Overkill (19 page)

“What’s in this?” The male exuded caution about something that the female had presented him to eat. Not surprising. It turned out that the male’s trail marking had actually been a product of digestive disruption.

“Chocolate. Aerated sugar. Melted between two graham crackers. Boy Scouts like you love ’em, Parker.”

“Hmm. S’good.”

“Hold still. You’ve got a marshmallow moustache. There.”

The grezzen turned his great face away, then tried to probe for prey, for danger, for anything but what he was witnessing. He felt in both the male and the female urges that he usually felt only in prey animals as rut and heat.

The grezzen knew that once in his lifetime he would someday come into rut. Then he would couple with a female, who would produce and raise an offspring, as his mother had raised him. His mother had taught him that during rut he would enjoy not only proximity to, but physical contact with, the female who chose him. He shuddered. The prospect was improbable and disgusting. In the meantime, he had as little desire to witness another sentient species do it as he had to participate in it.

Prey animals endured rut and heat only seasonally. But humans apparently came into and out of rut and heat randomly and often. Indeed, after the male had recovered from its illness, a simple word or glance from the female, or even her posture, aroused in the male visualizations of physical contact so strong that the male lost concentration on its surroundings.

The grezzen would, at this stage of his maturity, have found physical contact noxious even with a mate of well-curved fang. Female humans must have been the ones who had harnessed fire. Males couldn’t have concentrated long enough.

Now the female had moved closer to the male, and had just initiated physical contact, touching a foreclaw to the male’s lips. The male’s already elevated heart rate had increased.

“Thanks. I think there’s some on your lip, too.”

“Parker, I didn’t eat anything.”

The male escalated the physical contact.

The female audibilized, “What are you—?” But she thought, “Finally! For a minute I thought I was gonna have to draw you a picture.”

It was a picture the grezzen didn’t care to see. The prospect of spindly human limbs entangled like those of mating woogs was bad enough, but already there was rapid breathing and murmurs that could only get worse.

He brought forward the surrounding animate threads to drown the humans out, then sat bolt upright in the brush. In addition to himself and the two humans, he felt a third presence. It was one that jolted his own heart rate to a level even faster than that of the human male.

It was even possible that a flicker of the grezzen’s alarm had leaked back along the human threads that the grezzen had been monitoring.

Forty-one

I raised my head, pressed my fingers against Kit’s lips, and peered into the darkness beyond the campfire.

She muttered, “What’s—?”

“I just felt something.”

“I should hope so.”

There was no sound but the fire’s crackle and the constant rumble of water over the falls. Not even a hint of breeze. I said, “I must’ve imagined something.”

She stroked my back with both hands. “I’m still imagining something, Parker. It’ll go better if you participate.”

Forty-two

Nothing in the world could give a grezzen a fair fight on solid ground. The only thing that could give a grezzen a fair fight on any terms was a river snake, and then only if it caught a grezzen in the snake’s element.

The grezzen hadn’t been alert to the snake’s possible presence because in a normally wet season they would have been mating, days swim upstream from the falls. But, as the falls’ meager flow reminded the grezzen too late, this was not a normally wet season.

There was no mistaking what species the grezzen felt. A river snake’s mental signature mimicked its body and temperament. Outsized, stupid, and perpetually hungry, a snake displayed barely sufficient curiosity and visual acuity to investigate firelight. But it displayed enough.

The grezzen peered physically down toward the river’s surface, and saw a wake bulge the water as the river snake approached the two humans, the low whisper of its approach masked by the falls’ rumble.

The grezzen stood and paced five-legged, back and forth along the bluff while it peered down. The humans, now horizontal, were intent on one another and in such rude proximity that they appeared to be a single writhing animal.

The river snake was an aquatic organism, no more capable of breathing above water than the grezzen was capable of breathing under it. But the humans were close enough to the river’s edge that the snake could easily thrust itself across the smooth exposed rock of the river bed, snatch them up, and then slide back into the river.

The outcome of a battle between a grezzen, even on six good legs, and a river snake was not free from doubt. And that assumed that the grezzen could make his way down the bluff in time to interpose himself between the humans and the snake, which on five legs was also far from certain.

But it wasn’t fear of combat that kept him pacing the bluff. The plan on which he was staking revenge for his mother and the preservation of his race depended on these humans remaining alive for now, but only if they also remained unaware of his presence. So he paced.

Below, the snake had advanced so far into the shallows that its great, black back glistened wet above the river’s surface. But the humans remained focused on one another.

The grezzen leapt, twisted, and stomped three legs on the ground in frustration.

The snake was now only three of its enormous body lengths away from the river’s edge.

Only one option remained to the grezzen, and he might have left it until too late.

Forty-three

Kit whispered, “The snap’s on the side, Parker.”

“I’m out of practice. Sorry.” It wasn’t a lie, precisely. You can’t practice what you’ve never tried.

She purred in my ear. “It wasn’t a complaint.”

I sat bolt upright. “Why?”

“Where?” She sat up too, holding her coverall across herself.

I asked her, “Why should we run?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t say anything.” She poked my chest. “You said something was coming.”

It was my turn to shake my head. “I didn’t—”

Behind her, out on the river, I saw something move. I whispered, “Oboy.”

I stood and dragged her up by her wrist while she turned and looked where I was looking.

We were one hundred feet from the water’s edge, and one hundred feet out in the water, an attack submarine was surfacing, prow-on to us. At least, it was the size and bullet shape of an HK sub, without a conning tower, just a ring of knobby bulges that could have been eyes, where the torpedo tube doors should have been. Water rained off its flanks and boiled into the river as it moved toward us, twenty feet high and lit glistening black by the fire’s flicker.

We retreated, walking backwards side by side and staring up at the thing.

I whispered, “No predators, you said.”

“No
land
preds! These are all upstream, mating.”

“What’s this one? Gay?”

“Bite me, Parker.” Kit whispered, “Walk slow. It’s big. We’re little. It’s in the water. We’re on shore. Maybe it won’t—”

The submarine’s blubbery prow spread open like the bell of a tuba, until it looked like we were staring into a highway tunnel. Thousands of fist-sized triangular teeth, all pointing in and backward down the snake’s gullet, glistened in the firelight, pus yellow against wet pink flesh. The monster reached the water’s edge, then lunged and roared.

Ugly as it was, its breath was worse. Its roar flapped Kit’s coverall and blew her hair straight out behind her head.

The beast splashed down onto the rock fifty feet from us, then gathered itself for another pulse.

I turned to run, took a first step then realized that Kit was no longer alongside me. She was on one knee, teeth gritted, as she tugged to free her bare foot from one of the six-inch wide joints in the rock.

The monster quivered forward again, now thirty feet away, just six feet short of our fire.

I laid a hand on her shoulder while I tried to work her foot free with the other. No dice.

Her hands trembled as she tugged at her leg.

I said, “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. I think the fire’s stopped it.” In fact, I was pretty sure that the fire had attracted it in the first place.

The snake flopped like, well, a snake out of water, and its lower maw snuffed the fire and scattered burning logs and our dinner in all directions. So much for fire as snake repellent.

Kit pushed me away. “Run! It can’t come much farther out of the water.” Her foot bled at the ankle, chafed but still stuck fast. I fingered the trench knife at my belt. No. I would die here with her before I carried her out of here in pieces, to bleed to death like Suarez had.

The river snake lunged again, and its lip came to rest a yard from Kit. I hacked the lining of the animal’s mouth with my trench knife, and it bled, but seemed undiscouraged. I suppose it had endured its share of woog hoof scrapes to get a snack.

A rehydrated foil packet, the “buttery alfredo sauce,” had skittered alongside Kit when the monster scattered our fire and our dinner. I snatched it up, tore it open with my teeth, squeezed the slime down along her ankle, and twisted one more time.

Pop
.

If I sprained her ankle, she’d thank me later. Her foot came out clean, and I snatched her beneath one arm and dragged her away just as the monster lunged forward again.

I thought we were moving away fast, but it wasn’t fast enough. The monster scooped up both of us, the alfredo sauce, smoldering branches and kindling, and assorted debris like it was a sapper brigade’s bucket loader clearing a shell crater.

The sides and roof of the beast’s razor-toothed mouth contracted like a giant had pulled a laundry bag’s drawstring. The lips closed completely and the night got even darker for us.

Forty-four

The grezzen reached the bottom of the bluff at full gallop, though slowed by his still-numb forepaw. He skidded to a stop as the river snake’s mouth closed around the two humans. With the stimulus of the firelight and of food removed from its consciousness, the snake undulated and backed its immense bulk toward the water. Perhaps he could still attack the snake, but the battle would not be won soon enough to salvage the humans.

The grezzen shared the death throes of the two humans as they struggled inside the beast, kicking and screaming while needle teeth jabbed into their flesh. The only evidence that the two humans and their fire had ever existed was the residue of feeling that still washed over him, of their ebbing panic and pain as they struggled, and faint wisps of fire smoke that curled out of the river snake’s closed mouth.

He hung his great head. He had realized that Cutler had somehow warded off the ghosts’ attacks when Cutler encountered them. It seemed likely that the two humans would be able to do the same. The grezzen had planned to sneak past the ghosts by staying close to the two humans, though unknown to them. The grezzen didn’t know the human story of the Trojan horse, or even what a horse was. But he was learning guile from humans quickly. Now his plan had failed.

The great snake paused and twisted. It raised its head, then dropped it, then repeated the motion. The river snake was accustomed to digesting living, struggling prey. It was not accustomed to the irritation of fire smoke in any quantity attacking the lining of its mouth and throat. It thrashed one more time.

Then it sneezed.

Forty-five

Ka
-
boom!

One moment I felt consciousness sliding away forever as I suffocated in the dark, while a thousand knives pricked me.

The next moment I was rolling and bouncing over uneven rock, my vision an alternating flicker of dark sky and darker stone. Finally, I came to rest in a heap, alongside a water pool in a hollow.

I turned my head and saw the river snake slide back into the water tail first, like a remastered holo of a steamship being launched.

Kit’s body lay limp and face down on the pool’s opposite side. The red dots of tooth marks measled her torso, arms, and legs, which were covered in thick yellow slime and gobbets of the snake’s less fortunate meals. So was her hair. I crawled toward her on hands and knees. “Kit?”

Nothing.

I scrambled faster, reached her, and touched her cheek.

She moaned, then opened one eye. “Parker, I’ve never been so glad to see a man who looked like vomit.”

I bent, kissed her cheek, slime and all, and said, “You too. Me too.”

She got to her knees, then stood. Breathing through her mouth, she extended her arms and watched while the snake’s digestive juices and gut contents oozed down her arms, then dripped off her fingers. “This slime won’t digest us and the bacteria in this rotten gut meat won’t infect these cuts. But if I have to stink this bad for ten more minutes I’ll kill myself.” She slid into the pool, drew a breath, then submerged and popped up squeezing water from her hair. I joined her.

A half hour later, we had gathered our scattered gear and huddled together in the dark, seated with our backs against a rock and my sleeping bag wrapped around our shoulders. She laid her head on my chest and sighed.

Then she started shaking all over. “I thought I was dead. Really dead.”

I pulled her closer, but she kept shaking.

She said, “Thank you, Parker. I owe you my life.”

I held her tighter, until her shakes subsided. “No. You owe a snake with an itchy nose your life.”

She sighed, I sighed, then we sat, leaning on each other half asleep, until false dawn lit the clouds.

I said, “Y’know, all things considered, this was the best date I ever had.”

She sat up, then stared at me. “When we were, you know, why
did
you tell me to run?”