In the Courts of the Sun (42 page)

A leaf crinkled twenty feet behind me. Nothing else for it. Go. Gogogogogo.
I ran.
Oh, shit. Too soon.
There was a spear whistle on my left. I jumped left, rolled forward, and pushed myself back upright with the javelin shaft. For a second I thought I’d done everything right, but then my right leg slipped out from under me. Did it get hit? I wondered. If so, why didn’t I feel anything? Too much adrenaline, or what? I caught myself enough to fall on my knees and spin around in a squat. A Snuffler Clan blood was charging me, holding the headless shaft of his javelin like a club. I stuck the butt of my javelin into the ground and braced for a collision. Off to the right there were two hunters about three hundred arms away, coming up with their javelins raised, ready to throw. One of them was an Ocelot and the other was the Harpy kid with the sweet round face. I knew his name, I thought, Chacal had played hipball with him, he was a new initiate into the Harpy hipball team, I knew his name,
hah
, that’s it: Hun Xoc. 1 Shark.
Okay, I thought, just get through these three stooges and you’re in. I snapped back to attention and angled my javelin up at the Snuffler. He dodged the point and swung around my back, raising his shaft to brain me, and I turned to try to parry it. For an instant, and for no reason that I could see, he hesitated and took a half-step back, settling himself. Oh, I know, I thought. I’m polluted. Superstitious dick. I spread my arms and lowered my head rack and lunged at him. His shaft came down and knocked two points off my right rack but only grazed my forehead. You’ve spoiled your trophy, dude. I shook the dizziness out of my head, got my javelin in gear, and swung it in a wide arc eight inches above the ground. Snuffler Dude jumped and got his left foot clear, but the ferrule connected with his right one and snapped off the shaft. He tipped over, hit the ground, and sat up on the grass. Without needing to think I pulled back the javelin shaft for a thrust, and for an instant it was as though his skin was so thin and tight in the starlight that I could see through it. I zeroed in on where the exterior iliac artery was swelling and slackening, right inside the crotch, and jabbed the splintered end of the headless javelin in and around and dug for it. There was that gooey split-second resistance and release as the wood made it through the skin and twanged off a ligament and then I struck oil, an artery popped and I got that spurt of blood,
yeah
, spurt, spurt, SPURT! Ha! Wow, I really am hot shit, I thought. The Snuffler blood stayed silent and the only reaction in his face was maybe a flicker of disappointment in the eyes. I rolled away from him, hanging on to my javelin shaft, and wrenched myself upright.
I wobbled a bit. For some reason I thought of the number eight.
It doesn’t take a long time to register a lot of things, as long as your mind doesn’t try to move them up to a verbal level. In the span of less than a second I realized the Snuffler was dead, and I realized this was the first time I’d killed anyone. People say that your first time can bring on waves of guilt and elation, that you might get a sympathetic reaction and hear the blood rushing in your ears and get tunnel vision and faint, or you might get an adrenaline spike that can lead to an orgasm, or a sympathetic reaction that can make you faint, and then more guilt, and so on. And despite everything else that was going on, some part of me was expecting at least some of those things. But instead I felt something oddly familiar. It was the way I used to feel when I was shopping, when I’d bought something expensive, like, say, that last Plymouth Barracuda. Or even like I’d just clicked in a big bid on eBay in the last five seconds of the auction. There was the same little peak of tension, and then a release and relief, and then a fading aftertaste that’s a combination of buyer’s remorse and the satisfaction of ownership. It was as though I owned the Snuffler. Or, rather, I’d separated his body from his uay, and now his uay was prowling and snuffling around me, ready to follow me wherever I went, and if I did the right things, I could keep it from taking revenge on me and instead make it my pet. Or, rather, my slave. But then mixed with that I was feeling something like guilt, but not guilt. It was more physical, a sense of defilement, like I’d stepped in dog vomit, say, or like I’d been playing with radioactive chemicals and gotten my arm hot and now I had to be decontaminated. It didn’t feel like there was anything wrong with my character. It was just that I’d gotten close to death, and death is infectious. And finally, I realized that I was feeling these things, and not the things I’d expected, because this actually wasn’t my first kill. I’d killed before. That is, Chacal had killed people before, seven of them, on the hipball court.
I wasn’t feeling what I would feel, I thought. I mean, what Jed would feel. I was feeling what Chacal would feel. Yes, I was in control of his body, but my emotions were his. And no wonder, because 99 percent of his whole nervous system was still his. And then there was this thin little pattern wrapped around his frontal cortices that told him he was me and not himself. The self isn’t some big cosmic force. It’s flimsy.
Short Ocelot had come up on my right, yelling his capturing cry. I got up but there was no way I was going to get ahead of him, so I turned around. He had his javelin up like a lance, about to skewer me. I dove and rolled. He reacted quickly and got it together for another run, but he was close enough so I spat a big gout of blood at him and it hit him right in the chest, a big red mucousy splotch.
Take that
, I thought.
COOTIES!!!
He recoiled. Behind him I could see the Harpy blood hanging back. Why? Maybe he’s afraid of infection too. Or because he’s still kind of on my side? No, it’s just that they’re all really scared of touching me. I’m unclean. Irrationally, I felt insulted. Oh, for God’s sake. Just use it.
The short Ocelot was coming back. The torchlight from above me reflected in his eyes, and something in Chacal knew that if he was looking into the light he couldn’t see me as well as I could see him. I dove low and deflected his javelin with my left hand and steered my spear handle up into his mouth. It caught and I felt something soft. Have a tonsillectomy, punk. I jumped back and twisted the shaft out through his cheek. He didn’t make a sound and he didn’t back up, that whole macho ethic, he just got his balance back and came forward again. I wound up and slashed and my shaft bounced on his javelin and slid up it into his fingers. There was a little crunch and his hand released the spear. Try to get it? No, too late. Time to boogie. Step. Step. Eight steps up the hill I heard the telltale rattle of shell jewelry as the Harpy blood adjusted his body, getting ready to throw. An easy shot.
Damn, I thought, you would have made it. I braced for the shock of flint on my spine, but the javelin hummed through the air to my left with this beautiful sort of lost sound. Two more hops. I heard the Harpy blood trip on something and fall. Weird. Incompetent clod. Maybe he missed me on purpose. Forget it. Just make it the bloody blue hell to the
chingado
fire-line. Details later.
Keep going. Listen.
They had a trick of panting silently, and they ran gingerly like foxes so you usually didn’t hear their feet, but their ankle beads clicked against each other and air whistled over their gaudy earrings, and as they came up behind me on my right I even thought I could feel the heat of their bodies. How many were there? I didn’t want to slow my limping run even enough to turn my head. Just listen. Listen between steps.
Three. Three close enough to intercept me. One close on the left. Two farther on the right. Others coming farther away. Don’t worry about them. Just get down for a second and then make a break for it.
Get ready for a serious dash. The back of my thigh was still trickling, like a faucet turned down just to the point where the thread of water is about to break into individual drops. I felt a jab of the Fear, the old bleeding-out fear. I scooped up some dirt and pushed it into the puncture in my thigh. You need blood right now, I thought, deal with the germs later. No, there is no later. You have no later anymore.
I could feel that there were more than a few of them, on my right and probably on my left, watching the ridge from the trees. When I ran for it, at least a few of them would get within firing range.
I realized I was laughing, almost but not quite silently. Quiet, idiot. Or maybe I was whimpering. Not being very stoic about this. Chacal would
not
behave this way—
Wait. Who’s that?
No one here. But—
Hmm.
I was sure that there was someone there, someone right next to me . . . but there wasn’t anyone. Someone inside me . . .
Chacal?
Are you there?
Oh, Christ damn it, he’s
here,
he’s watching me, he’s
enjoying
this, fuck—
Shh. They’re coming. I got my feet under me and scrunched backward into a cluster of myrtle saplings. Come on, go for it,
maricones
, I’ll bite your toes off. I chuckled. Shushup.
I squatted. Act like a pebble.
Time to come up with a plan. Right. Heh heh. Shh. Shh. Somewhere between me and the torch line someone sang again:
“Your head is light, your ass is heavy, Deer . . .”
My hands and feet were freezing from blood loss and my jaw was chattering. Stop it. Stop it. Don’t let the teeth hit. Quiet. Quiet.
“The deer’s two ears become the ninth boy’s spoons . . .”
Shit, this isn’t working out. Nope. I’m dead. I am Spam. Spam I am. I heard feet all around me. Four people. No, five. Eight. Hell. Okay, fine. I’m moving out. I crawled toward the light. Actually, it wasn’t even crawling, it was creeping. In fact, it was scuttling. Like a horseshoe crab. A paraplegic horseshoe crab.
Face it, you’re not going anywhere.
Too slow. Too slow.
“The deer’s two antlers are the eighth boy’s rakes,
The deer’s hooves are the seventh boy’s four hammers . . .”
Damn. Run to ground. I guess I’m dead I guess I’m dead I guess I’m dead.
“The deer’s one back becomes the sixth boy’s purse,
The deer’s intestines are the fifth boy’s necklace . . .”
Anyway, there’s still the other version of me somewhere, right? Except that’s not all that comforting when the only consciousness you’re in is dying. I’m dead, this is it, this is really what it’s like, this is going to be it . . .
Hmm. Well, what’s the wait? It’s—

[33]

S
omething was wrong. And not just with me.
Silence.
It wasn’t anything I’d thought about—I’d been a little preoccupied—but of course all this time I was running for my life, the night had been so loud that it wasn’t so much a matter of hearing the pursuer’s footsteps as picking them out from the roiling ocean of night sounds. Now there was a rising all around, a universal whir and flutter like twenty thousand decks of cards simultaneously sprayed out of the hands of ten thousand show-off dealers. My mind, or maybe Chacal’s, separated a few nearby flaps and flops out of the cacophony and realized what it was: It was the global rush of some huge and incalculable but definitely even number of wings, all the bats and birds in the world taking off at once. It was too big, wrong, and what was most wrong about it was that the birds didn’t cry. Almost but not quite all at once, the stars went out. The invisible sky boiled and crackled, but in all of it the only vocalization was the automatic ultrashriek of the bats.
Pop.
Pressure on eardrums—
rrrrRRRRZZglglglglgl DDDDDDD
DDDDDDDDDDD
!!!
The subway beast growled up at me and that inside-out elevator-falling jet-dropping last-stair-not-there inner-ear panic filled existence as the ground liquefied. I held on to the turf as though, even if the world disintegrated, I’d have a chunk of asteroid to cling to in outer space. At some point I noticed the shocks had faded and that the silhouette of one of the hunters was standing above me, watching me, holding a club or mace in his left hand.
It happened,
I thought. It was Volcán San Martín.
Damn, they got it right. Taro, Marena, the Connecticut Yankee Department, even Michael Weiner, for once they knew what they were doing. I’d been near minor eruptions before in Guatemala and I’d felt one fairly serious earthquake, in San Pablo Villa de Mitla, in February of ’08. But this was in a whole different league. Even the soft dirt under me was thrumming like the bottom skin of a snare drum. Four hundred miles to the volcano and it sounds like it’s right over the hill. Well, eruptions are like—
Uh.