by David Drake
At the north end of the loft, Deehalter stopped and looked out the open loading door. The cowyard below was scraped and hosed off daily, but animal waste had stained the concrete an indelible brown which became purple in the mercury light.
To the left, within the fence of the cowyard and in the corner it formed with the barn, hunched Kernes with a shotgun loaded with deer slugs. From Deehalter’s angle, the smaller man was foreshortened into a stump growing from the concrete. Nothing moved in the night, though the automatic feeder in the hog pens flapped several times. As Deehalter watched silently, Kernes looked up at the moon. Despite the coolness of the night and the breeze from the west, Kernes pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead.
Deehalter turned and began pacing back to the south end of the barn. He had finished his thermos of coffee hours ago, and it was only by staying in motion that he was able to keep awake. He couldn’t understand how Kernes could huddle in the same corner since ten o’clock and still be alert; but then, Kernes wasn’t a person Deehalter wanted to understand.
Deehalter peered out the south door. Nothing, nothing, of course nothing. A fox barked in the invisible distance and the big man’s grip tightened on his rifle stock. He caught himself before he threw a bullet out into the night in frustration; then he began to pace back.
But each time the creature had come, it was in the near dawn. As if it were striding to the farm from far away, or because it got a late start. The notch he and Kernes had blasted in the Indian mound faced southwest. Moonlight would not have entered it until nearly morning. But there was no living thing in that narrow rock basin, only a litter of bones and what was probably a meteorite.
Why had that Indian been sealed up alive?
Nothing but bones and iron in the mound. Briefly, Deehalter’s mind turned over a memory of awakening to seize his rifle in the pattern of moonlight etched across his room by the venetian blinds. Now he held the weapon close and bent forward to look at his brother-in-law.
Kernes had moved slightly, out along the electric fence. The yard light colored his shirt blue but could not throw a shadow forward into the glare of the full moon. Kernes was staring west at that mottled orb. His shotgun barrel traced nervous arcs, rising and slipping back to a high port. It was almost as if the smaller man were wishing he could fire at the moon, but catching himself a moment before he did anything that … crazy.
Kernes’ body slithered.
“Kernes!” Deehalter screamed.
The man below turned and was a man again. The shotgun had fallen to the concrete. Kernes’ clothing was awry from having something monstrously thin start to clamber out of it. Part of Deehalter’s mind wondered what Kernes had thought in the mornings when he found himself naked in the pasture, his tangled pajamas outside his house.
Now the small farmer was looking up at Deehalter, his face as dead and horrified as that of the statue of Laöcoon. Then he changed again, and the long jaws spread to hiss at the man above. Deehalter laid his open sights in the middle of the thing’s breastbone and squeezed off the shot.
The bullet flew high because of the angle, but the big man was hunter enough to have allowed for that. The soft-nose spiked through the lower mandible and into the throat, exiting at last through the creature’s back. The jacketed lead, partly expanded but with only a fraction of its energy gone, slapped the concrete beyond and splashed away in a shower of sparks and a riven howl.
The thing that had been Kernes hurtled backwards and slid until it struck the fence. Its stick-thin limbs thrashed, shredding remnants of its clothing with claws and the strength of a grizzly. Its jaws snapped. The hole in its throat was small, but Deehalter knew that the supersonic bullet would have left a wound cavity like a pie tin in the back.
The entrance wound had closed. The beast was scrabbling to its feet.
Deehalter screamed and shot it through the chest, an off-center impact that spun the creature again to the concrete. This time Deehalter could see the plastic flesh closing on the scale-dusted torso. He remembered Wiener and the gullied throat of the Holstein. With only that instant’s hesitation, the big man braced his rifle in front of him and leaped through the window to his right. The fiberglas panel sprang out in a piece as the frame tore. Deehalter stumbled headlong onto the low roof of the milking parlor, rolled, and jumped to the ground. The jeep was only twenty feet away and he ran for it.
There was no ignition lock. Deehalter flipped the power on and stabbed at the starter button under the clutch pedal. The engine ground but did not catch. There was a tearing noise behind him, and despite himself the big man turned to look. The creature was in the cowyard fence. The top strand was electrified. Blue sparks crackled about the thing’s foreclaws. Its shape was in a state of flux so swift as to be almost subliminal. It was as if superimposed holograms of Kernes and the creature he had become were being projected onto the fence. Then the hot wire snapped and the thing’s legs cut the remaining strands like sickles through fog.
Deehalter fired one-handed and missed. He steadied the rifle, locking his left elbow on the tubular seat-frame, and knocked the creature back into the cowyard with no top to its skull. Then the engine chugged and the big farmer threw the jeep into second gear at higher revs than the worn clutch was used to. Spewing gravel but without the power to sideslip, the vehicle churned forward.
For choice, Deehalter would have run west for the county road as he had two nights before in his Chrysler. That would have meant turning and trying to race past the cowyard, where the creature was already on its feet again and striding toward him. Deehalter had small need of his imagination to picture that scene: the long-clawed arms hooking over the steering wheel and plucking him out like the meat from a walnut half, leaving the empty jeep to careen into a ditch. He was headed instead toward Sac Ridge and the mound from which the horror must have come.
Deehalter had the headlights on, but they were mounted too low to show up potholes in time even at moderate speed—and his present speed was anything but moderate. The jeep jounced so badly that only the big man’s grip on the steering wheel kept him in the vehicle. The shovels in the back did spin out into the night. It occurred to Deehalter that the rifle which he had wedged butt-downward beneath the back seat might fire and end him permanently as it had been unable to do to the thing pursuing. He did not care. He only knew that he had looked down the creature’s gaping jaws and would rather anything than die between them.
Despite his panic, Deehalter shifted into compound low to cross the stream, knowing that any attempt to mount the slippery bank in a higher gear would have meant sliding back into certain death. On the rutted pasture beyond, he revved and slam-shifted. He was proud of his skill only for the instant before the low moon flicked a leaping shadow across the corner of his eye. Fear washed away pride and everything else.
Despite the ruts the jeep made good time in the pasture, but as the old vehicle began to climb the side of the ridge Deehalter knew the creature must be gaining. There was no choice, nowhere else to run. If he turned either north or south, the thing’s long shanks would cut it across the slant of his right angle.
Where had the creature come from originally? Perhaps the Indians had known; but even if the teardrop was the source, it could as easily have fallen a million years before and a thousand miles away, carried south on a glacier. Deehalter could picture a nervous band of Sacs dragging one of their number to the rock basin, bound or unconscious. Or would it have been a tribe from the pre-Columbian past? There was nothing in the mound to date it. Something had come from the cocoon of iron and been trapped again between layers of rock. Trapped until he and Kernes had freed it in a vapor which merged with the black tendrils of the dynamite.
As Deehalter neared the top of the ridge, he glanced sideways. The creature was a foot behind him and a foot to the left, its right leg poised to stride and its yard-long right arm poised to rip the farmer’s throat open. Deehalter slammed on the brakes, acting by reflex. It was the proper reflex,
even though the jeep stalled. The beast’s claws swept where Deehalter’s head should have been, and its body belled and rebounded from the unyielding fender. For a moment, the thing sprawled backwards on the hillside; then it twisted upright, lizard-quick, and lunged.
Deehalter touched the muzzle of his Remington to the scaly ribs and blew the creature a dozen yards down the hill. The cartridge case sailed away in a high arc, the mouth of it eroded by the excessive pressures from the blocked muzzle.
And though Deehalter still had the part box in his pocket, that had been the last round in the weapon.
In stalling, Deehalter had flooded the jeep’s engine. He leaped out, winded already with fear, and topped the ridge with two long strides. The headlights were waning yellow behind him, where he could already hear the creature moving. The sky to the east was the color of blood. Deehalter ran for the mound as if its gentle contours could protect him. He tried to jump to its top, but his foot sank in the soft earth of the diggings. The big man windmilled forward onto his face in the grass beyond. His grip on the empty rifle had flayed his right knuckles against the ground. His twisted ankle gave a twinge; it might or might not bear his weight again.
Deehalter turned, trying to fumble another cartridge into the breech of the rifle. It was too late. Hissing like a cat in a lethal rage, the creature leaped delicately to the top of the mound.
It was even thinner than it had looked when flickering shadows had bulked its limbs. It had to be thin, of course, with only Kernes’ hundred and thirty pounds to clothe its frame. The curve of the mound made the creature’s height monstrous, even though its legs were poised to lunge and it carried its flat skull forward like that of a near-sighted mantis. The narrow lips drew apart in a momentary grin, gray-white and then crimson as the first rays of the sun touched the creature over the rim of the next hill.
For a moment the leer hung there. Deehalter, on his back, stared at it like a rabbit spitted by the gaze of a hunting serpent. Then the thing was gone and the fear was gone, and Deehalter’s practiced fingers slid a live round into the chamber of the ought-six.
“Wh-what’s the matter, Dee?” Kernes whimpered. He was pitiful in his nakedness, more pitiful in his stunned surprise at where he found himself. Kernes really hadn’t known what was happening, Deehalter realized. Perhaps Alice had begun to guess where her husband had been going in the night. That may have been why she had been so quick to run, before suspicion could become certainty.
“Dee, why’re you looking at me like that?” Kernes begged.
Deehalter stood. His ankle only throbbed. If his first bullet had killed the creature as it should have, he would have buried the body and claimed that something had dragged Kernes away. Perhaps he would have buried it here in the mound from which the creature had escaped to begin with. Alice and Dr Jepson could testify to the cattle’s previous injuries, whatever they might surmise had caused them.
The same story would be sufficient now.
“Goodby, you son of a bitch,” Deehalter said, and he raised his rifle. He fired point blank into the smaller man’s chest.
Kernes whuffed backwards as if a giant had kicked him. There was a look of amazement on his face and nothing more; but momentarily, something hung in the air between the dead man and the living, something as impalpable as the muzzle blast that rocked the hillside—and as real.
Deehalter’s flesh gave and for a startled second he/it knew why the Indians had buried their possessed brother alive, to trap the contagion with him in the rock instead of merely passing it on to raven and slay again.…
Then the sun was bright on Deehalter’s back, casting his shadow across the body of the man he had murdered. He recalled nothing of the moment just past.
Except that when he remembered the creature’s last red leer, he seemed to be seeing the image in a mirror.
THE SHORTEST WAY
The dingy relay station squatted beside the road. It had a cast-off, abandoned look about it though light seeped through chinks in the stone where mortar had crumbled. Broken roofslates showed dark in the moonlight like missing teeth. To the rear bulked the stables where relays for the post riders stamped and nickered in their filthy stalls, and the odor of horse droppings thickened the muggy night.
The three riders slowed as they approached.
“Hold up,” Vettius ordered. “We’ll get a meal here and ask directions.”
Harpago cantered a little further before halting. He was aristocrat enough to argue with a superior officer and young enough to think it worthwhile. “If we don’t keep moving, sir, we’ll never get to Aurelia before daybreak.”
“We’ll never get there at all if we keep wandering in these damned Dalmatian hills,” Vettius retorted as he dismounted. His side hurt. Perhaps he had gotten too old for this business. At sunup he had strapped his round shield tightly to his back to keep it from slamming during the long ride. All day it had rubbed against his cuirass, and by now it had left a sore the size of his hand.
The shield itself galled him less than what it represented. A sunburst whose rays divided ten hearts spaced around the rim had been nielloed onto the thin bronze facing: the arms of the Household Cavalry. Leading a troop of the emperor’s bodyguard should have climaxed Vettius’ career, but he had quickly discovered his job was really that of special staff with little opportunity for fighting. He was sent to gather information for the emperor where the stakes were high and the secret police untrustworthy. There was danger in probing the ulcers of a dying empire, but Vettius found no excitement in it; only disgust.
Dama chuckled with relief to be out of his saddle again. He used his tunic to fan the sweat from his legs, looking inconsequential beside the two powerful soldiers. Though he was a civilian, a sword slapped against his thigh. In the backcountry, weapons were the mark of caution rather than belligerence. He nodded toward the still silent building, his blond hair gleaming as bright in the moonlight as the bronze helmets of his two companions. “If it weren’t for the light, I’d say the place was empty.”
The door of the station creaked open, making answer needless. The man who stood on the threshold was as old and gnarled as the pines that straggled up the slopes of the valley. He faced them with wordless hostility. The last regular courier had passed, and he had been dozing off when this new party arrived. Like many petty officeholders, the stationmaster reveled in his authority—but did not care to be reminded of the duties that went with his position.
Vettius strode forward holding out a scroll of parchment. “Food for us,” he directed, “and you can give our horses some grain while we eat.”
“All right for you and the other,” the stationmaster rasped. “The civilian finds his own meal.”
“Government service,” Harpago muttered. He spat.
Vettius began kneading one wrist with his other hand. The little merchant touched his friend’s elbow, but Vettius shook him away. “I’ll take care of it my own way,” he said. His temper had worn thin on the grueling ride, and the stationmaster’s sneering slovenliness gouged at his nerves.
“Old man,” he continued in a restrained voice, “my authority is for food and accommodations for me and my staff. The civilian is with me as part of my staff. Do you dispute the emperor’s authority?”
The stationmaster reared back his head to look the soldier in the eyes. “Even the emperor can’t afford to feed every starving thief who comes along,” he began.
Vettius slapped him to the ground. “Will you call my friend a thief again?” he grated.
The old man’s eyes narrowed in hatred as he sullenly dabbed at his bleeding lip, but he shook his head, cowering before the soldier. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Then take care of those horses—and be thankful I don’t have you rub them down with your tongue.” Vettius stamped angrily into the station, Harpago and Dama behind him.
“Food!” Vettius snapped. A dumpy peasant woman scurried to open a cupboard.
“I could have paid something
, Lucius,” the merchant suggested as they seated themselves at the trestle table. “After all, I came because I thought I could set up some business of my own here.”
“And I brought you because I need your contacts,” his friend replied. “The traders here won’t tell me if they think the governor really is trying to raise money for a rebellion.”
He paused, massaging the inside of his thighs where they ached from holding him into his stirrupless saddle since early dawn. “Besides,” he added quietly, “it’s been a long day—too long to be put upon by of some lazy bureaucrat.”
Dama sighed as the serving woman set down barley bread and cheese. “Not much of a meal anyway, is it?” he said. “I thought the empire fed its post couriers better than this, even in the back country.”
“And I thought we were going to get directions here,” Harpago complained. “If we don’t get to Aurelia before the fair ends we’ll find all the merchants scattered—and then how are we going to learn anything?”
“We’ll find a way,” Vettius assured him sourly. He took a gulp of the wine the woman had poured him, then slammed the wooden cup back on the table. “Gods! that’s bad.”
“Local vintage,” Dama agreed. “Maybe I should try to sell some decent wine here instead of silk.”
The older soldier swigged some more wine and grimaced wryly. “Old man!” he shouted. After a moment the stationmaster came to the door. He limped slightly and his swollen lip was a blotch of color against his tight face.
The soldier ignored the anger in the old man’s eyes. “How far is it to Aurelia?” he demanded.