Hunters Run Page 0,18

an epileptic - head and heels bearing his weight, his spine bent like a bow. Something he couldn't see flipped him onto his belly, and he felt a needle slide in at the base of his spine. He vomited with wrenching violence - thick amber syrup gouting from his mouth and nose. And then again, sick, racking spasms that expelled even more, as if his lungs had been filled with the stuff.

I will live, Ramon told himself. It's no worse than being sick from too much muscat. I can live through this... .

Another long needle dug into his neck. A cold fire sprang to life where the thing had pierced him; he felt the salivalike secretion running down his sides, then heat, like boiling water pouring into him.

What have you done to me? Ramon tried to scream. What did you put in me?

Suddenly, violently, his heart came to life - and, with a terrible shudder, he began to breathe.

The air he gulped cut like glass, and his heart thundered in his chest. The world went red. Pain drove away all thought, all sense of self, and then slowly abated.

Another wave of the sickness shook him. He voided his bowels, weeping with pain and shame when he wasn't coughing. It seemed to go on for hours, but the moments of peace between spasms gradually grew longer, and it seemed as if some of the strength was beginning to come back to his arms and legs. His heart ceased to race like a bird trying to free itself from a net. Tentatively, he sat up.

He was sprawled naked on the bottom of a metal tank not more than ten feet square. So much for his measureless midnight ocean! The walls were too high to see over, and the lights - blue-white and bitter - were too bright to see past and make out the ceiling beyond. He tried to stand up, but his muscles were putty. It was bitingly cold. He settled against the metal floor and shivered, feeling his teeth start to chatter. He tried lifting an arm, but the impulse was slow to reach his flesh, and the limb swayed drunkenly when it rose. Strong smells that he couldn't identify burned his nostrils.

A thing like a snake reared up above the rim of the tank - thick as a strong man's arm, it was a dead gray color, like old meat, and segmented like a worm's body. Pulsations seemed to travel along its length. Ramon saw it hesitate, as if considering him, and then stretch down toward him. Three long, thin tendrils split off where the head should have been. The gray snake brushed aside Ramon's clumsy parry and seized him by the shoulder. Ramon struggled weakly. But his strength was gone, and the snake's grip was as cold and pitiless as death. Another snake stretched down and wrapped itself around his waist.

The snakes lifted him smoothly out of the tank. He tried to scream, but the sound he made was more like a cough. He was high in the air now, above what seemed to be a vast, high-domed cavern full of noise and lights and motion and alien shapes. The cavern swarmed with activity that Ramon could not resolve into recognizable patterns, having no referents for it. His nose and mouth were filled with a biting, acrid odor, something like formaldehyde.

The two snakes set him down on a platform near one wall of the cavern, the surface solid but spongy, like a great dark tongue. He collapsed as soon as they released him, his legs too weak to bear his weight. He waited on his hands and knees, staring into the terrible bright lights, panting like a trapped animal, suddenly longing for the timeless darkness he'd left behind.

It was dimmer here, in the angle of the wall and the cavern floor. Inchoate shapes moved ponderously in the shadows; as they came forward, they were finished and fleshed by the light, but Ramon still could not make them out. His mind kept fighting to resolve them into the familiar aspects of humanity, and - terribly, terrifyingly - they would not. They were too big, and shaped wrong, and their eyes were a bright, glowing orange.

A needle slid out of the end of a hovering gray tentacle, thrust quickly into Ramon's arm, too quickly for him to move or protest. Another prickly wave of heat passed through him, and he suddenly felt much stronger. What kind of injection had