He didn’t want the Wild Man to get too far ahead of them. It could have circled the town and gone up the other side of the valley, sensing something wrong, or not wanting to leave tracks in the snow. Or it could be holed up just ahead, watching and waiting.
The dogs barked again. Now they sounded nearer, and they were holding the tone. They must have crossed the Wild Man’s path somewhere and were trailing him now.
Ernst felt his pulse rise, like you do when beagles begin to circle, indicating the rabbit somewhere ahead of you is coming your way, or when a setter goes on point, all tense, and you ready yourself for the explosion of quail.
Shouts from the village cut across his reverie. Shots followed, and banging on pots and pans. The bells began to toll rapidly.
Mgoro stood against a rock so as to give no silhouette to anything down the ravine. Lights went on in town, flashlight beams swung up and around. They converged toward this side of town. Lights crossed the field and came toward the ravine, with sporadic small arms fire. The sounds from the town grew louder, like an angry hornet’s nest.
Mgoro pointed.
Far down, where the footprints had ended, there was a movement. It was only a blur against the snow, a dull change in the moonlit background, but it was enough.
Mgoro dropped the blanket from his shoulders, held the shotgun and wheel-lock, one in each hand, two feet to the side and one foot back of Ernst.
The movement came again, much closer than it should have been for so close a space of time, then again, closer still.
First it was a shape, then a man-shape.
It stopped for a few seconds, then came on in a half-loping ape shamble.
Behind and below, flashlight beams reached the far end of the ravine and were starting up, slowly, voices still too indistinct with the distance.
Now the shape moved from one side of the gully to the other, running. Now it was two hundred metres away in the moonlight. Now a hundred. Eighty.
It was too big for a man.
The baying of the dogs, up the mountain behind Ernst, got louder.
The man-shape stopped.
Ernst brought the Weatherby up, held his breath, squeezed.
The explosion was loud, louder than he remembered, but he worked the bolt as the recoil brought the muzzle up. He brought the sights back down, centered them on the gully before the shell casing hit the ground.
There had been a scream with the shot. Whatever had screamed was gone. The ravine was empty.
He and Mgoro ran down the gully.
* * *
It had jumped three metres between one set of prints and the next, and there was a spray of blood four metres back. A high hit, then. Maybe, thought Ernst, as they ran up out of the ravine to the left, maybe we’ll find him dead twenty metres from here.
But the stride stayed long, the drops of blood in the snow far apart.
Ernst’s lungs were numb. He could hardly breathe in enough air to keep going. His legs threatened to fold, and he realized what he was—an old, half-crippled man trying to run down something that was twice his size, wounded and mad.
Mgoro was just behind him. His lungs labored, too, but still he held both guns where he could hand them to Ernst in seconds.
The flashlights and lanterns from the town headed across the front of the village, between the town and the Wild Man. Behind Ernst and Mgoro, the dogs neared in the ravine.
Ernst and Mgoro slowed. The footprints were closer together now, and there was a great clot of blood that seemed to have been coughed up. Internal bleeding maybe, thought Ernst, maybe a better shot than I thought I could ever make again.
The moon was on the edge of the far mountain. They would lose the light for a while, but it should be nearing dawn.
The tracks led in an arc toward the roadway south of the village. Lights from the men in town and those halfway up the hill led that way.
They heard the dogs behind them, whining with urgency when they came to the place of the hit. Now they left the ravine and came straight behind the two men.
“Off the tracks. Off!” puffed Ernst. He grabbed Mgoro, pulled him five paces down the mountainside.
In a moment the dogs flashed by, baying, running full speed. As they passed, the last of the direct moonlight left the valley. The dogs ran on into darkness.
“Come,” said Mgoro, through gritted teeth. “We have him.”
They heard the dogs catch up to the Wild Man. One bark ended in a squeal, another just ended. Two dogs continued on, and the sound of the pursuit moved down the valley.
Ernst ran on, his feet and chest like someone else’s.
He realized that the Wild Man was heading toward the barn.
* * *
When Ernst was thirteen, up in Michigan one summer, he got lost. It was the last time in his life he was ever lost.
He had been fishing, and had a creel full of trout. But he had crossed three marshy beaver ponds that morning, and skirted some dense woods getting to the fishing. On the way back he had taken a wrong turn. It was that easy to get lost.
He had wandered for two hours trying to find his way back to his own incoming tracks.
Just at dusk, he came to a clearing and saw in front of him a huge barn, half-gone in ruin. He wondered at it. There was no house with it. It was in the middle of the Michigan woods. There were no animals around, and it looked as if there never had been.
He walked closer.
Someone stepped from around one corner, someone dressed in a long grey cloak, wearing a death’s head mask.
Ernst stopped, stunned.
The thing reached down inside its cloak and exposed a long, diseased penis to him.
“Hey, you, Bright Boy,” it said. “Suck on this.”
Ernst dropped his rod, his creel, and ran in a blind panic until he came out on the road less than half a mile from the cabin his family had rented.
* * *
One dog still barked. They had found the other three on the way. Two dead, torn up and broken. The third had run until it had given out. It lay panting in a set of tracks, pointing the way with its body like an arrow.
Now the sky to the east was lighter. Ernst began to make things out—the valley floor, the lights of the men as they ran, the great barn up ahead beside the road.
Something ran through a break in the woods, the sound of the dog just behind it.
Ernst stopped, threw the .575 to his shoulder, fired. A vip of snow flew up just over the thing’s shoulder, and it was gone into the woods again. The dog flashed through the opening.
Ernst loaded more shells in.
* * *
The great barn was a kilometre ahead when they found the last dog pulled apart like warm red taffy.
Ernst slid to a stop. The prints crossed a ditch, went up the other side, blood everywhere now.
Ernst jumped into the ditch just as he realized that the prints were doubled, had been trodden over by something retracing its steps.
He tried to stop himself from going just as Mgoro, on the bank behind him, saw the prints and yelled.
Ernst’s arms windmilled, he let go of the rifle, fell heavily, caught a rock with his fingers, slipped, his bad knee crashing into the bottom of the ditch.
Dull pain shot through him. He pulled himself to his other knee.
The Wild Man charged.
It had doubled back, jumped off into a stand of small trees fifty feet up the ditch. Now it had them.
The Weatherby was half-hidden in the ditch snow. Did he have time to get it? Was the action ready? Was the safety off? Was there snow in the barrel and would it explode like an axed watermelon in his hands when he fired?
Not on my knees, Ernst thought, and stood up.
“Gun!” he said, just as Mgoro slammed the shotgun butt down into his right shoulder from the bank above.
Ernst let the weight of the barrels bring the eight-gauge into line. He was already cocking both hammers as his left arm slid up the foregrip.
The Wild Man was teeth and beard and green-gray hair in front of him as the barrels came level with its chest.
Ernst pulled both triggers.
All the moments come down to this. All the writing and all the books and the fishing and the hunting and the bullfights. All the years of banging yourself around and being beaten half the time.
The barrels leaped up with recoil.
All the years of living by your code. Good is what makes you feel good. A man has to do what a man has to do.
A huge red spot appeared on the Wild Man’s shoulder as the slug hit and the right hand, which had been reaching for Ernst, came loose and flew through the air behind the buckshot.
Ernst let the shotgun fall.
“Gun!” he said.
And then you get old and hurt and scared, and the writing doesn’t work anymore, and the sex is gone and booze doesn’t help, and you can’t hunt or fish, all you have is fame and money and there’s nothing to buy.
Mgoro put the butt of the wheel-lock against his shoulder.
The Wild Man’s left hand was coming around like a claw, reaching for Ernst’s eyes, his face, reaching for the brain inside his head.
Ernst pulled the trigger-lever, the wheel spun in a ratcheting blur, the powder took with a floopth and there was an ear-shattering roar.
Then they take you to a place and try to make you better with electricity and drugs and it doesn’t make you better, it makes you worse and you can’t do anything anymore, and nobody understands but you, that you don’t want anything, anymore.
Ernst lies under a shaggy wet weight that reeks of sweat and mushrooms. He is still deaf from the explosion. The wheel-lock is wedged sideways against his chest, the wheel gouging into his arm. He pushes and pulls, twisting his way out from under, slipping on the bloody rocks.
Mgoro is helping him, pulling his shoulders.
“It is finished,” he says.
Ernst stands, looking down at the still-twitching carcass. Blood runs from jagged holes you can see the bottom of the ditch through. It is eight feet tall, covered with lichen and weeds, matted hair, and dirt.
Now it is dead, this thing that was man gone mad, man without law, like all men would be if they had nothing to hold them back.
And one day they let you out of the place because you’ve acted nice, and you go home with your wife, the last wife, and you sing to her and she goes to sleep and next morning at dawn you go downstairs in your bathrobe and you go to your gun cabinet and you take out your favorite, the side-by-side double barrel your actor friend gave you before he died and you put it on the floor and you lean forward until the barrels are a cool infinity mark on your forehead.…
* * *
Ernst stands and looks at the big barn only a kilometre away, and he looks at Mgoro, who, he knows now, has been dead more than thirty years, and Mgoro smiles at him.
Ernst looks at the barn and knows he will begin walking toward it in just a moment, he and Mgoro, but still there is one more thing he has to do.
He reaches down, pulling, and slowly turns the Wild Man over, face up.
The hair is matted, ragged holes torn in the neck and chest and stomach, the right arm missing from the elbow down.
The beard is tangled, thick and bloody. Above the beard is the face, twisted.
And Ernst knows that it is his face on the Wild Man, the face of the thing he has been hunting all his life.
He stands then, and takes Mgoro’s arm, and they start up the road toward the barn.
The light begins to fade, though it is crisp morning dawn. Ernst knows they will make the barn before the light gives out completely.
And above everything, over the noise of the church bells back in town, above the yelling, jubilant voices of the running people, there is a long, slow, far-off sound, like the boom of surf crashing onto a shore.
Or maybe it is just the sound of both triggers being pulled at once.
WALTER JON WILLIAMS
Video Star
Here’s a hard-edged and hard-hitting look at the gritty underside of future society, and at the price you sometimes have to pay if you want to play to win.…
Walter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives in New Mexico. He has sold stories to Omni, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Far Frontiers, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, and Hardwired. Upcoming is a new novel, Voice of the Whirlwind, from Tor. Williams says that he is “currently working on several short stories, about three novels, and a nervous breakdown, all simultaneously.” His story “Side Effects” was in our Third Annual Collection.
VIDEO STAR
Walter Jon Williams
1
Ric could feel the others closing in. They were circling outside the Falcon Quarter as if on midsummer thermals, watching the Cadillacs with glittering raptor eyes, occasionally swooping in to take a little nibble at Cadillac business, Cadillac turf, Cadillac sources. Testing their own strength as well as the Cadillac nerves, applying pressure just to see what would happen, find out if the Cadillacs still had it in them to respond.…
Ric knew the game well: he and the other Cadillacs had played it five years before, up and down the streets and datanets of the Albaicin, half-grown kids testing their strength against the gangs entrenched in power, the Cruceros, the Jerusalem Rangers, the Piedras Blancas. The older gangs seemed slow, tentative, uncertain, and when the war came the Cadillacs won in a matter of days: the others were too entrenched, too visible, caught in a network of old connections, old associations, old manners. The young Cadillacs, coming up out of nowhere, found their own sources, their own products and connections, and in the end they and their allies gutted the old boys’ organization, absorbing what was still useful and letting the rest die along with the remnants of the Cruceros, Rangers, and Blancas, the bewildered survivors who were still looking for a remaining piece of turf on which to make their last stand.
At the time Ric had given the Cadillacs three years before the same thing started happening to them, before their profile grew too high and the next generation of snipers rose in confidence and ability. The Cadillacs had in the end lasted five years, and that wasn’t bad. But, Ric thought, it was over.
The other Cadillacs weren’t ready to surrender. The heat was mounting, but they thought they could survive this challenge—hold out another year or two. They were dreaming, Ric thought.
During the dog days of summer, people began to die. Gunfire echoed from the pink walls of the Alhambra. Networks disintegrated. Allies disappeared. Ric made a proposition to the Cadillacs for a bank to be shared with their allies, a fund to keep the war going. The Cadillacs in their desperation agreed.
Ric knew then it was time to end it, that the Cadillacs had lost whatever they once had. If they agreed to a proposition like this, their nerve and their smarts were gone.
So there was a last meeting, Ric of the Cadillacs, Mares of the Squires, Jacob of the Last Men. Ric walked into the meeting with a radar-aimed dart gun built into the bottom of his briefcase, each dart filled with a toxin that would stop the heart in a matter of seconds. When he walked out it was with a money spike in his pocket, a stainless steel needle tipped with silicon. In the heart of the silicon was data representing over eighty thousand Seven Moons dollars, ready for deposit into any electric account into which he could plug the needle.
West, Ric thought. He’d buy into an American condecology somewhere in California and enjoy retirement. He was twenty-two years old.
He began to feel sick in the Tangier to Houston suborbital shuttle, a crawling across his nerves, pinpricks in the flesh. By the time he crossed the Houston port to take his domestic flight to L.A. there were stabbing pains in his joints and behind his eyes. He asked a flight attendant for aspirin and chased the pills with American whiskey.
As the plane jetted west across Texas, Ric dropped his whiskey glass and screamed in sudden pain. The attendants gave him morphine analogue bu
t the agony only increased, an acid boiling under his skin, a flame that gutted his body. His vision had gone and so had the rest of his senses except for the burning knowledge of his own pain. Ric tried to tear his arms open with his fingernails, pull the tortured nerves clean out of his body, and the attendants piled on him, holding him down, pinning him to the floor of the plane like a butterfly to a bed of cork.
As they strapped him into a stretcher at the unscheduled stop at Flagstaff, Ric was still screaming, unable to stop himself. Jacob had poisoned him, using a neurotoxin that stripped away the myelin sheathing on his nerves, leaving them raw cords of agonized fiber. Ric had been in a hurry to finish his business and had only taken a single sip of his wine: that was the only thing that had saved him.
2
He was months in the hospital in Flagstaff, staring out of a glass wall at a maze of other glass walls—office buildings and condecologies stacked halfway to Phoenix—flanking the silver alloy ribbon of an expressway. The snows fell heavily that winter, then in the spring melted away except for patches in the shadows. For the first three months he was completely immobile, his brain chemically isolated from his body to keep the pain away while he took an endless series of nerve grafts, drugs to encourage nerve replication and healing. Finally there was physical therapy that had him screaming in agony at the searing pain in his reawakened limbs.
At the end there was a new treatment, a new drug. It dripped into his arm slowly via an IV and he could feel a lightness in his nerves, a humming in his mind. For some reason even the air seemed to taste better. The pain was no worse than usual and he felt better than he had since walking out of the meeting back in Granada with the money spike in his pocket.
“What is that stuff?” he asked, next time he saw the nurse.
The nurse smiled. “Everyone asks that,” he said. “Genesios Three. We’re one of the few hospitals that has the security to distribute the stuff.”
“You don’t say.”
He’d heard of the drug while watching the news. Genesios Three was a new neurohormone, developed by the orbital Pink Blossom policorp, that could repair almost any amount of nerve damage. As a side effect it built additional neural connections in the brain, raising the I.Q., and made people high. The hormone was rare because it was very complex and expensive to synthesize, though the gangs were trying. On the west coast lots of people had died in a war for control of the new black labs. On the street it was called Black Thunder.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 64