Hunters Run Page 0,19

it given him? Glucose? Vitamins? Perhaps there'd been a tranquilizer in it as well; his head was clear now, and he felt more alert, less frightened. He drew himself up to his knees, one hand instinctively covering his crotch.

The shapes had stopped a few feet away. There were three of them, all bipedal, one bigger than the others. Ramon could see them more clearly now. His mind accepted them by treating them as frauds; he thought of them now as men wearing grotesque costumes, and kept looking for some unconvincing detail that would betray the disguise.

Intellectually, he knew better, of course. They were not men in costume. They were not men at all. They were aliens, and not of any race he knew. Ramon had sailed among the stars on one of the great galley ships of the Silver Enye, and once he had glimpsed three of the furred, six-legged H'zhei on the back streets of Acapulco, exotic creatures that looked like a cross between a cat and a caterpillar. The Turu he had seen only on video, and even there they made his skin crawl. These aliens were not Turu, not Enye, not Cian, not members of any of the Great Races. They were not part of the universe as he knew it. They did not belong. A hundred questions, accusations, and pleas fought in his mind. Who are you? What do you want? Please don't kill me.

At least they were humanoid bipeds, not spiders or octopi or bigeyed blobs, although something about the articulation of their limbs was disturbingly odd. The smaller two were perhaps six and a half feet tall, the larger one seven feet, which made even the shortest of them far taller than Ramon. Their torsos were columnar, seemingly of uniform breadth at hip and waist and shoulder, and surely they must weigh more than three hundred pounds apiece, although somehow the dominant impression they created was one of grace and suppleness. Their skins were glossy, shining, but each had its own distinctive coloration: one was a mottled blue and gold, the second a pale amber, while the largest one had yellowish flesh covered with strange, swirling patterns in silver and black.

All wore broad belts hung with unknown objects of metal and glass, and nondescript halters of some ash-gray and lusterless material. Their arms were disproportionately long, the hands huge, the fingers - three fingers, two thumbs - incongruously slender and delicate. Their heads were set low in a hollow between the shoulders, and thrust a little forward on thick, stumpy necks, giving them a belligerent and aggressive look, like snapping turtles. Crests of hair or feathers slanted back from the tops of their heads at rakish angles. Quills protruded from their shoulders, the napes of their necks, and the tops of their spinal ridges, forming bristly ruffs. Their heads were roughly triangular, flattened on top but bulging out at the base of the skull, the faces tapering sharply to a point. And the faces were faces out of nightmare: large, rubbery, black snouts streaked with blue and orange, trembling and sniffing, mouths like raw, wet wounds, too wide and lipless, and small, staring eyes set too low on either side of the snout. Orange eyes, hot and featureless as molten marbles.

Staring at him.

They were staring at him as though he was a bug, and that fanned a spark of anger inside him. He got to his feet and glared back at them, still shaky but determined not to show it. Ramon Espejo knelt to nobody! Especially not to ugly, unnatural monsters like these!

"Which one," he croaked, coughed, and began again. "Which one of you pinche motherfuckers is paying for my van?"

The aliens didn't react to his words. The large one reached out a strangely articulated arm - a motion that reminded Ramon of seaweed stirred by some gentle oceanic current. Ramon frowned as the alien curled what he had to think of as its fingers back toward itself once, twice, three times. The thing paused and then repeated the movement. There was something studied about the motion, as though it had been learned by rote, as though its natural equivalent might be without meaning for humans. A low, thudding boom came from deep below them; a mountainous heart that beat twice and went silent. Ramon glanced around him. The alien repeated the curling gesture.

"You want me to come close to you?" Ramon demanded. The great thing's snout twitched, and the quills on its head