“Why didn’t you kill it?” Lotus asked.
“I guess… it knocked my gun away.”
“No,” Crazy said. “You had your gun when we found you. You must have been holding it when the Beast made its getaway. We had to pry it from your fingers. Why didn’t you shoot it again?”
I tried to remember. I could picture the blue-white vibra-beam tearing the night apart and sewing it back together. There was some sort of exclamation which I had not made. Then I could not shoot. I explained the memories to the others.
“Hypnosis?” Crazy asked.
“I don’t think so. I wasn’t spellbound or anything like that. Something… something else.”
“I think we should back out now,” Lotus said. “We’ll just end up like Garner. Sorry, Crazy, but we will! I think we should pack our gear and move out fast.”
“No,” I said, trying to look more chipper than I felt. “We’ll get it. I know we will.”
“But there are other jobs — easier jobs,” she protested.
“We’ve shed our blood over this one,” Crazy said. “When you spill your blood for a hunt, you’re bound to get the Beast no matter what. It goes above revenge.”
She fluttered her downy blue wings, looked right through me like only she can. “It’s more than that to you, isn’t it, Andy?”
“Yes,” I croaked. No use hiding anything from Lotus — not with eyes that enter the soul like hers do. “Yes, I suppose it is. Though I don’t know what.” Then I passed out again.
Two days later.
All my wounds had healed under the speedheals. We had not seen the Beast since, though we were not inexperienced enough to think it had crawled away to die. That is a dangerous assumption in this profession; turn your back for even a second and bang! We decided, instead, that it had returned to its lair, somewhere in the forest, to lick its wounds and heal itself. We had ceased to speculate about why I had been unable to kill it when I had the chance, for that was not a happy thing to speculate about. Too many bad dreams in something like that.
Leaving everything that could not be carried with relative ease, we struck out with inflatable mattresses, food, water, and guns. Most of all, guns. After establishing what our quarry’s footprints were like (humanish, four-toed, long and wicked claws tipping each toe) from a set that led away from the clover patch fight scene in a limp pattern, we moved deeper into the woods. On the second day of the trek, we found where it had fallen and had lain for some time until it found the strength to go on. On the third day, we tracked it to the lip of the Harrisburg Crater — where the footprints ceased.
We stood there on the rim of the vast depression, staring across the table of nuclear glass that the triple-headed super-nuclear rocket had made. The crater, I knew from the maps, was two and a quarter miles in diameter. There was a lot of space. Dotting it were thousands of bubbles in the glass. A great number of them were broken and led to the maze of uncharted tunnels and caves that lay under the floor of the crater. Apparently, in one of these caves, the Beast was licking its wounds — and waiting.
“How can we cover all that?” Crazy asked. “It’s big! And slippery!”
“We’ll do it,” I said. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t know why I didn’t order everyone to backtrack, to get the hell out of there chop-chop, on the double. Lotus was right, of course: the reason was more than revenge against a dumb animal. For a moment, I felt like Hamlet on the castle ramparts, talking to a ghost. But that feeling passed. My determination had something to do with that night when I could have killed it but did not. That night when I almost let it kill me. And why? And what about the other twenty-two?
“I guess here is as good a place as any,” Lotus said. “Let’s make camp here.” She swung a hand around, indicating the thirty feet of hard-packed earth that separated the forest from the crater edge. Here and there, a few sparse pieces of vegetation were trying to grow on the no-plant’s-land between woods and glass. They weren’t doing very well, but they made the bleakness a little less bleak.
“Here it will be,” I said, dropping my own gear. “We’ll search the caves tomorrow.”
Nightfall stole in, a black fog.
There were stars in the sky, but the greatest light show of all lay at our feet. For two and one quarter miles ahead, the nuclear glass shimmered with vibrant colors as it gave off the heat of the day. Blues chased reds across its surface while ambers danced with ebonies, locked arms with streaks of green.
I was sitting on the crater wall, dangling my legs, a hundred yards from the main camp. Crazy was back there still eating supper. His suppers lasted two hours, with no time wasted in those hundred and twenty minutes either. Lotus drifted down next to me, folded her tiny legs under her, and put her head on my shoulder. Her hair was cool and sweet-smelling. Also nice: it was black as the night and blew around my ears and chin and made me feel good.
“Beautiful, isn’t it,” I said. There was a burst of orange rimmed with silver.
“Very,” she said as she tried to crawl even closer. She was our consolation. She held the team together. Crazy and I could not last a month without her. Briefly, I wondered how, when she consoled Crazy, they managed, what with his being so big and clumsy and her being so tiny, so fragile. But she never came back chipped or cracked, so maybe the lummox was gentler than he seemed.
“You scared?” I asked. She was trembling, and it was not cold.
“You know me.”
“We’ll win.”
“You sound so sure.”
“We have to. We’re the good guys.”
I felt something wet on my neck, and I knew it was a tear. I shifted a little and cuddled her and said now-now and other things. Mainly, I just sat there being uncomfortable and damned happy all at once. Lotus almost never cries. When she does, she is worried about one of us—really worried. Then you can’t stop her until she’s dried out. You can only sit and hold her. And when she’s finished, she never mentions the fact that she was crying; you better never mention it either, if you know what’s good for you.
So, she was crying. And I was cuddling.
And Crazy was suddenly screaming—
V
A very long time ago, as I had sat at the upstairs window before my mother made me leave our house, there had come two giant red eyes out of the night mists. They had been as large as saucers, casting scarlet light ahead of them, focusing on the house. It was a jeep covered with sheets and red cellophane and painted to look like a dragon by the Knights of the Dragon to Preserve Humanity. I thought it very funny that grown people should play at such ridiculous games.
Below me now, in the pit that had suddenly opened and gulped down Crazy, a spider, spindly legs bracing it a hundred feet down, was looking up with crimson headlamp eyes. Only there was something worse than a jeep behind these lamps. Much worse.
“Crazy!” I shouted.
“Here. To the left!”
I took the lantern Lotus brought from the camp, lowered it into the steeply sloping tunnel. The spider backed off another fifty feet but no more. Probably a female. Females are more fearless than their mates. Branching off from the main fall were several side tunnels, all filled with sticky eggs and webbing.
“It must have burrowed close to the surface,” Crazy shouted. “I just stepped on the ground. It wiggled, gave, and fell through.”
He had rolled into one of the side tunnels, was caught up in the stickiness and eggs. The web was probably a different variety than the one the other spider had used to entrap us earlier. This one was for protecting eggs and would be even more thick and gummy. The mother spider fidgeted below, wanting to come charging up to protect her eggs, frightened only for a moment. “Lotus!” I shouted. “Climbing cleats and your knife. Hurry!”