Hunters Run Page 0,97

the chupacabra from it.

Ramon let out a long sigh and considered his wounds. The cut across his side was serious, but it hadn't gone so deep that he had to worry about a collapsed lung. That was good. His leg, he discovered, had also been pierced at some point. He remembered something from the beginning of the fight. It was a little hard to recall the details. The wound bled freely, but it was superficial. He'd be fine.

He could feel the adrenaline dissipating. His hands were shaking, the nausea growing worse. He was surprised to find himself weeping, and more surprised than that to find the tears had their source not in exhaustion or fear or even the release that came after a bad fight. The sorrow that possessed him was profound. He mourned his twin; the man he had once been. His brother and more than brother was gone, and gone because he himself had killed him.

Perhaps it had been fated to end this way; the colony had room for only one of them. And so either he or his twin had had to die. His dreams of slipping away, becoming a new man had been just that. Dreams. And now, like the body of the man he'd killed, they slipped away. He was Ramon Espejo. He had always been Ramon Espejo. He had never had a real hope of being anyone else.

He unwrapped the sodden robe from his arm slowly. His awareness of the pain was growing. His pierced side was the most pressing issue. He could hold the robe against it, maybe stanch the bleeding. He wondered whether it would help if he wrung the cloth out first. He tried to guess how far he was from Fiddler's Jump and medical help. And what, he asked himself, would they find when they looked at him? Had Maneck and his people left any surprises for the doctors?

Even awash in his grief and uncertainty and pain, some part of Ramon's mind must have anticipated the attack. It was no more than a flicker in the corner of his vision; the sahael lashed out at him, thrusting spearlike. He didn't think. The blade was simply where it needed to be at the instant it needed to be there, the human-made steel impaling the alien flesh just inches below the wires at the thing's head. Ramon's heart didn't race. He didn't even flinch. He was too tired for that.

The sahael let out a long, high whine. A spark blackened the tip of the knife where it protruded through the thing's thin body. Snakelike, the sahael thrashed, pulling Ramon one way and then the other with its throes. He drove the blade's tip into a branch, pinning the sahael to the wood. The flesh below the blade was pale and thrashing violently. The wires and mucous membrane that had once burrowed into Ramon's neck were lolling like a dead thing.

"If you get back," Ramon said, then forgot what he was doing. His flesh felt as heavy as waterlogged timber. A few breaths later, he remembered. "I did Maneck's job for him, but I'm Ramon Espejo, not someone's goddamn dog. You get back, you tell them that. You and all the rest of them can go fuck yourselves."

If the sahael understood him, it gave no sign. Ramon nodded and muttered a string of perfunctory obscenities as he jerked the knife free and shoved the snakelike body off the raft. It sank into the water; only the head was visible as it bobbed away through the rain, first dim, then grayed, then gone. Ramon sat for a moment, the raindrops tapping his back and shoulders. A roll of thunder roused him.

"Sorry, monster," he said to the river. "It's just ... what it is."

There was too much to do. He had to pull himself together. He was cold. He was seriously injured and losing blood. He'd lost the oar and with it what little steering power he'd had. They'd never gotten any firewood onto the raft and he didn't have anything left to light a fire with anyway, although he'd need to dry off and warm up once the storm passed. His mind whirled back to the cataract and the queer peace that had settled over him when he'd been stuck on the rock. The thought related somehow to the dream of being Maneck and his trip from Earth with the Enye. He had a sense of something profound coming clear, like recognizing a face