F. Wilson - The Last Rakosh

But this’ll help me find it, he thought.

And then something occurred to him.

“You’re being awfully helpful.”

“Not at all. My sole concern is for the rakosh.”

“But you know I’m going to kill it if I find it.”

‘Try to kill it. The pines are full of deer and other game, but the rakosh can’t use them for food. As you know, it eats only one thing.”

Now Jack understood. “And you think by giving me this locator, you’re sending it a care package, so to speak.”

Oz inclined his head. “So to speak.”

“We shall see, Mr. Prather. We shall see.”

“On the contrary, I doubt anyone will ever see you again.”

“I’m not suicidal, trust me on that.”

“But you can’t believe you can take on a rakosh single-handed and survive.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Jack headed for his car, relishing the look of concern on Oz’s face before he’d turned away. Had he sounded confident enough? Good act. Because he was feeling anything but.

Jack hurried to the food area and bought half a dozen bottles of Snapple, plus an Atlantic City souvenir T-shirt, a ciggy lighter, and a newspaper. Then he moved his car to a far corner of the rest area by the RIDESHARE INFO sign and emptied the Snapple bottles onto the asphalt.

Shame to waste the stuff but it seemed Snapple was about the only thing that came in glass bottles these days.

He pulled a glasscutter from his burglary kit and began scoring the flanks of the bottles. A trick he’d learned from an old revolutionary. Upped the chances these babies would shatter on contact.

He began tearing up the shirt. Then he opened the trunk and fished out the gas can and a flashlight. He filled the bottles with gas and recapped them.

He gently placed the six gasoline-filled bottles into a canvas shoulder bag and worked sections of newspaper between them to keep them from clinking, then threw the pieces of T-shirt on top.

6

Jack trained his flashlight beam on the scrub at the base of the slope. He’d crossed the southbound lanes and trotted down to the 51.3 mile marker and stopped at the tree line. He was looking for broken branches and found them. Lots of them. Something big had torn through here not long ago.

He stepped through and followed the path of destruction. When he was sure he was out of sight of the highway, he stopped and pulled out the electronic locator. He was facing west and the blip was at the top edge of the screen. Had to move. Scar-lip was almost out of range.

He pressed forward until he came to a narrow path. A deer trail, most likely.

Flashed his beam down and saw what looked like deer tracks in the damp sand, but they weren’t alone: deep imprints of big, alien, three-toed feet, and work-boot prints coming after. Scar-lip, with Hank following-obviously behind because the boot prints occasionally stepped on the rakosh tracks.

What’s Hank thinking? Jack wondered. That he’s got a gun and maybe he learned how to hunt when he was a kid, so that makes him a match for the Sharkman?

Maybe he wasn’t thinking. Maybe a belly full of Mad Dog had convinced him he could handle the equivalent of taking on a great white with a penknife in a sea of ink.

Jack began following the deer trail, keeping one eye on the locator and turning his flashlight beam on and off every so often to check the ground. Scrub pines closed in, forming a twenty- to thirty-foot wall around him, arching their branches over the trail, allowing only an occasional glimpse of the starlit sky.

Quiet. Just the sound of insects and the branches brushing against his clothes. Jack hated the great outdoors. Give him a city with cars and buses and honking cabs, with pavements and right angles and subways rumbling beneath his feet. And best of all-streetlights. It wasn’t just dark out here, it was dark.

His adrenaline was up but despite the alien surroundings, he felt curiously relaxed. The locator gave him a buffer zone of safety. He knew where Scar-lip was and didn’t have to worry about it jumping out of the bushes at any second and tearing into him. But he did have to worry about Hank. An armed drunk in the woods could be a danger to anything that moved. Didn’t want to be mistaken for Scar-lip.

The trail wound this way and that, briefly meandering north and south, but taking him generally westward. Jack moved as fast as the circumstances allowed, making his best time along the occasional brief straightaway.

The green blip that was Scar-lip gradually moved nearer and nearer the center of the locator screen. Looked like the creature had stopped moving.

Why? Resting? Or waiting?

He guesstimated he was about a quarter mile from the rakosh when a gun report somewhere ahead brought him up short. Sounded like a shotgun. There it was again. And again.

And then a scream of fear and mortal agony echoed through the trees, rising toward a shriek that cut off sharply before it peaked.

Silence.

Jack had thought the woods quiet before, but now even the insects had shut up. He waited for other sounds. None came. And the blip on the locator showed no movement.

That pretty much told the story: Scar-lip had sensed it was being followed so it hunkered down and waited. Who comes along but one of the guys who used it as a pincushion when it was caged. Chomp-chomp, crunch-crunch, good-bye, Hank.

Jack’s tongue was dry as felt. That could have-most likely would have- been him if he’d gone after Scar-lip without the locator.

But that’s not the way it’s going to play. I know where you are, pal, so no nasty surprises for me.

He crept ahead, and the crack and crunch of every twig and leaf he stepped on sounded amplified through a stadium PA. But Scar-lip was staying put-eating, perhaps?-so Jack kept moving.

When the blip was almost center screen, Jack stopped. He smelled something and flashed his light along the ground.

The otherwise smooth sand was kicked up ferociously for a space of about a dozen feet, ending with two large, oblong gouts of blood, drying thick and dark red, with little droplets of the same speckled all around them. A twelve-gauge Mossberg pump action lay in the brush at the edge of the trail, its wooden stock shattered.

Only one set of prints led away-the three-toed kind.

Jack crouched in the scrub grass, staring around, listening, looking for signs of movement. Nothing. But he knew from the locator that Scar-lip was dead ahead, and not too far.

Waiting to do to me what he did to Hank, no doubt. Sorry, pal. We’re gonna play it my way this time.

He removed two Snapple bottles from the shoulder bag and unscrewed their caps. Gasoline fumes rose around him as he stuffed a piece of T-shirt into the mouth of each. Lifted one, lit the rag with a little butane lighter he’d picked up along with everything else, and tossed it straight ahead along the trail.

The small flame at its mouth traced a fiery arc through the air. Before it hit the ground and whoomphed into an explosion of flame, Jack had the second one in hand, ready to light.

Muscles tight, heart pounding, Jack blinked in the sudden glare as his eyes searched out the slightest sign of movement. Wavering shadows from the flickering light of the flames made everything look like it was moving. But nothing big and dark and solid appeared.

Something small and shiny glittered on a branch just this side of the flames. Warily Jack approached it. His foot slipped on something along the way: The sharpened steel rod Bondy had used to torment the rakosh lay half-buried in the sand. He picked that up and carried it in his left hand like a spear. He had two weapons now. He felt like an Indian hunter, armed with an iron spear and a container of magic burning liquid.