PREDATOR IF IT BLEEDS

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PREDATOR IF IT BLEEDS Page 20

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt


  Tommy thinks Uncle Jack isn’t the only one who’s senseless. But Aunt Mary is as trapped as they are, pinned down by a husband who won’t give up his land. Worse, she’s done what some animals in a trap will do: she’s turned mean. She might not have been, in the beginning. It doesn’t matter now. She’s mean, and she’s cruel, and she’s as bad as their uncle, in her own way. Even if they had a way to escape, she wouldn’t let them. She’d drag them back and holler to the heavens how the trap is the best place she’s ever been, and she’d never let them go.

  “I don’t know where my star fell,” says Annie.

  Tommy thinks they’ve got bigger things to worry about, things with leather belts and heavy hands, things that would see her married before she was anywhere near a woman. He keeps them to himself. Some things are better unshared.

  In the distance, something howls. It’s not a wolf or a coyote; it’s not a cougar. It sounds like the lion they heard once at the circus, captive jungle fury packed into a steel-barred cage, fur that smelled like a kind of heat even the desert has never known. It sounds like Annie’s fallen star given flesh and thought and rage at the idea that the sky is no longer its domain.

  It sounds like death.

  They cleave together, two children clinging to each other underneath the desert stars. Tommy is shaking, and Annie is still as stone, like she used up all her tremors on the dead cougar. Finally, in a low voice, she asks, “Do you think Uncle Jack heard that?”

  “I think the whole state heard that.”

  “Come on.” Annie steps away from her brother, not letting go of his hand, and starts to tug him toward the boundary line. “Uncle Jack always has a gun when he goes to the fence. He wants to be ready for bandits. This sounds worse than bandits.”

  Tommy wants to argue, wants to tell her that running toward Uncle Jack isn’t running toward safety, no matter what she thinks. But he wants an adult even more, wants someone who can make everything make sense, and so when she breaks into a run, he lets her pull him along with her. He doesn’t fight.

  He just wants this to be over.

  * * *

  Silence greets them at the boundary line—silence, and broken barbed wire all along one stretch of fence, snapped like fishing line when a fish that’s too big catches hold of it. Annie stumbles to a stop, her feet suddenly leaden, her grip suddenly like a vise. Tommy digs his heels into the gravel, holding himself up, holding them both up.

  “Annie?” His voice is too loud. It’s like a shout against the dark line of the cliffs. The desert has always been frightening. For the first time, he’s terrified.

  “He’s like the kitty,” says Annie. She sounds much younger than she is, sounds like she used to when they were littles, still holding fast to their mother’s hand. There’s a note of wonder in her tone, like she can’t quite make sense of what she’s seeing. “How is he like the kitty?”

  “What do you mean?” Tommy asks, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t strain to see. He doesn’t want to know. Annie shouldn’t be seeing this either—whatever it is isn’t meant for her eyes—but he doesn’t pull her back. One of them has to look. It’s already too late for her.

  Annie turns, her face pale and drawn, her eyes wide and dry. “His head’s all gone,” she says. She sounds more confused than anything else, as if this is something unthinkable. “How can he be alive when his head’s all gone?”

  She already knows the answer. Death is no stranger to either one of them: hasn’t been since they were babies, when their father caught sick and didn’t recover. Even then, death had remained a distant acquaintance until their mother— God rest her soul and all the angels keep her—had started coughing and not been able to stop, not until she’d stopped doing anything but getting slowly cold in her bed, not even breathing anymore. The undertaker had put her in a pine box and the priest had put her underground, and Annie and Tommy know better than anyone what death is. Uncle Jack is dead. Dead is all that’s left for somebody whose head’s all gone.

  “We should go,” whispers Tommy, but his feet stay rooted to the spot, because where can they go? To Aunt Mary, who will scream and wail and blame them for the death of the man she married, who maybe she’d loved before Montana had ground all the goodness out of both of them? Aunt Mary isn’t a woman who stands idly by while the world does her wrong. She looks for people to blame. Tommy’s pretty sure that her sister’s unwanted orphans will be easy targets.

  They could run away, just the two of them, fleeing deeper into the desert. It has to end somewhere, doesn’t it? Their mama had always said that their pa came from a place called “Boston.” That can’t be any farther from Montana than California is, and the train got them from San Francisco to here in just three days. Maybe they can walk to Boston in four, or five. Not so many. It should still be possible, a goal that can be achieved if they make it past the mountains. They can go to every house in the city until they find their grandparents, and then they’ll live happily ever after, far away from the desert, far away from men who haven’t got any heads, far away from—

  “My star!” Annie’s voice is suddenly full of wonder, the body of their uncle clean forgotten as she takes off and runs. Tommy makes a wordless sound of protest as he turns to follow her, and then he sees it, flickering behind a rock in the desert ahead of them: a pale, heatless light, something that doesn’t belong here. It should be burning in the sky, not down here, where ordinary people are trying to survive their ordinary lives.

  “Annie!” he shouts. But she’s faster than he is, she always has been. She ran into the world faster than he could, beating him by minutes, and she’s beating him now, running across the desert as fast as hope and fear can carry him. Those two together are a heady brew, and she’s standing by the stone before he can catch her.

  The light is not coming from a star. The light is coming from a machine the like of which he’s never seen before, a jagged crack running along one side of it, like it slammed too hard against the ground and hasn’t yet been put back together right. It’s so small that he could hold it in one hand, and bright enough that it takes a moment for Tommy to see the other source of light, the pale green glow that tips some of the stones, pools on some of the gravel. If it wasn’t glowing—cold light, such a cold light—he’d call it blood. But it can’t be that. It can’t.

  “Is this my star?” asks Annie, and reaches for the strange machine.

  There’s a clicking sound behind them, something like a rattlesnake and something like a spring winding underwater. It’s wet. That’s the only word that fits the sound: wet, meaty, almost. Bowels frozen with his fear, Tommy turns.

  The thing behind them is a man. It has to be, because it stands on two legs, wears clothes, has hands like a man’s hands and eyes like a man’s eyes, almost. Close enough. Nothing else has eyes like that, so they must be a man’s eyes.

  But it has a face like a flower in the process of withering, a flower made of meat and bone and terror. It clicks at them, and that strange face pulses and rearranges itself, never still, never anything but vital and awful and alive, and Tommy damn near wets himself, because he knows what this is. It’s the Devil his own self, come to haunt the desert, to hunt for bad kids.

  It has something in one hand, something red and sticky and segmented like the curve of a spine, and Tommy doesn’t want to see.

  “Oh,” says Annie softly. “That’s where their heads went. The star took them.”

  It’s such a small statement. It holds too much weight; it can’t possibly keep from collapsing inward on itself. Tommy moans. The thing—the man—the Devil makes that clicking sound again.

  Tommy doesn’t decide so much as he just does, stepping between the Devil and his sister and spreading his arms as wide as he can. “You can’t have her,” he says, and his voice barely shakes at all. “She didn’t do nothing to you, and you can’t have her.”

  The Devil looks at him, and he’d swear he can see confusion in those amber, almost-human eyes. It clicks again
. Tommy shakes his head.

  “No,” he says again. “She’s mine. Kill me if you gotta, but you can’t have her.”

  The Devil reaches out with one clawed hand. Tommy can hear Annie breathing fast and hard behind him, sounding like she’s finally found the sense to be scared. You didn’t find it fast enough, he thinks. If she hadn’t wanted to come looking for her star, if she hadn’t run away—

  You can build a whole palace out of “if,” but there won’t be a single wall thick enough to block the wind.

  That was what their mama always used to say. Tommy closes his eyes and waits to die.

  The clicking sound gets louder as the Devil gets closer. Tommy feels something brush his cheek, the barest whisper of a sensation, like a bee buzzing a little too near on a summer’s day. There’s a soft, descending purr, and then, silence.

  Silence, until Annie whispers, “I don’t think he wants to hurt us, Tommy. He’s just… just looking at you.”

  Tommy cracks open one eye. If Annie can stand to look at the Devil, he supposes he can too.

  The Devil’s still standing in the same place, looking at the pair of them with an unreadable expression in those awful eyes. Slowly, it raises its hand again, fingers spread, and gestures away from the mountains, back toward the farm.

  “Tommy, I think it wants us to go.”

  Tommy frowns. This is the Devil. This is Satan, the trickster, the Lord of Hell, and they’re just two innocent kids who couldn’t win if they tried. Why isn’t the Devil hurting them? They should already have their heads off and their blood on the sand, like the cougar, like the rattlesnakes, like Uncle Jack. They should be dead.

  “Tommy, come on. Let’s go.”

  What do all those things have in common that they don’t? What makes those things the same, and them different?

  “Tommy, please. I don’t like this.”

  Cougars are dangerous, they’re all teeth and claws and hunger. They’re not mean, not like people can be mean, but oh, they’ll hurt you bad if you let them, or if you surprise them, or if they’re bored. Cougars are about the worst thing in the desert.

  “Tommy.”

  Rattlesnakes too. Those are some of the worst snakes in the whole world. If they bite you, you’re just as good as dead—that’s what Uncle Jack said when they first came to live here, and Tommy believed him then. Still believes him now. Rattlesnakes aren’t as bad as cougars, but they’re still bad.

  Annie whimpers, and doesn’t say anything more.

  Uncle Jack, now… Uncle Jack was worse than a cougar, because when a cougar hurt somebody, it didn’t mean it. Cougars hurt people for food and territory, to protect themselves. Uncle Jack, though, he meant it. He liked it when people were afraid of him, when he saw the bruises on their bodies to prove that he’d been there, and Tommy wishes he could be sorry that Uncle Jack is dead now, but he’s not, he’s not, he can’t be and he’s not. Dead is dead and alive is alive, and Uncle Jack is dead and maybe they can be alive a little longer.

  Maybe.

  He looks at the Devil, standing there all terrible and strange, and suddenly he knows what’s different about him and Annie; what makes them something to spare, and not something to slaughter. It’s about the only thing that makes sense.

  “Annie,” he whispers, “I’m gonna need you to trust me, and I’m gonna need you to run.”

  “What?” There’s a hitch in her voice, the kind of sound that comes right before she breaks down and has one of her big cries. Tommy can’t afford to let her get that far. She starts crying, they’re never getting out of here together and alive.

  Maybe they aren’t anyway. What he’s about to do takes a whole lot of brave and even more stupid. He’s got plenty of the second—Aunt Mary tells him so every day—but he’s not sure how much he’s got of the first. If there’s enough of it to save one of them, he hopes it’s enough to save Annie. Whatever happens to him will be worth it, if he can just save her.

  Please, let him save her.

  “Run!” he shouts, and he grabs the Devil’s machine, not letting go even when the jagged edges bite into his hands, and he runs. He runs like his heels are on fire and the only bucket of water left in the whole world is back at the house; he runs like his life depends on it. He runs like his sister’s life depends on it.

  Annie has always been faster than he is, and when she passes him, legs pumping like pistons and tears streaming down her cheeks, it’s all he can do not to waste his breath on whooping. They’re outrunning the Devil, him and his sister, running for the horizon. Running for their future.

  He hears feet pounding the earth behind him, hears breathing that’s too harsh and too fast to be human, and he doesn’t look back. That would be a waste as much as whooping would. He needs to run like nothing on this world has ever run before. He needs to run like he means it.

  He means it. Oh, how he means it.

  The light from the farmhouse windows is visible ahead of them. The walk into the desert had seemed so long, but maybe it was never more than a few hundred yards; maybe it was fear that stretched the land out like a sheet, drawing it strange and tight and making it eternal. Panic and fear aren’t the same, and it’s panic that drives him now. Panic makes things shorter, smaller, narrower, like Aunt Mary and Uncle Jack have been doing to them since they came here. If they don’t get away now, before the panic crushes them completely, they’re never going to.

  I love you, Annie, Tommy thinks fiercely, and runs even harder, toward the light that will change everything. One way or another, it will change everything.

  * * *

  Annie reaches the house first and runs on, heading for the barn, where her best hiding places are. Tommy doesn’t waver. He hits the porch like thunder and slams the door open, revealing Aunt Mary sitting by the fireplace. She looks up, lowering her knitting, already preparing to scold him for banging the door like that. Then she stops, face drawing in and turning even meaner than usual.

  “Where is your uncle, you stupid, worthless boy?” she demands. “Do I need to remind you that you’re here at our sufferance?”

  Tommy doesn’t have the breath to answer her. He doesn’t even try. All he can do is fling the machine at her as hard as he can. His arms aren’t as strong as he’d like them to be: it lands on the floor at her feet, rolling to a stop.

  “Why, you insolent—” she begins, even as she starts rising from her chair.

  Tommy is still moving. He dives beneath the table, putting his hands above his head, closing his eyes as tight as he can.

  He hears the Devil enter, claws scraping on wooden floor. He hears the soft, purring click of the Devil’s speech, and Aunt Mary’s scream of terror and outrage and refusal. It’s the first time he’s felt like he understood her all the way down to the bone, because he knows that refusal, that denial that the world can possibly be this cruel.

  He hears the shotgun she keeps next to the fireplace rack into place.

  He hears her fire.

  Then there’s only screaming for a little while—screaming that doesn’t last particularly long. Something warm and wet hits his cheek. He keeps his eyes closed, keeps them closed until he hears footsteps approaching, until something hits the floor in front of him.

  Cautiously, Tommy cracks one eye open, and sees Aunt Mary’s shotgun in front of him. He opens his other eye and lifts his head, and there’s the Devil looking down at him, that strange meaty flower of a face pulsing as its petals open and close, open and close.

  Everything is blood. Aunt Mary… isn’t, anymore. What’s left doesn’t really look like her. Not at all.

  The Devil clicks, and nudges the gun closer to Tommy with its foot. He shakes his head, pulling himself farther under the table.

  “N-no,” he says. “I’m not a danger. I’m not.”

  The Devil looks at him thoughtfully. Tommy looks back, and waits.

  Finally, the Devil says, in a voice that is no man’s, that sounds almost approving, “Gahn’tha-cte,” and turns,
and walks away.

  Tommy stays where he is, and cries.

  * * *

  Annie finds him there, he doesn’t know how much later. She puts her arms around him and pulls him out into the light, her tears falling on his cheek.

  “It left,” she says. “It took its machine and it left. Tommy, what did you do?”

  He set them free. He led the Devil to Aunt Mary, and saw her judged for her sins, and now they’re free. They can find some other family to live with, family that doesn’t hit, that doesn’t hurt. They can get out of this desert.

  He killed her. As sure as if he’d been the one to hold the knife, he killed her. He’s a sinner now, like her, like Uncle Jack, and when the Devil comes back—the Devil always comes back—he’ll be fair game. He’ll be something to be hunted.

  For now, in this moment, he puts his arms around his sister, and he doesn’t say any of those things. He holds her fast, and he says nothing at all.

  TIN WARRIOR

  BY JOHN SHIRLEY

  The prisoner paced. It waited. Sometimes the prisoner lifted its head to sniff at the air. The smells were alien, yet becoming disgustingly familiar.

  The cell was twenty paces by forty. There were soft places to stretch out but without frames under them; there was plumbing, designed to be impossible to pull out of the floor. The cell was resistant and seamless, so that nothing could be used as a weapon.

  The electric lights dialed down automatically in the evening—was this a mock of night? But this dimness was nothing like the deep night of its own world.

  The prisoner was reassured by the fact that these soft primates knew little about his world. They had worked long, so long, trying to understand the Yautja technology—what little they could find. They had tried to communicate, using a few words and phrases gleaned from some fool Yautja prisoner—some coward who had betrayed its people; a weakling who had died from a terrestrial disease, apparently.

 

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