by Dean Koontz
It was forty-nine minutes before dawn of that day.
Soon, the Hunter would rise.
And dress in the hides of a hunter.
And make his prayers and set forth to do vengeance . . .
Chapter Six
Hulann's overmind had to wait only a few moments for his organic brain to come to life. When he was fully alert once again, he was immediately conscious of the cold. For a naoli to feel such a sharp sensation of temperature, the situation had to be drastic.
As it was.
He had been flung free of the shuttlecraft, slid along the snowy mountainside, scraping even his tough naoli hide raw in places. He came to a rest in a deep drift sloping into a row of seven, thick-boled pines. He was looking out of a depression in the drift now, up the well his body had made by falling in. His body heat had melted the crystals, and the severe cold had re-frozen them. He was coated in ice that kept melting the re-freezing. The bitterness was worst on the torn patches where he would have bled if the blood had not been frozen solid.
Even a naoli could not survive for long in a situation such as this. He pushed up, stumbled erect, and wearily slapped and kicked his way free of the drift. He stood in the early morning air, half an hour before dawn, scanning the darkness for a sign of Leo or the shuttle.
He could see neither.
Indeed, much of what he could see was blurred by the great clouds of ghostly vapor spouting from his four nostrils, especially from the lower, secondary set which, when operative, did the greatest amount of respiratory work. He was annoyed at this, yet he could not close the secondary nostrils without operating on a semi-dormant level. And he presently needed to move as fast and wisely as possible.
He looked up the side of the mountain, but he could not see the top. A combination of darkness and shifting snow kept his range of vision down to thirty feet. How far down the slope had they come, then? At what point had he been thrown free of the shuttlecraft? Had the car gone to the bottom of the mountain, or had it too come to a stop only part way down? Was Leo alive—or dead? Or dying?
He felt a rising panic at the last few questions. If Leo were dead or dying, then what purpose was there? If Leo were dead or beyond Hulann's help, then this entire flight, and the crime which had given it genesis, was without meaning. He might just as well turn himself in. The point was lost. The symbol had evaporated.
"Leo!" He called loudly, but his words were torn away by the wind, lost in the howling of the natural elements.
He turned and huddled against the wind, cupped his hands on either side of his mouth, shouted again. His hands withered the sound, only served to make the wind's final dissipation easier. Besides, if Leo were dead or unconscious, shouting would do no good whatsoever.
He stood, legs spread, drifted snow up to his knobbed knees, and looked around at the wilderness, confused and frightened. In all his nearly three hundred years, he had never found himself in remotely as dire a situation. The most dangerous moments of his life had been no more horrifying than those with the mutant rat in the cellar only days earlier. This was something else again. He was in a strange landscape, trapped without transportation other than his own feet during a furious spell of weather unlike anything he had ever encountered on the naoli home worlds. Somewhere, there was a boy, perhaps wounded seriously, whom he had to reach. And even if they did get out of this, onto the road again, there was nowhere to go. They had no friends.
The wind blew about him, whipped the snow hard against his scales, leaving it packed on him in some places. As he stood, huge green eyes picking up what little illumination there was, he seemed more of a statue, sculpted by a madman, than anything truly alive and functioning. An alien in an alien world, it seemed almost as if he generated the wind with his very presence, caused the snow to fall by merely standing and watching the darkness.
At last, he moved tentatively to his right, which somehow seemed the proper direction—though there were no signs by which he could intelligently judge. He knew that the car would surely have left a trail as it careened down the mountainside, and he hoped to cross over this eventually, then turn and follow it until he discovered the shuttle or whatever remained of it after its jolting descent.
The wind pounded him as he moved directly into it, buffeted like padded hammers. He could only progress when bent, making himself into a battering ram to crash through the eternal succession of the wind's doors. White breath gusted around him, swirled into the darkness.
He pushed to the last of this clump of pines, brushing a low, snow-laden limb out of his way. The vibrations of his rude passage swept upward through the tiers of the pine, causing a heavy deluge of snow that almost drove him to his knees.
A hundred yards later, he began to worry about his choice of direction. As yet, he had come across no signs of the shuttlecraft, only the smooth blown skin of the storm. Surely he could not have been thrown this far! He decided to make another twenty agonizing steps before turning back to explore the other direction. On the seventeenth step, he came to the edge of the ravine.
He almost stepped into the gulf. As he put a foot down, he realized the front of it curled over a break in the terrain. Cautiously, he pulled it back and went to his knees, peered into the fuzzy mask of the storm. As he concentrated, he began to make out the lines of a cut in the mountainside. He could not see the other side of it, but it was easily a few hundreds yards long, since he could not make out a point of origin or termination on either side.
It was also deep. It ended in a tumble of broken, jagged rocks that peeped up here and there, through their white blanket. If the shuttle had gone into that, then Leo was dead. There was no sense in descending to look for him.
Hulann stood and retraced his steps. During the last hundred feet or so, the wind had obscured his tracks, and he was forced to rely on what little he had noticed about the landscape on his way out. Still, using pines for markers, he got lost twice, spent several minutes stumbling drunkenly both times. He found the drift where he had awakened, for his fall had disturbed it too badly for the wind to heal it in minutes. Here, he hunkered for a moment against the trunk of a pine, trying to recover his breath, energy, and a little of the body heat he had lost.
He picked at the layer of ice that crusted him everywhere but at his joints, then stopped, deciding that the ice would offer his flesh some protection from the wind. He did not want to think about the warmth the ice itself sucked from his system.
After only three minutes of rest, he stood, stretched, and set out over the unexplored region to his left. At first, the wind was an asset, at his back now. It seemed to buoy him along, to make his treading lighter. Soon, the illusion disappeared. The wind became a great fist shoving, slamming against his rear. It sent him stumbling sideways, threw him to the earth and bulleted over him. He kept his long head tucked as much between his shoulders as he could, but the icy blasts against the back of his skull could not be ignored.
But he found the track of the shuttlecraft ripped through the virgin mantle of the winter storm. The snow had begun to fill it in, and the drifting wind had made fast work, narrowing it considerably from what it must have been in the first moments after the car passed. Hulann looked up the trail toward the top of the mountain, wondering if Leo had been thrown free, farther back. He tried to recall the long, falling moments after they had crashed through the rails, but it was all a blur even to his usually observant overmind. He would have to hope that the boy had remained in the craft. Stepping into the trail, he started down to find whatever there was to find.
At times, the way became so steep that he was afraid of stumbling, falling, losing control and sliding as the car had slid. In these places, he went to his hands and knees, crawling from one sprout of vegetation to another, from one jutting rock outcrop to the next. Here, the car had often left the ground, then smashed back to continue sliding.
Hulann found a few twisted pieces of it.
He held on to a few of them as he crawled forward, until h
e realized there was no purpose in that. He threw them away to free his hands again.
The cold air burned into his lungs. His chest had begun to ache strangely, and spasms of sharper pain more frequently lashed through his entire torso with a fierceness that forced him to stop and grit his needle teeth into his lips, drawing blood. It was some time before he understood that his tender lung tissues were being frozen by the winter air. The soft, wet internal flesh would harden and crack under this sort of punishment. He would have to take smaller breaths, slower breaths, so that they had more of a chance to warm on their way to his lungs. He could not get by on his primary nostrils, though he might be able to manage on the larger secondary set. He allowed the muscles of the primary pair to force down the blockage flap further back in his sinuses.
There was a mysterious grayness in the air. Dawn was coming, and even reaching small fingers through the clouds and the snow, through the pine needles to the floor of the earth where he so desperately needed it. Then, in the slightly increased light, he saw the fractured hulk of the shuttlecraft ahead.
It was wedged between two columns of rock which thrust out of the mountainside like markers for some sacred portal. At first, he thought they were artificial, but discovered they were natural—albeit odd—formations. The craft was on its side between the rocks, crushed by a third, battered beyond recognition. From this vantage point, looking partly in on the bottom of it, Hulann could see that both rotars were gone, that all of the drive mechanisms had been torn free. He had not expected it to be operative, of course. Yet its final, total death was somehow depressing.
Giving way to the slope, he slid and stumbled to the vehicle, came up hard against the back of it. He gripped it, breathing hard through his secondary nostrils. When he felt steady again, he looked the car over, cataloguing the dents and scrapes, then found a way up its side, along it until he came to the driver's door. The other door was pressed flat to the earth on the other side.
He could see nothing inside, for the passenger compartment was in total darkness.
"Leo!"
There was no answer.
"Leo!"
Silence.
He wrenched at the door, frantic. The guilt that had begun to lose its edge in him now flowered larger than ever. If the boy were dead, then he had killed the boy. Surely. Yes. Because he had been driving; because he had not been careful; because he was a naoli, and naoli had set up the conditions which had made their flight necessary in the first place.
But the door held, jammed, locked by bent and intermingled parts. It rattled slightly in its mounts, nothing more.
He fought it until he was exhausted. Then he called the boy's name some more.
The boy did not answer.
He tried listening for the sound of breathing from within, but he was defeated by the breath of the storm, which was greater, louder, more dynamic.
When more work at the door would not help, he leaned back and inspected the shuttlecraft for a breach that might give him entrance. He saw, then, that the wrap-around windscreen had been shattered. There were only a few splinters of glass sticking in the edges of the frame. He broke these out with the flat of his palm, then braced against the rocks and the hood, worked himself inside the car.
Leo had crawled—or had been tossed—into the luggage space behind the seats. It had been, in the plummeting, disintegrating car, the safest place to be. Hulann lifted his own suitcase off the boy's legs, rolled him over onto his back.
"Leo," he said softly. Then louder. Then he shouted it, slapping the small face.
The boy's face was very white. His lips were slightly blue. Hulann used the sensitive patches of his fingertips to test for skin temperature and found it dismayingly low for a human. He remembered then how little tolerance these people had to changes of temperature. Two hours exposed like this could do great damage to one of their frail systems.
He rummaged through his suitcase, brought out the powerful personal heat unit and thumbed the controls on the smooth, gray object that looked like nothing so much as a water-washed stone. Immediately, there was a burst of warmth that even he appreciated. He placed the device next to the boy and waited.
In a few minutes, the snow that had blown in melted and ran away, down the slanting floor to collect in the corners. The blueness left the boy's face; Hulann deemed it proper to inject a stimulant now. From the sparse medicinals in the case, he filled a hypo with serum and slid the needle into the visible vein in the boy's wrist, being careful to do as little damage as possible with the naoli-broad point.
Eventually, Leo stirred, kicking as if in a nightmare, Hulann quieted him by stroking his forehead. Ten minutes after these first signs, he opened his eyes. They were bloodshot.
"Hello," he said to Hulann. "Cold."
"It's getting warmer."
The boy moved closer to the heat unit.
"Are you all right?"
"Cold."
"Aside from that. Broken bones? Cuts?"
"I don't think so."
Hulann leaned against the back of the passenger's seat as he sat on what should have been the wall of the car. He breathed a sigh, realized his primary nostrils were still closed, and opened them. The warm air was good inside his chest.
In time, Leo sat up, held his head in his hands, began to massage his temples.
"We have to get out of here," Hulann said. "They'll be after us soon. We can't waste any time. Also, the heat source is going to give out if we have to keep it on full power. We'll have to find someplace to shelter and regain our strength and perspective."
"Where?"
"Up the mountain. There's no sense in going down. We don't know if there's anything down there. But there's a road at the top. If we get back on that, follow the guardrails, we should come to a building sooner or later."
Leo shook his head with doubt. "How far up?"
"Not far," Hulann lied.
"I'm still cold. And tired. And hungry too."
'We'll use the heat unit," Hulann said. "We'll have just a little to eat before we go out." You'll just have to fight the weariness. We must make time. The Hunter will surely be sent out soon."
"Hunter?"
"One of my kind. Yet not of my kind. He hunts."
Leo saw the terror in Hulann's eyes and stopped arguing. Maybe there were two kinds of naoli. The kind men had fought, Hulann's kind. Hulann was friendly. The other kind hunted. Maybe that explained the war. Yet Hulann had given him the impression that there was one Hunter—no more than a few. So that did not explain the war. That was still a mystery.
Hulann withdrew some doughy material which he compared with wheat bread—though Leo thought the taste altogether different, and inferior. He did not say so. The naoli seemed proud of the quality of the food he had been able to bring and considered these things minor naoli delicacies. To argue otherwise would only be to insult him.
They also had the eggs of certain fish suspended in a sour honey-gel. This, Leo thought, was indeed something special. He would have eaten much more if Hulann had not pointed out the danger of requiring too much heat for digestion and thereby forfeiting that needed to keep from freezing to death. Also, it might be wise to begin rationing.
When they finished and were as warm as they could get, Hulann closed the case, shoved it through the window. It slid down the hood, caught in among the rocks of the column on that side. He went out next, back into the maelstorm, and pulled Leo through the broken windscreen. They scrambled down until they were on the ground. Hulann fetched the case. He had Leo hold the heat unit, though the boy protested that Hulann was the naked one. He promised he would take turns with the unit now and then, and stay within a few feet of the boy in order to benefit by what it broadcast.
They turned and faced up the slope. Though daylight was now upon the land, visibility had not increased much. He could see an extra thirty feet, no more. The sky was low and threatened to stay that way for many hours to come. Hulann was thankful. At least, in the gloom and th
e walls of dancing flakes, Leo would not be able to see how far the top of the mountain really was . . .
"I'll break a way," he said to Leo. "Stay close, in my steps. Crawl when I crawl, walk when I walk. Okay?"
"I can take orders," the boy said haughtily.
Hulann laughed, slapped him on the shoulder, then turned and took the first step of the trek back to the highway . . .
. . . and simultaneously heard the first word of the Phasersystem alert . . .
Banalog stiffened in his chair when he heard the beginning of the Phasersystem alarm. The last traces of the sweet-drugs had left him an hour earlier, though he had decided to wait as long as possible before giving the alarm that would wake the Hunter and send him stalking Hulann and the boy. At first, he thought this alert had nothing to do with Hulann. It was being given by a woman named Fiala, an archaeologist and moderately well-known essayist in certain technical circles. When he ascertained, after the first few words, that she too was now tied and gagged by Hulann, he waited no longer. He added his voice to hers.
Moments after they had finished, there were naoli in his office to untie him, to take the gag from his mouth. One of them was a military officer named Zenolan, an extremely large person, a foot taller than Banalog, a super lizard with a head half again as large as a head should be. He took the empty hypo with the traces of sweet-drugs in it from the hands of one of the other naoli.
"Sweet-drugs?" he asked Banalog unnecessarily.
"Yes."
"When?"
"Last evening," Banalog lied.
"Why was he here?"
"A session under the machines."
Zenolan looked at the equipment hanging in the recessed section of the office ceiling. "A session? At night?"