Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (34 page)

Obviously mutant snouts could detect her because they were tracking her. Maybe they could smell her sex, although if they could, I
certainly
should have been able to. Whatever. One certainty: if they catch her, they'll screw her to death and then have a finger-lickin' feast on her snow-white flesh.

She is an albino. Big teats (but only two—like most humans) under a torn, close-fitting camouflage suit; thick white hair that cascaded over her face and down her back like long fur; huge oval eyes that were so blue they made you thirsty; a thin nose (nostrils so damn narrow, I often wonder how she breathes through them); and full, pinkish lips. I could see all that as she jumped away from a clearing into the bush. (Yes, my eyesight has also been augmented: I can see in the infrared, too, for all the good it didn't do me.)

She jumped and the clearing exploded... as did the copse of color-shifting spider grevillea that she jumped into.

The shooter was using an ancient Israeli Tavor, which shoots saboted sub-caliber tungsten darts and grenades. The stupid bastard had fired
everything
at her; and once I got a whiff of the rifle's gas signature, I directed one clean shot into his chest. (Yet another authorial intrusion: Of course, I can handle weapons. I've got opposable thumbs, remember? I carry an old reliable Swiss Canton G97 in a bandolier, and I drop to the ground to use it. You don't need any more details than that. What's important is that
I
know.)

That single shot brought the wrath of God down on me. I drew all kinds of fire from what seemed like every direction. Buttress roots, phosphorous bark, and wood exploded into shards and slime around me.

I ran, once again overcome by the ancient blood rhythms of gland, instinct, and reflex; and, as my name implies, I'm fast as a tornado firestorm feeding on dry scrub.

And before I even knew how the hell I had got there, my eyes were adjusting to the cool deep darkness of blackwood. I ploughed through thick and thin forest undergrowth; and as I inhaled its rich purple and sharp forest green in great hungry gasps, I wondered where the hell the woman had got to... and whether she was still alive: I couldn't smell any new blood, except for the mute's—which, although attenuated by distance, still smelled like clay—but, then, I couldn't smell anything that had to do with Crash. Anyway, I didn't have time to wonder for long because shots exploded all around me.

I leaped into a foul-smelling ditch.

It was crawling with moss that would soon start rotting my hide if I lingered too long; but for the moment it gave me the cover I desperately needed. But "cover" was a bit misleading in this instance, as the mutes were using their rifles to sight me through the blackwood. (And there was no way I could eliminate my heat signature, short of dropping dead and falling into an ice bath.) I caught their scents as they started moving in, so I could "see" their line of action—a pincer; but then they got smart and camouflaged themselves with something that smelled like plastic and was as thick as a rolling front of lewisite. I sniffed, but all I could hear was an occasional soft crunch of twig or fern.

The homeboys could certainly track; I'd have to give them credit for that.

Time to move again.

But too late... again.

A frag grenade sang into the ditch...

Three: Meet Unnatural Death #3

Okay, two things: (1) either the grenade was a Thales frag, which had a reputation for faulty detonation, or (2) it was a decent Gorhsen pineapple with a degraded fuze system—twelve lifetimes worth of radiation and slime rot can tank even the best can of metal. It detonated all right, but only after a few seconds.

A few precious seconds.

Enough time for me to take a flying leap and roll into a contiguous moss pit; but not before a curl of boomerang shrapnel blew off my muzzle, my nose, and my left rear leg from the second thigh down.

This wasn't good. Two hundred and eighty-eight years ago, the science lab boys fucked up their experiment (me!) because unless I'm practically pounded into pulp, I can't recover/regenerate from a mortal wound (or from being eaten). So much for my anticipated natural death... so much for my mortal coil uncoiling to the sounds of harps and sublime visions of tail-wagging angels with noisome buttocks.

I could smell blood, my own blood (pungent as iron filings and ozone); but that was just phantom sensoria. Although I was sanguineous and pain-shocked, I fired back round after round: by this lifetime, that was an autonomic response.

But for all intents and purposes, I was firing blind.

Sonovabitch!

I was going to become lunch for those murderous bastards; and, just to add sublimity to sublimity, my hide was itching like crabs feasting in pubic hair: that moss I'd been reclining in was particularly pernicious. When the homeboys were so close that I could see them, smell them (or
think
I could smell them), and leap upon them—there had to be thirty of them, at the least—the whole goddamn landscape turned into crack and fire.

My first impression was that I'd been hit again, which was probably true, or that my adrenals were exaggerating the throaty plosives of my rifle; but, no, it was Crash.

In that red time, which was either an eternity or a heartbeat, I took out, all up, about eight of the mutes. But Crash managed to get around and through them. She'd already taken out six or seven by stealth without making a sound: somehow, she used the mutes' camouflage cloud against them.

And then in a red breath, in a red heartbeat, she blew the hell out of the rain-forest.

I imagined the perfumed fragrances of napalm, and then—

All was sensory deprivation quiet; and like a sudden whiff of rain, I heard breathing. I felt cool hands stroke the wetness that had been my muzzle. "Poor thing."

Her voice was like rain, like wind soughing through shadow-green forest. As she stroked me again, I imagined myself getting a hard-on. (More about the sex-life of the unregenerate dog later.)

Although the proverbial lights were going out for me, I tried to focus my eyes on her albino whiteness, on her sweat-sheened face. That alone took great strength of will; but maybe, just maybe she could help me.

If I could just stay conscious long enough to communicate...

I tried to speak, then realized that I was just thinking at her.

Get your act together, dogshit. Wake-up. Focus. Words. Tongue. Gullet. Voicebox.
I managed to say, "Your knife," but my voice sounded like a bark. I started to choke on my own phlegm. I tried again: "Your knife."

She leaned her head close to mine, so close that I couldn't see her face anymore; but I could feel the dangly softness of her hair sliding like wind—like sleep—over me. I tried to speak (I can speak, you know, although I've always sounded like gravel thrown at a wall), but sleep, pain, numbness, blessed cold air-conditioned menthol numbness wrapped me in its silk cocoon and—
Let me in.

I heard
that
inside my head.

Louder than my own thoughts.

I've honed, developed, multiplied, and habituated into reflexivity my defenses against telepathic intrusion; but somehow she managed to push herself inside me. And even lying there in my own blood and smell, lacking face and limbs, trying not to die for the last time, I wondered how fucking long she had been inside me, monitoring me...

It was akin to being raped while unconscious.

Intrusive, insinuating, illegitimate, misbegotten, deviant mutated bitch!

No, no, no,
she seemed to whisper.
I've been keeping track of you for a while, but...

I can't read all your thoughts. Only the ones that—Ones that what...?
I thought back at her.

Only the ones that leak past your siege defenses. The unimportant, stray thoughts. I could track you, but that's about all... until now.

Because now I'm weak and dying.

But there was more to it—more to Crash the albino than that.

I hadn't been able to smell her, detect her because she'd been blocking me from the inside out. But that didn't matter a bean now. I was passing into cold stillness, numbness, and my unforeseen unplanned unnatural—and final—death.

I felt Crash's proximity, her intrusive warmth, sexuality, sensitivity, uncertainty, and—strange as it sounds and feels—her love.

I
must
be dying!

Is there anything I can do to help you regenerate?

That woke me up!

How do you know about...?
Didn't matter. I had just enough strength and consciousness to think,
Your knife. Stab me... and keep stabbing me until I'm dead. If I die now, like this, I won't transdifferentiate. Kill me dead, and then, if you've no prior engagements, stay with me until stolons start to push their way out of—

I felt a thud, heard an enormous cracking as knife scratched against bone—

That female was as powerful as a dog.—and then nothing, no blackness, no falling down endless abysses, no cold, heat, pain, or regret. Just nothingness.

Four: Ah, the Sweet Green Smells of Love and Duplicity

Dying unnaturally isn't so bad once the medusa takes hold of me.

I degenerate and regenerate; and after a few days, I begin to resemble a collapsed soufflé. You don't even want to know what I look like—or smell like—after a week. Ever see a dead human boiling with maggots? Okay, now imagine a wet, rotting, pulsating carcass wreathed with fur. By the end of week #2, I'm a gelatinous mass of programmed stoloniferous growth as my cells begin to multiply and remember what they were and where they belong. In the true physical sense, I'm just a manifestation of memory and experience.

Viva T. Denisovich Lysenko.

By week #3, I start to look like a dog; and I start remembering. First come the ancestral, racial memories—a synesthesia of smells sable sweet and strong and fecal—and then my own: there I am at five (for the first time), there's my second bunker where I died with my companion Leila: no, I won't think about that... ever. And there I am getting laid (for the first time). Not much of anything. Was over before I could figure out what the hell had happened. (Yes, it was with a dog, but just an ordinary unenhanced bitch, part kelpie and dingo... and that, I can tell you, was the last time I screwed one of my kind who wasn't jacked-up mentally. I might as well have made love to a chicken.)

And there I am seeing the Dead Territories for the first time.

And running from a cull.

And dragging my first kill to—

Enough of the
memento mori
crap.

I died, and I regenerated.

And Crash stayed with me... cared for me. I hadn't expected that; but, then, I hadn't expected her to be able to pierce my veil, so to speak, and eavesdrop on my raw, establishing memories. By the time my defenses kicked in, she had gnawed on the marrow of my psyche long enough to mirror my thoughts. I realize now that I had felt her presence early on, during my embryonic dream state. She whispered to me, but I couldn't understand speech. I heard it as soft barking, I heard the green smell of her; only later did I experience the discomfort of being laid bare, examined, probed.

My first words to her after I regenerated were,
Stay the fuck out of me.

She giggled because I thought them at her rather than spoke.
You needed someone to watch over you, protect you from predators.

"What are
you
if not a predator?" That spoken, or rather barked. Even though I meant what I said, I felt immediate regret; I felt her pain as if it were my own.
Get out of me, now!

I'm trying to, but—

For the first time in this new, discomforting incarnation, I opened my eyes.

I looked around and saw that she was standing well away from me. I could smell her fear. Where the hell were we? I wrinkled my nose: I could smell blood and human ordure. This place was dark and damp, stone damp and smoky; and Crash was but a pale, diaphanous shadow. I heard water dripping, tap-smack, tap-smack, tap-smack, like a heart beating in a huge chest.

Some of your thoughts... most of your thoughts just appear in my head. As if they're my own.

She shook her head, and her hair looked electric in the dim light.

And we're in a cave,
she continued.
I found this subterranean system of linked caves and burned out the occupying fauna.

Indeed she had. I saw a tidied pile of charred human remains on a ledge that might once have been used as an altar.
You're as bad as the mutes.

I
am
a mute. And I needed sustenance... and the rover pack is still out there. There were more of them than I'd anticipated.

Anticipated...?

Although she thought something back at me, I couldn't hear her. Biology being stronger than will, I'd fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep. But once I awakened, I would be completely regenerated.

And my first adrenaline-fueled thought would be: safety.

With a fucking great big capital "S."

She was running her fingers along the swell of my back when I woke up. I pulled away reflexively, although I must admit I felt—and desired—her warmth and closeness. Nevertheless I tried to shake her out of me, but that was a sham effort; and we both knew it. Neither did I try to vocalize. Like it or not, we were as one.

And a tumbling array of images took up my thoughts... a myriad of images.

Stop it,
I said.
Whatever it is you're doing... thinking.

She pulled away from me; and against all my finely honed instincts of self-preservation, I wished for her closeness.
I'm sorry,
she said, shaking her head. Her white nimbus of hair tickled me.
I'll try to stay out. Really, I will. But you'll need to close up a bit, too.

Give me a break, I just regenerated. You should have kept away—
She nodded, and I turned away from her. I felt redness, embarrassment, humilia tion. She had taken advantage of my situation... but on some deep instinctual level, I allowed her to. I could rationalize that I was unprepared because thought intrusion was a rare occurrence and talent (one I didn't possess). I could rationalize until the cows come home, but I
know
what happened: my dog-mind said "mate" and cracked open like a piñata.
My fault. Stupid. Fucking. Idiot. Lame—Stop it. We took advantage of each other.
She caressed me, drawing her palm lightly down the nap of my fur.
What you heard... I was thinking of home.