The Druid Gene

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  “What?”

  “It’s time to begin,” Raub thundered behind her.

  Selpis’s hand twitched. Darcy leaned forward to look into her face more carefully. Her eyelids fluttered.

  Raub wrenched Darcy’s arm brutally as he hauled her to her feet and turned her to face him. “Ow! What gives?” she cried out.

  “It would be wise not to ignore me. I said it is time to begin.”

  She raised her eyes to his and blanched. Raub leaned over her, his gaze hard and unblinking, his jaw set, nostrils flaring. His face was a mask of menace. She hadn’t seen him like this since their last VR game. He thrust the knapsack he’d just been packing at her.

  She stared at him dumbly, a cold lump of fear churned in her stomach.

  “Take it,” he demanded.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, keeping her arms at her sides.

  He dropped the pack. It landed at her feet with a thud, narrowly missing her bare toes. He pressed a control, causing a door to open in the side of the tern. “Get out.”

  “What?”

  He grabbed her and shoved her toward the opening, then scooped up the pack and threw it at her. She caught it and held it against her stomach. In her peripheral vision she could see Selpis sitting up. She wanted to go to her and make sure she was okay. She needed to check on Tesserae71, who still wasn’t moving.

  “I’m not telling you again.” Raub pulled out one of the weapons he’d used against the boarding party on the Vermachten and pointed it at Selpis and Nembrotha.

  Darcy backed up a couple of steps. She was reeling. Had he gone insane? “Why are you doing this?”

  “I’ll give you a three-spin start,” he said calmly. “Then the ritual will begin. You would do well to make the most of that time.” He advanced on her slowly, with the gun still trained on Selpis.

  She backed up until she stood in the doorway. “What are you talking about? What ritual?”

  “The ancient ritual of the gildrut. The hunt.”

  The hunt.

  He went on, “Our peoples have been locked in this contest for centuries. I thought perhaps I would not get the chance to complete this ancestral call. But then Hain found you. You are drudii. I am lovek. It will not end until one or both of us is dead.”

  The memory of the video Hain had played for her aboard the Vermachten surfaced. She’d thought about it often, puzzled over the meaning of so much of what had been stated. The host had said, “…hunted to virtual extinction by the predatory race, Lovekitus quamut.”

  Lovek…

  The Lovek.

  And when she’d first been moved to the prisoner hold Tesserae71 had told her, “The Lovek is rarely seen. He keeps to himself, does all his dealings through Hain. He is like you. An anthropoid species.”

  Raub was the Lovek.

  He intended to hunt her.

  34

  Darcy stumbled down the gangway. Raucous forest sounds and a wave of heat and humidity assaulted her, but she barely noticed them.

  Raub was the Lovek.

  He grunted and made another threatening gesture toward Selpis.

  Darcy backed down one more step, landing abruptly with her bare feet on damp soil.

  Raub’s lips twisted in a brutal smile. He closed the door on the tern and the gangway retracted.

  She stood there staring at the silent ship, still clutching the pack. Now her friends were locked inside the cabin with a madman. What was she supposed to do? Her first instinct was to defy him. To refuse to play this game. To find a way to fight him here and rescue her friends. But he had a weapon. A weapon she’d watched him kill people with. And he’d just been pointing it at Selpis and Nembrotha. He might kill them if she didn’t do what he said.

  She should have known this was what he was going to do. He was completely obsessed with that hunting game. She should have seen this coming.

  Damn it. She’d let herself be manipulated into this situation.

  Could he really have abducted her just to create a scenario in which he could turn her loose and hunt her? Could that actually be happening? Had all the rest been nothing more than machinations—a script he and his crew had followed to prepare her for this tableau?

  Had the whole thing been carefully orchestrated? The months of intensive training, the narrow escapes from the guards and the boarding party, the harrowing space battle? Was she just a pawn to this guy? To fulfill some kind of fantasy?

  What the hell? This was her life.

  Who else was in on this? Hain, surely. Was Tesserae71 a party to it too? To help make sure she was conveniently in the right place at the right time? Was Selpis? Nembrotha? Had they been placed in the corridor at that moment to serve as sympathetic plants she would grow attached to so he could threaten them in order to get her to do what he wanted?

  Was it even possible that all of that could have been mapped out ahead of time? She didn’t like the uncertainty she felt when she thought about that. The relationships she’d formed with the three of them had seemed real. But she couldn’t know for sure.

  Suddenly she felt very heavy. She crumpled to the ground where she’d been standing. The pack fell from nerveless fingers.

  Was there any alternative to running for her life? What else could she do?

  He was going to kill her.

  He’d trained her, telling himself that made it a fair fight. It didn’t. She knew that. She couldn’t beat him. There was no way.

  She didn’t want to die fighting him on some alien planet. All she wanted was to find Adam, get home, and forget that any of this had ever happened.

  Tears welled up in her eyes. She looked down at her hands. Though her vision was blurred, she could see that her fingers were shaking. She felt so empty inside. So hopeless.

  There wasn’t any way out.

  She felt so small. She was just one person, alone in this terrifying and huge galaxy that she knew nothing about. There was no one to save her from him or even to help her fight him.

  She thought about the people she’d left behind on Earth. She’d never see them again. Her mother, such a flake, but basically harmless. She’d never feel another one of her kisses on the forehead, be given another one of her blessings. Her father, who had worked three jobs to help her defray college expenses and avoid taking on so much debt, whose quiet strength had always inspired her. He was so proud of her ambition. He’d never envelop her in another bear hug.

  Adam. She’d failed him. What she wouldn’t give to be in some wild place with him now, roughing it. She should have enjoyed those times more instead of wishing she was somewhere else.

  She closed her eyes, remembering the two-week camping trip they’d taken in northern Minnesota after college graduation. It had been quiet and peaceful, sitting by the side of a river watching the sun set. She’d teased him that he should have brought a fishing pole so they could have fish for dinner instead of the beef jerky they’d just eaten.

  He’d stretched and gotten up, picking up short sticks in the area. She’d thought he was gathering more wood for the fire until he’d stripped off shoes and socks, waded into the stream, and started pushing the sticks down into the water.

  “When you give a patient a vaccine, what are you doing?” he’d asked her.

  “Protecting them from disease,” she’d replied.

  “Yeah, but how?”

  She’d raised her eyebrows. Apparently he was feeling philosophical that evening. She’d been less so, after hiking all day. “I’m giving them a dead virus to trigger their immune system to create antibodies that will protect them if they are exposed to a live virus.” She knew he knew this. She didn’t know what he was getting at.

  He nodded, bending at the waist, pushing another stick deep into the mud beneath the water. “Yep. You use something natural to change the environment to get the result you want. The vaccine makes the environment hostile to the virus. That’s what I’m doing. Changing the environment to make it work for me.”

  “We’r
e going to have hostile sticks for breakfast in the morning?”

  The next morning they’d eaten fish. It had been pretty delicious.

  “Where on Earth did you learn to do this stuff?” she’d asked, peering at the simple M-shaped corral he’d made out of sticks that had captured an enormous catfish overnight.

  “Oh, God. My dad made me go to survival camp three years in a row as a kid.” He’d shrugged. “I like to keep practicing this stuff. You never know when it might come in handy.”

  Darcy sat up straight.

  Wait a minute.

  It was true that Raub had the upper hand when it came to a physical fight. But that wasn’t all she knew. She had life experience that he knew nothing about.

  The only time she’d ever bested him was when she’d acted unpredictably and caught him off guard.

  She felt for the broken bolt in the hem of her jumpsuit to reassure herself it was still there.

  She had more to draw from than even she had realized. He would underestimate her. If she used her head, if she was as ruthless as he was, she might have a chance. Maybe as a human or druid alone she wouldn’t. But she was more than that. Much more.

  Darcy the medical student might not be able to survive this. Darcy, Raub’s martial-arts protégé, might not either. But Darcy the drudii-human hybrid could do this and find Adam too.

  She breathed deeply.

  Raub had no idea what she was capable of.

  35

  Darcy sat there for a while, deep in thought, cataloging the kinds of things she knew that she could use to outsmart Raub.

  If the thing brushing against Darcy’s calf hadn’t been so persistent she might have ignored it. But it went on and on, a light tickling, sweeping motion. She turned her head like she was waking from a deep sleep.

  It was at least six feet long, with dozens of delicate blood-red legs supporting a segmented, yellow-green speckled shell the diameter of a dinner plate. It was ambling across the forest floor, and her leg just happened to be in its path.

  It was so unexpected, so foreign, so huge, that she let out a blood-curdling scream and scrambled away from it. The creature paused, lifted the front of its body up and swung its head around to look at her for a moment, then continued on its way.

  She scrambled to her feet and grabbed the pack. While she’d been sitting there brooding, the shadows had lengthened. It was going to be dark in a few hours, and she had no idea what was in the surrounding area. That enormous insect could be just the beginning. There could be predators. This was a stupid time and place to sit around. She had to find somewhere safe to pass the night.

  First she needed to see what she was facing out here in this alien wilderness. Stepping carefully in her bare feet, she hiked away from the tern along the path of destruction it had made when it landed, so that she could easily find it again if she needed to. She didn’t want to get disoriented first thing, before she even had a plan. Keeping her wits about her was going to be key.

  It was odd though. She did have a distinct feeling about the direction she’d been traveling in. In fact… She turned slowly in a circle. She had a very strong sense when she faced a certain way, about twenty degrees off from the path she’d been following, that if she went straight and true in that direction, she’d find the tern again without any trouble. She didn’t know what to make of that new feeling and was afraid to trust it, though she’d always had a good sense of direction. Maybe that had been enhanced somehow when the apochondria had been charged back on Earth. That hadn’t been on the list of druid powers, but maybe the list hadn’t been complete.

  She scouted into the woods from time to time but always kept the tern’s path in sight just in case. For the most part this was very much like a forest on Earth. The trees had green leaves, though the shapes of those leaves were unfamiliar and most of the leaves’ coloration seemed to skew toward blue-green rather than a pure green. Fuzzy pale-orange mossy things grew on some of the tree trunks in thick clumps like shag carpeting, sometimes dripping with brown, wet-looking dots.

  The noises that filled the air were not like the birdsong or frog calls from back home. They were a creaking chorus of loud and disparate insect sounds, deeper than those of a Midwestern summer night, throbbing in and out in intensity.

  There were crimson blobs growing out of the soil all over the place. She accidentally stepped on one and discovered it was crunchy, crumbling into powder under her weight. She worried about being exposed to something toxic and immediately sat down, to use the hem of her jumpsuit to wipe the blood-red powder off her bare heel. She was already grimy with mud and perspiration from head to toe. She wished she had sturdy shoes, but the abducted aboard the Vermachten didn’t get to have shoes.

  Unless she found a lake or stream to bathe in, she was going to have to stay dirty. Maybe that was better. The shimmering stark white of her jumpsuit stood out in this environment. Dirt might act as a kind of camouflage.

  She’d been hoping to find some naturally defensible spot, like a cave or something, but even on Earth caves weren’t everywhere. She’d only been inside one once on a guided tour. She didn’t know how to find one, even if they existed on this planet.

  This planet. She was on an alien planet. It was so surreal. She’d had no idea what she’d expected, but it hadn’t been this. Trees. A blue sky overhead. During the journey in the tern she’d imagined that everything would be bizarrely different, but it wasn’t. It was only marginally different. So far, anyway.

  She leaned against a large fallen log, easily five feet in diameter, to catch her breath and just think. It was hot and she was unused to moving around in gravity after so long. She couldn’t see the two suns, but the light had the quality of late afternoon to her. She had to make a decision about how she would spend the night. She didn’t have a tent.

  Adam had obsessively watched a television show called Adventure Man. She’d watched it with him from time to time. The premise was that a man was dropped off in the remote wilderness with just a few tools, alone, to survive for a week. That guy always used whatever was available in the landscape to construct a shelter. It suddenly struck her that the tree trunk she was leaning against might serve that purpose adequately, if she could build a lean-to.

  Maybe it was overkill, maybe it would be completely inadequate, but it gave her some purpose and she supposed she needed that more than anything else at the moment. She gathered long sticks that had fallen from the trees and propped them along the log, creating a triangular space underneath. As she ranged through the immediate area looking for more suitably long sticks, she came across some tall plants, taller than her, that had long, four-inch-wide, ribbon-shaped leaves growing in whirls around a central point, like super-sized grass.

  She tried breaking one off at the base, then tried pulling it up, but both attempts failed. It was sturdy and rooted firmly. So she settled for pulling leaves off of several of them and carrying them back to her makeshift shelter. She laid them over the sticks like shingles in hopes they would help keep out any rain, but she was doubtful they would be adequate to prevent her from getting wet in a downpour. She quickly worked up a sweat.

  It was a really sad job of it, but it was better to attempt to be prepared in any case. She had to start somewhere. Night might be long here, and she wouldn’t have much warning if the weather should change. She could only see small patches of sky overhead.

  Once she had the makeshift shelter constructed, she climbed on top of one end of the log to sit and think and observe the woods. She took Raub’s pack with her to inspect the contents carefully.

  Primarily it was stuffed with what Raub had called crackers—a tougher version of the food cubes they had eaten on the Vermachten. Crackers were unflavored, dry nutrition bars. He’d said they were cheap and sold at a high markup to the poor in remote colonies that might suffer famine from time to time. They didn’t sound very palatable, but they would satisfy hunger and keep her going for a while.

  There were only
a few other items inside the pack: a sheathed knife with a tiny forked prong at the tip, a flask-shaped contraption that had a label saying it condensed humidity from the air to create drinkable water, and a very thin rectangular piece of brown fabric that was either a tarp or a blanket or both. So she had food, water, something to keep her warm, and something to defend herself with.

  She was thirsty from the work, so she examined the water flask carefully. She sighed. It wasn’t turned on and there was no water in the small reservoir. She’d been fooled by its weight until she realized it was more than just a canteen. She figured out how to switch it on and set it nearby. She had to keep the air intake uncovered, so it couldn’t stay inside the pack. The instructions said the rate of water production was dependent upon the relative humidity. It was very warm, and the air seemed heavy, so she hoped to see some water collecting inside the reservoir soon. It could also be used to siphon and purify water, so if she happened upon a stream she could drink all she wanted. She hadn’t seen one today, but she hadn’t travelled far.

  She was breaking off a corner of a cracker between her molars when movement overhead made her look up. Something with wings was darting around in the treetops. She chewed on the dry, tasteless piece of the bar automatically as she tried to figure out what she was seeing in the failing light.

  She saw a second one. Then a third. Maybe they hunted at dusk. Were they birds picking insects out of the trees? They seemed to fly like hummingbirds, though she was certain they were much larger.

  The crackers were gross. It was kind of like eating wet cardboard. She managed to get a few bites in her before putting the bar back in the pack. She kept her eyes on the activity in the trees overhead.

  The creatures moved erratically but gracefully, swooping up and down and changing direction quickly. One of them dove to within twenty feet of her and her jaw dropped. It was an insect, and its wingspan was easily three feet.