The rain stopped a half hour after Joe's Sun set. Betty Toal and I were
a long distance from Joetropolis and the Young Farmer School. Although
Toal had insisted upon carrying the hisser in addition to her firearm,
I was ready to collapse under the combined mass of my pack and the
robotic, which Rasmussen had left exposed to the rain.
The Hog moved with us. Where he stalked remained impossible to tell.
The darkening of night amplified the ventriloquial quality of his
grunting. At times, he seemed ahead of us, occasionally he walked on
either side, but, most often, he trailed close behind.
"Are you sure there's only one?" I panted. "Sounds like a herd."
In the darkness, the Hog laughed. That is, he rapidly grunted, "Huh,
huh, huh, huh!"
I stopped in the middle of the dirt road and squinted at indistinct
shapes. A field bordered the road on one side, and an area of fresh
stumps and scattered vinetrees, the other. "Do you have any night
goggles?" I asked.
"No," Toal said.
"I may have a light in my pack."
"No light! The Hog will charge it. He tracks by scent, but has poor
sight."
I imagined I saw a great shape in the brush. "Let's climb a tree," I
said. "There's a big vine. We'll wait until someone comes for us."
"No one will search. Ordinance 921 forbids anyone to go outside the
walls at night."
"Fine. Rasmussen deliberately left us for the Hog. I can understand he
may dislike me, but why you?"
"Eeet oo Keenlogh!" the Hog squealed, almost shattering my eardrums.
"The hisser!" I yelled. I dropped the heavy robotic in the mud, jerked
the hisser from Toal's arms, and shoved the woman behind me. I turned
on the light under the barrel.
The Hog filled the road thirty meters away. His back was at least four
meters above the road.
The Hog had only one glinting red eye. The other side of his head
contained a ghastly socket. Half of one ear was missing, and his lower
left tusk was broken. The bizarrely upswept, upper left tusk was twice
the length of the right. Reddish bristles grew, like weeds among rocks,
between the bony plates covering his creased hide. With snout touching
the ground, he stood on cloven hoofs too small for his oily, swelling
body. A stifling stench emanated from him. He moved.
"Run!" I barked. Pellets swished from the hisser's barrel. Some
actually rebounded from the Hog's neck. I shot at the charging
monster's skull. The hisser pinged empty. The Hog's tusks slashed
upward.
I squawked like a space-happy maniac as a tusk ripped into my oversuit.
I tumbled into the air and bounced through the branches of the nearby
vinetree.
Hanging stunned in a snarl of creepers, I heard sharp cracks from
Toal's firearm. The Hog squealed in rage. "Run, Toal!" I wheezed. "He's
pellet-proof!"
The Hog stopped squealing. Mud splashed and brush broke.
"Ube Kinlock," Toal cried, "where are you?" Her cries became a mourning
wail. I heard her stumbling in the undergrowth.
"Up here," I groaned. "Up here."
"Oh! Don't move. May have broken bones. Found your lantern." A light
flashed across the road and countryside, then moved up the tree. "Badly
injured?" Toal called.
Dangling in the vines, I became aware that I throbbed and burned all
over. "Don't think so," I said. "He tossed me."
The light swayed. Toal crouched on a broad, living rope slightly above
me. She unclipped the light from the neck of her sack and held it close
to me. "Anything broken?" she asked.
"I don't know," I moaned. "How can anything so big move that fast?"
"You are scratched and bruised." Toal pulled apart a long rip in my
oversuit. "Side is bleeding," she said. "Have to get you down."
"What about the Hog?"
"Ran. You hurt him, Kinlock. Blood on the road."
"Probably mine. A hundred pellets!" I sighed. "He kept coming."
"Said hissers won't stop him. Must cut that vine around your ankle."
Toal put her hand to the back of her neck and pulled it away clutching
a small knife. She sawed at the vines. Far away, the Hog grunted, but
the sounds had a new, bubbling quality. Toal said, "Going back to the
swamp."