She had no language other than grunts and he did not know how to converse with her.
But he spoke with her anyway. “I discovered in myself something very interesting—but this was centuries ago. I was a master of the earth then. A foul-breathed little beast like you would not have interested me then. But you are here.”
He picked up the two-foot steel-cored section of rubber hose, etching lines in his imagination with it across the white flesh of her abdomen, then very quickly, raked it hard across her breasts and she screamed. A scream of pain was somehow a universal language.
He began to undress fully—and then he would beat her well.
Chapter Thirteen
For three days and nights, he had followed them—scraps of burned human flesh, a bone, an occasional footprint—like something wrapped in rags. He had followed the only humans he had found on the face of the earth. The cannibals.
He had followed them on foot, leaving the Harley at the end of the second day, lest the motorcycle alert them to his presence, lest it deny him the chance of finding humankind, for somewhere inside him, he had told himself that there were at least two species moving on this part of the Earth/the cannibals and their victims. He knew little/of cannibal societies on the whole from Earth history, but logic and reason told him that any society, no matter how primitive, no matter how bizarre, no matter how brutal, would require certain rules. And that killing and eating fellow members of the tribe would be taboo—maybe. The human skull—the female—had seemed normal enough. But then, he had told himself, so too might the cannibals.
The trek after the cannibals was leading him through the mountains, through the very area he had chosen to search for the landing spot or crash site—for the origin of the mysterious light in the night sky, perhaps the origin of the indecipherable radio broadcast.
He had been maintaining a distance of perhaps two miles from the cannibals, never seeing them in more than a fleeting glimpse—a vaguely human shape passing into tree cover. They were nomadic, hunters, without a permanent village, he surmised.
Either that or a long-range hunting party. If it were the latter, then following them would lead to their stronghold or base.
Cautiously, lest he be discovered, he had tracked them, resting when he judged they rested, moving when he j udged they moved. They were diurnal in their travel.
As the third day drew into the third night, the scraps of human leavings had all but ceased and no more were there the occasional piles of human feces near the track. They would hunger again.
This night he would close the gap, come up to just outside their camp.
He would see…
Michael Rourke checked the face of the Rolex against the stars. It was nearly midnight. He theorized that his quarry would be asleep now. He shucked his pack so that he could move quickly, camouflaging it in nearby brush. He debated over the M-16. He had no intention of making battle. He camouflaged this as well, almost hearing his father’s voice telling him not to. But his confidence was in himself and in the two handguns with which he had so often practiced over the years.
He marked this spot’s map coordinates, then moved ahead in silence in the darkness.
Silence. He walked quickly, quietly over the rocky terrain, listening each time he stopped, listening for a human voice.
He heard none.
Clouds were moving into the sky on a stiff cold wind and he smelled snow in the air. He kept moving.
Ahead of him, a shadow hung, deeper than the darkness around it. The Stalker in his right fist, he moved ahead, quietly, listening, toward the shadow.
Michael Rourke stopped in the wooded defile beneath the shadow, the shadow now with form, substance, his left hand reaching up, touching at the harness webbing. He had seen these things in books, seen them in videotapes. What hung above him snarled in the trees was a parachute, the clouds overhead parting in a sudden and chilling gust of wind, the whiteness of siJk or nylon—he wasn’t sure which—catching the light from the stars or the moon. A parachute.
It had been an aircraft he had seen in the sky. He lit the Zippo lighter he carried to examine the harness webbing. It had been cut cleanly. A knife.
It was from what he had seen fall from the night sky. v
The aircraft should be nearby. And so should the pilot. He moved about beneath the parachute, on his hands and knees in the grass and dirt, feeling the dark ground, using the flickering blue-yellow flame of the Zippo sparingly lest he burn down the wick.
A folding knife—nothing unique about it. In the light of the Zippo he read the legend “Rostfrei” and “Solingen” on the blade, but there was no trade name. But the knife—it could not be new— was in perfect condition. He closed the single lockblade and pocketed the folding knife, continuing his search. He found nothing else beneath where the parachute hung. He sat on the ground in the cold and the darkness, constructing in his mind what might have happened. If the thing falling from the sky were some sort of conventional aircraft, what he had heard on the radio and what he had heard five years earlier had perhaps been a prerecorded distress signal, perhaps played at higher speed and broadcast toward some base which would have the equipment to ungarble it.
The empty parachute harness, the open folding knife. The pilot had bailed out after sending the message, the parachute snarling in the trees. The pilot had cut himself free. He looked up—the fall would have been perhaps six feet to the ground, but perhaps the pilot had already been injured. It would be the reason for leaving the knife—either that or the approach of the cannibals. But he could not envision even unconsciousness prolonging for more than a week and the pilot simply hanging suspended. He would have left the scene. But if he left the knife, it meant he was injured.
Michael stood beneath the parachute surveying the night around him. The pilot crashed his aircraft, bailing out after sending his distress signal. The pilot’s chute became hung up. The pilot was injured in one manner or another and crawled off into the denser trees. Michael moved to his right—down the defile, easier for an injured person to navigate. He followed the gentlest slope, toward the denser growth of trees.
His foot stubbed against something in the dark. He crouched, shielding the Zippo’s flame from the stiffening chill wind. A plastic container, the plastic opaque, heavy, evidently designed for reuse. He smelled the container. A food smell he could not identify. In the denser tree cover, he could trust to using a flashlight. It was one of the angleheads his father and Paul Rubenstein had taken from the geologi-cal supply store in New Mexico—his father had told them the story of the 747’s crash more than once, of the origins of his partnership with Paul Rubensiein. In the beam of the flashlight, Michael scanned the ground, the Stalker slung across his back.
The earth disturbed—he found a sharp stick and dug with it. Human feces, The pilot? The cannibals did not cover their leavings. He recovered the tiny mound. Another plastic container. In the brush there was the sign of a freshly sawn sapling. But the pine tar had solidified—he judged it as several days old. He moved deeper into the brush, stopping—his right leg, the shin barked against something hard.
Michael shone the flashlight down. Another sapling, but the entire shaft of the tree. He shone the light beyond it—a lean-to built into the natural brush. Around the lean-to and inside, three more of the plastic containers. A canteen— plastic, late G.I., one quart issue. The kind his father frequently had used when they would be away from the Retreat all day long. The canteen was empty.
He searched in detail near the lean-to—more of the neatly covered mounds of human leavings.
But where was the downed aviator?
He heard then, over the keening of the night wind, a scream. The first human sound he had heard since Annie’s voice when he’d left the Retreat, the first human sound beside his own musings.
He started toward the scream, up the defile, taking a right angle when he reached the tree where the parachute still hung, running now, the Stalker in both hands as he pushed through the trees. The cannibals—perhaps they had the pilot. Snow—he felt it touch his right cheek.
Another scream.
Michael Rourke threw himself into the run. If a civilized man were ahead of him, he had to know from where the man had come. His heart beat— not from the thinness of the air or its coldness, but from something deep inside him.