Authors: Robert Stallman
The train whistle screamed as the flat face of the engine came round the curve, the shrillness of the sound increasing in pitch as the light burst into the car like an explosion and Barry realized the personality switch was part of his guilty dream. He pulled everything in his mind into a small pile that was the wreckage of his consciousness. He turned the inner light of concentration on that pile of debris, releasing the power.
I shift.
I swing one arm across the windshield, smashing it to jagged pieces, feeling them cutting through the hair and hide like razors. I sweep again. The train noise rushing at me, and now my spatial sense feels the horror of that unstoppable traveling mass of iron, coming like a tidal wave, an earthquake. The blinding light washes over me as I push myself into the windshield opening onto the jagged glass that cuts my belly as I wriggle out across it onto the hood. The whistle screams like a knife as the train front swells with speed, a hurtling mass of iron slamming the air ahead of it. I roll, get one foot on a fender to leap away as the engine towers over me, the light disappearing at the last instant, and crashes into the car with deafening, splintering, destroying sounds. I am hit, torn into, spinning off into the darkness. I feel my chest and belly laid open, flapping with blood, as I land on a doubled hind leg hard in the cinders and roll down the skidding embankment into the weeds.
The engine is past, pushing the shattered, tearing wreckage of the car ahead of it down the track, and the string of lighted windows rushes by, but slowing, the sparks like fiery hair around each wheel. I lie half in the ditch on my back, senses all but gone, sight fading, my spatial sense showing something alive in the darkness near me as the last coach of the train screeches past. The train noise recedes, slowing but still moving away, and something moves in the darkness across the tracks. Have to stay awake, alive. Danger in that presence in the dark. Can't make my mind take hold, keep going blind, ears buzzing, spatial sense full of shapes that can't be there. I try to roll over. Something sharp pushes into the inner flesh near my heart. I move the other way to ease the pressure and feel the bones of one arm grate together. I hold my head still, concentrating on vision. I am hurt badly, maybe mortally. The something is a shadow on the road across from me. It stands looking down the track where the train has stopped and people are pouring out of it as steam billows out around the far away engine. Hide. I pull my body farther into the weeds with one arm and one leg, holding my belly together with the broken arm. My spatial sense flares suddenly, trees ahead, a woods. I keep crawling, feeling back behind me for that figure that still stands in the darkened road watching the train down the track.
Inside the trees I feel safer, but my body is numbing in several places, pains beginning to swell in my back, stomach, arms, one leg, and the sharp thrust of the broken ribs against my heart. I am on all fours now, dragging one leg, waving my head back and forth to clear one sense so I can find a place. They will not clear. Keep blanking out. Let the body do it. I see a dark place. Blank. I feel the living form moving behind me now, farther away. It does not know where I am. Blank. I am digging slowly under a fallen log. I feel the pain and hear something whisper softly. Blank. I am under the log. Blank. I hurt too much. Who is Renee? I call a name. Blank.
I float and sink in a painful fire that burns me when I move. There is a dark pain that impales my chest when I sink, and the fire burns me everywhere. My senses are falling away from me in the dark painful sea, and I cannot swim any longer. I let myself sink again so that the sharp pain impales my heart like a severed head on a stake. I cannot hold. I let go and the stake presses in so that the pain rushes up into my mind and flares there like an explosion. And then it is quiet. I am floating in the dark sea, but I no longer feel the pain, or rather I feel it, but it does not matter anymore. Lights, sparks appear in the mist and the current takes me toward them. They are eyes, many pairs of eyes with thoughts behind them resting as if on snags of rock in mid ocean, the eyes watch me as I float and drown before them. I hear their thoughts as they think to each other about me. They are wondering if I am dead yet. They do not care, merely wonder about the creature with their abiding trait, curiosity. I would speak with them, but I cannot move my mouth, and my mind is a burned out cinder from the last flare of pain. I can only listen, feel their thoughts with what used to be my spatial sense, most joyous of my senses, now only a receiver of dull thoughts from the sparkling eyes in this fog that extends forever.
"It is dead?"
"Yes. It floats without moving."
"No. I see a thought."
"The last merely, the final burst which we can see. It is dead."
"The man killed it like any animal."
"Yes. The men kill anything. It was a nuisance to the man."
"Few are left."
"There are others?"
"They would not help."
"It is not their nature."
"Alone is safe."
I sank. The sparks flew upward. For a long while in darkness I lay on the bottom of the sea, not breathing, listening to the slow hiss of my last thought escaping like a fine thread running off the emptying spool. Then, when my mind felt the last flicker of the thread slip past and disappear, I felt buoyant and rose, unwilling, into the fiery sea again, feeling again the pain as I rose and the darkness became lighter to my senses, and I heard the spool of thought running again like an undertone of agony trying to be thought. And now I hear myself scream for the pain, cut off the scream with my thought and make it silent. I feel my body. The pains can be separated from their ocean of searing agony. The mind will separate the pain, and it will care for the body as it can. The pain pushes me to shift, to escape this body. The mind knows it cannot escape, that to shift to a human form would mean instant death, for I am injured beyond what a human can stand.
I am alive. I will be alive. I move one arm that is caught under me so that I can roll off the sharp pain in my chest. The arm is swollen and throbbing. but it moves when I command it. I move away from the chest pain. A leg bone grates. It is broken. There is something hard just over my head. A fallen tree. I have clawed my way into a ditch beneath a fallen tree, a safe place. The dawn is beginning, I think, and I do not know what dawn, how many dawns it has been. Can I feel my other leg? Is there another leg? Yes, there, numb. Perhaps not broken. The other arm is also numb, dull pain there, but no movement in the claws - broken. The spine is a long pathway of pain, lying like a broken column, the last crashing fall of a marble pillar, the geography book that Charles loved - I cannot think of other things, for the pain overwhelms me. I must go away now.
The sparkling eyes are there again. How long have they been after me, running across plowed fields, running in the ruts, a young boy running in the cold with the huge yellow moon just over the horizon. It draws him, helps him cry for help and brings that help to him in need. The talisman has power from the moon. They were not Indians. It was not a bear, only looked something like one. This is your totem, the moon, the bear, the shape changer. The sparkling eyed things are chasing some great bear across the unplowed fields, the fields that will not be plowed for centuries, but they will not catch him. He runs, laughing, knowing where they are in the dark. Now there are more, circling him, the choice must be made. I must teach you this and then leave you. Your need creates your being. Alone is safe. But you must search for the connection. We are still running while the sparkling eyes are behind us in the darkness and the fields are standing with corn now, with the moon hanging over us like a round skylight, a window on the universe that only we can see through while we keep running, always in search, while the shining eyes fade in the moonlight. I will teach you, the great animal says while we run under the moon, and we fall to all fours and run more swiftly than the wind, more clever than the fox on a trail, more powerful than the bear in defense of her home.
Something screams in my ear. I move too suddenly and the pain jars me awake. I am still under the fallen tree, and thirst is torturing every cell in my body. I must have liquid. I will make it rain. And I find myself weeping tears. Again I fall into the agony and the blackness. This time it is dark and painful all the time. I extend my senses very feebly into the painful areas, the worst ones first. The large, raging area around my heart is a group of broken ribs that move each time I breathe. And my one hind leg is broken, but not badly separated. It will heal if I can manage it right. The arm. I cannot find the center of the pain. It feels as if the whole upper arm has been smashed, but I can still move the claws on that arm. It cannot be that bad. Perhaps an early infection. The other arm is broken near the wrist. Not as much pain, but a large swelling that is already helping to hold the bones in place. My back worries me. But if it were badly separated, I could not move the legs or arms, and I can do so a little bit. I am not dead. I will be alive. I must first set the bones.
I close off and reach inside to find the spot, the sharp edges along the inner wall of the chest. The pain leads me. I feel the ends separated. Three must be held, for they move each time I breathe, stabbing me each time I try to move. I concentrate my consciousness on the receptors in the muscles around the largest rib until each strand of muscle becomes clear, hanging loosely under the shock of pain like long skeins of wet yarn. I pull back for a moment to turn off as much of the other pain as I can. It dims under the force of my will, and I turn up the receptors around the large rib. The shock is stunning for a second, but now I can find the proper strands that will pull the bone ends together. These I pull carefully into place. The bone ends move in a glare of pain that I can now almost ignore, it is so intense. They meet and I feel them grate as I pull more muscle strands into tetanus so that they lock. The pain of the muscle spasms is so minute in comparison to the others that it is almost a relief. Piece by piece I build up a hard muscled splint for the ribs, shifting the burden of breathing to the other lung so that only the very bottom part of the left lung moves when I breathe. And then I can relax for a time.
Almost, death would come easily now, I feel, as I ride the wash of pain that comes back as I must relax my will. But the thirst drives me on. I promise my body water if it will finish this job. I must set the leg before I can move. My concentration drives down into the upper leg. The large bone, along the bone, through the mashed and weeping tissues. The impact must have been very great, but the veins and arteries are not completely severed anywhere, and their shock contractions are holding well and keeping me from bleeding to death. I feel along until there are bone splinters. These will work out. Now I am at the break. It is a transverse break, with not much manipulation necessary for setting. I must have dragged it carefully. I do not recall now. I pause to put back the pain from the rest of the body and set to work isolating the necessary muscles, which for the hind leg will be most of the large extensors. One by one I ease them into tension until a brief burst of overload locks them in place. The pain of the locking is greater in the leg, but still minor in comparison with the other agonies. Now the next one, the great thigh muscle that will most surely hold. It stretches slowly to receive the bone, contracts gradually as I apply the pressure of will to the strands, and it moves smoothly to embrace the break, sealing with its strength the fragile bone ends, and now it locks. Ah, it is a relief to feel that pain and know the bone is tightly held. As I back away from the internal sensorium, I begin to hear and feel externally again, and the raging dryness that is like burning wood in my mouth and throat rises above the pain. Now if the wrist is all right for a time. I raise it and hold it close to my stomach. It will do for awhile. Explore it in detail later. Must have water.
I extend my spatial sense. Trees, a few birds asleep, dim light like twilight coming through the leaves. Living thing moving along the ground near the place where the trees stop. Rabbits. Come, rabbit. Come to me. I want you, rabbit. I feel the nearest little animal hopping toward the hole where I am crumpled up under the fallen log. I cannot sense water nearby. As divided as my consciousness is now, I can still make this little creature come to me. The rabbit appears to my sight, looking with blank, stupid eyes into the hollow where I lie. Come, little vessel, down the slope and under my jaw. You must! I command as the burning in my throat and mouth overwhelm me. The rabbit takes a step and slides down into the hole with me. He lies against my bloody chest, quivering with fear. I command him to come close under my jaw, for I cannot move. He must nearly thrust his body into my mouth, and then I move reflexively to snap my teeth into him, feeling the hot blood in my throat, groaning with pain in my neck, and the rabbit lets out his final squeal. I tear it apart in my jaws, gulping it, sucking at the juices, trying to swallow the flesh before I am ready. I retch and realize that if I do not take it slowly I will suffocate myself, for I cannot properly swallow in this bent position. I take it carefully, chewing many times, swallowing the precious blood, taking small pieces back with my tongue. And then it is done, and I am exhausted with my tiny meal. I want more, but the strain is too much. I let go and consciousness blanks out like fire dropping into a dark lake.
Days and nights pass. Sometimes when I open my eyes it is light, other times dark; my spatial sense brings me news of the small forest around me. I command my meals, rabbits and squirrels, a chicken once that had come into the woods lost. And I move a little until I can slide part way up out of the hole, dragging the one leg, one arm held tight to my chest. Now the liquids of the animals are not enough. I must have water, and there is a pool not far away where rain has collected. The time it rained, how long ago? Days? I do not know. I only know the pool is near. I pull my heavy body out of the hole, feeling the stiffness of muscles pulling against each other, the pain wanting me to stop, to stay curled in the hole under the fallen tree. I pull up with the unbroken arm; the one that hurts the most is least injured, I think. I am out of the hole, lying in last year's brown leaves. It is dark, moonless, comfortingly empty in the woods. I have not heard trains or cars for many hours now. It may be near morning. The pool is near. I pull over to it, sliding on my right side like a swimmer doing the side stroke. The water smells better than any food ever did. My mouth shrinks up in anticipation of the water. It is there, a dark glaze in my perception. I pull along and feel the ground getting slick and muddy. I want to lick the mud, but I force myself to wait. Now the water is under my right paw, and now my face is over it. I drop my face into the water, sucking it in, long, slow sips that take me with delight so that I hardly feel the pain when I drink. Not too much. Lie quietly and drink slowly.