Forty-four
Sasha agreed to move in with Melanie rather than be
alone for even a minute of the day. They added a room onto Melanie's hut
with a door between them. Sasha preferred her privacy and her own small
campfire. She squatted before the fire day and night, clutching one of
Melanie's flint-tipped spears. Wallace slept by her side, but finally
confessed his growing concern to Melanie. "She's making me crazy. What
are we going to do?"
Melanie paced the hut, studying its flimsy wall. She
glanced out the door at the shadows among the trees. "I think she's just
paranoid, but it's catching. Even I've heard the cats growling at
something, and we're not very secure here. I think we should move into
the open. The cats can keep a closer eye on us."
Melanie reached for one of her spears leaning against
a wall and studied the crude weapon. "I can do better than this. I'd
prefer a fully automatic machine pistol, but I've got an idea for
something that'll kill just about as dead."
The following day, Melanie let Wallace choose a spot
out in the grasslands for the new hut and went in search of a collection
of wood for new weaponry. By that evening, Melanie showed him her first
prototype bow and arrow.
Wallace was amused. He could remember his father
buying him a little red plastic bow and taking him to the firing range
where the elder McFerguson launched metal-tipped arrows out of sight with
a far more formidable weapon. "You're going to stick one of your pet
rabbits with that thing," Wallace warned her with a grin.
"Don't be sarcastic." She notched an arrow and sent
it flying. One of the young cats nearby reacted with a shriek of fright
and watched the arrow bury itself in a distant tree. The cat then swung
its head around and looked at them with eyes wide with abject fear.
"Now you try."
Wallace missed the tree. He estimated the bow to be
a massive seventy or eighty pounder and discovered that even his untrained
muscles could send an arrow flying hard and fast enough to cause
substantial injury at close range. He called over his shoulder for Sasha
to join them and discovered that she, too, had some small experience in
archery. Her firing position was accurate. She drew the bow back to the
tip of the arrow and promptly snapped it in half. Wood, cord and the
useless arrow tumbled to her feet. Sasha looked back at Melanie in
disdain and went back to her room.
Melanie watched her retreat with a jaw lax. "My God,
she's strong."
Wallace was well aware of her strength. He picked up
the wreckage of the bow and handed it to her. "Try again."
Melanie snatched the debris from his hand. "I'll do
that."
Melanie constructed two more identical bows, one for
her own use and one for Wallace's. "I like the wood I'm using," she
commented. "It has a good flex to it. The only stronger wood I've found
is going to have over one hundred pounds of draw. It should suit Sasha
just fine."
Three days later, Sasha drew
her new bow to the arrow
tip and splintered a sapling fifty yards distant. Again, several young
cats screeched in panic and fled into the grasslands. The older and wiser
animals growled a low protest and lay down to watch what other terrible
magic the enigmatic aliens could perform.
Melanie spent the next few days showing Sasha how to
construct, maintain, and use her new weapon. Sasha made several dozen
arrows of her own design, using her own selection of glass arrow heads.
Thereafter, Sasha spent mornings practicing her newfound art. The
fascinated cats quickly made a game of retrieving spent arrows and the
rabbits learned to wrestle the embedded arrows from tree trunks and return
them on the cooperative backs of the felines.
Watching the rapidly evolving cooperation between the
animals unnerved Wallace. They behaved with an almost human level of
intelligence. The cats and the primate-rodents had become a symbiotic
partnership overnight. As Melanie had foreseen, an unimaginable future
lay in store for them.
Wallace awoke just before dawn of a day many peaceful
weeks later and found Sasha missing from his side. Without bothering to
awaken Melanie, he walked to the old hut, calling her name in the predawn
light. The hut was empty, but on his way back, a half dozen excited cats
came racing up to him, tugging on his clothing with their teeth to follow.
They led Wallace to the limestone ridge where he
found Sasha curled up in the sand, hugging a shapeless object. He reeled
back in horror when he recognized it for what it was and saw the blood
stains on her thighs. Sasha was no longer pregnant. There was no child
as yet, but there would be soon, and it would be as Sasha had feared, a
hatchling rather than a live birth, a child of the Saur.
Dazed, Wallace tried to arouse her. Sasha hissed at
him, the veneer of civilization and culture stripped from her soul.
Wallace staggered back in alarm, then hurried back to seek help from
Melanie.
Melanie was up and waiting for him, dressed in her
fatigues and boots and ready for trouble, forewarned by the behavior of he
cats. "We'll take everything we can carry," she said.
They camped a short distance further down along the
ledge. Sasha's hostility proved to be temporary, induced by the shock of
the passage of the egg sac. She calmed by the dawn of the second day.
She gathered up her fallen bow and arrows and arranged them neatly at her
side, then accepted a draft of water from one of Melanie's skin. She sat
facing her two companions, absently cradling the leathery issue that
Wallace could see moving from time to time, evidence of the life within.
"Don't let the Carn get the hatchling," Sasha
murmured, her voice thick with the accent of Qualin's language. "Please
don't let it get the baby."
The cats sensed Sasha's fear. The largest of them
stood in a broad semicircle among the trees, facing outward and alert for
trouble from unknown quarters.
Melanie planned a return to the hut to retrieve a
fresh deer carcass. Sasha's diet had always been largely protein, and she
was content to eat the meat raw now. Wallace needed to go for water. With
the cats standing guard and no evidence of the Carn in the area, Sasha
allowed the two to make the trip together.
He and Melanie rested an hour at the falls. They
started back beneath low-hanging clouds, Melanie with a partial carcass
thrown over her shoulder, Wallace with water skins hanging around his
neck.
They were caught in a deluge at the halfway point.
Lightning seared overhead like the beams of light from the Carn laser
rifles. Thunder vibrated in Wallace's gut. The downpour roaring in their
ears, and Wallace lightened his load by dumping the redundant water skins.
He could backtrack for them at a later date.
The moss covered ground proved to be especially
slick. Melanie lost her balance as she stood screaming in exhilaration at
the storm. She fell into Wallace's arms and they shrieked hysterically
when Wallace lost his footing as well and fell over backwards. They
rolled once in the mud and came to rest against one another, and the
excitement of the storm sparked a moment of passion that held both reason
and caution at bay long enough for the two to clutch at each other in a
brief, exploratory passion.
She didn't feel right in his arms. Sasha was built
differently. But Melanie was soft, and he ached to consummate a love he
had suppressed for too long.
"Please," she cried into the storm when he
hesitated. “You're all I have to love me!"
Wallace gave in to their need, hers, if not his own.
The energy of the storm galvanized them until their passion was spent.
They had little opportunity for a tender moment afterward. Water rushing
over the banks of the nearby stream forced their retreat. The thunder of
the nearby waterfall had intensified a hundredfold.
They left their discarded clothing behind and raced
for the ridge. Wallace felt more alive than at any time in his life that
he could remember, his every sense overpowered by the storm, and his body
still resonating with the passion of his lovemaking with Melanie.
The blow to the side of the head caught him entirely
unaware. He spun around once and slammed to the ground dead weight.
Above him, something inhuman snarled vehemently.
Melanie shrieked once and was cut off by the sound of
another impact. Hot blood sprayed across Wallace's face. His eyes were
open when the cold deluge quickly rinsed it from his face and left him
blinded, alone in the storm, and too stunned to move.
