Hunters Run Page 0,50

his twin out in the forest, maybe watching them. Had he had binoculars in his pack when the aliens found him, or had they been left in the van and got incinerated? No, they wouldn't have been. There wouldn't have been room in his pack for the field glasses and coring charges both.

Ramon's unease sprang to full panic. The coring charges! The branch set just at the edge of the stone where it could amplify any vibration within the granite slab. It wasn't a flag. It was a trigger.

"Stop!" he shouted, a half second too late. The yunea touched down. Ramon thought he could see the branch shudder in the immeasurably brief moment before the explosion came.

Chapter Eleven

Ramon struggled to move. There was something, something urgent, but he couldn't quite remember what it was. The earth beneath him felt unstable, like when he'd drunk until it was hard to walk. Only there was something bad, something important. And he couldn't remember what it was.

It was the shell of the yunea that first brought a glimmer of recognition. The bone-white slats and dripping strands of the thing's walls and floor had been broken and ripped apart. They lay on the ground, scattered on the granite stone like a child's game of pick-up sticks. Only one wall and a corner remained standing, and it was slumped like an old man's spine. The air smelled hot and acid - the scent, familiar to prospectors, of spent explosives. Across the stone, a great spray of fresh earth and new gravel showed where the charges had gone off, angled up toward anyone on the surface instead of down into the ground. He had an impression - likely more his own imagination than the truth - of the slats clicking closed and opaque at the moment of the blast. Shielding him. Him and the alien. Maneck.

Ramon tried to sit up and failed, slipping back down onto the ground. His arms were weak; his right leg was bleeding freely from a gash just above his knee. He forced himself to roll over. His head was beginning to clear, memories of the immediate past fitting themselves together.

The fucker had tried to kill them. The other Ramon, wherever he was, had known he was being followed, and he'd laid a trap to kill the alien. Outrage bloomed in his heart, followed almost instantly by respect and a strange pride. Let aliens everywhere know it: Ramon Espejo was a tough little fucker, and dangerous to cross. Ramon laughed, hooted, slapped ineffectually at the ground, his mouth aching with a grin. That had been a fucking ride. It occurred to him that he was laughing and not being punished for it.

The sahael was still trailing from his neck. Its pale flesh had gone dark as a bruise. Ramon swallowed. He wondered for the first time what would happen if the evil thing died while it was inside of him.

"Monster!" he called, and his voice seemed deep and far away. The high register of his hearing had been blown out by the explosion, leaving him only the low bass tones of his voice. "Monster! Are you okay?"

There was no answer. Ramon finally levered himself up to sitting, and, one hand on the dark, injured sahael, followed its line to the massive bulk of the alien. Maneck was standing, but its stance seemed lower and squat, as if it needed a wider base of support to keep its balance. One of its strangely jointed arms hung limp at its side. Its left eye had gone from hot orange to a deep ruby red and swollen to half again its previous size. The most dramatic change, though, was its skin. Where the silver had swirled on the black like oil over water, half of the alien's body had turned ashy and gray. Its flesh looked tighter as well, like a sausage cooked almost to the point of bursting. Pale mucus dribbled from its snout, spattering to the ground at its feet. Ramon couldn't guess what it was, but nothing about the alien spoke well of its condition.

"Monster?" Ramon said again.

"You failed to foresee this," the alien intoned.

"No shit," Ramon said.

"It is your purpose to mirror the man's flow," the alien said. "Well, I'm only so good a tool," Ramon said, and spat. "I forgot that

the fucker had those coring charges in his pack. It was a mistake." "What other devices does he have?"

Ramon shrugged, trying to recall the layout of his field pack.