The Last Hour of Gann (80 page)

The wind shook whatever unseen trees were close by extra hard and then finally died away a little. Amber pulled her pants up, tucking her spear between her shoulder and her chin like an oversized phone so she could
tie her excess underwear off and tighten Meoraq’s belt around her waist…and then paused and looked around.

Sounded like the trees were still shaking. Not a lot. Not at all anymore in fact. But it had definitely lasted longer than the wind.

Come to think of it…what trees? They’d made their fire tonight out of dead grass and dried corroki dung. She knew because she remembered so vividly the colorful comments of those who’d watched her carry the stiff patties into camp. The nearest trees had been dark smudges in the distance.

But if it wasn’t wind in the trees…what was it?

Grass whispered on her left, and sure, that could be the wind, but there was something about the way it was whispering that raised the fine hairs on her arms to prickles. It wasn’t one long whooooooosh but more of a wa-whoosh wa-whoosh.

Like footsteps.

Amber got her spear in her hand and backed up, promptly kicking her heel into a protruding stone and nearly going down on her butt. She recovered, but heard quite clearly a low and oddly bony-sounding clicking or tapping sound, this time on her right.

‘Don’t run,’ she thought, even as her body tensed to do just that. ‘You don’t hear them very well. They might not hear you very well. They might not see you any better than you see them either. If you run, that’s all over.’

Good advice. She had the best fucking advice at the worst possible times.

She walked, forcing herself to test her footing and cringing at each damp slap of grass hitting her legs. Her spear felt at once huge and weightless where she gripped it; she had a feeling that would change if she ever actually had to use it. The wind gusted again, once more right in her face. The sound of it roaring in her ears overwhelmed any little
noise the…the whatever-they-were made in their pursuit. If they pursued. If they were walking this way at all.

But why wouldn’t they, for Christ’s sake? There was the fire! And as tiny as it was, it was still the only fire out here! The only light of any kind! She was following it, why wouldn’t they?

She ran—yes, now a run, and if she hooked her foot on one of these rocks, she had no one to blame when she tripped and broke her head open—and slapped at the taut wall of Meoraq’s teepee in what she hoped did not sound like the panic it sure felt like.

“I n
eed you,” she said loudly. Over her shoulder, even louder: “Nicci, get up.”

Nicci squirmed under her blanke
t, but she raised her head, along with several other people. “Hunh? Why?”

Before Amber could answer, t
he flap of Meoraq’s tent twitched once and was thrown open. An entirely naked lizardman burst out of it with his breeches in one hand and his hooked sword in the other. “What is it?”

“I hea
rd something,” Amber stammered, trying without success not to look at the featureless mound between his legs. Entirely naked. “I didn’t see anything, but—”

“Where?” he asked crisply, managing not only to step into his breeches and pull them up while walking, but also not letting go of his sword while he did it.

She pointed, saying, “I thought there were footsteps, too. I could have been mistaken about those, but I’m sure about the clicks.”

He cinched his belt and buckled it, tipping his head at her in that way that rather urgently demanded more information as opposed to just wanting it.

She clicked her tongue at him a little, and then shook her head because it was all wrong. “Like that, but not really. It was…I don’t know, bigger. Harder.”

One of the many people coming over to listen suddenly laughed and said, “What?” as several others sniggered.

“Oh grow up!” she snapped, and Meoraq reached out and caught her chin, jerking her firmly back to face him. “It was…I don’t know how to describe it. It was harder. Like…Like rock or maybe wood. It sounded…hollow.”

He released her at once and drew the other sword. “Stay here,” he told her curtly. “Get your peop
le up and move them together. Build up the fire. Go.”

Barefoot, h
e ran agile as a deer over mud and around rocks and was gone.

“All right, you heard the man,” said Amber, wondering just what in hell she was feeling. It was relief, she decided. Relief that she’d done her job and now someone else knew what to do and was doing it. It had nothing to do with seeing the lizardman naked. “Everybody better wake up.”

“We’re not your people,” said Crandall, glaring at her even as he moved closer to the fire. “So fuck you, scale-bait.”

“What’s going on?” someone called. Maria, maybe, because it was
Eric’s voice that answered, muttering, “Bierce is stirring things up again. It’s nothing, just come on over here for a few minutes.”

“Did she
see something?”

“No,” Crandall answered loudly. “Someone saw her coming out of the lizard’s tent, so she’s acting like she was going to get him or something.”

“What were you doing in his tent?” Nicci asked.

“I wasn’t in his tent!”

“And he was bare-scaly-ass naked,” Crandall inserted meaningfully, tossing a few grass-bundles onto the fire. Burning ash puffed out and fresh flames caught, turning his smirk into a red-tinted leer. “So draw your own conclusions.”

Nicci’s puzzled frown became a gape.

“Oh for Christ’s—That’s not what we were doing!”

“What were you doing?” Nicci asked in a low voice.

“We weren’t doing anything!” Amber shouted.

Nicci’s dubious expression did not change.

“Get up,” Amber ordered, coming over to catch her little sister’s arm. “Go over by the—”

A beam of light hit Amber in the
eyes. A moment later, Scott’s most commandingly pompous voice rolled out: “Is this your idea of a joke, Miss Bierce?”

She
’d raised a hand against the glare of the flashlight. Now she lowered it, clenching it into a fist. She looked at him and then beyond him to all of them, so angry she couldn’t seem to pull a single face into focus. They were just a crowd. A staring, smirking, hostile crowd.

“Okay, everybody calm down,”
Scott was saying. “Just go back to bed. We’ll sort this out in the—”

Something just out of sight in the plains let out a piercing shriek. Meoraq roared back, almost completely unheard beneath the
commotion of people leaping up, scrambling back, grabbing each other and screaming.

“Stand together!” Amber shouted over the top of it. “Whatever you do, don’t
panic! Make the fire bigger! Burn everything! Give me that,” she finished, snatching the flashlight out of Scott’s hand. The sound of something big thrashing and shrieking was dead ahead of her, but Meoraq clearly had that one. In the plains, she’d heard two.

“I didn’t say you could have that!”
Scott said shrilly as she moved out into the plains. He backed up toward the fire, looked around to see everyone else already there and watching him, and then came after her. “Give it back! That’s stealing!”

She ignored him and ran as fast as she dared in the dark, completely unaware that he was running after her until she stopped to shine the light around and he snatched it out of her hand.

“There is no place in this colony for thievery!” he announced as she gaped at him. “Or for selfish, small-minded people who have hysterics to get attention!”

“This is not the time for this, goddammit!” she hissed. “How stupid are you to pick a fucking fight right now?
Give me that and go back to the others!”

She
made a grab for the flashlight.

He hit her with it
.

She
didn’t see it coming until it was too late. Even when he drew back his arm, she thought he was just being his usual snotty self and playing a grossly mistimed game of keep-away when in fact he was winding up for his swing. Impact came as a sensation of amazing heat all down the left side of her face and a ringing in her head. Through that, she heard a cracking sound—
my skull O god he broke my skull open
—and felt an insignificant little burn across her ear.

She
went down with a caw, arms and legs outflung in shock, executing a near-perfect belly flop right on the ground. Rocks caught her at the hip, thigh, left arm, and the mother of them all in the stomach. She rolled onto her side, choking and grabbing at her middle with one arm, clutching at the side of her head with the other, terrified that she would feel the hot jelly of her own brains squeezing up through her fingers. But there was nothing, nothing but hair.

Scott
was looking into the broken head of the flashlight. It was still shining, but the face-cap had cracked and the lens was missing, which made the light dimmer as it underlit Scott’s frowning face. “You broke it,” he said accusingly, as something huge slipped out of the blackness behind him and into the beam of that weak, yellow light.

She wanted to call it an ostrich, because that was the only frame of ref
erence her stunned brain had to give her, but it bore no more true resemblance to one than a saoq to a deer or a corroki to an armadillo. She wasn’t even sure she could call it a bird. What her eyes wanted to perceive as feathers clearly weren’t; what it had were flat, wedge-shaped plates thrust out from its body, rattling like wind in dry branches when it saw them. It walked on two muscular legs and had five toes each, the middle toe twice as long as the others and bent backwards so as to rest the massive length of its scythe-like talon on its ankle. Its arms were long and ridiculously skinny, terminating not in a hand but only a single blunt claw, with thousands of those plates—long and thin and tapered to points—sprouting from it to make wings. Its neck was long, but very thick and the head that sat atop it was huge and blocky, with a wide, hooked beak that opened now for a deafening, extremely unfunny, goose-like honk.

Scott
jumped and turned around. He screamed as Amber heaved herself onto her feet with her spear in both hands. It was a perfectly glorious B-movie scream and the only reason Amber didn’t join him in it was because her stomach and head hurt so fucking much.

The bird opened its wings and shook them, stalking forward with its head low and canted on its side. Amber swung her spear, making just one slapdash attempt to scare it off, but she knew it wouldn’t be scared and it wasn’t.

It lowered its head and charged.

“Run!” Amber
rasped, lunging to meet it.

Scott
stood there and screamed again.

The bird jumped, both legs folding up and two middle toes slicing out. Amber grabbed
Scott’s shirt and pulled as hard as she could while throwing herself forward.

Scott
’s scream yelped itself off when he hit the ground, a split-second before Amber drove the point of her spear into the bird’s breast. She heard fabric tear, felt a pulling sensation, and even though she could
see
it had snagged her shirt and nothing more, she still thought, ‘That’s it, I’ve just been disemboweled,’ and actually heard Meoraq telling her she was dead. Then she was wrenched violently to one side by the spear going crazy in her hands. She lost her footing, but held onto the spear, and was dragged painfully in a wide arc as the bird spun, trying to free itself.

Then it saw her at the end of the spear.

‘You know,’ Amber told herself in a remarkably mild inner voice. ‘It’s never quick when a person goes out this way. You’re always alive when they eat you.’

It lunged, shoving her ahead of it, and its beak clopped shut on empty air where she had been. It tried again, this time with a short running start that pushed Amber through the mud and grass until her
butt hit a rock and the unexpected leverage combined with the bird’s momentum pushed the spear in further.

It
shrieked, staggering and kicking at her. She fell back but never lost her grip, keeping the spear between them as its talon slashed through her shirt. In seconds, she was wearing nothing but two sleeves, three buttons and some shreds.

It couldn’t reach her. But only just.

Amber burst out laughing. It was sort of an hysterical sound, but honestly, it was funny. If she let go of the spear, the bird would kill her. If she stuck the spear in any deeper, the bird would kill her. Damned if you do, little girl, and damned if you don’t.

The bird let out another of those ear-splitting shrieks, which was easily identifiable, now that it was happening at arm’s reach and not off in the dark somewhere, as the sound of a very pissed off bird and not a mortally wounded one.
It didn’t even seem to care that it had a spear stuck in it, only that the tasty bag of meat dangling off the end of it remained just out of reach. The bird lunged at her in a beak-snapping frenzy and Amber felt the spear go in a little deeper and catch again. The bird recoiled, thrashing and kicking and beating at her with its wings, which felt a lot like getting horse-whipped with a bag of broken glass. Her arms went numb before she could even process the pain; the spear slipped out of her hands and she spun through the air and fell on her face.