Overkill (33 page)

“That I can fix.” Kit bent forward, tore open the sack with a tiny artificial claw, then sprinkled powdery bits of the exposed contents over an uneaten portion of the carcass.

She said, “We usually use this stuff to clean industrial equipment. But it should catalyze a reaction between your digestive enzymes and this animal’s flesh. Try a bite.

He razored off a tissue morsel as small as Kit’s head, speared the flesh on a claw, and touched it to his tongue. He growled and thought, “Now it tastes even worse!”

“It’s already raw blubber. It can’t taste worse. Eat up. It’s good for you.”

She sounded like his mother. He rumbled a sigh, then forced down a portion, seasoned with her dreadful powder. It was as large as Kit was.

She said, “Lie still. I don’t have any more of that stuff if you barf it out. Give it an hour or so. Then we’ll see whether it works.”

He shuddered, but lay still as instructed. She returned to the crippled tilt wing, then folded her body slowly alongside it, sheltered from the wind by the shell’s bulk. Only then did he feel from her intense pain. Her survival had become critical to his own.

He thought, “You are injured.”

She said aloud, “Hard landing. Cracked ribs probably.”

He nodded, mimicking the human gesture of affirmation that he had learned. He knew this injury. Prey animals often cracked ribs in falls, or as the result of butting attacks, like the attack the sons of this whale had just launched against him. Rib damage impaired mobility. Impaired mobility rendered a weakened animal easier prey. But as for the injury itself, most animals recovered from it. Probably she would, too.

However, sometimes the organs within the cavity that the ribs enclosed ruptured. He had often watched animals far more robust than Kit die when that happened, as their internal cavities flooded with their own blood.

Based on his brief but precarious experience in this unfamiliar world, he needed Kit alive, to assure that he would live long enough to reach and kill Cutler.

He looked closely at her. She breathed shallowly, and tiny beads of moisture leaked from her closed eyes. She was not barfing out blood, as animals bleeding internally often did. But when he felt her pain, it was disproportionate to a mere rib injury. Anxiety sped his heartbeat. He thought to her, “Is your heart broken?”

Her eyes opened wide. “What?” She wiped them with a padded forepaw. “You sarcastic asshole.”

Her anger bewildered him. “I asked whether you have suffered internal injuries?”

She said, “Oh. No. At least, I don’t think so. I thought you meant because Jazen may be . . . ” She stopped speaking, but in her mind she finished, “Dead.”

He remained silent.

She said, “You felt my emotional pain just then, didn’t you? You can feel us, even if we aren’t thinking specifically, can’t you? Not just talk to us, feel us.”

The grezzen felt hope blossom in her. She continued, “And if you can, you know whether he’s alive. Right?”

The grezzen remained so weak that he could no longer separate threads. She was right. He needed to rest. So did she. There would be time enough to sort this out.

He felt the pain of her injuries and the strain of her efforts drag consciousness from her.

Then he slept, himself.

Ninety-two

“Wake up!”

The grezzen opened his center eye. Kit stood a paw stretch in front of him, forelimbs across her thorax. White stiff water encrusted her yellow wrapper, and the wind tugged and flapped it. He heard her as well as felt her, because she was shouting above the gale.

He moved a paw, and it crackled, as a bark of stiff water broke off his fur and was carried away by the wind. However, he felt his old strength returning to the limb.

Kit said, “Are you stronger?”

Before he responded, he drew all his limbs beneath himself, then stood. He lifted each leg in turn, then flexed it. Finally, he thought, “Somewhat.”

“Eat more.”

He turned his eyes upon the whale carcass. The wind had piled stiff water against it like sand washed down river by a flood. Kit’s injured shell was similarly covered.

He stepped to the carcass and picked at it.

Kit shouted, “Can you find Jazen?”

The grezzen felt his acuity was as restored as his physical strength. There was no benefit to him or to his objectives in finding Jazen. Kit possessed the knowledge and skills that he needed.

“Well?” Kit peered up at him through a tiny transparent shield that covered her eyes.

But Jazen had often placed his own welfare behind that of the grezzen. More than that, the grezzen had felt in Jazen feelings, of affection for his mother, of loneliness, of fear, that mirrored his own feelings. It had even occurred to the grezzen that he would have someday liked to knock back a few with Jazen.

“I’ll try. But I won’t find anything if he is—if he is not close.”

The grezzen substituted the last phrase for the word “dead.” In fact, he knew full well that close or distant made no difference. He realized that he had just told less than the truth. He had done so without premeditation, and he had done so to spare Kit sadness. It was a very ungrezzenlike reflex, but a very human one.

The truth that he did not tell was that in all probability Jazen was dead. The grezzen felt that Kit knew it, too. Possibly Jazen had been alive after the crash. But as frail as humans were, and as harsh as this world was, it was probable that Jazen now lay stiff and dead and buried in cold whiteness.

He reached out, searching, with scant enthusiasm, and even less hope.

Ninety-three

Somebody poked me.

I opened my eyes, and frost crinkled off the lashes. There was nobody there.

Snow covered me like a blanket, and I couldn’t feel my fingers or my toes. I turned my head and saw a mound in the snow beside me. It was somebody, but I couldn’t remember who.

The wind still howled, and needled snow into my eyelids.

For some reason, it seemed wrong to go back to sleep. I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn’t move. I was so tired, and sleeping was so easy.

So I slept.

Ninety-four

While the wind howled, Kit paced in front of the grezzen. She stopped, then stared up into the grezzen’s eyes. “Well?”

“A flicker. No more than that. Scarcely more aware than the walrus was.”

“That could be him! If he’s hypothermic he can’t even add two plus two. He’d be dopey. Can you tell where he is?”

“How can I express distance to you? From the burned tree to the place where I found the fat woog is not meaningful to you.”

Kit raised her forelimbs and threw back her head. “I dunno. The
Midway
. How many times the length of the
Midway
?”

“The
Midway
as it was, or as it is?”

She cocked her head to one side. “How the hell would I know how long it is now? As it was!”

The grezzen sat back on his haunches. She was as impatient as his mother could be.

Kit said, “I’m sorry. But I need to reach him quickly. He can’t survive long in these conditions. He may already have been exposed for hours. He may be injured, too.”

“Seven
Midways
.”

She folded her padded foreclaw and punched the air. “Yes!”

He canted his head. Why had she answered when no question was pending?

“Seven miles. In what direction? Just ballpark.”

“Ballpark?”

She waved her foreclaw. “Forget it. Can you just point at him?”

The grezzen raised his forepaw toward the wreck of the
Midway
.

Kit nodded, then scrambled back into the mound of snow that now covered the spoiled shell that had carried her here. When she reemerged she carried a pack, like the one she carried when he had followed her and Jazen back home. She also carried coiled vines of human construction.

She said, “You’ve seen how quickly this environment can kill you. You can imagine how quickly this storm can kill one of us. I need to get to him pronto.”

“I have seen you move. In this storm you will not cross a distance of seven
Midways
pronto.”

“But you can.”

“Easily. But I am incapable of assisting him. If I carry him back to you I may break him.”

“Right. But what neither of us can do alone the two of us can do if we work together.” She held up the coiled vines in a foreclaw, and they flapped in the wind. “I can rig a riding harness with these ropes.”

The obscenity of her suggestion caused him to rock back onto his hind legs so violently that his hindquarters plopped into the snow. This misadventure had already forced him to endure confinement, and proximity to other individuals, and human individuals, at that.

No adult grezzen of manners would even approach another within a hundred body lengths. It was not merely vulgar, it was unnecessary.

Actual physical contact with another grezzen was beyond vulgarity. It was unthinkable, except to mate. Actual physical contact with another species was even more abhorrent, unless the animal was food. Now that he had come to regard Kit as a person, he could no more think of her as food than he could think of cannibalizing another grezzen.

“No!” He shook his head at her, as the humans did, to punctuate his refusal.

Kit nodded. “I understand. But I’ve risked my life for you. You know it won’t hurt. Don’t be a wuss.”

“What is a wuss?”

“Cooperate and I’ll tell you.”

He sighed, folded his forepaws, then knelt and exposed his back to her. He bowed to her not because he cared to know what a wuss was, but because he cared whether Jazen lived.

Kit spun the end of one of the vines, then hurled it up and across his back. It landed on his fur like a tree snake and he shuddered, but held still. Then she crawled beneath him to retrieve the loose end of the vine.

He felt the first touch of her back against his belly hair, and it made him grit his teeth.

Kit said, “Yippee-eye-yo!”

Shortly thereafter, he bounded through the storm, chafing at the unfamiliar harness that wrapped beneath his forelimbs. Kit sprawled ventral side down against his back, gripping the harness with her foreclaws and straddling his back with her hind legs. She was, in truth, scarcely noticeable. Indeed, he felt that she was suffering far more than he, because her weight pounded her injured ribs against his broad back each time he landed.

Slowed by the lack of visibility in the storm, and by the depth of the snow, his bounds carried them at a rate of progress only equal to fifty
Midway
s per human hour. Still he could feel her exhilaration as she clung to him.

Kit thought, “No wonder I wanted a pony for Christmas.”

He had scarcely grown accustomed to her touch before the dark bulk of the
Midway
’s remains loomed ahead in the swirling snows.

Kit said, “The wreck? He’s in the wreck? Nobody could survive that crash.”

The grezzen said, “I did. Jazen wasn’t in the wreck when I was. I would have felt him.”

“Then where—?”

“Perhaps he came to the wreck afterward, for shelter. If it was him that I felt, he is close by but he is not inside the wreckage.” The grezzen began a slow circle around the base of the wreckage, stepping carefully. It would scarcely do to crush the frail body they were trying to save.

As he walked and probed, the storm abated.

They had come halfway around the wreckage, and the wind had abated, when Kit tugged on his harness. “Stop! Over there!”

As he paused, she slid down his flank into snow that reached the middle joints of her hind limbs. Then she stumbled through the snow until she reached a mounded area alongside the hull, where a tiny patch of orange was visible.

He trotted up behind Kit and watched over her shoulder as she pawed snow off of an orange human.

“Oh, God, Parker. Oh, God.”

The grezzen could feel no life in the male.

Kit peeled off the coverings on her foreclaws, then dug tiny, shiny implements from her bag. Then she skinned Parker and poked his upper hind leg with one of the implements.

The grezzen thought. “I fear it is useless.”

Behind her transparent eye shields, moisture leaked down her cheeks. “Shut up! He’s gonna make it. It just takes this stuff a while to work.” The grezzen felt that she didn’t believe her own words. But that rarely seemed to stop humans from hoping that their words would become true.

Kit huddled close to the still body, then waved a foreclaw at the grezzen. “Get over here and snuggle up to us.”

The grezzen rocked back and forth while he plucked at the offensive harness beneath his forelimbs. He looked up and surveyed the now-visible wreckage. The crumpled hull stretched away in both directions, blackened by its fiery passage through this curiously changeable sky. A human-sized cleft in the hull was visible four of his body lengths to their left. Directly above them, he saw the tear he had made in the outer hull when he had cut and burrowed his way out from the cargo bay.

Indeed, Jazen could not have been here when the
Midway
had first struck this place, or the grezzen would have landed on top of him.

Kit said, “We need your body heat.”

The grezzen realized that her words were only part of what she felt. While she indeed felt that the grezzen’s great metabolic furnace might reanimate Jazen, she also felt that the grezzen’s physical proximity would heal the wound to her spirit.

He had already debased himself by allowing Kit to touch him. So, desensitized to this additional perversion, he stepped forward, then carefully bent his body to cocoon them against the cold.