He hated Earth. Never since reaching his majority had Tagen believed he hated anything or anyone. Hate was, in the words of that dour old soldier who had adopted him, nothing but the decay of discipline. It was pointless at the best of times, reckless at the worst. It was contrary to every fiber of his being. But no matter how much he may wish to be a better man, Tagen could not deny that he hated Earth.
How easy it would be to turn around right now, follow his locater back to his ship, and just go home. He could make out his report from the comfort of space. He could honestly say his investigations had turned up no sign of E’Var or the prison transport vessel. The prisoner had met his end in a mid-Gate termination and let that be an end to bad business.
That would work…right up until E’Var emerged from the abyss and this time, with his own Gate to Earth. And Tagen, lucky Tagen, would get to shoulder the sole responsibility for allowing him to slip through the fingers of the Fleet.
No. Best to stay. Thirty days was the Fleet standard for a fruitless investigation, and off records, sixty days was encouraged. Tagen didn’t have the supplies (nor Earth the resources, apparently) for such a lengthy search, but in five more days, if he had still found no water, no real food, and no trace of his prisoner, he’d return to his ship and wait in orbit around this miserable planet. He hated to do it that way, giving E’Var free reign to harvest humans, but at least he could not fail to see a ship as it left Earth. It would be an ugly confrontation, but prison transports had only minimal weapons. Even though he was confidant the cruiser he’d been given for this mission would prevail in a firefight, it remained a tactic of last resort.
Tagen was lost in these thoughts, unaware of how circular and locked they had become. It was no longer a debate but only a distraction from his body’s complaints. It was a dangerous frame of mind in any circumstances. Here, alone on Earth, it was a killing trap.
He walked right into the human’s camp without seeing it or them. Heat exhaustion and dehydration, so deep he no longer felt them, had ravaged his reflexes. The tree beside him had to explode before the world came back into focus.
Tagen looked around in dull surprise as bark blew out from the tree. He had heard the thunderous sound of it, but he could not immediately force his mind to make the connection.
Someone was shouting.
Tagen turned toward the noise and saw two humans, one larger than the other by a full head. Both were holding what looked to Tagen’s heat-thick mind a lot like ion rifles, only uglier.
For a moment, no one moved.
The larger human said something, too loudly and hurriedly for Tagen to decipher. In the same instant, it hefted the weapon it held, not aiming it at him, but wanting Tagen to see it all the same.
Tagen looked back at the camp. He saw a temporary shelter, another enigmatic groundcar, a portable table and chairs, and several containers crafted from brightly-colored polymers. One of these was open. Tagen could see water and what looked like ice. Actual ice.
Tagen’s mouth had no moisture. He tried to speak, produced only a dull croak and a rattling cough, and tried again. “
Hola
.”
The large human shouted again, shaking its head in short, sharp movements. The meaning was clear: Get out. Go away.
Tagen looked at the water again. There had to be a compromise here. With difficulty, he made his brain turn to N’Glish. “I mean you no harm,” he said.
He had killed the last human he’d said that to.
“I need water,” he went on, and pointed at the chest for good measure.
Both humans locked their eyes on his extended claw and went instantly berserk. The smaller one screamed and backpedaled. The larger raised its weapon and pointed it at Tagen’s heart.
Tagen’s brain was still stuffed with sand. His body acted without him. He pulled his plasma gun and fired. The bolt sheared through the barrel of the weapon; it took off the human’s hands and then its head. The body dropped forward and gravity, in an act of cosmic cruelty, caused it to somersault with dead man’s grace and land belly-up.
The shorter human staggered back, its face opening up in an expression of grief too awful to be ungenuine. It shrieked, just once, a despairing cry that did not seem to be, to Tagen’s ear, entirely wordless. The sound of it cut through Tagen’s trance-like exhaustion, but it only gave his killing hand a target.
Breath went out of the tail of the human’s scream. It started to look down, started to raise one hand to the gaping hole greedily opening in its chest. It crumpled. It fell.
A roar of pure horror ripped its way rustily from Tagen’s throat and he threw the gun his hand gripped into a tree hard enough to knock bark from it. He ran forward, but it was already over. It had been over from the first instant. The humans were dead.
Tagen bent over the body of the short human, rubbing handfuls of earth into the sizzling edges of char, trying unthinkingly and futilely to stop the progression of superheated plasma, to undo what he had done now for the third time. The water in the human’s camp was forgotten. The rifle-like weapon the humans had aimed at him were forgotten. In that awful moment, even E’Var and his mission were forgotten. He knew only what he had done.
He had murdered them.
*
They rested at the house for hours. They ate leftover chicken, rich and sweet with barbeque sauce, cold from the fridge. Raven drank almost a full gallon of milk and a pitcher of lemonade by herself. Kane just kept bringing her glasses and stood over her brooding while she forced it down her throat. She felt bloated and sick and awful.
Afterwards, he’d taken her to the sagging, smoke-pungent couch in the living room and sat with her under his arm in the dark. He was asleep in minutes. She sat awake and staring blindly. Every little creak and rustle the old house made seemed to her to be the slide of dead feet rising and coming for her.
The sun rose, and still Kane slept. Raven looked at the pictures on the walls. Family photos and horses and trains and Jesus.
When he woke up, it was all at once. One second, soundly sleeping. The next, standing up and looking around the living room. He sniffed the air, glanced upwards, and grunted. She wondered if the bodies had started to stink yet, if he could smell it already. She imagined them lying there, blackening and bloating and drawing flies.
Then he was looking at her, running those empty eyes down her from head to toes and back again. “Anything hurt?” he asked. He put a claw below her chin and tilted her back to study her eyes.
“No.”
He put his thumb into her mouth and she opened like a baby bird and felt the touch of him on her gums and then her tongue. He grunted, looking satisfied, and then stepped back. “Let’s eat.”
The chicken was all gone. Raven made eggs, frying up all eight of the ones she found in the fridge, and dumping the shells into the sink with the dirty dishes. She’d run water over the whole mess when they were done here. They couldn’t get fingerprints off wet things, could they? And she’d remember to wipe down the dials and stuff on the stove, the refrigerator door, anything else she’d touched.
After breakfast, Raven started pulling down boxes of cookies and crackers to take with them in the car. Kane watched her, walking behind her as she carried things out to the yard, and holding doors for her as she passed. The dead man’s keys fit two of the vehicles in the driveway: a fairly-new pickup and a rusty old hatchback. She took the hatchback. She couldn’t drive a stick.
“Is that everything?” Kane still had his hand on the car door, waiting to see if she would go back into the house or not. He was wearing his new clothes. The overcoat was too small; its long sides hung down behind him like demonic wings, and left his chest bare. He had no nipples. Funny, the things you notice.
“I think so,” she said finally, and he shut the door and went around to let himself in the front passenger seat. She got behind the wheel and he handed her the keys. “Where do I go?” she asked, turning the ancient engine over.
“Find us a road and take us east,” he said, and that was that.
They drove all day, navigating out and around through the winding roads and nearly-roads of backwater Oregon, filling up at towns too small for stoplights and pissing in the woods. It wasn’t so bad. The car was old, but the A/C worked, and the miles had a way of slipping by. It was late afternoon before they found a highway. It was evening when they left Oregon. And it was dark again before Kane’s voice finally growled up and told her to pull over.
Raven yawned against the back of her hand, squinting into the sparse line of headlights. There were plenty of turn-offs ahead of her, but it was something behind her now that occupied her mind. It was important to be tactful, not to give the appearance of arguing, but…
“Do we have to?” she asked.
She sensed his eye on her, glittering black at the edge of her peripheral vision. “I know,” she said hurriedly. “I’m on the edge of unsafe here, but there’s a motel up ahead.”
“Motel?”
“Yeah. I…I kind of thought it’d be nice to sleep in a real bed. Maybe get a shower.” She sniffed at her underarm and pulled a face. “Definitely a shower.”
He grunted.
“Is that a ‘yes’?” she asked tentatively. “I’ll pull over here if you really want to.”
“It’s been a while since I’ve slept in a…bed,” he said, in a low, musing voice. “And I could use washing up.” He shifted around and the weight of his gaze became an itch all down Raven’s right side. “When I’m tired,” he said evenly, “it’s easy for me to…over-react. Any little pause or other harmless thing you may say is going to make me want to rip your head clean off.”
There was no hint of malice in his tone. None whatsoever. He was as calm and conversational as if he were telling her that he liked to go skiing in the winter. She did not doubt him for a second.
“Kane,” she said softly. “You said we were going to be traveling together for a while. You can’t really want me to smell this bad.”
He grunted again and faced the windshield. Then he laughed and said, “No, not if I don’t have to. All right, Raven. Take us to this motel.”
She could feel parts of her she hadn’t even known were tense start to relax. Her back, her arms, her thighs, her stomach—how could a stomach even tighten up?—everything. “Thanks,” she said softly.
“You’ll make it up to me.”
Her stomach tightened up again. All at once, the hatchback enclosing her washed out just a little, and she was flat on her back on the dry grass. She could feel him wedging into her, could feel herself crushed and shoved and rocked by the brutal size and uncaring movements he sent against her. Slowly, the car bled back into focus, but her pussy still ached. He hadn’t even glanced at her since that first time. She’d hoped that part was over.
Kane was looking at her again and now he was smiling.
They were coming up on the motel, but there was still no town in sight. It was just a wide spot in the road, really. A little log cabin office with a strip of six rooms off to either side of it. The vacancy light was lit, but the amenities board beneath it read, not
Welcome
! or
Free HBO and Continental Breakfast
, but
Gone Fishin. Closed until September. Keep cool
.
She wasn’t sure which to believe, but the light was on in the office, so she pulled in and parked. “This could be tricky,” she said, unbuckling herself. Little places like this tended not to be as strict as the bigger ones about showing I.D. when people registered, but flags got raised in a hurry if they asked and no one had any. She’d just have to cross her fingers and hope, maybe spin out that old ‘my wallet got stolen’ story if she had to.
Kane didn’t look concerned. He followed her into the office, which was unlocked, and put his arm around her shoulders as she hit the service bell. It was a strange gesture coming from him, right up until she felt his claws digging at her skin below her shirt sleeve and realized just how close they were to her neck. One quick pull, one rush of heat, and it was all over for her. Her throat went dry at once; she tried to swallow for spit and got only a sandy click for her efforts.
“Easy, human,” Kane murmured. “Easy. You’re going to make him nervous.”
Raven sucked in a breath, let it out slow, and smiled as an old man shuffled into the office from a back room. He was wearing a bathrobe with the unabashedness unique to seniors, and he waved at them amiably as he came to the front desk and eased into the worn cushions of a tall chair.
“I was beginning to think maybe you weren’t open,” she said. Her voice sounded too loud and inanely sunny, but Kane’s claws didn’t prick a warning at her. It must be all right.
“Figured what the hell,” the old man said cheerfully. “Might as well hang out the shingle ‘till midnight at least. But I’m meaning to be on my way tomorrow noon, so’s you need to be checkin’ out right on the buzzer of eleven. Not generally so particular, myself, but you see how it is. Damn weather.”
Kane emitted a single cough of laughter and nodded. “Damn weather,” he agreed.
The old man nodded vigorously, leaning forward over the desk. “Got no pool, that’s the problem. Used to be a man could make a living on summer trade ‘n deer season and such with a little premium cable and a muffin in the morning, but can’t be done these days. This weather! Pardon my French if you’re religious, but this goddamn heat!”
“Amen,” said Kane, and Raven blinked at him.
“I’m too old for this crap,” the motel man grumbled good-naturedly. “I got a place up by the lake Ontario-way I ain’t seen in five years, killing myself down here as I am. And so tonight I’m thinking, no hide or hair of customer in five days, and this damn weather, why not?”
“Why not?” Kane shrugged.
The old man made a cheerful grimace and then waved at them again. “Ah, listen to me rattle on and it half-past eleven. Let me get your key. Room 3 got the best A/C, and you might as well take it for a goodbye. I’ll have a good breakfast laid on tomorrow for you, you just come and buzz me, I’ll have it out. You’re welcome to take any and all with you when you go your way, too. Muffins, mostly, and they ain’t fresh, but they’re not bad.”