Old Man's War Boxed Set 1 (79 page)

Yoder walked us to where he saw the men enter the woods and told us he’d wait for us there. Jane and I went in and started looking for the trail of men.

“Here,” Jane said, pointing to boot marks on the forest floor. Paulo and his boys were making no attempt to keep themselves hidden, or if they were, they were very bad at it. “Idiots,” Jane said, and took off after them, unthinkingly moving at her new and improved high speed. I ran off after her, neither as fast nor as quietly.

I caught up with her about a klick later. “Don’t do that again,” I said. “I’m about to heave my lungs out.”

“Quiet,” Jane said. I shut up. Jane’s hearing had no doubt improved with her speed. I tried to suck oxygen into my lungs as quietly as I could. She began walking west when we heard a shot, followed by three more. Jane began running again, in the direction of the shots. I followed as quickly as I could.

Another klick later I entered a clearing. Jane was kneeling over a body that had blood pooling underneath it; another man sat nearby, propped up by the woody stump of a bush. I ran over to Jane and the body, whose front was spattered with blood. She barely glanced up. “Dead already,” she said. “Shot between the rib and the sternum. Right through the heart, straight out the back. Probably dead before he hit the ground.”

I looked up at the man’s face. It took me a minute to recognize him: Marco Flores, one of Gutierrez’s colonists from Khartoum. I left Flores to Jane and went over to the other man, who was staring blankly ahead. It was another Khartoum colonist, Galen DeLeon.

“Galen,” I said, crouching down to get at his eye level. The salutation didn’t register. I snapped my fingers a couple of times to get his attention. “Galen,” I said again. “Tell me what happened.”

“I shot Marco,” DeLeon said, in a bland, conversational voice. He was looking past me, at nothing in particular. “I didn’t mean to. They just came out of nowhere, and I shot one, and Marco got in the way. I shot him. He went down.” DeLeon put his hands on
his forehead and started grasping at his hair. “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “All of a sudden they were just there.”

“Galen,” I said. “You came out here with Paulo Gutierrez and a couple other men. Where did they go?”

DeLeon waved indistinctly in a westerly direction. “They ran off. Paulo and Juan and Deit went after them. I stayed. To see if I could help Marco. To see . . .” he trailed off again. I stood up.

“I didn’t mean to shoot him,” DeLeon said, still in that bland tone. “They were just there. And they moved so fast. You should have seen them. If you saw them, you know why I had to shoot. If you saw what they looked like.”

“What do they look like?” I asked.

DeLeon smiled tragically and for the first time looked at me. “Like werewolves.” He closed his eyes and put his head back in his hands.

I went back over to Jane. “DeLeon’s in shock,” I said. “One of us should take him back.”

“What did he say happened?” Jane asked.

“Said the things came out of nowhere and ran that way,” I said, pointing west. “Gutierrez and the rest of them went chasing after them.” It hit me. “They’re running into an ambush,” I said.

“Come on,” Jane said, and pointed to Flores’s rifle. “Take that,” she said, and ran. I took Flores’s rifle, checked the load and once again started after my wife.

There was another rifle shot, followed by the sound of men yelling. I put on a burst of speed and came up a rise to find Jane in a broken grove of Roanoke trees, kneeling on the back of one of the men, who was yelling in pain. Paulo Gutierrez was pointing his rifle at Jane and ordering her off the man. Jane wasn’t budging. A third man stood to the side, looking like he was about to wet his pants.

I leveled my rifle at Gutierrez. “Drop your rifle, Paulo,” I said. “Drop it or I’m going to drop you.”

“Tell your wife to get off Deit,” Gutierrez said.

“No,” I said. “Now drop your weapon.”

“She’s breaking his goddamn arm!” Gutierrez said.

“If she wanted to break his arm, it’d be broken by now,” I said. “And if she wanted to kill every one of you, you’d already be dead. Paulo, I’m not going to tell you again. Drop your rifle.”

Paulo dropped his rifle. I glanced over at the third man, who would be Juan. He dropped his, too. “Down,” I said to the both of them. “Knees and palms on the ground.” They went down.

“Jane,” I said.

“This one took a shot at me,” Jane said.

“I didn’t know it was you!” Diet said.

“Shut up,” Jane said. He shut up.

I walked over to Juan and Gutierrez’s rifles and picked them up. “Paulo, where are your other men?” I asked.

“They’re behind us somewhere,” Gutierrez said. “These things popped out of nowhere and started running this way, and we came after them. Marco and Galen probably went off in another direction.”

“Marco is dead,” I said.

“Those fuckers got him,” Deit said.

“No,” I said. “Galen shot him. Just like you almost shot her.”

“Holy Christ,” Gutierrez said. “Marco.”

“This is
exactly
why I wanted to keep this quiet,” I said to Gutierrez. “To keep some idiot from doing this. You dumbfucks haven’t got the first clue what you’re doing, and now one of you is dead, one of you killed him, and the rest of you are running into an ambush.”

“Oh God,” Gutierrez said. He tried to sit up from his four-on-the-floor position but lost his balance, and collapsed in a pile of grief.

“We’re going to walk out of here now, all of us,” I said, walking over to Gutierrez. “We’re going to go back the way we came in, and along the way we’re going to pick up Galen and Marco. Paulo, I’m sorry—” I caught movement out of the corner of my eye; it was Jane, telling me to cut it off. She was listening for something. I looked over at her.
What is it?
I mouthed.

Jane looked down at Deit. “What direction did those things you were chasing run off in?”

Deit pointed west. “That way. We were chasing them, and then they disappeared, and then you came running up.”

“What do you mean they disappeared?” Jane said.

“One minute we saw them and the next we didn’t,” Deit said. “Those fuckers are fast.”

Jane got off Deit. “Get up. Now,” she said. She looked over to me. “They weren’t running into an ambush. This
is
the ambush.”

Then I heard what Jane had been hearing: a soft mass of clicks, coming from the trees. Coming from directly above us.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“What the hell is that?” Gutierrez said, and looked up as the spear came down, exposing his neck to its tip, which slid into that soft space at the top of the sternum and drove itself into his viscera. I rolled, avoiding a spear of my own, and looked up as I did.

It was raining werewolves.

Two fell near me and Gutierrez, who was still alive, trying to pull out the spear. One grabbed the spear near the end and drove it down farther into Gutierrez’s chest and shook it violently. Gutierrez spat up blood and died. The second slashed at me with claws as I rolled, ripping my jacket but missing flesh. I had kept my rifle and drew it up with one hand; the thing grabbed the barrel with both of its paws or claws or hands and prepared to pull it out of my grip. It didn’t seem to know that a projectile could come out of the end; I educated it on the subject. The creature brutalizing
Gutierrez uttered a sharp click of what I hoped was terror and sprinted east, getting a running start at a tree, which it scaled and then hurled itself from, landing on another tree. It disappeared into the foliage.

I looked around. They were gone. They were
all
gone.

Something moved; I trained the rifle on it. It was Jane. She was pulling a knife out of one of the werewolves. Another werewolf lay nearby. I looked for Juan and Deit and found them on the ground, lifeless.

“Okay?” Jane said to me. I nodded. Jane stood, holding her side; blood slipped between her fingers.

“You’re hurt,” I said.

“I’m fine,” she said. “It looks worse than it is.”

In the distance there was a very human scream.

“DeLeon,” Jane said, and started running, still holding her side. I gave chase.

Most of DeLeon was missing. Some of him was left behind. Wherever the rest of him was, it was still alive and screaming. A blood trail went from where he had sat to one of the trees. There was another scream.

“They’re taking him north,” I said. “Come on.”

“No,” Jane said, and pointed. In the east, there was movement in the trees. “They’re using DeLeon as bait to lead us away. Most of them are headed east. Back toward the colony.”

“We can’t leave DeLeon,” I said. “He’s still alive.”

“I’ll get him,” Jane said. “You get back. Be careful. Watch the trees and the ground.” She was off.

Fifteen minutes later I breached the border of the woods and came back to colony ground to find four werewolves in a semicircle and Hiram Yoder standing silently at their focus. I dropped to the ground.

The werewolves didn’t notice me; they were entirely intent on Yoder, who continued to stand stock-still. Two of the werewolves had spears trained on him, ready to run him through if he moved. He didn’t. All four of them clicked and hissed, the hisses falling in and out of my sonic range; this was why Jane heard them before the rest of us did.

One of the werewolves came forward to Yoder, hissing and clicking at him, stocky and muscular where Yoder was tall and trim. It had a simple stone knife in one hand. It reached out a claw and poked Yoder hard in the chest; Yoder took it and stood there, silently. The thing grabbed his right arm and began to sniff it and examine it; Yoder offered no resistance. Yoder was a Mennonite, a pacifist.

The werewolf suddenly struck Yoder hard on the arm, perhaps testing him. Yoder staggered a bit from the blow but stood his ground. The werewolf let out a rapid series of chirps and then the others did, too; I suspected they were laughing.

The werewolf raked his claws across Yoder’s face, shredding the man’s right cheek with an audible scraping sound. Blood poured down Yoder’s face; he involuntarily clutched it with his hand. The werewolf cooed and stared at Yoder, its four eyes unblinking, waiting to see what he would do.

Yoder dropped his hand from his ruined face and looked directly at the werewolf. He slowly turned his head to offer his other cheek.

The werewolf stepped away from Yoder and back toward its own, chirping. The two who had spears trained on Yoder let them drop slightly. I breathed a sigh of relief and looked down for a second, registering my own cold sweat. Yoder had kept himself alive by not offering resistance; the creatures, whatever else they were, were smart enough to see that he was not a threat.

I raised my head again to see one of the werewolves staring directly at me.

It let out a trilling cry. The werewolf closest to Yoder glanced over at me, snarled and drove his stone knife into Yoder. Yoder stiffened. I raised my rifle and shot the werewolf in the head. It fell; the other werewolves bolted back into the woods.

I ran over to Yoder, who had collapsed on the ground, and was pawing gingerly at the stone knife. “Don’t touch it,” I said. If the knife had nicked any major blood vessels, pulling it out could cause him to bleed out.

“It hurts,” Yoder said. He looked up at me and smiled, gritting his teeth. “Well, it almost worked.”

“It did work,” I said. “I’m sorry, Hiram. This wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for me.”

“Not your fault,” Hiram said. “I saw you drop and hide. Saw you give me a chance. You did the right thing.” He reached out toward the corpse of the werewolf, touching the sprawled leg. “Wish you didn’t have to shoot it,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. Hiram didn’t have anything more to say.

“Hiram Yoder. Paulo Gutierrez. Juan Escobedo. Marco Flores. Deiter Gruber. Galen DeLeon,” Manfred Trujillo said. “Six dead.”

“Yes,” I said. I sat at my kitchen table. Zoë was at Trujillo’s, spending the night with Gretchen. Hickory and Dickory were with her. Jane was in the medical bay; on top of the gash in her side she had scraped herself up pretty badly chasing DeLeon. Babar was resting his head in my lap. I was patting it absentmindedly.

“One body,” Trujillo said. I looked up at that. “A hundred of us went into those woods, where you told us to go. We found blood,
but not a single one of their bodies. Those things took them with them.”

“What about Galen?” I said. Jane had told me that she’d found parts of him, leaving a trail as she went along. She stopped following after he stopped screaming, and when her own injuries kept her from going farther.

“We found a few things,” Trujillo said. “Not enough to consider a body.”

“Great,” I said. “Just great.”

“How do you feel?” Trujillo asked.

“Jesus, Man,” I said. “How do you think I feel? We lost six people today. We lost godda—we lost Hiram Yoder. We would all be dead if it wasn’t for him. He
saved
this colony, him and the Mennonites. Now he’s dead, and it’s my fault.”

“It was Paulo who put that posse together,” Trujillo said. “He went against your orders and he got five others killed. And put you and Jane in danger. If someone’s going to shoulder the blame, it should be him.”

“I’m not looking to blame Paulo,” I said.

“I know you’re not,” Trujillo said. “That’s why I’m saying it. Paulo was a friend of mine, as good a friend as I have here. But he did something foolish, and he got those men killed. He should have listened to you.”

“Yes. Well,” I said. “I thought making these creatures a state secret would
keep
something like this from happening. That’s why I did it.”

“Secrets have a way of getting out,” Trujillo said. “You know that. Or should.”

“I should have let everyone know about these things,” I said.

“Maybe,” Trujillo said. “You had to make a call here and you made it. It wasn’t the one I would have thought you would make,
I have to say. It wasn’t like you. If you don’t mind me saying so, you’re not that good with secrets. People here aren’t used to you having them, either.”

I grunted assent and patted my dog. Trujillo shifted uncomfortably in his chair for a few minutes. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.