Dean Koontz - Beastchild

"Early evening,'' Banalog said. "And it was because he had forgotten his appointment for this afternoon. Or so he said. I contacted him to get him in after hours. He was reluctant even then. Tried to make excuses. I wouldn't have any of it." He looked at Zenolan to see what effect the story was having.

The big man seemed to believe it. "Go on," he said.

"Then, when he was here, he tried to outwit the machines. Which is impossible, of course."

"Of course."

"When I found his secret, that he was harboring a boy — well, he overpowered me, smashed my head against the floor, knocked me out before I thought to use my Phaser contact. When I woke, he had me tied and drugged."

"You're sure it was not any earlier than last evening?"

Banalog looked perplexed. "If it had been, the sweet-drugs would have worn off. I would have contacted you sooner."

"That's what I mean."

"Are you suggesting — "

"No," Zenolan said, shaking his huge head. "Forget it. I'm just upset."

Banalog snorted to show his contempt. He knew better than to get too irate. Too much anger would make them suspect he really did have something to cover. He was pondering his next move when his desk phone buzzed. He wondered what private message he was receiving that could not be sent over the Phasersystem. He picked up the receiver and said hello.

"You will come to see me in ten minutes," the smooth, cold voice on the other end said. "I will want your full story."

It was the Hunter Docanil.

The Hunter Relemar stepped out of the thousand-gallon storage tank in the foundry yards in the city that had been Atlanta. He opened his Phasersystem contact and informed the military officials who assigned his missions (and, incidentally, everyone else linked to the Atlanta area system and the Fourth Division system) that he had completed his assignment. Then he broke contact.

He did not look back at what had been Sara Laramie.

He stuffed his clawed hands into the pockets of his greatcoat and walked across the yards toward the exit gate.

There was only a slight chill in the air, yet he could not go without clothes, as other naoli could.

He was a Hunter.

He was different.

Elsewhere at that time:

Fiala finished the necessary tapeforms for application for director of her archaeological team. The job that should have been hers in the first place. There was no problem now. She could not help but get it. Hulann had cracked without her help. She felt terribly pleased with things.

David watched the dawn from the viewglass of the engineer's room in front of the plummeting Bluebolt as it streaked down a two-mile incline toward a flat plain where speed could be safely raised. It was one of the nicest dawns he had seen in some time. When it was over and day had insinuated itself on the world, he planned to go back to the sleeping car for a nap.

The body of the dead naoli guard who had fallen under Hulann's shuttlecraft was annointed with sweet-drugs, wrapped in a purple shroud, and burned.

The edges of the conversion cannister crater near the Great Lakes continued to crawl forward, hissing and spitting green light.

Attention: it struck Hulann with the force of a piledriver, mentally and emotionally, not physically. He stood very still, receiving the alert until there was nothing more to be heard except official messages and directions which could do him little or no good now.

"What is it?" the boy asked.

"They have discovered my absence and know its reason."

"How?"

"They found the traumatist I tied and gagged. And the woman from whom I stole the shuttle."

"But how do you know this?"

"The Phasersystem."

Leo looked perplexed, screwed his face up until his eyes and mouth seemed to be sucked in towards his nose. "What's that?"

"You — you haven't such a thing. We do. A means of talking together without talking. For intercommunication."

"Mind reading?"

"Sort of. Only it's all mechanical. A little thing they implant in your skull when you've just grown big enough to come out of the brood hole."

"Brood hole?"

"Every house has a brood hole near its warren where — " Hulann paused, blinked his big eyes. "Forget it. For now, anyway. It just gets more complicated to explain."

Leo shrugged. "You want the heat?"

"You keep it a while. We have to get moving."

Before he could start, a second interruption drew his attention. There was loud crash from somewhere near at hand, the sound of metal striking metal, and the hollow ring of an echo.

"What's that?" he asked the boy.

"It came from over there." He gestured to their left.

The noise came a second time. Not as loud, but definitely metal against metal. Big pieces of metal, too.

Hulann forced down his terrors. The Hunter could not have come this far in only moments. He would not have received the alert any sooner than Hulann had. They still had many hours of grace. He turned and walked in the direction of the clanging noise, Leo close behind.

They had not gone forty feet before the faint outlines of the pylons began to be visible through the snow. And the swinging, squarish bulk of the car. "An aerial cable-way," he said as much to himself as to Leo. He was astonished. He had heard of the things, had heard that earth-men had built them in places where they considered elevators impractical. But to see one "It must go somewhere," Leo said. "Perhaps there is a town above. That would give us shelter."

"Perhaps," Hulann said distantly as he watched the yellow cablecar swinging in the wind. If he drew his lids down, it seemed as if the car were a great, yellow bee dancing above the storm.

"You said we should hurry."

Hulann looked at the boy, then back to the swaying yellow car dangling from the nearly invisible filament of the aerial cable. "Perhaps we could ride up," he said, "It would save us walking."

"We'd have to go to the bottom to get on the thing," Leo said. "It would be easier to go up."

The wind seemed to increase in fury. Snow whipped them like buckshot pellets, exploding by, whining through the trees, gone.

Hulann watched the car. "It's farther up the mountain than I led you to believe."

"You lied?"

"Something like that."

Leo grinned. "Or are you lying now — so you can get to ride the cableway?" When Hulann made the sign of naoli shame, the boy pushed by him and trudged off toward the nearest pylon. "Come on, then. It might not work anymore, but you won't be satisfied until we find out."

A few moments later, they drew up next to the ice-crusted pylon, looked up at the hobbling yellow bee that waited overhead. They involuntarily ducked as it slammed into the pylon again. The sound of crashing metal echoed painfully in their ears.

"There," Leo said, pointing down the mountainside. "We don't have to go clear to the bottom after all."

Two hundred yards down, there was a boarding station on the middle of the mountain. Stairs wound around a pylon, then jutted out near the top on a support beam, stopped at a platform which served as a boarding and debarking station. It was all quite ghostly seen through the waves of snow, like the ruined tower of a long dead civilization.

Leo was forty feet away, kicking up clouds of white as he stomped down the steep slope, huddled against the wind, cradling the heat source against his chest. Hulann shook off his reverie and followed. At the base of the stairs up to the platform, Leo was waiting, staring up the steel rungs, licking his lips, squinting as if wrestling with a difficult problem.

"Ice," he said to Hulann.

"What?"

"Ice on the stairs. No maintenance since the war. It's not going to be easy to climb up there."

"There's only thirty steps."