Fear that man

the bedroom, there was a light body against mine, lips on my two, and soft velvet wings enclosing us in the closet of our souls… The next morning, we went out to collect the cameras. Crazy’s arm was almost healed, thanks to the speedheal salve and bandages. We hoped that he would be well enough to begin the hunt shortly after noon, in the event the cameras had recorded anything that would interest us.
        And the cameras had.
        “I don’t like it,” Crazy grunted as the film loop came across the viewer for the sixth time.
        “It isn’t the ugliest we’ve met,” I said, trying to reassure myself as well as them. Not the ugliest, but ugly enough. Seven and a half feet, heavier than Crazy. Two arms trailing the ground, six-inch claws on them, and a set of smaller arms in the middle of the barrel chest. The little hands fiddled with each other, lacing fingers, picking insects from each other, scratching in a strange symbiosis. The mouth was a treasure trove-if one happened to be a biologist who valued sharp yellow teeth. The Beast had one sunken eye in the left side of its face, an undeveloped socket where the other one should be. The facial skin was leathery, dark, broken occasionally by tufts of bristly hair. “It doesn’t even look as dangerous as the spider.”
        “That’s what I mean. I don’t like it.”
        “Huh?”
        “I think,” Lotus interrupted, “that Crazy means it looks too easy. Anything as easy as this Beast looks would have been knicked out by the first team that went after it. It must have something else besides claws, teeth, and an extra pair of hands.”
        It did look evil. And there were those other twenty-two bounty hunters to think about. “What do you think?”
        “Can’t say,” Lotus murmured, almost as if she were talking to herself. “That would be like stating the cause of death before the murder.”
        “What’s the consensus? Should we back out of this one?”
        They both said no.
        “We don’t really need the money yet.”
        “There was Garner,” Crazy added.
        I smiled, shut off the tape loop. “Okay. Let’s get started. Crazy, your arm good enough?”
        He peeled off the bandage, flexed the muscular arm. The skin stretched new and tight and delicately across the wound. It was swollen and red, but unscarred. “Never felt better. Let’s go.”
        And we did.

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    IV
        
        After a short but hot march, we made camp near the cross-way where the camera had caught him. Lotus took the first watch near evening, and I was halfway into the second when I heard something of more than medium size coming along from the right. Unholstering my pistol, I stretched out behind a heavy row of bushes and waited. My infrared goggles filtered away most of the night, giving me a view that was probably as good as the Beast’s.
        In a way, I wished it were still dark. This fellow looked a great deal more formidable in person than seen from a little piece of film through the eye of an unemotional lens. First, in the short view it gave, the camera didn’t catch the easy loping motion of the mutant. I decided upon its ancestry pretty quickly: ape. There must have been a zoo around when the big bang wiped out the city and its suburbs-a zoo just far enough out to be saved from a mortal blow. Radiation did the rest. I watched, horrified, as it loped by in the night.
        I was sweating profusely, yet the wind was cold.
        Pushing up from the ground, I stepped back to my previous waiting post. I had not fired, for I wanted to judge how much it would take to stop this Beast before I leaped out firing my little toy-like gun. Now I had that figured out, and I could wait for its reappearance. I was in the process of sitting down when I saw, from the corner of my eye, that the Beast had returned and was standing a dozen yards away, squinting at me. I cursed myself for forgetting the curiosity and cunning of the apes.
        Suddenly, it started for me.
        I brought up my pistol, fired.
         Blue-white, blue-white!
        But when the flash was gone and the night had angrily rushed back in to claim its territory, there was no ape-alive or dead. If I had killed it, it would be lying there, a blackened corpse. Had I wounded it, it certainly could not have gotten away that quickly. Which meant that it was still alive, somewhere near.
        The night seemed exceptionally black, even with the