The Rift - Howard Chris - Страница 23

It was too risky, and it was too late, anyway—they were pulling the gun from my grip.

“Kade,” Zee called, but we soon lost my sister. Alpha grabbed my hand as the strangers pried at her, but then they ripped her away, too.

Crow was gone. Then Kade. But I bolted upright. Out of reach of the fingers, standing in the middle of the top of the tank.

I felt the sharp point of a spear jab the side of my leg. And I watched the cloaked strangers below me, their eyes bright as the moon could make them, their mouths murmuring words I couldn’t make out.

But then I heard something else. A heavy, thumping sound, just down one side of the ridge.

Rocks were falling beneath us on the western slope, clattering into the depths of the valley. And then, through the darkness, six figures appeared, struggling up onto the ridge with ropes pulled taut behind them.

The ground shook and scrabbled with a strange stomp and shuffle. And I heard a wailing moan echo out across the mountains. It was the sound of something alive. But no human had made it.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

First thing I saw was horns.

They stuck straight up over the ridgeline as the thing climbed towards us, silhouetted against the giant white moon. And those two horns were massive. Each of them as long as Crow stood tall. Set wide apart and curving upward, thick as two skulls mushed together at the bottom, but tapering to sharp points.

And that was just the horns. You should have seen the rest of it. A quick burst of speed, and the thing scrambled towards us, lumbering up to the flat top of the ridge, so it was towering above me, blocking the moonlight. Must have stood more than fifteen feet high.

Its head alone was bigger than I was. Its four legs stood taller than me. And it was buried in fur. All of it shaggy and shaking as it stamped about, making that low, rolling wail.

I gazed up at it. Trying to take it all in. The small eyes and floppy ears and rounded back. The short tail at its rear end, and the long, hairy tail up front where its nose should have been. A snout, I reckon, is what you would call it. Only that don’t come near a hundred miles of describing it. I mean, it was a snout that hung right down to the ground.

My body got limp as I stood there, listening to the great beast breathing deep, shadowy sounds. The strangers with spears and arrows stared up at me. Surrounding me. But for the moment, they left me alone.

On top of the tank, I was almost high enough to look into the beast’s eyes, and it was so close, I could reach out to touch it—so before my brain knew what the rest of me was doing, I did. I felt the smooth surface of its horns as it curled its shaggy, long snout in my direction and took a sniff at me.

An animal. A living, breathing thing that weren’t a human or a locust. Eyes and ears and a big beating heart. You best believe my hands were shaking so hard, they shook up the rest of me.

And then the thing tapped its snout at my head.

The people below waved their arrows and spears as they busted out laughing.

I glanced down at where Crow and Zee were surrounded, separated from Alpha and Kade. Someone had taken the sub gun and dismantled it. But the faces inside the hoods smiled up at me, their fingers pointing at the beast like they wanted me to go on and get close to it again.

It made a chewing sort of sound when I patted its snout. It slapped its tongue around and let out this big sigh. The hair on that thing was coarse, long, packed thick. And up close, I could make out some color. The horns that reared up from either side of its mouth were the pale yellow of old bone. And, no mistaking it, the beast’s fur was a deep shade of purple.

“Get down,” Alpha called, but our captors just laughed even harder.

“It’s alive,” I called.

“Yes, yes.” A woman patted the beast’s giant leg. She tried to tell me something else, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She clicked and clacked, and I guess she were joking, because the rest of her folks all cracked up again.

Hell, I’d forgotten what it felt like to laugh like that.

“It’s an animal,” I said, peering down at where Crow was blocking Zee from the arrows and spears. I glanced at Zee as I patted the thing’s head. “Like in the stories. It survived.”

“It’s purple,” Kade said. “And so is all the fur they’re wearing.”

“These people ain’t GenTech,” I said. “Look at them.”

The woman who’d been trying to talk to me pulled off her hood in the moonlight. She had cheekbones like knife edges, and her long, dark hair wound like a rope down her back. She kept on speaking, and though I’d no way to understand her, the look she gave me, and the way she started to jiggle her spear, seemed to mean I was supposed to get down now. And what else could I do standing up there? There weren’t no way to fight these people. And there weren’t no way to run.

Our captors had a harness rigged to the beast, and we watched as they reconnected the harness to a salvaged flatbed trailer that had been stashed up ahead, out of sight behind a wall of rock.

The trailer formed a giant steel sled for the beast to haul over the ice, loaded up with junk, rubbery nets strapping everything in place—and it soon became clear they aimed to strap us in, too.

They unwound ropes and unclipped hooks, then peeled back the mesh and forced us to climb in with the salvage. The woman that seemed to be in charge messed with the tank’s controller until she figured out how to get it moving. Then she had her folk lower a ramp off the trailer so she could wheel the tank up and get it squeezed in with the rest of the things these people had collected, as if the tank full of trees was just one more piece of junk.

The ramp got shoved back in place, and the strangers started wrapping their thick nets back over everything, trapping us with the big chunks of steel and plastic, binding things tight. Then, once they had the nets secure, our captors resumed their march southward, dragging our asses across the ice in a makeshift sled.

I could get my head clear of the nets just enough to watch them in the moonlight. Half a dozen of them rode on the beast’s back, perched behind the hump of its shoulders, and the rest of them took turns walking beside the thing, running their hands along its shaggy coat and speaking to it in their strange tongue.

“Praise Jah,” Crow whispered, straining through the nets to watch the beast swagger and roll. “Trees in the tank, and a monster on the loose.”

“You ever seen something like it?” I said. “I mean, in pictures? Drawings? I never heard one tale about a thing so big.”

“It’s like an elephant,” Zee said, strapped somewhere in the junk behind us. “But with fur on it.”

“An elephant?” Sounded vaguely familiar.

“People used to keep them in cages,” said Kade.

“You can’t keep something that big in a cage,” I told him.

“Depends how big your cage is.”

“I wonder what it eats,” said Alpha, her head jamming up next to mine as she wrestled some scrap metal aside to scoot closer.

“It didn’t eat me,” I said. “And I was up close to it. I was patting its head.”

“The beast itself could be good eating.” Kade’s shoulder jabbed in my ribs as he fought the nets.

“Will you get off me?” I tried to push him away. “And don’t be a fool. You can’t eat something like that.”