The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man (2 page)

He misjudges and lands on the side of the
buck with a thud, his hands already wrapped tightly around the
smooth base of the young prongbuck's
horns. His legs dangle off one side of the buck. He tries to heave
himself up onto the buck's back, but pain screams in his left arm.
He steals a glance and sees thick prongs protruding in a line out
of the prongbuck's spine. They gore his arm and run the full length
of the animal.

Surprises
. He does not like
surprises.

Seeing the wound makes the pain worse, and
his mind races with fresh adrenaline. His left hand clings to the
buck's set of horns, but he cannot flex it. Instead he pulls with
his right and tries to lift his feet clear of the brambles flying
past as the buck tries to shake him. The mad elk changes directions
like a serpent and his arm burns with fire as the row of prongs
yank him one way then the other. He would have fallen off if not
for the devilish hooks of the prongs. He pulls harder with his
right hand and finally hears the crack he wants. The tip of one of
the prongs breaks free in his hand. With one smooth motion, he
swings the tip down, hard, into the prongbuck's heart.

The buck leaps higher than it had before, and
this time he pushes off of it. The three prongs lodged in his arms
snap and go with him as he soars from the beast. He tumbles through
the underbrush, rights himself immediately and sprints after the
prongbuck. It jumps, in erratic leaps and bounds, then slips on the
blood pouring from its chest, and careens into a tree. The horns
catch on a branch and its neck snaps as momentum carries its body
forward. The prongbuck tumbles to a pile and ceases to live.

While the young hunter limps over to the buck
he observes the prongs in his upper arm. They are firmly embedded,
two above the bone and one below, in a neat diagonal line that
connects his elbow to his shoulder. Each trickles a tiny stream of
blood, but they are stuck fast. He can hardly use his arm, but his
tribe has medicine. If he can just get the meat and rack of prongs
back to his people, all will be well.

He stands weakly over the buck. It has a low
row of prongs all the way down its spine. He shudders to think what
would have happened if he had landed how he had wanted, squarely on
the buck's back. His lungs and stomach would have been punctured,
maybe even his heart. His mistake had turned the protective row and
the rack of prongs into the weapons that ended the long chase, and
the prongbuck's own life. The irony was lost on the hunter.

He unravels his twisted rope from around his
chest, ties the buck's hind legs, and heaves it up, off the ground,
to drain the blood. His arm hurts only when he hangs on it to lift
the buck. It will hurt much worse. He is still fresh from a kill
and his body will spare him the senses he does not ask it for.

The blood glows red in the silver moonlight
as the elk’s life flows back to the earth.

The young hunter, tired and hungry, kneels
down and lets the blood pour over him. He cups his hands, fills
them with the rich liquid and drinks deeply. It tastes wrong, not
the usual rusty tang of blood. It tastes darker, metallic and
unfamiliar. Yet his stomach groans in thanks as the blood restores
his strength. He laps it up, nearly dead with thirst and hunger,
then collapses to the forest floor. For a moment, he thinks of how
special this particular prongbuck seemed, its uncanny hiding place
in the herd, the alien motion that destroyed his knife, the prongs
lodged in his arm, and its bitter blood.

Old legends race through his mind before he
falls into dreams of weaker prey and stronger blades.

The Hidden have not been seen on the earth for a
long time, since before I was a boy, but they are felt, as sure and
as mean as the wind and the cold, they are felt.

Her bare feet squelch in mud as she stumbles
through the Garden. Her sides ache. She is too tired already. The
fecund growth is too tall, too dark. This way is alien to her,
though she knows the Garden better than anyone. Her eyes can't
adjust. The full moon up above is too bright. Its lunar beams make
harsh black shadows that taunt her.

Brambles and thorns sting as they grasp at
her skin. She looks down and sees pale toes covered in grit catch
on a root.

Her toes.

She crashes to the earth. It hurts. It should
not hurt. Dazed, she looks at herself. Pink lines of blood
crisscross pallid, hairless skin.

Her skin.

A snarl forces her to her feet. She runs.

The
panthera
is getting closer. The
girl can hear her covetous breath behind her, low and steady,
hungry. Her padded feet make no sound. She can kill the girl, but
cats sharpen their tools as they play. Terror is this night's
game.

The girl bursts from the undergrowth. She's
in the clearing around the Spire. The moon is high and full
overhead, the same color as the towering edifice. She runs to it
and pounds it with fists. Sparks jump from the tower to her own
tender skin.

“Help me!” she screams, but the Spire is too
tall. From down here it reaches to the heavens, a vertical
structure as tall as the horizon is long. From her perspective on
the ground it seems to cradle the moon, though she knows it holds
far more than that.

“Skup!” she shouts her brother's name loud
and long, but she knows he can't hear her. At more than a mile up,
Spire City might as well be
on
the moon. Still she pleads,
“Baucis, Jacob, someone!” The Spire's electric current stings her
knuckles and she pulls her hands away. It is useless.

The Spire has lasted hundreds of years. This
sole structure survived the deluge, the Scourge, and all Nature
hurls at civilization. A lithe, pale girl is no match. The Spire
stands as mankind's only protection against a vengeful planet. The
High Priestess has said Nature conspired against mankind. The girl
feels the truth of that in the air around her.

Desperate, she whirls around to face her
attacker. She stands tall, taller than anyone in the Spire save her
brother. She throws her shoulder length hair behind her and bares
her teeth. She knows the
panthera
's mind well. The colossal
predator has tired its prey, it waits only for the element of
surprise. It will not find it in her.

“Come on!” she screams. But before the girl
finishes the
panthera
is in the air, her black mane blocks
out the moon. The Spire still glows, but all the girl can see is
the orange of its eyes around slitted pupils. Her black claws
glisten like melting ice in the silver light.

The girl turns to face her, she knows her
mind, how to bend it to her will, but she falters. She tries to
flee and feels herself leap away in huge bounds. It matters not.
The
panthera
is upon her, its bulk crushing her supple body.
She flails with cloven feet and a deadly set of antlers that juts
from her skull. It matters not.

She's back where she belongs, behind the
panthera
's eyes. She feels the terror of the elk and also
the familiar exhilaration of the kill. She feels her own arm reach
back as the
panthera
draws a long claw and plunges it into
the heart of the elk. She taught the
panthera
this way to
kill. She thought the method humane. Now it seems ritualistic and
callous. The
panthera
sinks its teeth into the elk's neck.
She tastes still living flesh. She wants to cry but the
panthera
doesn't let her.

This is all wrong, it’s not supposed to
happen like this. It’s too much. The
panthera
is too
powerful. She is trapped, powerless and synchronized with senses
that Baucis said were intangible. She's shaking violently inside of
its body, screaming. She hears her name.

“Urea, Urea!” The sound comforts her. Its so
far away, from the top of the Spire. She summons all of the will
she can muster. She forces the
panthera
to turn and look to
the top of Spire. She does slowly, each muscle rebels with
resentment, but she does turn. Urea can feel the VRC burn with
resistance inside her own skull as it routes her orders through the
electromagnetic field in the air and into the
panthera
's own
chip.

The voice is louder, “Urea, wake up! You're
having a nightmare!”

Urea's eyes sprung open. Her twin brother
Skup was kneeling over her, shaking her. Beneath his long hooked
nose, he smiled her own smile back at her when she opened her
eyes.

“It was terrible. I was running. I could feel
the dirt under my feet, my own feet Skup! I don't even know what
that feels like! And then I was an elk, and she was killing
me.””

“It’s OK. It was just a nightmare.” Skup said
as he brushed her black hair behind her ears. She instinctively
grabbed at her VRC, the Virtual Reality Chip embedded at the base
of her skull. She moved it back and forth, felt the heat coming off
of it. It had been transmitting.

“It’s the third full moon that I've had
visions like this.”

“It was just a nightmare.”

“Then why are you here?"

Skup's face dropped, “Baucis has called an
assembly. Jacob lost his elk to an unknown predator. It was stabbed
in the heart.”

“Just like my dream.”

“No, not
just
like it,” Skup’s voice
was firm, but Urea knew him too well, she could hear trepidation
beneath his bravado.

“I should ask Ntelo-“

“So she can tell the whole Spire you’re a
dream oracle as well as the Nature's Princess of death?”

Urea glared back at her brother. She looked
so much like the
panthera
she piloted it sent shivers down
his spine.

“It’s just a coincidence, that’s what Baucis
would say.”

“Since when did you care what Baucis
said?”

“Since you’ve been taking Ntelo’s sermons
seriously,” Skup retorted. Urea couldn’t help but smile. Skup could
never miss an opportunity to make fun of the Naturalists and their
high priestess.

“Come on, you’re going to get me in trouble,”
Urea said then hopped to her feet, her nightmare forgotten as
quickly as it seized her.

“That will be a first,” Skup replied, but
Urea didn’t hear him, she was already marching dutifully to the
call of the Council.

The Master Ecologist's eyes moved back and
forth underneath his closed eyelids. The long slender fingers of
his right hand compulsively tumbled two six sided dice, relics of
Spire City's past. His left hand jerked involuntarily as he ran
with the elk. Fat beads of sweat dripped down his bald head. He was
examining the footage, dissecting it for any piece of information
he could use. It wasn't necessary to close one's eyes with a
Virtual Reality Chip, the embedded computers simply bypassed all
sensory input, but reflexes were hard to quell for older patrons.
Besides, sometimes a fluctuation in the broadcast signal would
cause the brain to receive signals from the eyes and the visual
feed from the VRC, a thoroughly nauseating experience to most.
Baucis recoiled as the elk's neck snapped; he felt the others do
the same. The hunt was over. The master ecologist opened his silver
eyes.

Seated around the green felt table was his
team of most skilled pilots, as well as a few powerful Councilors,
masters of their field, colleagues. The group had just replayed the
final moments of an elk that was killed by an unidentified
predator. Baucis did not believe the young pilot's assessment, but
after experiencing the hunt for himself, he didn't know how else to
interpret it. He stood up, clasped his delicate hands behind his
back, and silenced his dice.

“It appears the elk was indeed killed by an
unknown predator,” Baucis said, the words venomous on his soft
tongue, “something undoubtedly capable of using tools.”

The table erupted in argument.

“Impossible!”

“I've foreseen it!”

“Snake eyes you did!” The typical response to
anything. No matter the regularity or oddity of a report, the same
people reacted the same ways. Urea and Skup could hear it from the
hall.

“The people cannot find out.”

“The people will find out regardless.”

The twins strode into the meeting room. All
rose for them except Baucis Patrisus. He only looked at them
coldly, his gray eyes as revealing as a fog bank.

Urea detested the room. It was hidden away in
the back of the games level, somewhere Spire Casino didn't have
cameras, not that those operated anymore. There were ancient
paintings of skyscrapers on the walls—boastful, petulant reminders
of the Spire’s inarguable superiority. A garish yet rusted
chandelier hung from the ceiling above the ornate card table. Urea
hated everything about the room. The chandelier was gaudy and
wretched, a memento of a time no longer and a world lost. The
paintings were puerile reminders of their place, high above the
world in tower of their own. The whole room screamed of the Spire’s
past: the most luxurious casino in the world, a city of sin lifted
to the heavens. But the card table was the worst. Its soft velvet
top was one of the last pieces of genuine cloth left in Spire City.
It was made of actual plant fiber, unlike the carbon-silicate
garments they all wore, and even it was beginning to unravel into
nothingness. Urea hated the fact that something so beautiful had
been used for games. It reminded her that there was a time when
people did not have to concern themselves with survival every day.
She resented her ancestors. They had taken much for granted.

“The meeting has already commenced,” Baucis
said, his face devoid of emotion. Only the wrinkles around his
narrowed eyes told hints of his fury, that and the frigidity of his
voice.

“Sorry sir,” Urea murmured humbly.

“I went as soon you ordered,” Skup
replied.

“I believe you have a flock to tend,” Baucis
said icily.