Zoe`s Tale вбиос-4

by John Scalzi

  I went very cold. "No," I said.

  "Whatever they are, they appear to follow the fantie herds as they migrate," Hickory said. "They have followed those herds back here. And it appears that they found Joseph Loong in the woods."

  "Oh my God," I said. "I have to tell Jane."

  "I assure you, she has figured it out," Hickory said. "And I am to find Major Perry now, so he will know presently. This is being taken care of. The lieutenant asks for you to return to Croatoan. As do I. Dickory will accompany you. Go now. And I advise silence until your parents speak of this publicly." Hickory strode off into the distance. I watched it go, and then headed home, fast, Dickory matching my strides, both of us moving quietly, as we had practiced so many times.

  * * *

  The fact that Joe Loong was dead spread fast in the colony. Rumors of how he died spread even faster. Gretchen and I sat in front of Croatoan's community center and watched a revolving cast of rumormongers offer up their takes.

  Jun Lee and Evan Black were the first to talk; they had been part of the group that had found Loong's body. They were enjoying their moment in the spotlight as they told everyone who would listen about how they found Loong, and how he had been attacked, and how whatever had attacked him had eaten part of him. Some people speculated that a pack of yotes, the local carnivores, had cornered Joe Loong and brought him down, but Jun and Evan laughed at that. We'd all seen the yotes; they were the size of small dogs and ran from the colonists whenever they saw them (and for good reason, since the colonists had taken to shooting at them for bothering the livestock). No yote, or even a pack of yotes, they said, could have done to Joe what they'd seen had been done to him.

  Shortly after these gory tidbits had gotten around, the entire colony council met in Croatoan's medical bay, where Loong's body had been taken. The fact that the government was being pulled into it made people suspect it might actually have been murder (the fact that the "government" in this case was just twelve people who spent most of their time hoeing rows like everyone else didn't matter). Loong had been seeing a woman who'd recently dumped her husband, so now the husband was a prime suspect; maybe he'd followed Loong into the woods, killed him, and then yotes had at him.

  This theory made Jun and Evan unhappy—their version with a mysterious predator was much more sexy—but everyone else seemed to like it better. The inconvenient fact that the presumed murderer in this case had already been in Jane's custody on a different charge and couldn't possibly have done the deed seemed to escape most people's notice.

  Gretchen and I knew the murder rumor had nothing to it, and that Jun and Evan's theory was closer to reality than not, but we kept our mouths shut. Adding what we knew wouldn't make anyone feel less paranoid at the moment.

  "I know what it is," Magdy said, to a bunch of male friends.

  I nudged Gretchen with an elbow and motioned with my head at Magdy. She rolled her eyes and very loudly called him over before he could say anything else.

  "Yes?" he said.

  "Are you stupid?" Gretchen asked.

  "See, this is what I miss about you, Gretchen," Magdy said. "Your charm."

  "Just like what I miss about you is your brains," Gretchen said. "What were you about to say to your little group of friends, I wonder?"

  "I was going to tell them about what happened when we followed the fanties," Magdy said.

  "Because you think it would be smart at the moment to give people another reason to panic," Gretchen said.

  "No one's panicking," Magdy said.

  "Not yet," I said. "But if you start telling that story, you're not going to help things, Magdy."

  "I think people should know what we're up against," Magdy said.

  "We don't know what we're up against," I said. "We never actually saw anything. You're just going to be adding to the rumors. Let my parents and Gretchen's dad and the rest of the council do their jobs right now and figure out what's actually going on and what to tell people without you making their job harder."

  "I'll take that under advisement, Zoë," Magdy said, and turned to go back to his pals.

  "Fine," Gretchen said. "Take this under advisement, too: You tell your pals there about what followed us out there in the woods, and I'll tell them the part where you ended up eating dirt because Hickory dropped you to the ground after you panicked and took a shot at him."

  "A really lousy shot," I said. "One where you almost blew off your own toe."

  "Good point," Gretchen said. "We'll have fun telling that part."

  Magdy narrowed his eyes at both of us and stomped off toward his pals without another word.

  "Think it'll work?" I asked.

  "Of course it'll work," Gretchen said. "Magdy's ego is the size of a planet. The amount of time and effort he puts into doing things to make himself look good is astounding. He's not going to let us mess with that."

  As if on cue, Magdy glanced over at Gretchen. She waved and smiled. Magdy surreptitiously flipped her off and started talking to his friends. "See," Gretchen said. "He's not that hard to understand."

  "You liked him once," I reminded her.

  "I still like him," Gretchen said. "He's very cute, you know. And funny. He just needs to pull his head out of a certain part of his anatomy. Maybe in another year he'll be tolerable."

  "Or two," I said.

  "I'm optimistic," Gretchen said. "Anyway, that's one rumor squashed for now."

  "It's not really a rumor," I said. "We really were followed that night. Hickory said so."

  "I know," Gretchen said. "And it's going to come out sooner or later. I'd just rather not have it involve us. My dad still doesn't know I did all that sneaking out, and he's the sort of guy that believes in retroactive punishment."

  "So you're not really worried about avoiding panic," I said. "You're just covering your own tail."

  "Guilty," Gretchen said. "But avoiding panic is how I'm rationalizing it."

  But as it happens, we didn't avoid panic for long.

  * * *

  Paulo Gutierrez was a member of the colonial council, and it was there he found out that Joe Loong had not only been killed, but that he'd been murdered—and not by a human being. There really was something else out there. Something smart enough to make spears and knives. Something smart enough to turn poor Joe Loong into food.

  The council members had been ordered by my parents not to talk about this fact yet, in order to avoid a panic. Paulo Gutierrez ignored them. Or, actually, defied them.

  "They told me it was covered by something called the State Secrets Act, and that I couldn't tell you about it," Gutierrez told a group that surrounded him and a few other men, all carrying rifles. "I say to hell with that. There's something that's out there right now, killing us. They have weapons. They say they follow the fantie herds, but I think they could have just been in the woods all this time, sizing us up, so they would know how to hunt us. They hunted Joe Loong. Hunted him and killed him. Me and the boys here are planning to return the favor." And then Gutierrez and his hunting party tromped off in the direction of the woods.

  Gutierrez's declaration and news of his hunting party raced through the colony. I heard about it as kids came running up to the community center with all the latest; by that time Gutierrez and his crew had already been in the woods for a while. I went to tell my parents, but John and Jane were already off to bring back the hunting party. The two of them were former military; I didn't think they would have any trouble bringing them back.

  But I was wrong. John and Jane found the hunting party, but before they could drag them back, the creatures in the woods ambushed them all. Gutierrez and all his men were killed in the attack. Jane was stabbed in the gut. John chased after the fleeing creatures and caught up with them at the tree line, where they attacked another colonist at his homestead. That colonist was Hiram Yoder, one of the Mennonites who helped save the colony by training the rest of us how to plant and farm without the help of computerized machinery. He was a pacifist and di
dn't try to fight the creatures. They killed him anyway.

  In the space of a couple of hours, six colonists were dead, and we learned that we weren't alone on Roanoke—and what was here with us was getting used to hunting us.

  But I was more worried about my mom.

  "You can't see her yet," Dad said to me. "Dr. Tsao is working on her right now."

  "Is she going to be okay?" I asked.

  "She'll be okay," Dad said. "She said it was not as bad as it looked."

  "How bad did it look?" I asked him.

  "It looked bad," Dad said, and then realized that honesty wasn't really what I was looking for at the moment. "But, look, she ran after those things after she'd been wounded. If she had been really injured, she wouldn't have been able to do that, right? Your mom knows her own body. I think she'll be fine. And anyway, she's being worked on right now. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she's walking around like nothing happened by this time tomorrow."

  "You don't have to lie to me," I said, although per the previous comment he was actually telling me what I wanted to hear.

  "I'm not lying," Dad said. "Dr. Tsao is excellent at what she does. And your mom is a very fast healer these days."

  "Are you okay?" I asked.

  "I've had better days," he said, and something flat and tired in his voice made me decide not to press the matter any further. I gave him a hug and told him I was going to visit Gretchen and would be over there for a while, in order to stay out of his hair.

  Night was falling as I stepped out of our bungalow. I looked out toward Croatoan's gate and saw colonists streaming in from their homesteads; no one, it seemed, wanted to spend the night outside the walls of the colony village. I didn't blame them one bit.

  I turned to head to Gretchen's and was mildly surprised to see her striding up under full steam. "We have a problem," she said to me.

  "What is it?" I said.

  "Our idiot friend Magdy has taken a group of his friends into the forest," Gretchen said.

  "Oh, God," I said. "Tell me Enzo isn't with him."

  "Of course Enzo's with him," Gretchen said. "Enzo's always with him. Trying to talk sense to him even as he's following him right off a cliff."

  SEVENTEEN

  The four of us moved as silently as we could into the forest, from the place where Gretchen had seen Magdy, Enzo and their two friends go into the tree line. We listened for their sounds; none of them had been trained to move quietly. It wasn't a good thing for them, especially if the creatures decided to hunt them. It was better for us, because we wanted to track them. We listened for our friends on the ground, we watched and listened for movement in the trees. We already knew whatever they were could track us. We hoped we might be able to track them, too.

  In the distance, we heard rustling, as if of quick, hurried movement. We headed that direction, Gretchen and I taking point, Hickory and Dickory fast behind.

  Gretchen and I had been training for months, learning how to move, how to defend ourselves, how to fight and how to kill, if it was necessary. Tonight, any part of what we learned might have to be used. We might have to fight. We might even have to kill.

  I was so scared that if I stopped running, I think I would have collapsed into a ball and never gotten up.

  I didn't stop running. I kept going. Trying to find Enzo and Magdy before something else did. Trying to find them, and to save them.

  * * *

  "After Gutierrez left, Magdy didn't see any point in keeping our story quiet anymore, so he started blabbing to his friends," Gretchen had told me. "He was giving people the idea that he'd actually faced these things and had managed to keep them off while the rest of us were getting away."

  "Idiot," I said.

  "When you parents came back without the hunting party, a group of his friends came to him about organizing a search," Gretchen said. "Which was actually just an excuse for a bunch of them to stalk through the forest with guns. My dad caught wind of this and tried to step on its head. He reminded them that five adults just went into the forest and didn't come out. I thought that was the end of it, but now I hear that Magdy just waited until my dad went to go visit yours before gathering up some like-minded idiots to head off into the woods."

  "Didn't anyone notice them heading off?" I asked.

  "They told people they were going to do a little target practice on Magdy's parents' homestead," Gretchen said. "No one's going to complain about them doing that right about now. Once they got there they just took off. The rest of Magdy's family is here in town like everyone else. No one knows they're missing."

  "How'd you find out about this?" I asked. "It's not like Magdy would tell you this right now."

  "His little group left someone behind," Gretchen said. "Isaiah Miller was going to go with him, but his dad wouldn't let him have the rifle for 'target practice.' I heard him complaining about that and then basically intimidated the rest of it out of him."

  "Has he told anybody else?" I asked.

  "I don't think so," Gretchen said. "Now that he's had time to think about it I don't think he wants to get in trouble. But we should tell someone."

  "We'll cause a panic if we do," I said. "Six people have already died. If we tell people four more people—four kids—have gone off into the woods, people will go insane. Then we'll have more people heading off with guns and more people dying, either by these things or by accidentally shooting each other because they're so wired up."

  "What do you want to do, then?" Gretchen asked.

  "We've been training for this, Gretchen," I said.

  Gretchen's eyes got very wide. "Oh, no," she said. "Zoë, I love you, but that's loopy. There's no way you're getting me out there to be a target for these things again, and there's no way I'm going to let you go out there."

  "It wouldn't just be us," I said. "Hickory and Dickory—"

  "Hickory and Dickory are going to tell you you're nuts, too," Gretchen said. "They just spent months teaching you how to defend yourself, and you think they're going to be at all happy with you putting yourself out there for something to use as spear practice. I don't think so."

  "Let's ask them," I said.

  "Miss Gretchen is correct," Hickory said to me, once I called for it and Dickory. "This is a very bad idea. Major Perry and Lieutenant Sagan are the ones who should deal with this matter."

  "My dad's got the whole rest of the colony to worry about at the moment," I said. "And Mom's in the medical bay, getting fixed from when she dealt with this the last time."

  "You don't think that tells you something?" Gretchen said. I turned on her, a little angry, and she held up a hand. "Sorry, Zoë. That came out wrong. But think about it. Your mom was a Special Forces soldier. She fought things for a living. And if she came out of this with a wound bad enough for her to spend her night in the medical bay, it means that whatever is out there is serious business."

  "Who else can do this?" I asked. "Mom and Dad went after that hunting party on their own for a reason—they had been trained to fight and deal with experiences like that. Anyone else would have gotten themselves killed. They can't go after Magdy and Enzo right now. If anyone else goes after them, they're going to be in just as much danger as those two and their other friends. We're the only ones who can do this."

  "Don't get angry at me for saying this," Gretchen said. "But it sounds like you're excited to do this. Like you want to go out there and fight something."

  "I want to find Enzo and Magdy," I said. "That's all I want to do."

  "We should inform your father," Hickory said.

  "If we inform my father he'll tell us no," I said. "And the longer we talk about this the longer it's going to take to find our friends."

  Hickory and Dickory put their heads together and clacked quietly for a minute. "This is not a good idea," Hickory said, finally. "But we will help you."

  "Gretchen?" I asked.

  "I'm trying to decide if Magdy is worth it," she said.

  "Gretchen," I said.


  "It's a joke," she said. "The sort you make when you're about to wet your pants."

  "If we are to do this," Hickory said. "We must do it on the assumption that we will engage in combat. You have been trained with firearms and hand weapons. You must be prepared to use them if necessary."

  "I understand," I said. Gretchen nodded.

  "Then let us get ready," Hickory said. "And let us do so quietly."

  * * *

  Any confidence that I had any idea what I was doing left me the moment we entered the forest, when the running through the trees brought me back to the last time I raced through them at night, some unknown thing or things pacing us invisibly. The difference between now and then was that I had been trained and prepared to fight. I thought it would make a difference in how I felt.

  It didn't. I was scared. And not just a little.

  The rustling, rushing sound we had heard was getting closer to us and heading right for us, on the ground and moving fast. The four of us halted and hid and prepared ourselves to deal with whatever was coming at us.

  Two human forms burst out of the brush and ran in a straight line past where Gretchen and I were hiding. Hickory and Dickory grabbed them as they passed by them; the boys screamed in terror as Hickory and Dickory took them down. Their rifles went skidding across the ground.

  Gretchen and I rushed over to them and tried to calm them down. Being human helped.

  Neither was Enzo or Magdy.

  "Hey," I said, as soothingly as I could, to the one closest to me. "Hey. Relax. You're safe. Relax." Gretchen was doing the same to the other one. Eventually I recognized who they were: Albert Yoo and Michel Gruber. Both Albert and Michel were people I had long filed away under the "kind of a twit" category, so I didn't spend any more time with them than I had to. They had returned the favor.

  "Albert," I said, to the one closest to me. "Where are Enzo and Magdy?"

  "Get your thing off of me!" Albert said. Dickory was still restraining him.

  "Dickory," I said. It let Albert go. "Where are Enzo and Magdy?" I repeated.