Fear that man

slowly like a great amusement ride reaching its end, came to a full stop. “I shot it, wounded it anyway. It tried to kill me.”
        “Why didn’t you kill it?” Lotus asked.
        “I guess… it knocked my gun away.”
        “No,” Crazy said. “You had your gun when we found you. You must have been holding it when the Beast made its getaway. We had to pry it from your fingers. Why didn’t you shoot it again?”
        I tried to remember. I could picture the blue-white vibra-beam tearing the night apart and sewing it back together. There was some sort of exclamation which I had not made. Then I could not shoot. I explained the memories to the others.
        “Hypnosis?” Crazy asked.
        “I don’t think so. I wasn’t spellbound or anything like that. Something… something else.”
        “I think we should back out now,” Lotus said. “We’ll just end up like Garner. Sorry, Crazy, but we will! I think we should pack our gear and move out fast.”
        “No,” I said, trying to look more chipper than I felt. “We’ll get it. I know we will.”
        “But there are other jobs-easier jobs,” she protested.
        “We’ve shed our blood over this one,” Crazy said. “When you spill your blood for a hunt, you’re bound to get the Beast no matter what. It goes above revenge.”
        She fluttered her downy blue wings, looked right through me like only she can. “It’s more than that to you, isn’t it, Andy?”
        “Yes,” I croaked. No use hiding anything from Lotus-not with eyes that enter the soul like hers do. “Yes, I suppose it is. Though I don’t know what.” Then I passed out again.
        
        Two days later.
        All my wounds had healed under the speedheals. We had not seen the Beast since, though we were not inexperienced enough to think it had crawled away to die. That is a dangerous assumption in this profession; turn your back for even a second and bang! We decided, instead, that it had returned to its lair, somewhere in the forest, to lick its wounds and heal itself. We had ceased to speculate about why I had been unable to kill it when I had the chance, for that was not a happy thing to speculate about. Too many bad dreams in something like that.
        Leaving everything that could not be carried with relative ease, we struck out with inflatable mattresses, food, water, and guns. Most of all, guns. After establishing what our quarry’s footprints were like (humanish, four-toed, long and wicked claws tipping each toe) from a set that led away from the clover patch fight scene in a limp pattern, we moved deeper into the woods. On the second day of the trek, we found where it had fallen and had lain for some time until it found the strength to go on. On the third day, we tracked it to the lip of the Harrisburg Crater-where the footprints ceased.
        We stood there on the rim of the vast depression, staring across the table of nuclear glass that the triple-headed super-nuclear rocket had made. The crater, I knew from the maps, was two and a quarter miles in diameter. There was a lot of space. Dotting it were thousands of bubbles in the glass. A great number of them were broken and led to the maze of uncharted tunnels and caves that lay under the floor of the crater. Apparently, in one of these caves, the Beast was licking its wounds-and waiting.
        “How can we cover all that?” Crazy asked. “It’s big! And slippery!”
        “We’ll do it,” I said. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t know why I didn’t order everyone to backtrack, to get the hell out of there chop-chop, on the double. Lotus was right, of course: the reason was more than revenge against a dumb animal. For a moment, I felt like Hamlet on the castle ramparts, talking to a ghost. But that feeling passed. My determination had something to do with that night when I could have killed it but did not. That night when I almost let it kill me. And why? And what about the other twenty-two?
        “I guess here is as good a place as any,” Lotus said. “Let’s make camp here.” She swung a hand around, indicating the thirty feet of hard-packed earth that separated the forest from the crater edge. Here and there, a few sparse pieces of vegetation were trying to grow on the no-plant’s-land between woods and glass. They weren’t doing very well, but they made the bleakness a little less bleak.
        “Here it will be,” I said, dropping my own gear. “We’ll search the caves