She was a good nurse; I knew that from wounds of my own she had bound. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” Actually, it was four minutes, but when I settled the floater down next to the pieces of web, she already had Crazy uncovered and clean of every fragment of the stuff. I took the cameras, slung them over my shoulders, and set out — lugging what two were meant to carry — keeping my gun drawn and an eye out for hairy trees…
Three hours later, I stumbled back, worn out and showing it. Lotus and Crazy were sitting there laughing about something. “Nice way to get out of work,” I said, standing over them.
Crazy looked up and whinnied that silly whinny of his. “You can have this blasted arm if you want. I’d rather have gone setting the cameras than nursing this.”
“A likely story.”
“We’d better be getting back,” Lotus said. “Looks like a storm, and I don’t want to see what might come tramping around in the rain.”
It was heavy rain that gave Fanner II’s vampire plants their most voracious appetites.
“Okay. Can you walk, Crazy?”
“I can manage.”
One day, the men start looking like animals to you. Noses metamorphose into snouts. Eyes grow beadier. Ears suddenly become tufted with hair. Fingernails take on the appearance of claws. And you realize you are allowed to shoot animals: it is within you to shoot animals, though men are off limits. You go to oil your guns… But you also realize you are just imagining them as animals so that you will be able to shoot them and revenge your mother — and maybe wipe out that entire chapter of your life. Deep down, you fear that you want to spill the rich blood of men — spill it and drink it…
I must have been moaning in my sleep. It was an old and often felt dream, recurring through all the years that I could remember. I say that I must have been muttering, for when I slipped from the dream to the dark reality of the bedroom, there was a light body against mine, lips on my two, and soft velvet wings enclosing us in the closet of our souls… The next morning, we went out to collect the cameras. Crazy’s arm was almost healed, thanks to the speedheal salve and bandages. We hoped that he would be well enough to begin the hunt shortly after noon, in the event the cameras had recorded anything that would interest us.
And the cameras had.
“I don’t like it,” Crazy grunted as the film loop came across the viewer for the sixth time.
“It isn’t the ugliest we’ve met,” I said, trying to reassure myself as well as them. Not the ugliest, but ugly enough. Seven and a half feet, heavier than Crazy. Two arms trailing the ground, six-inch claws on them, and a set of smaller arms in the middle of the barrel chest. The little hands fiddled with each other, lacing fingers, picking insects from each other, scratching in a strange symbiosis. The mouth was a treasure trove — if one happened to be a biologist who valued sharp yellow teeth. The Beast had one sunken eye in the left side of its face, an undeveloped socket where the other one should be. The facial skin was leathery, dark, broken occasionally by tufts of bristly hair. “It doesn’t even look as dangerous as the spider.”
“That’s what I mean. I don’t like it.”
“Huh?”
“I think,” Lotus interrupted, “that Crazy means it looks too easy. Anything as easy as this Beast looks would have been knicked out by the first team that went after it. It must have something else besides claws, teeth, and an extra pair of hands.”
It did look evil. And there were those other twenty-two bounty hunters to think about. “What do you think?”
“Can’t say,” Lotus murmured, almost as if she were talking to herself. “That would be like stating the cause of death before the murder.”
“What’s the consensus? Should we back out of this one?”
They both said no.
“We don’t really need the money yet.”
“There was Garner,” Crazy added.
I smiled, shut off the tape loop. “Okay. Let’s get started. Crazy, your arm good enough?”
He peeled off the bandage, flexed the muscular arm. The skin stretched new and tight and delicately across the wound. It was swollen and red, but unscarred. “Never felt better. Let’s go.”
And we did.
IV
After a short but hot march, we made camp near the cross-way where the camera had caught him. Lotus took the first watch near evening, and I was halfway into the second when I heard something of more than medium size coming along from the right. Unholstering my pistol, I stretched out behind a heavy row of bushes and waited. My infrared goggles filtered away most of the night, giving me a view that was probably as good as the Beast’s.
In a way, I wished it were still dark. This fellow looked a great deal more formidable in person than seen from a little piece of film through the eye of an unemotional lens. First, in the short view it gave, the camera didn’t catch the easy loping motion of the mutant. I decided upon its ancestry pretty quickly: ape. There must have been a zoo around when the big bang wiped out the city and its suburbs — a zoo just far enough out to be saved from a mortal blow. Radiation did the rest. I watched, horrified, as it loped by in the night.
I was sweating profusely, yet the wind was cold.
Pushing up from the ground, I stepped back to my previous waiting post. I had not fired, for I wanted to judge how much it would take to stop this Beast before I leaped out firing my little toy-like gun. Now I had that figured out, and I could wait for its reappearance. I was in the process of sitting down when I saw, from the corner of my eye, that the Beast had returned and was standing a dozen yards away, squinting at me. I cursed myself for forgetting the curiosity and cunning of the apes.
Suddenly, it started for me.
I brought up my pistol, fired.
Blue-white, blue-white!
But when the flash was gone and the night had angrily rushed back in to claim its territory, there was no ape-alive or dead. If I had killed it, it would be lying there, a blackened corpse. Had I wounded it, it certainly could not have gotten away that quickly. Which meant that it was still alive, somewhere near.
The night seemed exceptionally black, even with the goggles.
I stood very still, listening. Then it struck me that the Beast might be hunched below the dense brush line, moving along the pathway to a point where it could more easily leap — and dismember me. I cursed myself for missing, tried to reassure myself that it had moved too fast for any marksman to hit. Rather than wait for the attack, I began moving backward through the brush, gun drawn, eyes watering as I kept them pinned to the weeds and flowers, trying to sight anything that would give me a target.
Behind me, a hundred yards away, a small knoll rose in a clearing. If I could back to that, I would be looking down on this area and could spot the mutant as it stalked me, blast it before it could get close. Carefully, I moved toward that knoll. No use in yelling for help. The dense woods would cut that shout to nothingness before it had passed over the ridge that separated me from camp.
The wind was not just cold. The wind was laden with the freezing steam of dry ice. I shivered inwardly and outwardly.
When I reached the knoll, I found it was not a knoll at all. The clearing was filled with a dense clover-like vegetation that was only inches tall at the edge but which grew higher toward the middle until it reached a mushroom-like peak of about five and a half feet. I stopped, turned to go back the way I had come. But I stopped again. Somewhere ahead of me lay the Beast, waiting. I couldn’t know where, and it would be certain suicide to try to go back the way I had entered. My only hope was to continue back through this clearing, out of it, up the ridge, down the ridge and into camp. I backed.
It was not as simple as it sounded.
Halfway into the clover stuff, with thick, bushy vegetation up to my shoulders, I became aware of the growling and snuffling that boomed ferociously somewhere very close at hand.
I stopped, stood perfectly still, trying not to breathe even. Somewhere in this clover, somewhe
re beneath its almost sea-like surface, the Beast moved — and searched. I panicked, fired wildly into the growth. A spot the size of a man was burned away, leaving a black, shadow-filled hole in the sea that did not refill itself. There was still growling, closer now. I forced myself into calm. Shooting without a target would do me no good and might serve to give the Beast a fix on me.
Ice wind whistled around me.
Finally, I saw what I was looking for. A ripple in the surface of the clover. A body as large as the Beast’s, moving crouched through the clover, would leave a wake on the top that should be noticeable. I pointed at the ripple, steadied my hand…
And reeled sideways as the Beast leaped! It missed me only by inches, crashing into the clover and disappearing beneath the green surface. I fired at the spot where it went in, but it had moved now and was somewhere else. Heart pounding, I started to survey the surface again.
And again it jumped. This time, though I twirled wildly aside, it caught me a bruising swipe with its claws before crashing into the brush again. Blood spurted from my shoulder, then subsided into a steady, thick flow. Fire shot through every muscle in my arm, and I transferred the gun to my good hand.
Forcing myself to ignore the pain and find the ripple in the clover that marked the enemy, I searched the surface again, half resolved to being mauled by the Beast before I could locate it. Then, just when aching fatigue began to creep upward from my feet, I saw it. Sighting carefully on the lead of the wake, I fired. The Beast staggered erect, clutching its arm, reeled sideways. Shivering, I fired again, opened a wound on its leg. It was bleeding as badly as I was. I sighted for another shot.
Then, suddenly, everything went into a slow, syrupy, fogbound set of events that registered only indirectly on my mind. The Beast was trying to stagger away… I could not shoot… the Beast had done something so that I could not shoot… the trigger was stone to me… the night swallowed him… I passed out.
Later, the sun was up and the birds were singing, and Lotus was pouring something warm into my mouth, forcing me to wake to a beautiful scene: her face. Then Crazy spoiled it by sticking his horsey mug into the picture. “What happened?”
“We found you in that clover, almost dead. What was it?”
I struggled to sit up, managed with their help. My head spun, settled slowly like a great amusement ride reaching its end, came to a full stop. “I shot it, wounded it anyway. It tried to kill me.”
“Why didn’t you kill it?” Lotus asked.
“I guess… it knocked my gun away.”
“No,” Crazy said. “You had your gun when we found you. You must have been holding it when the Beast made its getaway. We had to pry it from your fingers. Why didn’t you shoot it again?”
I tried to remember. I could picture the blue-white vibra-beam tearing the night apart and sewing it back together. There was some sort of exclamation which I had not made. Then I could not shoot. I explained the memories to the others.
“Hypnosis?” Crazy asked.
“I don’t think so. I wasn’t spellbound or anything like that. Something… something else.”
“I think we should back out now,” Lotus said. “We’ll just end up like Garner. Sorry, Crazy, but we will! I think we should pack our gear and move out fast.”
“No,” I said, trying to look more chipper than I felt. “We’ll get it. I know we will.”
“But there are other jobs — easier jobs,” she protested.
“We’ve shed our blood over this one,” Crazy said. “When you spill your blood for a hunt, you’re bound to get the Beast no matter what. It goes above revenge.”
She fluttered her downy blue wings, looked right through me like only she can. “It’s more than that to you, isn’t it, Andy?”
“Yes,” I croaked. No use hiding anything from Lotus — not with eyes that enter the soul like hers do. “Yes, I suppose it is. Though I don’t know what.” Then I passed out again.
Two days later.
All my wounds had healed under the speedheals. We had not seen the Beast since, though we were not inexperienced enough to think it had crawled away to die. That is a dangerous assumption in this profession; turn your back for even a second and bang! We decided, instead, that it had returned to its lair, somewhere in the forest, to lick its wounds and heal itself. We had ceased to speculate about why I had been unable to kill it when I had the chance, for that was not a happy thing to speculate about. Too many bad dreams in something like that.
Leaving everything that could not be carried with relative ease, we struck out with inflatable mattresses, food, water, and guns. Most of all, guns. After establishing what our quarry’s footprints were like (humanish, four-toed, long and wicked claws tipping each toe) from a set that led away from the clover patch fight scene in a limp pattern, we moved deeper into the woods. On the second day of the trek, we found where it had fallen and had lain for some time until it found the strength to go on. On the third day, we tracked it to the lip of the Harrisburg Crater — where the footprints ceased.
We stood there on the rim of the vast depression, staring across the table of nuclear glass that the triple-headed super-nuclear rocket had made. The crater, I knew from the maps, was two and a quarter miles in diameter. There was a lot of space. Dotting it were thousands of bubbles in the glass. A great number of them were broken and led to the maze of uncharted tunnels and caves that lay under the floor of the crater. Apparently, in one of these caves, the Beast was licking its wounds — and waiting.
“How can we cover all that?” Crazy asked. “It’s big! And slippery!”
“We’ll do it,” I said. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t know why I didn’t order everyone to backtrack, to get the hell out of there chop-chop, on the double. Lotus was right, of course: the reason was more than revenge against a dumb animal. For a moment, I felt like Hamlet on the castle ramparts, talking to a ghost. But that feeling passed. My determination had something to do with that night when I could have killed it but did not. That night when I almost let it kill me. And why? And what about the other twenty-two?
“I guess here is as good a place as any,” Lotus said. “Let’s make camp here.” She swung a hand around, indicating the thirty feet of hard-packed earth that separated the forest from the crater edge. Here and there, a few sparse pieces of vegetation were trying to grow on the no-plant’s-land between woods and glass. They weren’t doing very well, but they made the bleakness a little less bleak.
“Here it will be,” I said, dropping my own gear. “We’ll search the caves tomorrow.”
Nightfall stole in, a black fog.
There were stars in the sky, but the greatest light show of all lay at our feet. For two and one quarter miles ahead, the nuclear glass shimmered with vibrant colors as it gave off the heat of the day. Blues chased reds across its surface while ambers danced with ebonies, locked arms with streaks of green.
I was sitting on the crater wall, dangling my legs, a hundred yards from the main camp. Crazy was back there still eating supper. His suppers lasted two hours, with no time wasted in those hundred and twenty minutes either. Lotus drifted down next to me, folded her tiny legs under her, and put her head on my shoulder. Her hair was cool and sweet-smelling. Also nice: it was black as the night and blew around my ears and chin and made me feel good.
“Beautiful, isn’t it,” I said. There was a burst of orange rimmed with silver.
“Very,” she said as she tried to crawl even closer. She was our consolation. She held the team together. Crazy and I could not last a month without her. Briefly, I wondered how, when she consoled Crazy, they managed, what with his being so big and clumsy and her being so tiny, so fragile. But she never came back chipped or cracked, so maybe the lummox was gentler than he seemed.
“You scared?” I asked. She was trembling, and it was not cold.
“You know me.”
“We’ll win.”
“You sound so sure.”
“We have to. We’re the good
guys.”
I felt something wet on my neck, and I knew it was a tear. I shifted a little and cuddled her and said now-now and other things. Mainly, I just sat there being uncomfortable and damned happy all at once. Lotus almost never cries. When she does, she is worried about one of us—really worried. Then you can’t stop her until she’s dried out. You can only sit and hold her. And when she’s finished, she never mentions the fact that she was crying; you better never mention it either, if you know what’s good for you.
So, she was crying. And I was cuddling.
And Crazy was suddenly screaming—
V
A very long time ago, as I had sat at the upstairs window before my mother made me leave our house, there had come two giant red eyes out of the night mists. They had been as large as saucers, casting scarlet light ahead of them, focusing on the house. It was a jeep covered with sheets and red cellophane and painted to look like a dragon by the Knights of the Dragon to Preserve Humanity. I thought it very funny that grown people should play at such ridiculous games.
Below me now, in the pit that had suddenly opened and gulped down Crazy, a spider, spindly legs bracing it a hundred feet down, was looking up with crimson headlamp eyes. Only there was something worse than a jeep behind these lamps. Much worse.
“Crazy!” I shouted.
“Here. To the left!”
I took the lantern Lotus brought from the camp, lowered it into the steeply sloping tunnel. The spider backed off another fifty feet but no more. Probably a female. Females are more fearless than their mates. Branching off from the main fall were several side tunnels, all filled with sticky eggs and webbing.
“It must have burrowed close to the surface,” Crazy shouted. “I just stepped on the ground. It wiggled, gave, and fell through.”
He had rolled into one of the side tunnels, was caught up in the stickiness and eggs. The web was probably a different variety than the one the other spider had used to entrap us earlier. This one was for protecting eggs and would be even more thick and gummy. The mother spider fidgeted below, wanting to come charging up to protect her eggs, frightened only for a moment. “Lotus!” I shouted. “Climbing cleats and your knife. Hurry!”
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