Free Benighted by Kit Whitfield Page B

walk.
    “Marty,” I say. “We’re getting out here.”
    “They’re still in the dark.”
    “We’re not going to get any closer. Okay, remember: I catch, you guard. Fire your silver if you—”
    “I know, I know,” he hisses.
    “—but God help you if you hit one of them. Are you all right?”
    He shakes himself. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m all right.”
    “Let’s go.”
    I can smell gunpowder as I step down onto the grass, gunpowder and wet earth. The cold bites at my lips. My breathing is loud enough to hear a mile away.
    The van casts a tall shadow, and there’s an oval of light; I can see nothing outside it. I turn on my flashlight and step forward: the scanner showed one shape directly ahead of us. There are two trees close together, monumental in my flashlight beam. A little smear of light spreads around me, and I listen. I hear nothing in the dark.
    Then the impact hits my back and I’m crushed down on the ground with my mouth full of grass. My head hits a fallen branch, skin splits on my forehead, and there’s a great weight on my back pressing my lungs down into the ground. Cloth rips between my shoulder blades and heavy teeth batter against me, trying to get through. Wet breath burns my neck. I try to shriek to Marty and grass chokes me.
    Another blow slams me and I’m rolled onto my back with two lunes over me. I see black gums, I see the glint of pink from four eyes, I see teeth longer than my fingernails up against my face. I jab upward with my catcher and knock one of them in the throat; its jaws snap together and it backs off with a roar, and I roll away. The sound of Marty’s gun goes off, and the second lune flinches for only a second before coming back at me. My catching arm is pinned to the ground and I only have time to throw my other arm up over my throat and scream.
    There’s another blast, and some impact kicks the lune sideways. It hits a tree as it falls then tumbles down and snuffles on the ground, wailing; some blood is slick on the grass because Marty’s shot it in the leg. I’m on my feet with my catcher and trying to get the other one and the collar swings wide as the lune runs by me and heads for Marty.
    Marty has shot both his bullets and he doesn’t have a catcher and his trank gun is still on his belt. His hands are empty as the lune leaps for him. I grab for my trank gun and as I do another lune comes out of the dark behind a tree and they both pin Marty to the ground and slash.
    My trank dart hits the first one in the shoulder. There are several seconds of tearing flesh before the dope takes effect. The other lune looks up, sees the dart, and whips around. It runs straight for me. There are three seconds in which I know with bright cold certainty that I’m going to die, and then the lune is past me, through the forest and away into the night. I look after it. It’s gone into the dark beyond where I can see it. After a moment I remember the wounded one, and when I look for it, it’s gone, too; it must have got up on three legs and run.
    The ten steps across to where Marty is lying are among the worst I’ve ever taken. Marty’s lying on the ground because he was empty-handed and couldn’t defend himself, and he was empty-handed because he did what I told him. The little walk I take, around a tall horse chestnut, over some leaf litter and across a fallen branch to where he lies, will last me a lifetime and beyond.
    Under the yellow light, blood looks almost black. Marty lies on the ground with a strip of tar across his throat. Oil trickles out of him, his face is smeared with charcoal, and his eyes are moving. I can hear his breathing dragging over his shredded throat like metal over stone.
     
    I load the tranked lune myself. I tug a bandaged Marty into the van and drive him to a shelter. The medic keeps him alive till morning and then puts him into a hospital. They transfuse blood into him, inject chemicals into him, lace up his throat with catgut. He might not be able to