Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  Our patrol tonight takes in Spiritus Sanctus Park and the area around it. Last time we had to do Kings, which wasn’t so bad; Kings is less densely wooded, so there’s a better chance there of finding a lune that’s kept out of the forest. Though not as much as any of us would like. Sanctus is small, forested, impenetrable. Too many trees, not enough open space. No one likes getting assigned there; it’s early in Marty’s training to be given somewhere so difficult. I wonder if this is a token of official approval of him, or of me.

  Marty is biting his fingernails; I reach over and pull his hand out of his mouth without taking my eyes off the tracker. “Bad habit,” I say. “Light me a cigarette, will you?”

  He makes a noise like one fragment of a laugh, and gets out the pack for me. “Nothing much on the tracker,” he says.

  “Not yet. Best not to worry about it, though. Could just be a quiet night.” I turn the van left along the patrol route. As I do this, I wonder how I’ve become the grown-up. I’ve been catching since I was eighteen, and I still don’t know a damn thing about doing it safely. I think about the woman who taught me catching, my friend Bride Reilly, a big jolly woman with blond-by-choice hair who showed me all there is to know about a right hook. I share cases with her sometimes. She’s got a new trainee: a boy shorter than I am who boxes as well as she does, probably to make up for his lack of height. Bride used to sing dirty songs as we cruised, tell jokes and make me forget my fears. Poor Marty’s stuck with me, and I can’t think of any way to make him forget.

  “How many—” Marty’s voice clicks in his throat. “You never told me—how many catches does this make it for you?”

  I keep my hands on the wheel. “I can’t remember. You lose track after a while.” I am lying. I remember every single one.

  Marty takes my lighter out of the pack, and as he does so, there’s a soft wail from the left. His hand jumps, and my lighter falls on the floor.

  “Cool it,” I say, my voice snapping. This is tough enough if your partner’s calm, there’s no way I can keep my head if Marty starts panicking on me. “Check the tracker, will you?” I swing the wheel in the direction of the voice, and slow down.

  Marty draws a deep breath, and lets it go. “About eleven o’clock,” he says. “Just one.”

  He’s making an effort to brace himself. “Atta boy.” I say this very softly, and turn my attention to the road.

  I stop the van and take a look: it’s small, smaller than it should be. “Might just be a stray dog,” I say. My nails dig into the steering wheel as I say this. There are days when I dream of driving around all night, ignoring all pickups and just staying snug inside my own van. My fantasies are going to have to wait, though.

  This one is outside a park. Less common, more risky. We’ll have to fight it in the streets. I look at the map, and try to plan a route.

  “Maybe it’s a juvenile,” says Marty over the sound of the engine restarting.

  “You don’t miss much,” I tell him. “Or it could just be showing up smaller than it is, of course, that happens often enough. Or it really could be a stray. In which case, I’ll go to church tomorrow. You awake?”

  He rubs his eyes. “Yes.”

  “It’s past your bedtime, kid. Sure you don’t want any Pro-Plus?”

  “No, thank you anyway.” His manners do him credit.

  I look at the street ahead of us. Gray in the headlights, with no streetlamps burning, it looks rainswept, war-torn, faded. I turn at the junction, and try to stop imagining things.

  “Okay,” I say. “I want you to do this collar. I’ll be right behind you. Remember, if this is a juvenile, it’ll be more likely to be panicking, so you need to be efficient. No missing its head and swatting it with the collar or anything like that. I don’t want to be chasing it till sunrise. Clear?”

  “Yes.” He fingers his catcher. “What if I do miss?”

  I think he’s just covering all his bases, but the thought still chills me. There was a time when I wanted to do every collar for him, to spare him the dangers of being bitten and me the risk of him missing. I can’t, I’d be doing him no favors. He has to learn sometime. “Then we trank it and take the consequences.”

  “Is that bad? I mean, worse?” Marty chews his fingernail.

  “It’s not good.” They ought to teach him this kind of thing in classes. I’m not too surprised they don’t, though—they usually leave the worse facts to be found out by experience. “People don’t like the idea of tranking children. So they don’t make child-sized darts. It would be like admitting we might use them.” No one thinks baby lunes can possibly be dangerous. No one who hasn’t seen them. “If we trank it, we’ll just have to drag it to the nearest shelter that’s got someone who knows a damn thing about first aid.” As I say this, I find we’re nearly at the right street.

  I turn the corner and something sinks inside me. Not my heart, I think, that’s tethered into place, yet it still gives me a long second of dismay when I see that Marty was right. It’s a juvenile. A small one, not much bigger than a German shepherd, and it’s doing its best to dig through a pile of black garbage bags. Withered lettuce leaves and wet cereal boxes are scattered across the street; the smell of rot hits us at the same time as the sound of whimpering.

  I take my trank gun out and watch how Marty handles the pole. When he first started, he looked like he was conducting an orchestra for some slapstick number; I didn’t dare let him carry it outside. I was impressed, though: two catches along, and he’d progressed to just awkward, and now he’s managed some perfectly competent collars. He’s a quick learner. And he’d better be as able as I think he is on this one, or we’ll end up rushing the juvenile to a shelter with a sedative overdose.

  The yellow light of the van has turned everything pale, and the shadow of the pole looms black against the pile of trash. Then Marty’s foot comes down on a gray leaf. It only makes a little splashing sound: that little sound, then silence. The juvenile stops digging. It pulls its head out of the pile, and a waterfall of bags tumble down around it. It looks up, and it sees the pole.

  The sound it makes is like something falling from a great height to smash at the bottom. A whimper, and the whimper rises to a screaming snarl, and then it leaps bare-toothed into the air. There’s a dull gleam as its jaws snap together just under the pole, and it circles around on the pavement preparing for another leap.

  “Marty, hurry,” I mutter. “Catch it while you still can.”

  The juvenile leaps again, up against the wall and back toward us, it’s fast as a cat. Marty swings the pole and misses, it knocks against the side of a building and it’s way out of line. The juvenile gives a high, grinding wail. In a minute, the whole street will start howling. Already there are several voices coming down, they blend and rise, coming down on us, and I press my hands against my head because I cannot afford to panic, whatever the noise I cannot afford to panic. Marty wrestles with the pole and swings again, way off-balance: the collar brushes the juvenile’s head and doesn’t catch it.

  “Marty, in a minute it’s going to attack you.” My voice is as quiet as I can make it. “Catch it now.”

  Marty reaches the pole out. It hangs in the air above the juvenile, and the juvenile cringes down, snarling at it. There’s a moment where there’s nothing but howling voices and the snarls below us, and then the juvenile springs. Marty makes another swing just as it leaves the ground.

  There’s a thud and a shriek, and I see what’s happened. He hit it with the stick. Bad luck, bad timing, he missed and he hit this under-age stray on the head with a heavy ten-foot pole. The juvenile cowers on the ground, its head between its feet and its tail between its legs. Its howls shouldn’t make sense to me, every howl should sound the same. They don’t, though. This pitched, shaking wail may be lune-talk, and I don’t know how lunes think: all of that is true. It doesn’t matter, not just this minute. I know crying when I hear it.

  I take the pole out of Marty’s hands and collar the weeping juveni
le in one shot. Once it’s collared it fights, and we shove it, still sobbing, into the van, bruising its neck as we go. It lands a bite on my calf as we get it up the ramp, but its teeth don’t go through the suit. I’ll just have a mark there tomorrow. Marty holds it pressed against the wall.

  “Hold it there for a bit,” I say. Lycos have chips in their necks inserted at birth, to help us ID: I scan the microchip in his neck with the chipper as I pass, and yank open a cage door. Marty harries him in, and I slam the door and lock it.

  “Check this reading, will you?” I say.

  “Toby McInley,” says Marty. “Seven years old.” Toby McInley curls up in the middle of the cage, shivering.

  “What have we got?” I go to look over Marty’s shoulder. What we’ve got on him is nothing surprising. He’s on the at-risk list: a social worker, neglect, suspected abuse. They’re always the ones we find out on the streets.

  I leave Toby sitting huddled on the floor and start the van up again.

  “That wasn’t good, Marty.” This is a matter of fact.

  Marty rubs his fists together and doesn’t say anything.

  “Marty. You have to be quicker than that. You can’t just clout them with the pole, you could get done backward and forward for that. You’re lucky it’s a neglected child whose folks probably won’t sue.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” he mutters.

  “I know you didn’t mean to, it doesn’t matter that you didn’t mean to. You did. You’ve got to be more careful.”

  “I know.” Marty glares at his fists and slouches down in his seat. I could go on in this vein for a while, and I probably should. There’s no excuse for that kind of mistake. The trouble is, it was a mistake. We all make them. There’s just no good way of doing this job.

  “Anyway,” Marty mutters. “It worked.”

  “What?” I turn to look at him, and he sits glowering at his feet. “Marty, did you do that on purpose?”

  “No.”

  “Did you do that on purpose?”

  “No.”

  Toby is silent in the back. There’s only the sound of the engine and Marty kicking his feet on the floor, and nothing else. I open my mouth to tell him to stop it, then decide against it and change gears instead. The thud of the gearshift is the loudest thing for a mile around.

  “It won’t do, Marty,” I say.

  “It was an accident,” he says. He sounds upset.

  “I know. But parents can sue over injured juveniles. It’ll mar your record just as you’re starting out. Next one, we do absolutely by the book, okay?” I think of the wailing as the pole knocked the boy’s head.

  I see Marty come close to saying, Whatever. He doesn’t. He stretches out his fingers for a moment, then says, “Yes. I’ll be careful.”

  “Good for you.” I half smile at him, nod. He’s a smart boy.

  We drive for an hour in silence, back into Sanctus. Toby doesn’t howl in the back. He crouches, silent, calling no attention to himself. Marty taps his feet in a regular rhythm and stares out ahead of us at the blank road. Whenever I look at him, I see the wall of trees behind him, the woods. The first layer is visible, with monochrome bark and ragged branches; they quiver a little at the edges and make no sound. The shadows they cast in our headlight twist and slice by us as the beam passes them. After the first layer, nothing. A few shapes are visible, branches and ivy, braided into each other so you can’t judge distance, and shadow overlays shadow in a deep tangle so I can’t see more than five feet in.

  For a while, we have rain, a few heavy drops that trickle down the windshield and then stop, leaving the air chilly and close.

  I’m beginning to think it might be a quiet night when there’s a bleep from the tracker and we both look toward it. An ugly, shining clump has appeared on the screen. It doesn’t have the appearance of a single figure: its shape is amorphous, like two, three, four objects close together. It’s in the park, it’s near us. It shows up left of center on the screen. Which means that I’ve got to turn the van around, head into the woods and make my way carefully through the black and gray trees.

  “Two,” I say. “Maybe more.” Marty bites his lip; his hand drops to his gun with the motion of the van swinging around. I don’t think he’s noticed he’s doing it.

  The way the woods are planted, you can drive between the trees, at least most of the time. Twigs crush under the slow-turning wheels as I drive forward, barely at a walking pace. The van rocks to and fro on the uneven ground. When it rocks, I can hear it grate at the joints, make sounds of wear: it turns into a machine, just a mechanism that’s liable to damage. The wheels creak as I tug the steering wheel to and fro, jostling our way around the trees. It chills my fingers, and I find I’m staring down at them. I might not have them all in the morning.

  “Marty.” My voice crackles in my mouth. “Listen, this is going to be a tough one.”

  “I know.” His head is ducked away from me.

  Stopping the car, I unfurl my still-whole hand and reach out for the radio. “This is Galley, car thirty-two, Galley, car thirty-two, calling from Sanctus Park, Sanctus Park.”

  “Yes?” Josie’s voice comes over. She must have been sitting at the switchboard all this time. She’s so hurried she’s panting.

  “We’ve sighted a group, size unknown. Is there any backup available?”

  “Just a moment…No.”

  “None?”

  “No. Everyone’s miles away, and it’s a heavy night. You’ll have to handle this alone.”

  I hadn’t expected anything else, not really, but this is still shattering. “Thank you.”

  “Sorry, Lo,” says Josie’s voice, and then the radio clicks off.

  “Lola?” Marty’s voice sounds in my ear, very softly. “How are we going to handle this?”

  I count my fingers. I don’t know. “We’ve just got to round them up.” He draws breath, and I keep talking before he can start. “It depends on the size of the group. Now, we can leave most of the cages open because we’ve only got one of them occupied, so that’s one thing working for us. If there’s only two of them, then we can go for one each. And it’s possible that the group may scatter when they see us, I’ve seen that happen.” I have. I hold this thought.

  “What if there’s more than two and they stick together?”

  I inhale. “Then I’ll do the catching and you cover me. No, listen to me. I go for one, and if the others close in, you fire your silver gun into the air. It makes a lot of noise, and they’ll probably back down. Two bullets, so you can do it twice if need be. If there’s more than two, one of us needs to stand guard the whole time.”

  “Will we—will we be able to see them?”

  I look at him, seeing the narrowness of his shoulders, his height lost as he sits down. “You mean because of the trees? Well, they—they sometimes provide cover for us, too, Marty.”

  “Can’t we just trank them?” It’s soft, plaintive like a bird’s song. I close my eyes briefly before answering.

  “Not to start with. We can’t. Not unless we’re in serious danger.” He gives a strangled laugh. I try to scowl at him. I want to laugh too, I really do, but if I start laughing I’m afraid of not being able to stop. “That’s the law. You read it at school, you’ve done exams in it, I know you know the drill. Tranking is a last resort. We may well have to take it, but not until we have to.”

  “Oh.” Marty makes no complaint. He hangs his head.

  “Listen.” I try to soften my voice. “Normally we could. But after that first mistake tonight, you could lose a lot if we bend the rules on this one. I know it’s hard, but we’ve just got to try.”

  “I thought the bullets were the last resort,” Marty says quietly.

  I shake my head at him. “Don’t let a lyco hear you say that. As far as the rest of the world wants to know, they’re not a resort at all.”

  “Have you ever fired the bullets?” Marty wants to know. He’s picking at his fingernails.

  I swallow.
“Not so you’d want to know about.”

  I start up the engine again, and we roll over the ground. The branches are unreal in the artificial light; they loom around me and I have to remember that they’re solid. The dark, the quiet, the figure on the tracker, they’re making me light-headed, and if I’m not careful, I might try to drive through the trees.

  The tracker glows red in the darkness, with the white cluster of light still there. It’s very close to the center. The lines across the tracker meet in the middle—there’s a point of convergence which is us; and just a few millimeters away from it is this foreign, multiple shape. I drive forward just a little more, and the shape breaks open, splits like an amoeba into three separate circles. I look out through the cracked glass of our windshield, and see nothing but textured, receding shadows.

  “Okay,” I whisper. “Now we’ve got to be very quiet. Don’t knock the windows, don’t rattle your seat belt, just keep still.” There are three separate shapes on the scanner, ten meters from us. I press the accelerator, and the shapes move. They can hear us.

  Ten meters, fifteen. The van moves forward, and I check again. It’s the same reading. They’ve moved with us, they’re keeping out of reach, they’re not running away. Ten meters. We’ve got to walk.

  “Marty,” I say. “We’re getting out here.”