Walking
home, he felt a surge of energy, like needlepricks on his skin—a
trickle from the gland in his elytra, Billy presumed. That was a
good sign and it made him optimistic. Maybe the malfunction was
temporary.
His
thoughts were more coherent, at least.
Home,
he attached the headgear to his armor and prayed the diagnostics were
still working.
His
eyepiece bled graphs and numbers into his field of vision. A complete
diagnostic sequence took more than an hour, but Billy knew what all
the numbers ought to be. He ran down his electrical systems, then
started on the biologicals. Everything came up normal or near normal
except for two items: a local blood pressure and the temps on a tiny
circulatory pump. Billy finished the general diagnostic, then called
back those numbers for a closer look. He asked the armor for a
complete sequence on the abdominals and waited nervously for the
results.
More
numbers appeared, chiefly pressure readings. But Billy understood
what these misplaced decimal points implied: a blood clot had
lodged in the reedlike lancet.
Billy
climbed out of his armor.
He
hadn't powered all the way up, though he had worn the armor a great
deal in the last week, and maybe that was good—a full power-up
would have placed greater demands on the gland in the elytra, perhaps
thrown the clot into an artery. He might have died.
But
the Need was still very great.
The
armor was limp in his hand. He turned the flexible elytra inside out
and deployed the lancet—a long, narrow microtube still wet with
blood.
Here
was where the clot had lodged.
Billy
went to the kitchen and put a pot of water on the stove. As it
boiled, he shook in a handful of Morton salt to approximate the
salinity of human blood. This was "emergency field
service," a technique he had never tried, though he remembered
it from training.
When
the water was cool enough to touch, Billy dipped the lancet in.
Micropumps
responded to the heat. Threads of dark blood oozed into the pot.
He
couldn't tell whether the clot had dissolved.
He
cleaned the lancet and retracted it. Then he wrapped the elytra
around his body, sealed them, and ran the diagnostics again.
The
numbers looked better. Not perfect—but of course it was hard to
tell until he plugged the lancet into his body and allowed his own
blood to course through it.
Billy
activated that system.
He
felt the lancet slide under his skin. It stung a little— perhaps
some salt still clinging to the microtube in spite of its own
sterilants and anesthetics. But at least—
Ah.
—
it
seemed to be working.
Billy
experienced a dizzy sense of triumph. He set out from the apartment
at once.
He
had lost a lot of time. It was late now. A street-cleaning truck had
passed this way and Billy caught the reflection of a fingernail moon
in the empty, wet asphalt.
Only
an interruption, he told himself. How childish to have been so
frightened of a minor malfunction. But understandable: all his
courage came from the armor.
He
thought about the secret gland hidden in the folds of the elytra.
It
was dormant when the armor was folded away, tissues bathed in
life-suspending chemicals. But the gland was a living
thing—grown, he supposed, in a factory somewhere, a critically
altered mutation of a thalamus or thyroid. When it lived, it lived on
Billy's blood—pumped in from an artery through the stylet,
processed and pumped back through the lancet. The gland secreted the
chemicals that made Billy the fine hunter he was tonight.
But
because the gland was alive it might age, might be susceptible to
disease, tumors, toxins—Billy simply didn't know. For all the
armor's inbuilt diagnostics, such problems were necessarily the
business of the infantry doctors.
No
infantry doctors here.
He
wondered whether his gland had been damaged by the blood clot.
Whether it would clot again. Maybe it would . . . maybe this last
episode had been a token of his own mortality.
But
no, Billy thought, that's wrong. I
am
Death.
That's what I am tonight. And Death can't die.
He
laughed out loud, an overflow of joy. It felt good to be hunting
again.
He
went to the place his prey had gone, where the hunt had been
interrupted. He adjusted the bandwidth on his eyepiece and saw a
dust of blue light in the doorway, very faint. And up the stairs.
Tonight,
Billy thought, it would all come together.
Tonight,
at last, he would kill someone.
Catherine
backed out of the woodshed, turned and ran, stumbling over the
berry-bush runners and scratching herself on the thorns. She didn't
feel any of this. She was too frightened.
The
thing in the shed was— Was unnameable. Was not human.
Was
a pulsating travesty of a human being.
She
ran until she was breathless, then braced herself against a tree
trunk, gasping and coughing. Her lungs ached and her unprotected arms
were bloody from the nettles. The forest around her was silent,
large, and absurdly sunny. Tree-tops moved in the breeze.
She
sat down among the pine needles, hugging herself.
Be
sensible,
Catherine
thought.
Whatever
it is, it can't hurt you. It can't move.
It
had been bloody and helpless. Maybe not a monster, she thought; maybe
a human being in some terrible kind of distress, skinned,
mutilated . . .
But
a mutilated human being would not have said "Help me" in
that calm and earnest voice.
It
was hurt. Well,
of
course
it
was hurt—it should have been dead! She had been able to see through
its skin, into its insides; through its skull into its brains. What
could have done that to a human being, and what human being could
have survived?
Go
home,
Catherine
instructed herself. Back to Gram Peggy's house. Whatever she
did—call the police, call an ambulance—she could do from
there.
At
home, she could think.
At
home, she could lock the doors.
She
locked the doors and scoured the kitchen shelves for something
calming. What she turned up was a cut-glass decanter of peach
brandy, two thirds full—"for sleepless nights," Gram
Peggy used to say. Catherine swallowed an ounce or so straight out of
the bottle. She felt the liquid inside her like a small furnace,
fiery and warming.
In
the downstairs bathroom she sponged the blood off her arms and
sprayed the lacework cuts with Bactine. Her shirt was torn; she
changed it. She washed her face and hands.
Then
she wandered through the downstairs checking the doors again, stopped
when she passed the telephone. Probably she ought to call
someone, Catherine thought.
911?
The
Belltower Police Department? But what could she say?
She
thought about it a few minutes, paralyzed with indecision, until
a new idea occurred to her. An impulse, but sensible. She
retrieved Doug Archer's business card from a bureau drawer and dialed
the number written there.
His
answering service said he'd call back in about an hour. Catherine was
disconcerted by this unexpected delay. She sat at the kitchen table
with the peach brandy in front of her, trying to make sense of her
experience in the woodshed.
Maybe
she'd misinterpreted something. That was possible, wasn't it? People
see odd things, especially in a crisis. Maybe somebody had been badly
hurt. Maybe she shouldn't have run away.
But
Catherine had an artist's eye and she recalled the scene as clearly
as if she had sketched it on canvas: dark blur of mold on ancient
newsprint, bars of sunlight through green mossy walls, and the
centerpiece, all pinks and blues and strange crimsons and yellows, a
half-made thing, which pronounced the words
Help
me
while
its larynx bobbed in its glassy throat.
Sweet
Jesus in a sidecar,
Catherine
thought.
Oh,
this is way out of bounds. This is crazy.
She'd
finished half the contents of the brandy decanter by the time Doug
Archer knocked. Catherine opened the door for him, a little
light-headed but still deeply frightened. He said, "I was out in
this neighborhood so I thought I'd just drop by instead of calling .
. . Hey, are you all right?"
Then,
without meaning to, she was leaning against him. He steadied her and
guided her to the couch.
"I
found something," she managed. "Something terrible.
Something strange."
"Found
something," Archer repeated.
"In
the woods—downhill south of here."
"Tell
me about it," Archer said.
Catherine
stammered out the story, suddenly embarrassed by what seemed like her
own hysteria. How could he possibly understand? Archer sat
attentively in Gram Peggy's easy chair, but he was fundamentally a
stranger. Maybe it had been dumb to call him. When he asked her to
get in touch if she noticed anything strange, was
this
what
he meant? Maybe it was a conspiracy. Belltower, Washington, occupied
by hostile aliens. Maybe, under his neat Levi's and blue
Belltower Realty jacket, Archer was as transparent and strange as the
thing in the woodshed.
But
when she finished the story she found herself soothed by the telling
of it.
Archer
said he believed her, but maybe that was politeness. He said, "I
want you to take me there."
The
idea revived her fear. "Now?"
"Soon.
Today. And before dark." He hesitated. "You might be
mistaken about what you saw. Maybe somebody really does need help."
"I
thought about that. Maybe somebody does. But I know what I saw, Mr.
Archer."
"Doug,"
he said absently. "I still think we have to go back. If there's
even a chance somebody's hurt out there. I don't think we have any
choice."
Catherine
thought about it. "No," she said unhappily. "I don't
guess we do."
But
it was late afternoon now and the forest was, if anything, spookier.
Fortified by the brandy and a great deal of soothing talk, Catherine
led Archer downhill past the creek, past the blackberry thickets and
the tall Douglas firs, to the edge of the meadow where the woodshed
stood.
The
woodshed hadn't changed, except in her imagination. It was mossy,
ancient, small and unexceptional. She looked at it and envisioned
monsters.
They
stood a moment in brittle silence.
"When
we met," Catherine said, "you asked me to watch out for
anything strange." She looked at him. "Did you expect this?
Do you have any idea what's going on here?"
"I
didn't expect anything like this, no."
He
told her a story about a house he'd sold to a man named Tom Winter,
its strange history, its perpetual tidiness, Tom Winter's
disappearance.
She
said, "Is that near here?"
"A
few hundred yards toward the road."
"Is
there some connection?"
Archer
shrugged. "It's getting late, Catherine. We'd better do this
while we can."
They
approached the crude door of the woodshed.
Archer
reached for the latch handle, but Catherine turned him away. "No.
Let me."
You
found him,
Gram
Peggy would have said.
He's
your obligation, Catherine.