Legion, page 10
“Come on,” he said suddenly, “let’s check around and see what we see.”
They stayed closer together then and, using the pines as a base, moved in enlarging arcs from their shadows. From the signs he could read, and those she read for him, they noted how Dix had moved Kalen to safety a good twenty meters away from the boulder to a thick patch of reeds beside a dried-up creek. His blood too was evident, the trail it left too clear, and the fact that it stopped abruptly—as did the imprint of his body—made them frown. But though they searched until dark, they could uncover no directions, no routes; and by the time they could no longer see, it was evident at least to Vivian that the Hunters had managed to grab the rest of the team; or had killed them and taken their bodies deeper into the forest.
“But I’m sure they’re not dead,” said Vivian finally.
“But Hunters aren’t captors,” he protested as a matter of course. “I mean, you should know that better than I do.”
He saw the frown on her face but chose to ignore it. If she was suddenly going to start getting sensitive about her background, he wasn’t about to start trying to talk her out of it. She would just have to see by his intent and like it or not.
They moved south, then, for several kilometers along the road until darkness made them stumble more than walk and the night’s oppression drove them into silence. They stopped, the uncertainty of each affecting the other, and climbed a low bank to a clearing above, settled their packs for pillows and lay side by side without touching. Mathew knew he should eat something, but he wasn’t hungry. The surges of adrenalin that had galvanized him earlier had finally dissipated, and he was exhausted. The scrapes, the scratches, the several bruises on his legs and arms ached, prodding at him dully whenever his mind slipped and thought about them. Sharply, whenever he shifted and his clothes rubbed them. The ground under his back poked at him, the humid night air made him feel he was lying in a continual wash of perspiration though his hand, when it strayed over his face, came away dry, and shaking. He turned once to ask Vivian about the next morning, scowled when he saw she had fallen asleep already.
No nerves, he thought sourly; like a bloody machine.
And there were several, widely spaced moments when he sat up abruptly, feeling that he should not be lying in an attempt to sleep as long as Marla and the others were…
But neither, he reminded himself, was he an army. And, for all their small numbers, the Hunters were.
He punched at the ground in frustration. So soon started, and so soon failed. Everything had been worked out so that all he had to do was act and react, with a minimum of thinking. Yet Will kept telling him he thought too damned much. Damnit, he thought, why doesn’t anyone understand me? He lay back and cupped his hands behind his head.
“If you don’t settle down,” Vivian whispered, nearly frightening him to death, “neither one of us will be any good in the morning.”
“How can I sleep?” It was almost a growl.
She grunted and rolled over, pushing at him until he groaned and lay on his stomach. Then she slapped at his back several times, gripped his shoulders and began to knead them, slowly. “There’s nothing we can do now,” she said matter-of-factly. “Steel had all the ’torches in his pack. So we’re stuck until it’s light. Then, but not before, we can follow them, try to find out why they’re behaving this way.”
“Quilly,” he said, though his voice sounded distant. He sensed her shrug. “Who else? But why? When I was … when I was younger, there was nothing a man like that could have promised them to get them to follow. What can he promise that they don’t have already? I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe they’re changing,” he muttered. “It has been a while since you’ve been with them, you know. Maybe they’re changing, like everyone else.”
“Maybe,” she said, her fingers tightening momentarily. “But I don’t think so.”
“Well, if I were a genius, I’d tell you everything right now. But I’m not, so….”
He tried a shrug, but the effort was too much to produce more than the thought. Her hands, the scent of them, the feel of them, the sudden peaceful crooning she began almost under her breath. Wordless. Quiet. Merging with the nightwind that crept among the leaves. Her hands moved lower to the small of his back, higher to his nape; lower, and higher. To his neck, to his arms. He wanted to tell her to stop, that he was fine, that he could sleep now with no trouble, that her arms must be tired and she needed rest herself. He wanted to talk to her about Marla and Will and the giant and the dwarf, but none of the words that formed in his mouth were able to escape as more than a sigh.
IX
Firstlight was accompanied by an unpleasant sensation of rain not yet fallen. The air was sluggish, even the leaves felt weighted when Mathew opened his eyes abruptly and sat up, his hands immediately grabbing for his sides to massage them. He shook his head, momentarily disoriented, then saw a tiny tripod set up in the place where Vivian had lain, a fuelcone beneath it emitting virtually lightless heat. And by the time he had rubbed his eyes clear, she was kneeling beside it, setting a palmful of pastemeal into a shallow bowl half-filled with water. She grinned and mouthed good morning. He smiled back, though he couldn’t help but notice the drawn look about her eyes, accentuated by the smudges of dirt smeared across her cheeks. He scratched his head vigorously, returned to rubbing at the muscles complaining of a lack of bed. “Don’t know how you stood it,” he muttered, then scratched at his legs until he thought he would bleed.
“Practice,” she said, stirring the colorless nutrient paste with one finger until she judged it warm enough. Then she extinguished the ’cone and slipped it immediately back into her pack, dismantled the tripod and did the same. She reached for his hand and poured half the paste into his palm. “Eat,” she ordered when he winced. “We’re in a hurry, remember?”
The day was already warm, shades-of-grey clouds masking what blue there might have been. He could feel thunder lurking in the tension that sparked the air, in the patches of groundfog that refused to lift from the depressions around them as they ate quickly, silently, and moved out without saying a word. Without rancor, he deferred instantly to her skills, her experience; the fact that he was supposed to be leader of this expedition had vanished almost as soon as the expedition had. He imagined that, in theory, he could have made a point, a debate, instead concentrated on reading what signs he could, and wondering how—when he could not—she found something to follow. That there were more than a dozen Hunters, however, was simple enough to grasp, and they didn’t seem to be bothering to hide any of their passage. That much did not bother him—they were confident, and rightfully so, and they probably had not even wasted manpower by setting back a rear guard. It was evident, however, that they had not stopped at all during the night, and for that error in prescience he cursed himself roundly. And when he did so loudly, Vivian promptly contradicted him. Without excusing.
“It doesn’t make any difference, really,” she said as they walked. “We were too tired anyway, and we wouldn’t have done much good to anyone even if we had caught up with them. Besides, it looks as though they still have the four, so they’re not going to be able to move all that quickly. I told you they stayed away from the roads. This time that’s in our favor, believe it or not.” She bent suddenly and stared at the ground. “Four.” She nodded to herself. “Basil was wounded, remember, and they think Will’s an old man.” She stopped and glanced back at him over her shoulder. “Do you think he’ll be—”
“No,” he said, not needing to consider. “He’ll be an old man if he has to play dead to prove it. Unless one of them tries to slice or shoot him, they’ll never know the difference. And he sure won’t tell them. No, they’ll never know.”
“That’s funny,” she said, “because I do. Know the difference, I mean.”
“Because you lived with him and his friends.” He grinned at her sour expression. “It’s in the eyes, Viv. I don’t know how else to explain it, but there’s something about the eyes. Not exactly lifeless, necessarily but … instinctive, perhaps. It’s really the only way, unless you happen to tangle with one.”
“Right,” she said, doubtfully, and he dropped it without trying to explore the reasons further. For all her possession, and her apparent remnants of Hunter callousness, he knew that she still did not trust anyone … anything not human, and her mission back at Central would not have kept her in any great, lengthy contact with any of the androids. And that, he decided, was her loss; just as his inability to read the forest well was his. But he could live with it; at the moment, he didn’t much care if she could or not.
By the middle of the afternoon, they had crossed enough large streams and strong-racing creeks for him to know without her telling him that they were approaching the seabent river. There were times when he found himself straining to hear if the Delaware had a voice, succeeded only in giving himself a headache it took several hours to shake. By nightfall, when he was ready to surrender pursuit—with no feelings of guilt—and see what he could do to salvage what was left of his plan—she told him they were only an hour or two behind, if that, and by the way the Hunters were beginning to slow down, she did not think they would lose much time if they took the night to sleep and pick up strength. He protested, but only mildly. Working on a rehab team meant, for the most part, sticking to the roads, sleeping more nights than not in a house with a bed; this, however, was something he had been idiot enough not to count on—his legs were working, but barely; his arms were weary of holding back, fending off, beating around branches; his eyes were burning from staring through the perpetual gloom and the dust that flew into them, the gnats, the flies, the occasional stench of dead animals. He counted himself lucky in only one respect—that the rain had held off, and the thunder was only imagination. He told himself he should be grateful for at least that much. Told himself … and wished he could believe it.
When finally it was again impossible for them to see more than an arm’s length ahead, Vivian sagged against a tree and dropped her pack. “Enough,” she said. “We’ll break our legs.”
“Are you sure—”
“No, I’m not sure!” she snapped. “Damned Steel has the ’torches, and if he hasn’t opened his big mouth, they don’t know about it. They may have some of their own, but if they did I think I would have seen some sign of it. No, I think they’ll stop. After all, if you were a Hunter and had a dozen or so friends tagging along with you after you’d nabbed a couple or four people, would you worry yourself to death about one man and one woman—from Central, remember—tailing along after you? Would you be scared?”
He brushed a hand over a partially buried log. Shook his head. “But you don’t have to rub it in,” he muttered.
“Hey, look, Parric,” she said, “this wasn’t my idea, you know. I’ve got my own … I could have done better on my own, you know.”
“Then why didn’t you?” he blurted, looked quickly away back to the log. Vivian was getting more and more to be a puzzle he had no time to work for a solution; and while part of the solving might come with an answer to his ill-advised question, he wasn’t sure now that he wanted to hear it. She had her reasons; he reminded himself; there’s no sense in playing what you hate in someone else.
Sleep came easily after they had eaten, too easily, and it bothered him. There was no time for discussion, for plans, for some speculation on what they would do when they finally caught up with the Hunters. His question had made her sullen, and she wasted little time after dinner searching for and finding a place to sleep a good distance from his own. Walking further was impossible—his legs refused to obey him, despite the weeks on the road they had already spent. It was the urgency, he decided, this time taking the extra running step when before, as a team, they had not been moving at constant straining speed. He thought, when he lay down and pushed his pack under his head, that he would die. Not, he thought, a bad idea. A lot more pleasant than infighting and pouting, and walking into a tree that suddenly sprouted angrily in the middle of your path. Dying might not be so bad.
But in the meantime there was sleep…
…and the sun and Vivian already handing him a ration of paste before his eyes were opened and his mouth was ready.
“What?” he said, startled. “My Lord, Vivian, this is—”
“Shut up,” she whispered harshly. “I heard voices a few minutes ago.”
Instantly, he was on his feet, scrabbling for his pack, scowling at her when she didn’t move in kind. “What’s the matter?”
She nodded toward her right. “There’s a ravine beyond the trees there. No water, but fairly deep. Sound carries. They’re not on top of us, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He didn’t know what to think. Nothing was working, and he was tired of trying to figure it out. He paced impatiently, then, up the narrow animal trail they had been following, back again until she told him she was ready to move on. He almost snapped at her, held his tongue and followed her instead, branches slapping, thorns gouging, until the trees stopped at a low brushwall, beyond which was a fifty-meter drop into a dry wash overgrown with man-high thickets. They kept close to the forest shadows, every so often glancing at the sky, waiting for the threat to become a storm. She pointed northward, away from the drop, and he nodded. Followed. Punched once at a leg that nearly collapsed beneath him. Feeling an ache grow at the back of his skull when he strained to hear what she claimed to have heard, on the verge of not believing it until she suddenly dropped to one knee and waved him down behind her. He froze, felt the pack on his spine, his weapon pressing against his stomach, the crease of his boots, the dirt on his hands.
And heard.
Voices. Low, though not whispering. A quick laugh cut off to silence. A muttering, and the laugh again.
At Vivian’s sharp gesture he moved up beside her where she took his head in her hands and drew his ear close to her lips. “I don’t understand,” she admitted. “They’re not our Hunters or they wouldn’t be making all that noise.”
“Overconfident?”
She glared at him and he shrugged, feeling like a child eavesdropping on parents. When she said nothing more, he waited, trying to form words out of the voices, failing and wishing he could do something except crouch. Finally, with a decisive nod, she made a series of hand signals he had to have repeated before he knew and moved off the trail into the brush, keeping as low as he could without losing his balance, seeing ahead of him now the broad division the ravine caused in the forest.
It occurred to him that he might have to kill someone.
And the first wave of anger at an image of Robbins faded when he realized with a start that he could probably do it.
He drew his handgun from its place in his waistband, primed it and waited until he felt the warmth of the charge seep into his palm. He wished, as he slowed, that he had some inkling of Vivian’s position. It was an abrupt sensation of loneliness that almost broke him into a run, made him call out, until he was able to control himself with a low, sharp grunt.
He skirted a fallen tree, saw the ground spotted grey and black. The voices were louder now, but still unintelligible until, as he froze after snapping a dead black branch, a laugh boomed through the trees. His eyes widened. He stood. The laugh was repeated, pealed, and he nearly laughed himself as he kicked into a run.
Sometime in the recent past, a lightning-fire had cleared a great swatch of black from the rim of the ravine. There were stumps fitfully, futilely sprouting weak green shoots that didn’t quite mask the death of the trunks; fallen boles that had shattered and scattered across the level ground, hollowed and jagged, brittle still to the touch; no grass, a few stubborn weeds; and dead sticks of ash and birch and elm and pine that posed grotesque against the matching sky.
Had it all been fired the desolation could have been tolerated. But behind it, and across the ravine, the green continued as though nothing had happened.
And in its center, propped against a massive chipped log was Basil Kalen, a wide medpatch strapped inexpertly around his middle, over his blouse where it was still whole enough to be tucked into his trousers. He was pale, his red hair all the more brilliant, and though his eyes were crinkled in silent laughter they were nonetheless subdued against the blood he had lost, the pain that he’d felt. Beside him and slightly above, sitting on the log like a camouflaged crow, his forearms dangling over his knees, was Will Dix.
When Mathew burst into the open from the direction of the ravine, Kalen tried to scramble out of danger, only succeeded in falling onto his side where he lay helpless, and moaning. Dix only looked up.
“You’re late,” he said. “I heard you last night.”
Mathew didn’t know whether to thrash him or hug him, lost the chance to do either when Vivian broke from the woods behind the log, stopped, and closed her eyes briefly.
Dix, one hand on the log to balance himself, looked back and beckoned. “Come on, girl,” he said. “I’m out of patience.”
“He’s out of patience,” Kalen said calmly to Mathew. Then he lifted his head and bellowed: “You’re out of patience? You are out of patience?” He struggled to sit up, refusing Mathew’s quickly offered hand. “Do you have any idea,” Kalen said to him, a palm pressed tightly to his side, “do you have any idea what it’s like to spend the night with this … this…“ He spat in disgust, slumped suddenly and his head dropped toward his chest. “Damn,” he muttered when Mathew knelt in front of him. “Damn, I thought he was going to be the last thing I ever saw.”
Vivian wasted no time in greetings. She unshouldered her pack and yanked out a medpatch to replace the one Kalen had on his wound. And as she worked, wincing as she pulled the old one off and saw the caked, dangerously dark blood, nodding when she washed it off and saw the flesh nevertheless pulling together, Dix explained to them how they had gotten there, and why neither Marla nor Tim had also been left behind.
