He ran out into the open, yelling. He fired five direct blasts with the plasma rifle, and—unlike his father—he struck his target each time. One high-energy projectile after another hammered into the gruzzly’s chest. The enormous animal collapsed to the blood-soaked grasses with a loud whuff!
Jerrick approached the monster, showing no caution. One of the gruzzly’s arms had been nearly severed by the sawblade, the other mangled by the thresher cylinder. Her blood looked dark in the glare of lights from the harvesting machine.
Jerrick saw the mirrored camouflage of the alien predator also closing in on the dying beast—but he arrived first. Defiant, he stood over the monster, pointed his plasma rifle at the wounded gruzzly’s throat, and blasted at point blank range.
When the giant creature lay dead on the grasses of what should have been peaceful pastureland for the colony’s cattle, Jerrick held his plasma rifle in both hands, sweeping its barrel across the night, looking for the flickering hint of the alien hunter.
“This is mine,” Jerrick shouted. “My kill—my trophy!” He placed a boot on the great gruzzly’s furry carcass.
He swung the plasma rifle around, doubting it would save him if the alien predator decided to attack. He saw a flicker off to the right, and he stared defiantly. “My kill!”
The camouflage field flickered into traceries of static, then dissipated to reveal a tall and powerful humanoid figure. A smooth, eerily inhuman mask covered his face, and snake-like ropes of hair dangled from his skull down to his shoulders. Even though the eye holes were blank, Jerrick could read deep menace there, a simmering bloodlust. The predator might respond with fury, killing Jerrick for daring to intrude on the kill… but Jerrick didn’t think so. The predator faced him, stared at him.
“My trophy,” he said again in a lower voice.
Risking everything, Jerrick pointed his plasma rifle and fired twice more at the dead gruzzly’s neck, severing its head. He tossed the plasma rifle aside, heard it clatter on the grass, then he bent down to grasp the dead monster’s hideous head, and dragged it away from the rest of the body. He stood with his legs spread on either side of the cauterized neck. “My trophy.” He crossed his arms over his chest as he faced the predator.
The ominous alien stared at him, muscular arms at his sides.
After a long, tense moment, the predator bowed slightly in acknowledgement, then turned away. He activated his mirrored camouflage and stalked off into the night.
Jerrick nearly collapsed with terror and relief. He stood blinking in the whipping wind and intermittent rain, but otherwise the night remained silent—until off in the hills he heard a series of explosions as the team of predators kept hunting gruzzlies…
6
Rattling along, limping with mechanical damage, the mammoth combine rolled back to the settlement inside the stockade. Cradled in its harvesting scoop, the big machine carried the oversized gruzzly head—Jerrick’s trophy. The dead monster stared out with glassy eyes as the combine rolled toward the gates.
Awed colonists swarmed out, both terrified and relieved. When they opened the stockade gate to see that Jerrick had brought back the head of a huge gruzzly, they recoiled. He stopped the vehicle just outside the defensive wall, swung the combine around, and worked the controls to set down the scoop. He deposited the head of the mother gruzzly on the ground.
Leaning out of the cab, he shouted to the colonists, “Leave it there as a warning to those predators! It’s my trophy. Maybe the smell of death will even keep the gruzzlies away.” He let out a bitter laugh. “They don’t want to tangle with us.”
Jerrick regarded Hardscrabble’s greatest indigenous predator—but he had killed it, so maybe he was the greatest predator on this raw, unclaimed world. He saw fire rising in the distant hills and knew that the alien predators would keep hunting gruzzlies as those beasts retreated deeper into the wilderness.
Leaving the oversized head outside as a warning, Jerrick rolled the machine inside the stockade, and the colonists swung the gate shut behind him. He felt vindicated now. Victorious and, oddly, safe. He hoped the alien predators as well as the gruzzlies would give the human settlement a wide berth for now.
The desperate colonists would pick up the pieces, then figure out how to survive. For now, Jerrick wouldn’t worry about what the next season would bring.
BLOOD AND SAND
BY MIRA GRANT
LAST BRIDGE TOWNSHIP, MONTANA, 1933: TWO NIGHTS AFTER THE STAR FELL DOWN
“Boy!”
The shout is furious: the shout is always furious. Tommy doesn’t understand why they even have a rooster, since it’s not like it ever gets to wake anyone up. Aunt Mary always takes care of that, shouting high and loud and angry even before the sun is in the sky. Boy! Why haven’t the pigs been fed. Boy! Why hasn’t the fire been lit. Boy! Where’s that useless sister of yours; doesn’t she know the morning’s half-over already, and the chickens are still brooding on their eggs.
Boy, why are you here. Boy, why aren’t you good enough.
Boy.
She never yells at Annie the way she yells at him, and he supposes that might be better, except that Annie says it’s not. Annie says there’s something wrong with the way Aunt Mary looks at her, like she’s a prize sow being fattened for the market, and they’re both of them eleven years old, and they both know how to count. Ten boys their age, or near enough as to make no difference, on the farms within a solid day’s ride. Some of those farms are doing fair well, especially when compared to their own rock fields and empty hoppers. Some of those farms might pay for a dutiful daughter-in-law.
No girls. It’s like the gods of Montana know this is no place for girls. He said so to Annie once, when he was feeling particular blue, and she smacked him so hard his arm ached for a week.
“Girls aren’t better nor worse’n boys,” she’d said, voice hot and angry, as it so often was since they’d come to this awful place. “They’re just different. Easier to sell without feeling guilty on it later.” Then she’d been gone, off to do the mending for Aunt Mary—there’s always mending for Aunt Mary; she takes it in from those same neighboring farms, and claims every straight stitch is Annie’s, like that drives the bride price up just a little bit more.
“Boy!”
Tommy jerks himself out of his woolgathering with a start, suddenly terribly aware that he’s committed the greatest sin in all Montana: he has made his Aunt Mary— Aunt Mary, who took him and his sister in when she didn’t have to, didn’t they know their mama had been worthless and their daddy even worse; Aunt Mary, who is the only person left to love them and isn’t sure they’re worth the bother—he has made her call him twice.
He pulls himself out of the cubby in the kitchen where he’d gone to think, and he runs toward the sound of her voice, swift as the cat his mama used to have, that big stupid orange thing with a purr like rocks grinding together. He never would have thought he could miss that cat, which was sometimes mean and left dead mice on his pillow while he slept, so that he’d roll over and see death as soon as he opened his eyes, but he does. He does, though. He misses that cat like anything, dead mice and all, because that cat was a part of home, and this?
This is not home.
His Aunt Mary is standing on the porch, searching the red-tinted horizon like she thinks he’d go running out there, out in the big, unfamiliar desert, where near anything could come to snatch him up and carry him away. The sun is down low enough in the sky that the light has gone all funny and forgiving, and for a heartbeat, she looks almost like his mama. Then she hears his footsteps and turns around, letting him see her face, the way the lines of it have pulled into something petulant and mean, and she doesn’t look like his mama at all.
She’s his mother’s sister, though, the same as Annie is his, born on the same day, in the same bed, and sometimes that’s enough to scare him halfway to the grave. If his mama’s own sister, who she’d always spoken of fondly, can somehow turn into Aunt Mary, what’s going
to happen to him and Annie? Is one of them going to get spoiled and twisted, worn into something so petty it can’t even find kindness for kin? And if that has to be—if that somehow can’t be helped—is there any way to make sure he’s the one who suffers?
Annie is good. Annie is maybe the only good thing left in his life. If one of them should be spared, it’s her.
“Where the hell have you been, boy?” she demands.
There’s no good answer here, not the truth and not a lie, so Tommy says nothing at all, merely looks down at his feet and waits to be told what’s expected of him. Silence has been a hard habit to learn. He’s done it, though. For his own sake, and for Annie’s, he’s done it.
“No matter,” grumbles Aunt Mary, sounding almost sorry that he didn’t challenge her authority. “Your uncle’s been out in the cow pasture a good hour past when he told me he’d be home for supper. Go out and fetch him, and be quick about it.”
Tommy looks up, naked fear in his eyes. Aunt Mary is frightening. Uncle Jack is terrifying. But the desert?
The desert is something altogether different. There’s nothing out there under that painted sky that doesn’t think a little boy would taste like heaven incarnate. Even the ground is treacherous, turning underfoot like a live thing, capricious and cruel. Tommy would sooner another session with the belt than go out to the desert.
“Mind me, boy, or I’ll send your sister instead.”
Annie might like that. Annie thinks the desert is beautiful, thinks the things that live there are worth admiring. Annie is wrong, but try telling her that. For a moment, Tommy is tempted to let Aunt Mary send her instead of him—but that’s a temptation that ends with another funeral, another headstone with a family member’s name written in the stone, where it can’t ever be erased.
“I’ll go, I’m sorry, I’ll go,” he says, and runs, almost tripping over his own feet in his urgency to show her what a good boy he can be, how well he can mind her. If she sees, she gives no sign, and when he reaches the edge of the light cast by their oilpaper windows and looks back, she isn’t there anymore. It’s only him, alone against the deepening dark.
No: not quite alone. There’s a scuffle in the rocks and shrub off to his left, the sort of sound that could be the billy goat broken out of its pen again, or could be a coyote, lean and hungry and looking for a little boy to swallow down whole. Tommy gasps and turns—
—and Annie smiles at him bright as anything, pretty as a picture and unafraid of the desert. “Hi, Tommy,” she says, and her voice, while cheerful, is pitched low to keep their aunt—who has ears like a bat sometimes—from hearing her. “Going walking? Mind if I come?”
“The desert’s not any place for a girl,” he whispers harshly back.
Annie shrugs, unconcerned. “It’s not any place for a boy, neither, but there you are, and here I am, and I guess if we’re together, it’ll be a little more of a place for both of us.”
“Why do you want to go to the stupid desert?”
“So I’m not alone with Aunt Mary,” says Annie, and his heart breaks a little. Then, with the careless bluntness of sisters, she adds, “And I want to look for my star, and if you’re with me, the cougars will have something to eat first.”
“Annie,” he hisses, and punches her in the shoulder while she giggles. “Go home.”
“No,” she says. She’s as stubborn as the night is long— and here in the desert, the nights go on forever. “I want the star.”
Tommy glares at her. Annie is unrepentant.
The star fell two days ago. It was like lightning running through the sky, so bright and blazing that it couldn’t be real. For just a moment, as they watched it fall, it had been like Mama had never died, like they were still in California, safe in their little house that had never been fancy, but had been theirs. It had been enough, and they had loved it.
Make a wish, my dearest ones, and see what you can see. That was what she’d always said, with her hands on their shoulders and her eyes on the sky. Make a wish, and maybe it would come true. So they had watched the star fall, and they’d made their wishes, and then Uncle Jack had come hollering for them to get their butts to bed, oil cost money, and the moment had passed.
Not for Annie. She’d been set on going out into the desert and finding that star ever since. She still is. Tommy can see how serious she is in the way she looks at him, the stubborn set of her chin and the narrowing of her eyes.
“You let me come, Thomas Warrington, or I’ll scream so loud Aunt Mary will come running.”
“She’ll smack us both upside the head if you do that.”
“Yeah, but I’ll have earned it.”
Tommy wants to argue, wants to stand here fighting her until the sun comes up or Uncle Jack comes back on his own, whichever one comes first. But he knows better. Maybe he didn’t, when they first came to Montana, but he’s a quick study, and he has to be the responsible one. It was the last thing his mama asked from him. He has to take care of her.
“Hush, then, and come on,” he says. “We have to find Uncle Jack.”
“And my star.”
Lord, but she’s stubborn. “And your star, but Uncle Jack first,” he says.
“All right,” says Annie, sweet and sly, and she slides her hand into his as they look toward the rapidly darkening vastness of the desert, which might as well go on forever. Side by side, they step over the border of their half-tamed farm, and into the wild desert that makes up the bulk of their family’s land.
* * *
Walking in the desert isn’t the same as walking in streets. Everything’s loose here, ready to trip a body up and knock them down. Stones and gravel and great brown sticks, which don’t make so much sense, since it’s not like there’s trees here for them to drop off of. Falling is even worse than it sounds, because half the desert seems designed to hurt. Cactus spines and scorpions, sharp rocks and rattlesnakes— nothing here knows how to be kind. Falling down doesn’t just mean skinned knees and bruised elbows. It means pain, more than Tommy would ever have thought existed.
None of that stops Annie, though. She’s roving ahead, far enough that if she hurts herself he’ll have to run to catch up, looking under stones and scuffing in the gravel, still chasing after her star. Tommy more than half expects her to break her leg.
Even so, it’s a shock when she stops and screams, the sound slicing through the night like a sawblade. All the blood in his body turns into ice in an instant, and he breaks into a run, racing to catch up to where she stands frozen, the remains of her scream held captive behind the wall of her left hand. Her right hand is pointing, jabbing at the air, and he turns to look, briefly unable to understand what he sees.
It’s a cougar, or it was, once, one of those big tawny cats that prowl in the high bluffs. They had cougars in California too, even if he never saw one. They were more common here, their screams breaking the walls of night. They always sounded like they wanted nothing more than to fill their bellies with boy flesh, which was sweet and delicious when compared to the stringy things that called the desert home.
This cougar won’t be screaming anymore. This cougar is recognizable only by the color of its pelt and the shape of its paws. The rest of the creature has been split open like some sort of ripe fruit, and its skull… its skull…
“Where’s its head?” asks Tommy, looking to Annie with alarm, like he’s afraid she has it tucked under her arm as a prize. She shakes her head, still silent. There are tears rolling down her cheeks, fat and sad. Annie’s always loved cats. She even loved that stripy old thing Mama had, even though it scratched and spat whenever she got near. What happened to that cat, Tommy can’t say. It didn’t get sent to Montana, though.
Lucky cat.
“Annie?” This time his voice is soft, hesitant; he’s not sure how scared she is. He can’t leave her here, but he can’t take her home either, not until he finds Uncle Jack. As soon as she followed him into the desert, she became an unsolvable problem.
“It’s not fair.” She lowers her hand. She’s still crying, but she’s angrier than she is upset. That should probably be a good thing. It will be, as long as she aims that angry at something that’s not him. “It’s just a kitty. No one should go killing kitties.”
It’s a kitty big enough to have eaten them both and gone looking for seconds: it’s a killer with whiskers. Tommy’s smart enough not to say any of that. He shakes his head and says, “I don’t think fair counts for much out here.”
“Tommy… what if whatever hurt the kitty is still hungry?”
That’s a new problem, and not one he particularly wants. Tommy swallows hard. “Guess we’d better move then. We need to find Uncle Jack before Aunt Mary comes looking for us. I’m more scared of her than I am of anything that might not be anywhere nearby.”
Annie wipes her cheeks with vicious swipes of her hand, and mutters darkly, “I hate them.”
Those are forbidden, fighting words, and Tommy can’t do anything but nod agreement and whisper, “So do I.”
They walk side by side into the desert night, leaving the slaughtered cougar behind them, staying close together and not admitting why, exactly, they feel like that’s a thing they ought to be doing. The desert sky grows brighter by the second as the stars come out, and the moon is so big it’s like a balloon on a string, floating just out of reach.
They pass a snarl of rattlesnakes on a rock, none of them moving, all of them split open like the cougar, their fangs and rattles missing. “Wolves,” says Tommy, and he doesn’t believe it, and neither does Annie, but words have power, and so they walk on, through the endless desert night, heading for the distant line of wooden posts and barbed wire that marks the end of their land. They have more rocky field than livestock or capacity to farm, but Uncle Jack won’t sell it on. Mama would have called him proud and senseless. Aunt Mary calls him forward-thinking, says Montana will be the next golden shore, just you wait for all those fools on the coast to realize that the real riches are in cattle farming and a sky that goes on the better part of forever.
PREDATOR IF IT BLEEDS Page 19