by Gene Wolfe
Somehow he got to his feet, charged the other and grappled him. I killed that buck like this, he thought; the buck had an arrow in its gut, but that had hardly seemed to matter. His knife was in his hand. He stabbed and felt it strike bone.
Then it was gone.
At once the other had it, and there was freezing cold where his shirt pocket should have been, cold followed by burning heat, and he was holding the other’s wrist with both hands, and the blade was wet and red. The other’s fist pounded his nose and mouth. He did not hear the shot, but he felt the other stiffen and shudder.
He pushed the other’s body from him, insanely certain that it was only a trick, only a temporary respite granted so that he might be taken by surprise again in a moment or two. Rising, he kicked something.
It was the knife, and it went clattering over the sidewalk. He pulled it out of some snow, wiped the blade with his handkerchief, returned it to its sheath and the sheath to his pocket.
Then the woman who sold guns was tugging at his sleeve. In her other hand she held a short and slender rifle with a long box magazine. “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here.”
He followed her docilely between the hulking building that was eighteen Greentree Gardens, and a similar building that was probably sixteen or twenty. Two floors down in a dark underground garage, she unlocked a blue CUV. As he climbed in he said, “Borrowed from another friend?”
“This’s mine, and if I didn’t sell what I do I couldn’t afford it.”
It reeked of cigar smoke; he said, “In that case, I’d think they’d know about it—the plate number and so forth.”
She shook her head. “It’s registered under a fake name, and these aren’t my plates.”
He considered that while she drove eight or ten blocks fast, then up a winding ramp and onto the interstate.
When they were in the leftmost lane, he said, “Why are we running away?”
She turned her head to look at him. “Are you crazy? Because I killed that guy.”
“He was going to kill me.” He looked down at his wound, and was mildly surprised to find that it was still bleeding, his blood soaking the two-sided raincoat and, presumably, the hunting coat under it.
“So what? Look, I can’t even defend myself, according to the law. Say you were going to rape me and kill me.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Just suppose. I couldn’t shoot you or stab you or even hit you, and if I did you could sue me afterward.”
“Could I win?”
“Sure. What’s more, I’d be defending your suit from a cell. And if I hurt you worse’n you hurt me, you’d be out.”
Jay shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Not for us it doesn’t.” The interstate sloped sharply down here, but she kept pedal to the floor; for a moment the CUV shook wildly. “For them it does—for the Feds. If we got used to the idea of going after somebody who went after us, we’d go after them. Capeesh?”,
“We should.”
“Sure. Only for me it’s a lot worse. For you, too. I killed that guy. Don’t say maybe he’s not dead. I saw him when I hit him, and I saw him afterward. He’s gone.”
“How did you know we were out there?”
“Saw you out the window, that’s all. It’d been a while, so I kept looking outside, hoping you were just looking for the right number. I’d stopped off and picked up your gun on the way home, and I was afraid you’d come and gone before I got there. You want to see it? It’s on the back seat. Only be careful, it’s loaded. I think I put the safety on.”
Jay took off his seat belt and picked up the carbine, careful not to touch its trigger.
“Keep it down so the other drivers can’t see it.”
He did. “This car doesn’t talk to us.”
“I killed that bastard as soon as I got it. It’s pretty easy.”
Sensing that she was about to cry, Jay did not speak; he would have tried to hold her hand, perhaps, but both her hands were on the wheel.
“And now I’ve killed the bastard that was trying to kill you. There’s tissues in back somewhere.”
He got them, heard her blow her nose.
“I told you how bad that is. It’s murder one. He was trying to kill you, but that doesn’t make a damned bit of difference. I should have called the cops and showed them your body when they got there. That would have been when? Two or three o’clock. My God, it’s lunchtime.”
He looked at the clock on the instrument panel. It was nearly one.
“You hungry?”
“No,” he said.
“Me neither. Let’s skip lunch. We’ll stop somewhere for dinner tonight.”
He agreed, and asked where they were going.
“Damned if I know.”
“Then I’d like you to take Eighty.”
“We need to get off the interstate before too much longer,” she said.
He nodded. “We will.”
“Listen, I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“I feel the same way,” he said. “You saved my life.”
“Who was he, anyway?”
“The man I’d gotten to read your note. You didn’t want Globnet to get it on the air before we’d left, so I had to have somebody who would look at it for me and take me there. I tried to find somebody who wouldn’t call the police as soon as we separated. Clearly that was a bad idea.” Jay paused. “How did you think I’d handle it?”
“That you’d guess. That you’d go there and look at my note and see that you were right when you got there.”
“No more crying?”
“Nope. That’s over. You know what made me cry?”
“What?”
“You didn’t understand. You can’t kill people, not even if they’re killing other people, and I did it with a gun. If they get me I’ll get life, and you didn’t understand that.”
“Who’d take care of your kids?” He let his voice tell her what he felt he knew about those kids.
She drove. He glanced over at her, and she was staring straight ahead, both hands on the wheel.
“I’m going back into the woods. Maybe they’ll get me in there, but it won’t be easy. If the holovid company can’t help you, maybe you’d like to come with me.”
“You had it all doped out.” She sounded bitter.
He shook his head. “I don’t think I understand it all even now, and there’s a lot of it that I just figured out a minute ago. How much were you supposed to get for this?”
“A couple thousand.”
He thought about that. “You’re not an employee. Or at least, you don’t work for Globnet full-time.”
“No.” She sniffled. “They did a documentary on the gun trade last year, and I was one of the people they found—the only woman. So I was on holo with this really cool mask over my face, and I thought that was the end of it. Then about a month ago they lined me up to do this.”
He nodded.
“They figured you’d want women or drugs, mostly, and they had people set for those. I was kind of an afterthought, okay? Stand by for a couple hundred, or a couple thousand if you called. Another thousand if I sold you a gun. I did, but I’ll never collect any of it.”
“The bot must have called you after he gave me your number.”
“Kaydee Nineteen? Sure. That’s how you knew, huh? Because you got it from him.”
Jay shook his head. “That was how I should have known, but I didn’t. It was mostly the phone call you made last night to somebody who was supposed to be sitting your kids. Real mothers talk about their kids a lot, but you didn’t. And just now it hit me that you’d called your friend Val, and James R. Smith’s secretary was Valerie. Then I thought about the bot. He took his security work very seriously, or at least it seemed like he did. But he had given me the number of a gun dealer as soon as I asked, and he had been friendly with Valerie.”
“So I was lying to you all the time.”
He shrugged.
; “Don’t do that! You’re going to get that thing bleeding worse. What happened to your ear?”
He told her, and she pointed. “There’s a truck stop. They’ll have aid kits for sale,” and cutting across five lanes of traffic, raced down an exit ramp.
That night, in an independent motel very far from Interstate Eighty, he took off his reversible raincoat and his hunting coat, and his shirt and undershirt as well, and sat with clenched teeth while she did what she could with disinfectant and bandages.
When she had finished, he asked whether she had been able to buy much ammunition.
“Eight boxes. That’s four hundred rounds. They come fifty in a box.”
He nodded.
“Only we don’t have it. It’s back in that place in Greentree Gardens.”
He swore.
“Listen, you’ve got money and I’ve got connections. We can buy more as soon as things quiet down.”
“A lot of the money’s ruined. It has blood on it.”
She shook her head. “It’ll wash up. You’ll see. Warm water and a little mild detergent, don’t treat it rough and let it dry flat. You can always clean up money.”
“I thought maybe I could just give it to them,” he said. “Show them it wasn’t any good anymore.”
She kissed him, calling him Skeeter; and he shut his eyes so that Globnet and its audience would not see her kiss.
He had been after deer since before the first gray of dawn; but he had never gotten a shot, perhaps because of the helicopters. Helicopters had been flying over all morning, sweeping up and down this valley and a lot of other valleys. He thought about Arizona or New Mexico, as he sometimes did, but concluded (as he generally had to) that they would be too open, too exposed. Colorado, maybe, or Canada.
The soldiers the helicopters had brought were spread out now, working their way slowly up the valley. Too few, he decided. There weren’t enough soldiers and they were spread too thin. They expected him to run, as perhaps he would. He tried to gauge the distance to the nearest.
Two hundred yards. A long two hundred yards that could be as much as two hundred and fifty.
But coming closer, closer all the time, a tall, dark-faced woman in a mottled green, brown, and sand-colored uniform that had been designed for someplace warmer than these snowy Pennsylvania woods. Her height made her an easy target—far easier than even the biggest doe—and she held a dead-black assault rifle slantwise across her chest. That rifle would offer full or semiautomatic operation, with a switch to take it from one to the other.
Less than two hundred yards. Very slowly Jay crouched in the place he had chosen, pulled his cap down to hide the stars of his upgrade, then raised his head enough to verify that he could keep the woman with the assault rifle in view. His wound felt as hot as his cheeks, and there was blood seeping through the bandage; he was conscious of that, and conscious too that it was harder to breathe than it should have been.
A hundred and fifty yards. Surely it was not more than a hundred and fifty, and it might easily be less. He was aware of his breathing, of the pounding of his heart—the old thrill.
Thirty rounds in that black rifle’s magazine, possibly. Possibly more, possibly as many as fifty. There would be an ammunition belt too, if he had time to take it. Another two or three hundred rounds, slender, pointed bullets made to fly flatter than a stretched string and tumble in flesh.
For an instant that was less than a moment, less even than the blink of an eye, a phantom passed between him and the woman with the black assault rifle—a lean man in soiled buckskins who held a slender, graceful gun that must have been almost as long as he was tall.
A hallucination.
Jay smiled to himself. Had they seen that, back at Globnet? They must have, if they still saw everything he did. Would they put it on the news?
A scant hundred yards now. The little carbine seemed to bring itself to his shoulder.
Seventy yards, if that.
Jay took a deep breath, let it half out, and began to squeeze the trigger.
Rattler with BRIAN HOPKINS
We heard this in a truck stop in Oklahoma. Two men in the next booth were talking about dogs, and one said that he had trained pointers and setters of several breeds, and that it was much easier to train a bird dog if you had a trained dog that would hunt at the same time—that the trained dog taught the untrained one.
It don’t (the other man said), or not so’s you could notice. I’ve hunted with dogs all my life, and I ain’t never noticed no dog teaching but one. That German shorthair you got now learns, sure enough. But the other don’t teach it. It just sees what the other’s doin’ and sees you like it. That’s all. That pup wants to please, so it does like the other dog.
No, sir, I never seen nor heard of but one dog that taught like a regular teacher would, and that was a ol’ coonhound I used to have. Bud his name was. Ol’ Bud taught sure enough, only it wasn’t no other dog he taught. I reckon he thought that would be too easy for him. Or else maybe he never wanted to see another dog smarter than he was. That there was the smartest dog ever made. I could tell you—well, you wouldn’t believe it. And it ain’t to the point anyways, you know.
You seen my ol’ pickemup what we rode out here in? I parked it in the barn back then like I do now, and Bud was always feered he’d miss a ride, so he slept in the back so I couldn’t go off without him’less I chased him out first. It got so anytime I nailed up a coonskin, Bud would tear it down and carry it back there to sleep on. He had quite a pile there before long. I’d nail’em higher and higher, and I never did figure out how he moved the ladder.
Oh, sure, he could climb it all right. Any coon dog worth a biscuit can climb, you bet! They’ll climb trees and such if there’s limbs for’em, to get at the coon.
Bud got hisself a nice pile of coonskins in the back of my pickup, and he’d sleep back there just about every night. If I had to put hay bales or somethin’ in the back I’d have to chase him out, and throw all them coonskins out, too,’fore I could do it. Only if I was just goin’ into town to pick up fixin’s and maybe some beer, I’d leave him and his coonskins right where they was and ride him into town to watch my truck.
Well, sir, one day I drove that ol’ pickemup into town’cause I had to go to the bank, and when I come out there was a kid hangin’ around it, you know, and I heard Bud growl. “You get away from there,” I says, and he growls at the kid again. I took three or four more steps, and it hit me that Bud was dead. He’d died the week before, and I’d buried him out in the back of my wood lot and read over him, too, changing a couple words so it was dogs’stead of people, you know how you do, and put up a marker for him that I’d cut his name in.
It was his ghost was what I thought. He’d loved that ol’ truck and come back to it, and I went goosefleshed all over. Felt like my skin was goin’ to crawl right off me. Only when I started up the engine I heard the growl just like before. That same exact growl, you know. It was the starter motor, and it was my ol’ pickemup that had been growlin’.
After that I noticed a few things. Like if I’d parked by a tree or the light pole or somethin’, there’d be a little puddle of gas when I pulled out. I put newspaper under, you know how you do, to see where it was leakin’, only it wasn’t. Bone dry. Then I was ridin’ a feller and he said what a nice truck, and it lost the back like it was on ice. Just a teeny little it was, but I noticed. It quit pretty quick but I got to thinkin’ why’d it do that, and by-’n-by it come to me—he’d been waggin’ his tail.
So I called him Bud awhile, you know, thinkin’ he was hauntin’ it, only that truck never did cotton to the name. After that I tried various names that didn’t none of’em work. And he give me some trouble, always wantin’ to chase coons. You know how you’ll drive at night and see a coon in your headlights? I always try to miss’em. I been a coon hunter all my life, and the more coons the better the huntin’ is, is the way I see it. Only that ol’ pickemup had been learned by Bud real good and he’d ch
ase after ‘em. Took me right through a bobwire fence once and’bout a half a mile over the prairie’fore I could get him stopped. I killed the lights and drove out quiet as I could, you bet!
Well, sir, one time he took off after a coon and I was wrestlin’ the wheel and stompin’ the brake tryin’ to get him back on the road. You know how you do. And I hollered out, “Stop! Stop you derned ol’ rattler!”
And he done it. So I knew then what his name was do you see, and I call him Rattler when I got to get his attention or quiet him down when I take him to the vet—the mechanic’s what I mean, that OK Auto Repair place in town. Only Rattler, he likes vet better, and if you’ll just quit interruptin’, I’ll let you have your say.
(The first man, the one who trained bird dogs, spoke at some length at this point. We will not give his entire argument word for word, but he was skeptical.)
Well, sir (the other man said), you’re just like to Junior. He’s my brother-in-law, the dumb fat one. He seen Rattler and rode in him and all, and he just kept on sayin’ how’d you get him to do that? I tol’ him just like I tol’ you, but it took a heap of tellin’’fore he’d believe me. Then he said whatever a dog could do he could do. Dumbest thing I ever heard a man say. I says can you scratch your neck with your back foot, Junior? Everybody laughed—this was at the Baptist social, you know—and he got mad and shut up, which was what I wanted.
‘Bout a month after, he let drop that he’d been teachin’ hisself. Had a big green pickemup with a crew cab he cared the world about, you know, and he said he’d talk to it while he was drivin’. What’s its name? I says. He tells, and it wasn’t the truck’s name but the company that made it. Dumbest thing I ever heard. So I asks if he’s taught it to fetch. He says not yet, how’s it goin’ to do that? You watch I says.
So right there’s where I took a big chance. I’ll be square with you like I always am, and say if I had it to do over again probably I wouldn’t. But I was mad and wanted to show Junior, and I got ol’ Rattler and I says, “You see that calf with the white blaze? Fetch!”