Pariah

by W. Michael Gear

  She twisted around, searching desperately. One of the damn things could be paces away, obscured by the hammering downpour. She’d never know. Not until that last instant when the giant head snapped through the curtain of falling water to crush her.

  Sobering, wasn’t it? To know that her life was no more valuable than any other man or woman’s. For the first time in her life, she was completely inconsequential. Vulnerable. And the universe just plain didn’t give a damn.

  Fucked bitch that she was, half of her wanted to laugh—and the other half was desperate to break down and bawl.

  A blinding white light flashed off to the west. Like a giant strobe it illuminated the falling streamers of rain in a million silver streaks. Cast the outlines of buildings in black silhouette. Burned pale against the low clouds and vanished in an instant.

  It was immediately followed by a loud concussion, a blast that shook buildings and sent a tremor through the earth under her feet like a small quake. Sure as hell, that wasn’t thunder. Explosion!

  “What the hell?” was followed with a flurry of chatter on the com.

  “Hey!” Dya’s voice from the control room drowned them all. “One at a time. Report.”

  Paco Anderssoni’s voice came through from the military channel. “We just had a detonation at the fence about midway between north and west gates. Looks to me like a twenty- to thirty-foot hole has been blown in the chain-link, and what’s still standing on either side isn’t looking any too healthy.”

  Wan Xi Gow reported. “My battle tech shows that I’ve got an aircar coming in from the west. Don’t know if it’s related.”

  “Don’t shoot!” another voice broke into the net. “We’re coming in with an emergency medical. What the hell is going on down there?”

  “Yvette?” Two Spot asked.

  “Roger that.”

  “Hey, my team.” Step’s voice cut through, hard and commanding. “We got a problem, people. Somebody just took down the fence. And we’ve got three quetzals ready to rip us into pieces and swallow us chunk by chunk.”

  “So what do you want to do?” Michegan asked.

  “Keep to the plan. We stay in contact with Abu Sassi’s team. Sweep forward until we hit the hole in the fence. At that point, we have to stop, people. We pass that hole, half of Donovan can slip in behind us.”

  “Roger that,” Abu Sassi radioed back. “We’ll go as far as we can to keep the line.”

  And what about all the people in the residential section beyond that? Kalico asked herself, thinking about the map, about the huge section of Port Authority they just didn’t have the personnel to rescue.

  She ground her teeth, searching desperately through the falling rain. As hard as it was coming down, a quetzal could be looming over her, its hide the same color of black as the night.

  Catching sight of Mgumbe, she started forward, searching desperately for Abu Sassi’s man. Where the hell was he? She was so focused that at first the pile of cloth in the middle of the street didn’t register.

  She was almost upon it before she recognized the torn overalls. A rifle lay in the mud off to the side. “People,” she called, “Got another probable here.”

  Trying to see in all directions, she bent down, rifle up and ready, and carefully reached out. Water was filling the quetzal tracks where the beast had slid, turned, and grabbed its victim.

  Kalico lifted the fabric. “Got a name stitched on the breast pocket. Says Dube Dushku.”

  Lightning danced above, the glaring flash of white light blinding before the night-vision filters kicked in, but Kalico could still see the rent fabric. How the quetzal had torn Dushku in half.

  The thunderclap deafened, and Kalico let her tears mix with the rain running down her face.

  77

  Talina wheeled her aircar in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, lined up with the avenue, and set it down. Even as she was spinning the fans down, she turned, calling, “Shig, Yvette, you get one end of the stretcher.”

  Come on, Trish. Hang in there!

  Port Authority seemed to flash into existence as lightning flickered in the black skies. The front of the hospital was briefly bathed in white; then darkness swallowed all but the light over the double doors. Rain pounded down around them.

  Raya Turnienko was propping the doors open as Talina killed the power and swung her legs over the side. She barely had the strength to push herself onto her feet.

  Rain battered at her head and shoulders as she forced herself to grab her end of the stretcher and lead the way. The world seemed to sway and spin with each step.

  “How are you doing?” Raya asked her briefly, and then turned her attention to Trish.

  “Lightheaded, half in the world of dreams.”

  “This is bad,” Raya growled as she got her first glimpse of Trish’s leg. She placed one of her diagnostic monitors on Trish’s neck. “Operating room. Right now!”

  Shig got the doors as they hurried down the hall. Raya—having produced cutters—was clipping off Trish’s pants as they went.

  Talina got a good look at her friend’s face: slack, deathly pale, didn’t look like she was breathing.

  Tal bit her lip, fought the urge to reach down and touch one of the glassy eyes for a reaction. Didn’t really want to know.

  Memories flashed—times when Trish had been a kid. Lost, orphaned, in need of some sort of direction. “Listen,” Talina had told the stunned and grieving girl, “I’ve got nobody. Why don’t you move in with me until you get your legs under you?”

  She remembered the sudden welling relief that had rolled through Trish’s wounded green eyes. Was that the same person who’d thumbed Cap’s drug monitor wide open?

  I need you to pull through, kid.

  And if she didn’t?

  No. Don’t even think it.

  “I need Dya!” Raya called as they burst into the operating room and slipped the stretcher onto the table.

  “Where is she?” Shig asked, water running down his round brown face.

  “Admin, running the quetzal search.”

  “On it,” Shig said.

  Yvette added, “We’ll get her here if we don’t get eaten in the process.” That said, she and Shig were gone.

  “That right?” Talina asked as she wobbled her way over to the medical cabinet. “They said three quetzals?”

  Wasn’t bad enough she was worried sick about Trish, her subconscious flooded with recurring images of Xibalba and quetzals. Damn it, she had to concentrate. Her best friend was hanging by a thread, her heart was breaking, her body was exhausted, and people were dying out there.

  “Apparently so,” Raya muttered as she ran her hands into the sterilizer. “What are you doing in my cabinet?”

  “Stim shot. I’ve been in Xibalba for the last week being spoon-fed and peeing into a diaper.”

  “What’s Xibalba?”

  “The battleground where my psyche chose to fight for control of my mind.”

  “And how’s that working? Last time you tied me to my own bed.”

  “How about you wait to whip and beat me until this quetzal thing is over? Save my friend’s life. Then you can hammer the crap out of me in payback.”

  Raya nodded, glanced up, and for the first time, really got a good look. “Pus and buckets, Tal. What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “Just woke up with them. We can creep-freak over my new looks as soon as we get shit back in order around here.” Talina found the stim, pulled a syringe, and loaded a healthy three ccs.

  “Hey, you go easy on that stuff!”

  “Yeah, what I’d give for a heaping plate of chamois enchiladas drowned in poblanos, refritos, and a couple of buckets of tea.” Talina pressed the syringe against her forearm and hit the release.

  “Absafragginglutely miraculous,” she whispered as the chemicals hit
her depleted system.

  “Got a problem here!” a voice said in her com. “Everybody hold up. Nobody moves until we clear this mess of haulers.”

  “Keep Trish alive,” Talina called over her shoulder. She hit the hallway, stopping only long enough to grab Raya’s slicker off the back of the woman’s office door. Then she was out into the night.

  At the aircar, she retrieved her rifle, checked the load, and made sure her belt was tight, the pistol and knife loose in their sheaths.

  “Okay, Demon,” she told the quetzal in her belly, “it’s war, is it? Let’s go turn some of your relatives into steaks and leather.”

  Careful, Rocket whispered in her subconscious.

  Quetzal vision. It had been shading into her eyesight for the last year. The eyes through which she now saw were remarkably clear. No wonder the damned things loved to hunt on stormy nights. She might have been walking down the avenue in broad daylight. Not only that, she needed only scent the breeze eddying through the rain to smell quetzal.

  And blood.

  And fear.

  Should have been her and Trish walking down the avenue, headed into the jaws of danger. She half expected Trish’s familiar voice to break into the com at any second, asking for a report, calling orders.

  Damn it, kid. Stay alive! We’ll deal with what you did to Cap later.

  She passed a couple of people who’d been located by the search teams and were headed for their weapons to join the hunt. Caught up to the search lines just past Montoya’s shop.

  “Coming up behind you. Don’t shoot,” she called to the woman who stood in the middle of the avenue at the key position between the lines.

  “Careful, got a quetzal somewhere close.”

  “Kalico? What the hell are you doing out here?”

  “Trying to hold the line. How was Rork Springs?”

  “Not much better than this. What the hell’s happened here?”

  “Benteen. You heard of him?”

  “Yeah, Shig and Yvette gave me a brief history on the flight in.”

  “He pulled all the guards off the gates to arrest the town leaders. Left the gates open, and the quetzals came right in. If you were flying in, you saw that detonation.”

  “Yeah. What kind of lunacy—”

  “Benteen. Fits his MO. He had to know he was screwed. Probably saw that my people had taken control of the gates. My guess is that he raided one of the warehouses. It’s not like Port Authority is short of explosives. What better way to make an escape than to blow a hole in the fence in the middle of a quetzal hunt?”

  “Deal with him later. Three of them, huh?”

  “Just found Dube Dushku’s overalls. They’re killing people right and left. Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Yeah, it does. But you’d have to be a quetzal to understand.”

  “Tal? That you?” Allenovich called from his position on the line as they moved into the next cross street.

  “Hey, Step!”

  “You joining the line?”

  “Sorry. Got other business.”

  “Manicure? Foot massage? Must be really pressing.”

  She chuckled, feeling incipient panic from the quetzal in her gut. “Yeah, got a bunch of quetzals to kill.”

  To Kalico she said, “Watch your ass, Supervisor. Don’t let any of them slip past you.”

  “What do you think you are doing?”

  Talina took a breath. “Steaks and leather. Paybacks are a bitch.”

  “You’re not going in there alone!”

  “Got to. They’re not going to be expecting me.” She grinned into Kalico’s night-vision goggles. “Watch your ass.”

  “You’re a fucking lunatic, Perez.”

  Talina gave a wave and trotted on down the avenue. The few still-working street lights cast cones of illumination through which the rain fell. The shadows behind buildings and in the recesses under machinery might have been liquid ink.

  She could feel them, knew they were waiting.

  Maybe there was more than one Lord of Death in Xibalba.

  “Should have killed me when you had the chance, Whitey.”

  78

  The heavy downpour had let up, the weather gods seemingly satisfied to surrender their wrath to a constant medium rain. Lightning kept flashing, only to be followed by hollow booms of thunder as the heart of the storm moved westward to pile against the Wind Mountains.

  Distant rumbling filled the heavens as Talina slipped into the darker shadows of the new school building. The soft patter of rain covered any sound of her approach, but it did the same for any of the quetzals.

  Flickers of memories, ancient hunts, the stalking of long-dead quetzals, tried to form. They battled with other images: times with Trish. She saw Cap’s face looking up from the steps of her porch the night she’d found him there after his resignation from the marines.

  Come on, concentrate.

  The scent was stronger here, and she thought it might be Whitey. The squirming of her demon could have been confirmation. But then Demon, Whitey, and their companions, they were all part of the same lineage. Was a quetzal’s scent as much a genetic constant as disposition and shared ancestral knowledge?

  She could imagine how the beasts were working through the buildings. Shifting back to the north. Aware that the game had changed. That the humans were slowly closing the net.

  “Shig?” she asked in her com. “Where’s the search line on the east?”

  “Past the shuttle field gate, working its way through the lumber yard.”

  Step’s line was stopped cold at the blown fence. The other lines would have to swing around like a gate on hinges, pivoting around Kalico’s position on the avenue at the corner of Montoya’s shop.

  Damn it, they hadn’t trained for this. They had perfected the procedure of hunting from south to north in a single unbroken wave. This was altering the plan; people were having to search ground they hadn’t developed a familiarity with and do it from a completely new direction.

  Mistakes would be made.

  Demon chattered with delight at the thought.

  Talina listened to the com chatter for a moment more, fought with her worry about Trish, then blanked her thoughts.

  She let herself become a hunting quetzal. They’d shared so many thoughts, so many memories of other hunts. She could see herself in their place moving, sniffing for . . .

  A sharp pain in her gut took her by surprise.

  “Scared you, huh? Just figured out what I’m doing?”

  And in a flash of insight, she understood. Yes, that’s how they’d react. That’s what they’d do.

  Stepping out from the school, she trotted across the street, slipped behind the Hmong house. She negotiated the obstacle course of children’s toys, rounded Monson’s dome, and slowed as she advanced warily.

  Toys. Trish had come to her as a teen girl, past toys, but just suffering the first interest in boys. And of course, there’d been the school cliques, the anguish and drama. The time that Randy Jenks broke Trish’s heart and she had wailed that it was the end of the . . .

  Will you fucking concentrate?

  A shift in the wind brought her the scent. Not Whitey this time. Different quetzal. One almost smoky in odor and tainted with the metallic tang of fresh blood.

  Carefully Talina hunkered down behind a four-wheeled cart. The steady and slow pulsing of her blood, the feeling of rising tension, made her swallow hard.

  You’re still dehydrated. Still half starved. Got to be careful.

  She caught a glimpse of movement. A quetzal head poked out from behind the curve of the old Micka dome. Abandoned now since most of the Turalon people had moved to Corporate Mine.

  Talina settled her rifle, got a solid rest on the cart’s sideboard, and steadied her sight picture.

 
Shit. Two heads.

  Now both quetzals eased out onto the street, carefully searching for any threat.

  Easy, Tal. She took up slack on the trigger.

  Side by side, the quetzals crept out, clearly heading back south, paralleling the fence. Seemed that they not only understood the hole in the fence, but had recognized that the noose was tightening.

  Peering through her optic, she watched as the red dot bumped slightly with each beat of her heart. She placed the spot of red right at the junction of the neck and shoulders.

  The faintest pressure, and . . . Bam!

  The rifle bucked in her grip. As the gun dropped back in recoil she was settling the sight for a shot on the second quetzal.

  The bare eddy of breeze, the snatch of odor, the prickling at the back of her neck.

  Run! Rocket’s voice screamed in the back of her mind.

  Talina leaped, turned, fired a panicked shot as a radiant mass of enraged quetzal launched itself from the Hmong roof.

  Whitey’s clawed feet hammered into the damp ground where Talina had been but an instant before. The beast crushed the cart in an attempt to kill its momentum.

  Talina twisted her rifle around. Shot. Point blank. And turned and ran.

  Behind her came a squeal of rage. She heard the remains of the cart being cast wide. Then came the hammering of feet splashing into the muddy street.

  Tal pivoted, threw the rifle up, and fired. Hardly her best shot. Nevertheless, she saw Whitey’s left foreleg jerking, flopping loosely, and the quetzal screamed.

  At the last instant, Talina dove to the side. She hit face-first in a pool of muddy water. Lost her rifle. Scrambled and splashed her way under a junked backhoe, and pulled her pistol.

  She fought to blink the gritty water out of her eyes. “Come on, you shit-sucking son of a bitch.”

  The only sound was the slapping of heavy feet, a shrill twittering. Whitey was leaving, hopefully dying.

  Tell me I put at least one of those rounds into your guts.

  Talina, adrenaline-charged, poked her head out, clawed her way to her rifle, and pulled it from the mud. She stumbled to her feet, staggered out into the street. Saw nothing but tracks.