so that he could reach them easily for a more personal revenge. Such was the way of a Hunter.

The engine's front wheels leaped the twisted ends of the steel track, sank through the crossties and into the yielding sand. The cab tilted, toppled sideways in painfully slow motion. It pulled the other cars inexorably after it, whirling them free of the rails and hurtling them onto the wet sand. The shrieking, clanging, squealing noise grew until it was a vicious, impossible assault on the ears — then died with the abruptness of an exhausted man falling into sleep.

David felt blood trickling down his head from a number of superficial cuts on his skull and a nasty gash on his right temple. For the first time in his life, the meaning of the war came home to him-like a fist in the guts. He had been separated from it before. He had told himself that a writer's duty was to be separate from the grossness of his generation. Later, he could comment. But now the blood was real.

Aching, bloodied, they got to their feet inside the disordered, canted cabin, struggled upwards toward the sheered section of the big cab where the Hunter Docanil waited, silhouetted by the light gray dreariness of the stormy sky.

A few drops of rain fell.

Somewhere, there was thunder.

Outside, the three fugitives stood against the overturned hulk of Bluebolt, watching Docanil parade proudly before them, recounting the details of his careful search from the first moments of the Phasersystem alert. In a human or a naoli normal, such behavior would have been known as a braggart's act. But with a Hunter, it was more than self-aggrandisement; it was something more sinister, something tied closely to sadism.

When Docanil finished his account, he described in brutal detail what he would do with them. He obviously relished this chance to stretch out the actual executions, glorying in the anticipation. When Banalog objected that they were to be brought back alive, Docanil withered the traumatist with a glance that frankly threatened him. That done, he began his series of revenge deaths with David. Again, his bare hands came out, twitching. David's flesh, reacting to the invisible weapon, took on a ruddy glow.

Docanil played his hands over the man's body, back and forth with obvious pleasure, then used one hand to increase the force of the deadly plague on David's right arm. The clothes flashed and burned away from that arm, fell onto the ground as ashes.

"Stop!" Banalog pleaded miserably.

Docanil ignored him.

The outer layer of skin on David's arm began to shrivel as if it were dehydrating. It broke open and exposed pinker layers beneath. These too were quickly browned by the Hunter's weapon. There was a smell of roasting meat.

David was screaming.

Leo was screaming also, holding his hands up to the sides of his head as his mind thrust memories at him: memories of his father beneath the grenade launcher, twisted, broken, charred… dead.

Hulann put his arm around the boy, tried not to let him see what was becoming of David. He felt, surprisingly, as if the boy were one of his own brood, of his own loins. And the touch of the human child was warm, not ugly and frightening as it had been that first time when he had tried to dress his wound in the Boston cellar. But Leo felt worse for not knowing what was happening and pulled away to watch.

David rolled, cradling his damaged arm under his chest to keep it from being totally ruined. Even now, it would take months to heal it. But what was he thinking? He would not be alive months from now — or even minutes from now. He was dying. This was real.

Docanil brought his fingers to center on David's legs. The boy-man's clothes caught fire and ashed, as did the first layer of his tender skin. Docanil laughed, a terrible cackling sound and — abruptly gasped, tried to scream as his victim had been screaming, eyes wide. He staggered two steps, then fell forward onto the sand, quite dead. Protruding from his back was the hilt of a ceremonial knife of the sort Hunters used to cut out and eat certain parts of their victims' bodies. Banalog had taken it from the prepared Hunter's Guild Altar, had brought Docanil to an end he so often distributed to others.

As the others stood transfixed, still not clearly comprehending the magnitude of what they had witnessed, Banalog, moving dreamlike, withdrew the blade and wiped every drop of Hunter blood from it. He then turned the point against his chest and slipped it quietly between two ribs, deep into the eighteen layered muscles of his pulsing heart. He tried not to think of his brood, of his precious family name, of the history he had denied to his children. Instead of crying out in pain, he smiled rather wistfully and collapsed onto Docanil, lying very, very still indeed.

Hulann could not straighten out his emotions. Here, in the moments of disaster, death, and disgrace, they had been salvaged after all. It was nearly like being resurrected. They could go on now, find Haven and try to do something about the misunderstanding between the naoli and the non-spacer Earthmen. Yet Hulann was not a violent creature. He wove forward, somehow managed to lift the traumatist's body as if it weighed only ounces, carried it off several feet so that its precious blood would not mingle with that of the Hunter Docanil.

It was raining lightly again.

The rain diluted the blood.

Hulann returned and scuffed away all traces of what blood had mingled before he had acted.

With that accomplished, the joy of the moment began to gush into him and gain the upper hand of his emotions. They were in California… The ocean roared near them… The tracks paralleled the sea, so they could follow those to search for the Haven. Leo would be safe. He could grow, become a man, have his own brood in his own way. And would not the boy's brood have, as part of its cultural and historical heritage, the history of Hulann the naoli? That thought gave wings to his mind and made him feel even more free and happy with life. He turned to Leo, wanting to lift the boy and dance with him as he might have with one of his own lizardy children, and he felt the first bullet sink deep into his side, ripping through vital things and bringing with it a horrible, final darkness