Werehunter (anthology)

As he came up even to where the box had been, he saw what the thing had been covering; roadkill, a dead ’possum. At that exact moment he knew what had been wrong with the scene a second before, when the box had moved. Because it had moved against the wind.

He cast a startled glance in his rear-view mirror just in time to see the box skitter back, with the wind this time, and stop just covering the dead animal.

That brought all the little calculations going on in his head to a screeching halt. George was an orderly man, a career engineer, whose one fervent belief was that everything could be explained in terms of physics if you had enough data.

Except that this little incident was completely outside his ordered universe.

He was so preoccupied with trying to think of an explanation for the box’s anomalous behavior that he didn’t remember to report the kid in the sports-car at the guard-shack. He couldn’t even get his mind on the new canard specs he’d been so excited about yesterday. Instead he sat at his desk, playing with the CAD/CAM computer, trying to find some way for that box to have done what it did.

And coming up dry. It should not, could not, have moved that way, and the odds against it moving back to exactly the same place where it had left were unbe­lievable.

He finally grabbed his gym-bag, left his cubicle, and headed for the tiny locker-room MacDac kept for those employees who had taken up running or jogging on their lunch-breaks. Obviously he was not going to get anything done until he checked the site out, and he might just as well combine that with his lunch-time exercise. Today he’d run out on Mingo instead of around the base.

A couple of Air National Guard A-4s cruised by overhead, momentarily distracting him. He’d forgotten exactly where the roadkill had been, and before he was quite ready for it, he was practically on top of it. Suddenly he was no longer quite sure that he wanted to do this. It seemed silly, a fantasy born of too many late-night movies. But as long as he was out here . . .

The box was nowhere in sight. Feeling slightly foolish, he crossed to the median and took a good look at the body.

It was half-eaten, which wasn’t particularly amazing. Any roadkill that was relatively fresh was bound to get chewed on.

Except that the last time he’d seen roadkill on the median, it had stayed there until it bloated, untouched. Animals didn’t like the traffic; they wouldn’t go after carrion in the middle of the road if they could help it.

And there was something wrong with the way the bite-marks looked too. Old Boy Scout memories came back, tracking and identifying animals by signs. . . .

The flesh hadn’t been bitten off so much as carved off—as if the carcass had been chewed by something with enormous buck teeth, like some kind of carnivorous horse, or beaver. Nothing in his limited experience made marks like that.

As a cold trickle ran down his spine, a rustle in the weeds at the side of the road made him jump. He looked up.

The box was there, in the weeds. He hadn’t seen it, half-hidden there, until it had moved. It almost seemed as if the thing was watching him; the way it had a corner poked out of the weeds like a head. . . .

His reaction was stupid and irrational, and he didn’t care. He bolted, ran all the way back to the guard-shack with a chill in his stomach that all his running couldn’t warm.

He didn’t stop until he reached the guard-shack and the safety of the fenced-in MacDac compound, the sanity and rational universe of steel and measurement where nothing existed that could not be simulated on a computer screen.

He slowed to a gentle jog as he passed the shack; he’d have liked to stop, because his heart was pounding so hard he couldn’t hear anything, but if he did, the guards would ask him what was wrong. . . .

He waited until he was just out of sight, and then dropped to a walk. He remembered from somewhere, maybe one of his jogging tapes, that it was a bad idea just to stop, that his muscles would stiffen. Actually he had the feeling if he went to his knees on the verge like he wanted to, he’d never get up again.

He reached the sanctuary of his air-conditioned office and slumped down into his chair, still panting. He waited with his eyes closed for his heart to stop pounding, while the sweat cooled and dried in the gust of metallic- flavored air from the vent over his chair. He tried to summon up laughter at himself, a grown man, for finding a flattened piece of cardboard so frightening, but the laughter wouldn’t come.

Instead other memories of those days as a Boy Scout returned, of the year he’d spent at camp where he’d learned those meager tracking skills. One of the coun­selors had a grandfather who was—or so the boy claimed—a full Cherokee medicine man. He’d per­suaded the old man to make a visit to the camp. George had found himself impressed against his will, as had the rest of the Scouts; the old man still wore his hair in two long, iron-gray braids and a bone necklace under his plain work-shirt. He had a dignity and self-possession that kept all of the rowdy adolescents in awe of him and silent when he spoke.