he would not touch them. A bush, wet, the smell on the leaves that of urine. He scanned each oi the bones as he moved about the place—the encampment. Michael stopped beside a clump of thorny blackberry bushes. It was what he had searched for.
There were no insects since the Night of The
War, or at least none he had detected. So nothing crawled over it. He could have picked it up, if he could have reached through the thorny blackberry bush to take it.
But there was no need to take it.
The skin was gone from the top of the thing, as if scalped. Only the facial skin from halfway down the forehead to below the chin remained, the ears gone as well. The eyes were missing, Eaten, he surmised. The face had been that of a girl younger by some years than his sister. Now, Michael turned away and threw up, dropping to his knees, lurching forward with his heaving abdomen.
There were people—but they were not people like himself.
They were cannibals.
He had cried as a little boy, but never as a man. Until now.
Chapter Twelve
It was true that the cryogenic process served to regenerate the body. But not completely. Only one kidney func-tioned. He no longer had a spleen. A section of his left lung had been cut away. There was a bypass around an irretrievably damaged portion of the large intestine. But aside from urinating a bit more frequently, and in the thin air tiring a bit more quickly than he would have, he suffered no sustaining ill effects. He stood, leaning against the fir tree, watching the snow-capped mountain peaks in the distance.
Greater distances away, beyond these moun-tains and the next and beyond what had been and was still an ocean, lay his desire.
He was confident that destiny had not cheated him. He had chosen the higher elevations where the air was thinnest for this period of four years since his awakening, chosen it so that he could adapt to thinner air and his decreased lung capacity, so that at normal elevations he would be at full physical strength.
His right hand in his right pocket, he felt at the hardness of his genitalia. He had thought of the woman.
It was time for that.
He turned and walked back from the precipice, along the rugged ground beneath the snow-laden fir trees, toward the mouth of the cave where he and the others had set their encampment three years earlier. He stroked his beard. He passed through the mouth of the cave and beyond./It was warmer from the solar-battery-generated electric heating coils and he opened his coat, not feeling any shortness of breath as he sometimes did when coming into warmth. His people were about their business and he was all but alone at the encampment. All but alone. He opened the wooden door of his hut, stepping inside, throwing down his coat, stripping away the shoulder holster and letting it hang from the straight back of the rough-hewn chair beside the table he used as his desk. He allowed the semi-automatic pistol to stay in its holster. He wouldn’t need it, though he practiced with it three times a week at least. He practiced drawing it quickly from the leather and hitting the torso of a silhouette-shaped target.
He walked from the small room of the hut into the larger room, the only other room. To the left, the shower and toilet behind a curtained doorway built off the room. To the right, the cabinet where he stored the bulk of his possessions. Ahead of him, the bed.
The girl waited there.
“Do you know what I intend to do?”
She had frightened eyes. She was one of the ones who had survived by some means or another and become more animal than human. But she, the animal, was frightened of him, the man.
She had no language other than grunts and he did not know how to converse with her.
But he spoke with her anyway. “I discovered in myself something very interesting—but this was centuries ago. I was a master of the earth then. A foul-breathed little beast like you would not have interested me then. But you are here.”
He picked up the two-foot steel-cored section of rubber hose, etching lines in his imagination with it across the white flesh of her abdomen, then very quickly, raked it hard across her breasts and she screamed. A scream of pain was somehow a universal language.
He began to undress fully—and then he would beat her well.
Chapter Thirteen
For three days and nights, he had followed them—scraps of burned human flesh, a bone, an occasional footprint—like something wrapped in rags. He had followed the only humans he had found on the face of the earth. The cannibals.
He had followed them on foot, leaving the Harley at the end of the second day, lest the motorcycle alert them to his presence, lest it deny him the chance of finding humankind, for somewhere inside him, he had told himself that there were at least two species moving on this part of the Earth/the cannibals and their victims. He knew little/of cannibal societies on the whole from Earth history, but logic and reason told him that any society, no matter how primitive, no matter how bizarre, no matter how brutal, would require certain rules. And that killing and eating fellow members of the tribe would be taboo—maybe. The human skull—the female—had seemed normal enough. But then, he had told himself, so too might the cannibals.
The trek after the cannibals was leading him through the mountains, through the very area he had chosen to search for the landing spot or crash site—for the origin of the mysterious light in the night sky, perhaps the origin of the indecipherable radio broadcast.
He had been maintaining a distance of perhaps two miles from the cannibals, never seeing them in more than a fleeting glimpse—a vaguely human shape passing into tree cover. They were nomadic, hunters, without a permanent village, he sur-mised.
Either that or a long-range hunting party. If it were the latter, then following them would lead to their stronghold or base.
Cautiously, lest he be discovered, he had tracked them, resting when he judged they rested, moving when he j udged they moved. They were diurnal in their travel.
As the third day drew into the third night, the scraps of human leavings had all but ceased and no more were there the occasional piles of human feces near the track. They would hunger again.
This night he would close the gap, come up to just outside their camp.
He would see…
Michael Rourke checked the face of the Rolex against the stars. It was nearly midnight. He theorized that his quarry would be asleep now. He shucked his pack so that he could move quickly, camouflaging it in nearby brush. He debated over the M-16. He had no intention of making battle. He camouflaged this as well, almost hearing his father’s voice telling him not to. But his confidence was in himself and in the two handguns with which he had so often practiced over the years.
He marked this spot’s map coordinates, then moved ahead in silence in the darkness.
Silence. He walked quickly, quietly over the rocky terrain, listening each time he stopped, listening for a human voice.
He heard none.
Clouds were moving into the sky on a stiff cold wind and he smelled snow in the air. He kept moving.
Ahead of him, a shadow hung, deeper than the darkness around it. The Stalker in his right fist, he moved ahead, quietly, listening, toward the shadow.
Michael Rourke stopped in the wooded defile beneath the shadow, the shadow now with form, substance, his left hand reaching up, touching at the harness webbing. He had seen these things in books, seen them in videotapes. What hung above him snarled in the trees was a parachute, the clouds overhead parting in a sudden and chilling gust of wind, the whiteness of siJk or nylon—he wasn’t sure which—catching the light from the stars or the moon. A parachute.
It had been an aircraft he had seen in the sky. He lit the Zippo lighter he carried to examine the harness webbing. It had been cut cleanly. A knife.
It was from what he had seen fall from the night sky. v
The aircraft should be nearby. And so should the pilot. He moved about beneath the parachute, on his hands and knees in the grass and dirt, feeling the dark ground, using the flickering blue-yellow flame of the Zippo sparingly lest he burn down the wick.
