Overkill (22 page)

I said, “Maybe it—”

“You know where he went as well as I do, Parker! He’s headed for Eden. When he gets there, he’s going to kill somebody. Everybody, if he can. Unless they kill him first.” She tweezed her closed eyes while she shook her head. “What was I thinking?”

I turned and ran, pointing at the doors. “You’ve got a Sixer in there. Maybe we can get there in time to do something.”

She returned to the mike and warned Oliver that trouble was on the way while I backed the Sixer out. Then she jumped in beside me and I drove us, bouncing, down the road back to Eden like the place was on fire and we had the only water bucket on the planet.

Fifty-six

The grezzen had been running toward his mother for two hours, and night had fallen, when he felt the first humans, directly ahead.

He had run directly down the path the humans had cleared between the hole where he had left Kit and Jazen and the nest that the humans called Eden. He chose the route, though he had never traveled it before, for the same reason that he followed trails worn by prey animals. Because that was where he would find them.

He felt humans and paused. There were two, side by side, concealed along the trail, a human mile ahead of him.

“You don’t really expect it to come walking down the road, do you?”

“Path of least resistance. It gives us a clear shot with the RPG.”

“I don’t even know if an RPG will kill one.”

“You rather just hide out in the woods and wait for it to sneak up on us in the dark?”

“We got snoopers.”

“They had snoopers thirty years ago and look where it got them. Radio back that we’re in position.”

The grezzen understood that an RPG was a large stinger. He also understood that he could easily kill these two, regardless. But that might alert the others ahead, and his objective was first to learn his mother’s fate.

“How long do they want us to stay here?”

“All night.”

“Grezz aren’t the only things that can kill you at night.”

Indeed not. But if these two were killed, it wouldn’t be by him. He circled wide around these first humans, then continued.

A tree snake as thick as his thigh dropped down onto his back, sadly misinformed about what it was attacking. The grezzen tore the snake off his back. Then he bit off and spit out the snake’s head, which was all gristle, fangs, and venom. The fleshy body he wrapped around his neck, to eat later. His run had sapped him of energy he would need when he reached the Eden nest.

As he came closer to the human nest, a red glow became visible, reflected off the clouds. Human stingers crackled, and he felt a vast jumble of human confusion, as well as fight and flight reactions.

He reached again for his mother. Her lack of response this time was unlike the hesitations that had become increasingly frequent.

He was forced to contemplate the probability that she would never respond again.

A human hour later, he reached high ground from which he could not merely feel the humans, but could look down upon their nest. Flames snaked skyward from one spot, around which humans had concealed themselves, some hidden behind movable shells, others behind stationary objects.

Sporadically, stingers in the hands of the concealed humans spit fire and rattled. Equally sporadically, fire spit and rattled back from the place that blazed.

He felt Liu shout, “Cease fire! Cease fucking fire, you yokels!”

The flashing and rattling crescendoed. “Go to hell, you mercenary bastards.”

“You got what you wanted!”

“Not because we listened to you! And now there’s another one inside the Line.”

“The second one’s not our doing, or our problem.”

“It’s gonna be everybody’s problem! You don’t know what you’re dealin’ with.”

“I do. I been trying to tell you. We killed this one, no problem. So back off.”

The grezzen stiffened. He had feared this result. And he had known that this moment would come, as it came to all sons. His mother had prepared him to live without her. Indeed, she would disapprove if he didn’t handle his sudden independence responsibly. His first responsibility, he decided, was revenge.

Fifty-seven

By the time we got within Handtalk range of Eden, we saw the red glow of fire, lighting the bellies of the clouds above the town. The drive had been uneventful, except for a couple of idiot lookouts who almost ambushed us with an RPG. If they represented the dull point of the human spear, the grezzen had probably gotten into Eden easily.

Kit raised Oliver and asked, “Oliver, what’s going on?”

“Nothing good, Kit. Cutler’s thugs killed the first grezzen with an antitank missile. Then the second grezzen showed up.”

“Casualties?”

“The thing just roared into town like a runaway mag rail. Ignored everybody else, went straight for that warehouse where Cutler’s thugs were holed up with the other one. Peeled back the roof plating like it was cardboard, then jumped down in there and tore them all apart. You would have thought it knew.”

Kit said, “It did.”

Oliver continued, “Since then, it’s just been sitting down in that hole, next to the dead one. We can hear it howl. Frankly, though, I hardly weep for those bastards it killed.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t. Their boss kidnaped his mother, then those bastards killed her.” I looked over at Kit. Her eyes reflected moist in the fire’s glow.

While Kit and Oliver talked, and we bounced closer to town, I peered up through the Sixer’s windscreen. A triangle of red, winking navigation lights appeared in the darkness as the evening Downshuttle broke through the cloud ceiling. It glided over Eden, then disappeared over the hills that separated the town from the port.

Kit asked Oliver, “What’s everybody planning to do now?”

“Kill it, of course. The plan is to flood the warehouse with kerosene while it’s down in there, then burn it to death. The grezz never seemed to like fire. We’re bringing up a tanker truck now.”

Kit rubbed her fingers across her forehead. “Can you wait ‘til I can talk to the vigilantes?”

“People are done talking. Kit, I’d keep my distance if I were you. This new grezzen got in through your section of the Line. That makes you about as popular as Cutler right now. I imagine half of town was glad to look up and see that Downshuttle.”

Kit and I looked at one another. The evening Upshuttle took off only after the Downshuttle landed safely. The appearance of the Downshuttle in the night sky probably
had
caused half the population of Eden to think that Cutler was out at the port and about to escape from this planet. If that many people had thought it simultaneously, the grezzen had probably noticed.

“Sonuvabitch!” Oliver’s shout rang from Kit’s hand talk as I swung the Sixer onto Main Street and headed for the flames that marked the warehouse compound.

“The goddamn thing just jumped out of that hole like it got shot from a cannon! Like it knew what we were planning. Now we don’t know where it’s headed!”

Kit switched off the Handtalk, turned to me, and said, “I do.”

I pointed out the windscreen. “Me too. Hang on.”

I hit the brakes and swerved. The Sixer flipped and rolled onto its roof.

Fifty-eight

As the grezzen ran, he leapt up and over the human shell that hurtled on a collision course toward him. Beneath him, the shell toppled and rolled like a tripped woog.

As he passed above the tumbling object, he fleetingly felt Kit and Jazen, or so it seemed. Then the immediacy of the moment seized control of his thoughts again.

He took no satisfaction from killing Liu and the others, and his mother’s death left him hollow. But he had seen with his own eyes the flying object that had burst through the clouds. His mother, his race were wrong. Humans did not merely imagine that the world was bigger than grezzen thought it could possibly be. Humans
knew
that it was bigger. He was uncertain what to make of his new knowledge.

But one thing the grezzen did know. Cutler, who the grezzen counted among those responsible for hastening his mother’s death, now waited beyond the hills that bounded the Eden nest. But shortly Cutler would escape, unless the grezzen reached him first.

The grezzen sought and found Cutler’s thread.

“Now boarding First Class Upshuttle passengers holding reserved accommodation vouchers aboard HUS
Yorktown
.” Cutler walked forward, toward a human-sized opening in the largest shell the grezzen had yet seen.

The grezzen searched among his peers for knowledge of the terrain through which he ran. He had never been here, within this small area of the world that had been ceded to the human race. But his ancestors knew the territory, and so he knew it. A narrow canyon led through the hills. If he cut through it, he would reach the place where Cutler now was sooner. The canyon was a place where his ancestors had ambushed and slain many humans. Surely such terrain would still favor him.

The grezzen altered his course toward the pass, and lifted his pace.

Fifty-nine

I hung upside down, suspended by my seatbelt against the Sixer’s driver’s seat.

I twisted and saw Kit, also suspended, limp, in the same posture. “Kit? You okay?”

No answer.

I pulled myself up until I could release the seatbelt, dropped onto the Sixer’s roof, then crawled to Kit. Her eyes were closed, and blood trickled from her nose down toward her hairline. But she was breathing.

My heart pounded. Should I move her?

She moaned, then her eyes opened.

I said, “You okay?”

She nodded. “Get me down.”

Two minutes later, we stood and examined the Sixer. The right front wheel had snapped off at the axle, and two left side wheels folded beneath the chassis like bent jar lids. Even if we could have righted the vehicle, its close encounter with the grezzen had left it undriveable.

We limped, arm in arm, toward the dying flames that marked the warehouse complex.

I said, “You think it’s after Cutler?”

“What else? But I don’t think it understands that it can’t reach him. There’s no reason to think grezzen even understand the concept of space beyond this world. Much less travel through it.”

“If Cutler gets away after all this, you think he’ll abandon his project?”

She shook her head as we walked. “No chance. He’ll have to pay the locals more, maybe move his operations outside town. But the costs are peanuts compared to the profits.”

Headlights, tall and accompanied by a big displacement diesel’s bellow, winked on at the opposite end of main street.

I shielded my eyes. “I imagine that’s Oliver’s kerosene bomb tanker.”

The diesel, towing a two-hundred-barrel tank wagon, rumbled toward us down the mud street, lit by fading firelight. The truck’s brakes squealed as it stopped and idled alongside us. A dozen armed men and women, faces smoke-blackened, clung to the tanker’s sides.

Oliver leaned out the cab window. “You two all right?”

Kit looked up at him. “Nothing serious. Where you all going?”

“They spotted the thing. It’s making for the Cageway.”

Kit said, “The Cageway’s blocked at the other end.”

“Exactly. Once it gets inside, we’ll close the doors on this end. Once it’s trapped inside, we can set up hoses and pump kerosene in through the roof bars. We’ll roast it just like we planned. Just in a different spot.”

I said, “That thing nearly wrecked a main battle tank. You might want to just leave it alone.”

“I saw what happened to the tank. It’s still parked down by the warehouse. But tanks weren’t built to keep grezzen on the outside. The Cageway was. It was built of one hundred percent newsteel. The Cageway’ll keep a grezzen from getting out just as well as it’ll keep one from getting in.”

A bearded man in a black stetson, straddling the tanker’s top hatch, waved a rifle. “Let’s go, Oliver!”

The old man looked back at the posse, nodded, and the tank truck lurched away in the direction of the Cageway.

Kit said, “We can’t let them kill the grezzen.”

“In their shoes, I would.”

“You’re not in their shoes! Parker, you refused to kill children. The grezzen are as innocent as children.”

“Children don’t commit mass murder. That grezzen just did.”

As the tanker’s rumble faded, distant thunder replaced it.

The Upshuttle rose above the hills, through the darkness, navigation lights flashing.

“Parker, you know the two situations aren’t equivalent. And we’d be dead now if the grezzen hadn’t bodyguarded us back to the Line.”

“It didn’t do that to for us. It did that to get inside the Line! That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

“You blame it? For reasons it doesn’t understand, its only family was taken away from it. It’s been sentenced to be shot on sight, just for being born. Do you think that’s right?”

Kit had just described my own life. I didn’t think that was right for me. I couldn’t very well think it was right for the grezzen.

I stood in the street for a moment, thinking. Then I pointed at the sky, where the engine flare of the Upshuttle had just disappeared into the low clouds. “Can you really fly one of those?”

“Why?”

“Come on!” I took her arm and dragged her behind me down Main Street, toward the smoldering ruins of the warehouse.

Sixty

The grezzen raced through the narrow canyon that led to the place where he had felt Cutler. He was slowed by the canyon’s open, barred roof, against which his back would crash if he ran with his normal, bounding stride. The bars admitted the dim light of night that reflected off the clouds, but the bars had obscured his view of the object that had roared overhead moments before.

He sifted threads until he found Cutler, and was horrified to realize that the man was gone, already above the clouds—yes, there really was more of the world above the clouds—and already planning to return and do to other grezzen what had been done to the grezzen’s mother.