3
Time went by. I think the sun went down and came up again. I drank some more water. The second day I managed to choke down some dried stuff I'd been carrying, but keeping it down was a chore and I didn't eat much more that day. Maybe the wound hurt a little less. I stuck some more mud in it just in case. That tired me out again, and when I woke up I was shivering and it was almost dark. The sky was still light, and there were no stars showing, but the shadows were heavy down in the hollow where I was. There was a little bit of a breeze, cooling the heavy, thick air.
First I checked the plasma rifle, quietly, out of habit. Then I sat hunched up for a second, trying to figure out what woke me up. I knew I'd heard something. I waited a minute, listening, and then I heard it again. There was something snuffling off to my left, out of sight at the top of the hollow. It might be a wild dog, but I was willing to bet it was a yao guai. I held real still. I could probably kill one of the big beardogs with my rifle, but it'd take a lucky shot to bring him down on the first one and I'd only get one chance. I wanted to see him first. I'd thought all the blood had dried up, but yao guai are scent hunters and they've got a good sense of smell.
Then I heard another sound. This one came from the other side of the hollow, away from the hunting animal.
It's kind of hard to describe, but once you've heard a body being dragged over the hard ground you never forget it. Fabric makes a noise where it scrapes through the dirt and gravel. If it's somebody crawling you can hear them push off with their boots or shoes here or there. People can learn not to do this, but most never do.
Whoever this was didn't know that. That meant it wasn't Jay. Anyhow, I couldn't think of any reason for him to come back. He sure as Hell wasn't about to check and see if I was doing all right, not after last time. So I listened hard as I could. After a while I realized something odd: whoever he was (the sound was too big and heavy for it to be someone my size), he was pushing off with just one shoe at a time. And there wasn't much wind, never is out here, but it was blowing from him to me.
The yao guai, if that was what it was, wasn't after me. It was after him.
I tried to decide if there was anything I could do about this. Whoever it was, he must be able to hear the thing as well as I could – maybe even see it. And if he wasn't crawling because he was trying to sneak up on me, it was because he was hurt too bad to walk upright. Maybe he knew about the pond and was trying to get to the water. Or maybe it was another Ghoul and he was trying to get to the mud.
The yao guai solved my problem for me with a scrabble of claws and a snarl. I caught one fast-moving glimpse of it as it shot past on the rim of the hollow, a high-shouldered four-legged silhouette against the paler sky. Sound stopped for a second as it sprang and its feet left the ground. The silence held for a beat.
Then there was a booming rattle like the biggest can of BBs you ever heard and a flash of red light, and I actually saw pieces of the beardog raining down on the edge of the hollow. The light cut off.
"I WIN AGAIN," said a voice. I tensed up as I realized what it was. Lots of Ghouls have raspy voices, but we tend to sound like we've been gargling rocks. There are some smoothskins who can hit bass notes that will make the floor shake under you. Not smoothskin nor Ghoul can produce that absolute guttural note I was hearing, that rumbling snarl from a chest bigger than any human ever born. It had to be a super mutant.
Now, it's mostly for the benefit of the person reading over my shoulder that I'll explain why this worried me. The mutants around D.C. have never tried to hit Underworld. That whole area around the Mall is one big war zone with Ghouls, the Brotherhood of Steel, and the occasional slavers or other humans with guns mixing it up with the super mutants, and the fact that the mutants are still there should give you some idea exactly how tough those mothers are. They've mostly left us Ghouls alone. Since we're pretty sure they're not just being nice, the conventional wisdom is that we either 1. don't taste very good or 2. aren't eligible for conversion into mutants ourselves, although that last one is mostly just a rumor and nobody really knows if they've still got active vats around. (My commentator here thinks they do, but he's never seen one. Says he heard it from somebody named Leo. But that's a digression.)
Those are groups of super mutants all in one place, and they're about as organized as they get. Ghouls in D.C. mostly keep to Underworld, out of sight and out of mind. So just because those two large armed groups have never mixed it up did not, to my way of thinking, mean I was not going to be an easy snack for one wounded mutant with a scary-ass weapon out here in the middle of nowhere. Especially since he'd just blown the yao guai to smithereens and rumor had it they needed fresh protein to heal.
Now I could hear him crawling again. I turned up the power on the plasma rifle, more for reassurance than because I had much hope of that working. The crawling sound stopped. I thought about trying to scramble around behind my boulder, but I was still pretty weak at that point and I didn't think I'd be able to lift my rifle after that. Maybe if I was lucky he'd come over the edge of the hollow headfirst and I could get a shot off before he did.
No such luck. The first thing I saw was the barrel of the weapon. It was about as big as my head, or looked it. I could see little red lights glowing in all the cylinders of the big drum, and I knew I was looking at a gatling laser.
You don't see a lot of those around. Not being carried by one person, anyhow.
"I know you're down there," said the mutant's voice. It sounded different than it had before. Then it had been out of control, berserk. Now it was calmer, but the words jerked into place like a line of bricks, like the speaker had to work hard at getting them where he wanted them. "And I know you're armed. As you can see, I, too, am armed."
I frowned. This was not the kind of talk I was used to hearing from super mutants. I think about the longest sentence I ever heard from one was "Get out of the way," and that one had been smarter than the average.
"I would rather not harm you," said the mutant. "But I require water. This is the only source for miles."
"Help yourself," I said. It came out as a croak the first time and I had to clear my throat and say it again. "You power down that gat and I'll put down my rifle."
The red lights on the gatling laser's drum shut off immediately. There was a pause. I could almost hear the mutant listening to the soft hum of the plasma rifle powering down. Not a lot of super mutants would know to do that. In fact, none. Something really weird is going on here, I thought. I laid the rifle down carefully beside me and waited to see what would happen.
The gat disappeared. I listened to the sound of someone hanging it on a backpack one-handed. The scrape of the mutant crawling resumed, and after that a head and shoulders bulked up against the sky at the far edge of the hollow. He looked pretty much like a lot of other super mutants. He had green skin with weird orange highlights where the surfaces were higher. Muscles bulged out of his neck and shoulders, and veins bulged out of those. His bald head looked small for him. His eyes were set close together back in his skull, so I couldn't really see them in the dim light. The hand I could see was almost as big as his head, certainly bigger than mine. Super mutants start at nine or ten feet tall. This one couldn't be too old but he was probably close to eleven feet standing up. I'd seen bigger but I'd seen smaller, too.
He stayed there for a minute, I guess waiting to see if I'd keep my part of the agreement. We looked at each other.
"It appears you are an honest person," he said. Super mutants have basically nothing in the way of lips, so they have this permanent sort of tooth-baring snarl. Makes their faces kind of hard to read. Mostly this is not a problem because there's nothing there to read. I could tell that wasn't true here.
"Well, I'm not a liar," I said.
"We will see," he said, and crawled on down into the mud. The gatling laser was strapped to his back. The thing had to weigh more than I do (actually two or three times that, I've found out since) but he seemed not to feel it at all. As he wriggled down the slope I could see why he was crawling. His left leg was gone just above the knee. The stump had mostly closed up, but tags of skin and the fabric of his torn pants dragged in the radioactive slime behind him. That was another weird thing. Most super mutants wear some kind of armor, thrown together from whatever they can find – car parts, old tires, broken weapons. This one just had on a pair of blue pants, one very large boot, and a torn blue jacket with part of a number on the back.
He'd held onto the other boot when he lost his leg. It was tied to the top of the gatling laser's power pack. He'd tied it tight enough that it didn't swing down and bop him on the ear as he crawled, which was more than I would have thought to do.
"What happened to your leg?" I asked. He stopped crawling so he could shove himself up on his elbows and look at me. Maybe I surprised him.
"I met an older and larger one of my brethren to the East," he said. "I've heard them called behemoths, though I don't care for the word. It took me some time to persuade him that I am inedible." It was surreal, listening to him. I'd met professors who weren't as well-spoken, but it was still a super mutant's voice, and he still slotted every word in place like he was picking them off a shelf.
"He tore your leg off?" I said. The mutant lowered himself and went back to crawling on his belly through the mud.
"No. I'm afraid I stepped on a mine."
I'd heard of a place where there were people with mines. I'd heard a rumor there was a behemoth there, too. I'd never been stupid or crazy enough to go check.
"You crawled all the way from Evergreen Mills?" I said.
"That's a very good guess," said the mutant. He finally got to the pond and stuck his face down in it. I listened to him suck up water with no lips for a while. When he came up for air he looked across the dingy water at me, and the rising moon fell on his face so that I saw his eyes. They were green, and the pupils were tall and thin the way they usually are on mutants. They reflected the light just a little. At that range he had to be able to tell I was a Ghoul, even covered in mud and blood. If he hadn't guessed it from my voice already, that was.
I was starting to think he probably would notice something like that. I wasn't sure if I should be reassured or scared as Hell.