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, con-tinuing 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 re-use. 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 re-covered 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.
Chapter Fourteen
Annie Rourke sat up in bed—she was cold.
It was a curious effect of the cryogenic sleep— she and Michael had discussed it. But dreaming, which was so continual, so vivid during “the sleep,” seemed somehow to be all but impossible once “the sleep” had been endured. She had consciously dreamed twice since the awakening of herself and Michael. Once on the night her father had returned to the sleep. And this was the second time. She was aware of the fact that dreaming was frequently subconscious, that one didn’t remem-ber the dream or remember having had it. But this was a dream of which she was aware.
Perhaps it was the closeness with Michael, of knowing no other human being for sixteen years—but she could feel inside her that the dream was somehow more than a dream.
She pushed back the covers, standing up, her nightgown falling down around her ankles, not bothering with a robe until she found her slippers in the dark. She found them, then feit in the darkness at the bottom of the bed, finding the robe, pulling it on, belting it around her waist. She shivered still. She turned on the light beside the bed, its yellow glow bathing the room that her father had built for her in diffused light. She went to the closet—from a hanger she took the heavy knitted double triangle of shawl, throwing it around her shoulders, huddling in it. She turned off the light, sitting on the edge of the bed in the total darkness, still cold.
Michael. She could not remember the dream. But Michael had been in great danger.
She shivered.
She stood up, walking in total confidence in total darkness across her room. Just outside the door was one of the switches for the lights which illuminated the Great Room.
She hit the switch.
She walked down the three steps from her room toward the four operating cryogenic chambers.
It was nearly Christmas anyway.
First her father, then her mother, then Natalia, then—she studied the face as she activated the switch. “I’ll finally know you.” Paul Rubenstein. It would be several minutes before they began to awaken—running, she took the three steps to her room. She wanted to change into something pretty. She threw the shawl down onto the bed and began to rummage through her closet.
Chapter Fifteen
He had run into it, not slowing, the snow cover-ing the ground in spots now, the cold wind blow-ing the snow like tiny icy needles against his skin, the fire at the center of the clearing flickering, the flames licking skyward into the cold darkness, the screaming again. A woman—a human woman. She screamed once more and was silent, the instru-ment in the hands of the cannibal dripping crim-son with blood in the firelight as her executioner turned. The woman’s guts spilled to the ground.
Michael Rourke raised the Stalker in both fists, shouting, “Freeze!” The cannibal raced toward him, shouting some-thing barely intelligible—but it sounded like “Meat!”
Michael Rourke thumbed back the hammer. He had taken human life, but it had been centuries ago. “So help me—freeze!”
The cannibal kept coming. There were others— at least two dozen. In the flickering of the bon-fire—the smell of human flesh in the smoke as the wind died for an instant—there were bodies tied to trees. An arm was missing from one of them, and a man—was it a man really—at the fireside held the thing—the arm—to his teeth. There was a human form dead on the ground. But it wasn’t dead. It was moving and there was a scream—the skin was be-ing peeled away from the flesh with ^ wedge of rock.
Michael Rourke pulled the trigger, the 240-grain lead hollow point making a tongue of orange flame in the gray-black night as the Stalker rocked in his fists. The center of the cannibal’s face collapsed, blood and brain matter spraying in a cloud on the air, the fire hissing and steaming with it. A scream, almost inhuman, and then the shrieked word, “Help!” Michael Rourke wheeled right, a woman there. She had shouted in English. Naked, tied to a tree, one of the cannibals falling upon her, his teeth catching the glint of firelight, yellow, saliva dripping from his mouth as he started to bite at her right breast and she screamed again. Michael jacked back the Stalker’s hammer, firing, the big customized Ruger rocking again in his hands, the cannibal’s body jerking away from the woman as if caught in some irresistible wind. Michael felt it on the hairs at the back of his neck— grateful Annie hadn’t cut his hair. He wheeled, backstepping. The Stalker not raised to his line of sight yet, he jerked the trigger, a cannibal with a stone axe less than six feet trom him, the axe making the downswing, Michael feel-ing the rush of air as the scoped .44 Magnum rocked in his fists. The cannibal’s body jackknifed, feet off the ground, the body rolling back in mid-air, falling. Michael slipped the Stalker’s sling over his head and his right arm through it, letting the pistol fall to his side, grabbing the smaller, more manueverable Predator in his right fist, fir-ing as another of the cannibals charged at him.
