Night Freight

"Jesus," Hixon said, "you smell that?"

"Wolf smell," DeVries said.

"Worse than that. Something dead up there . . ."

Larrabee said, "Shut up, both of you." His finger was on the Savage's trigger now. He drew a breath and began to climb again, more warily than before.

The breeze had died, but after another thirty yards the smell was in his nostrils without it. Hixon had been right: death smell. It seemed to mingle with the heat, to form a miasma that made his eyes burn. Behind him he heard DeVries gag, mutter something, spit.

Somewhere nearby the magpie was still screeching at them. But no longer flying around where they were—as if it were afraid to get too close to that outcrop.

Larrabee climbed to within twenty feet of it. That was close enough for him to see that the brush had been dragged in around its base, all right. Some of the smaller rocks looked to have been carried here, too, and set down as part of the camouflage arrangement.

Hixon and DeVries had stopped a few paces below him. In a half whisper DeVries asked, "You see anything, Ben?"

Larrabee didn't answer. He was working saliva through a dry mouth, staring hard at the dark foul-smelling opening of a cave.

. . . Haven't you ever wondered why there have been so many unexplained disappearances in the past few decades? Why so many children are kidnapped? Why there is so seldom any trace of the missing ones?

Haven't you ever wondered about all the random murders, so many more of them now than in the past, and why the bloody remains of certain victims are left behind?

You fools, you blind fools, who do you think the serial killers really are? . . .

They were all staring at the cave now, standing side by side with rifles trained on the opening, breathing thinly through their mouths. The death-stink seemed to radiate out of the hole, so that it was an almost tangible part of the day's heat.

Larrabee broke his silence. He called out, "If you're in there you better come out. We're armed."

Nothing. Stillness.

"Now what?" DeVries asked.

"We take a look inside."

"Not me. I ain't going in there."

"We don't have to go in. We'll shine a light inside."

"That's still too close for me."

"Do it myself then," Larrabee said angrily.

"Charley, get the flashlight out of my pack."

Hixon went around behind him and opened the pack and found the six-cell flash he carried; tested it against his hand to make sure the batteries were still good. "What the hell," he said, "I'll work the light. You're a better shot than me, Ben."

Larrabee tied his handkerchief over his nose and mouth; it helped a little against the stench. Hixon did the same. "All right, let's get it done. Hank, you keep your rifle up and your eyes open."

"Count on it," DeVries said.

They had to prod brush out of the way to reach the cave mouth. It was larger than it had seemed from a distance, four feet high and three feet wide—large enough so that a man didn't have to get down on all fours and crawl inside. The sun glare made the blackness within a solid wall.

Larrabee stood off a little ways, butted the Savage against his shoulder, took a bead on the opening. "Okay," he said to Hixon, "put the light in there."

Hixon switched on, sent the six-cell's beam probing inside the cave.

Almost instantly the light impaled a crouching shape—big, hairy, wild-eyed. The thing snarled, a sound that was only half-human, and came hurtling out at them with teeth bared and hands hooked like claws. Hixon yelled, dropped the flashlight, tried to dodge out of the way. Larrabee triggered his rifle, but the sudde

He wouldn't have had time to get off a second shot if DeVries hadn't held his ground below, if DeVries hadn't fired twice while the man-beast was in mid-lunge.

The first bullet knocked him aside, brought a keening cry out of him and put him down in the brush; the second missed high, whanged off rock. By then Larrabee had set himself, taken aim again. He shot the bugger at point-blank range—blew the left side of his head off. Even so, his rage was such that he jacked another shell into the chamber and without thinking shot him again, in the chest this time, exploding the heart.

The last of the echoes died away, leaving a stillness that was painful in Larrabee's ears—like a shattering noise just beyond the range of his hearing. He got his breathing under control and went in loose-legged strides to where Hixon lay writhing on the ground, clutching at his bloody neck. DeVries was there too, his face pale and sweat-studded; he kept saying, "Jesus God," over and over, as if he were praying.

Hixon's wound wasn't as bad as it first seemed: a lot of blood but no arteries severed. DeVries had a first aid kit in his pack; Larrabee got it out and swabbed antiseptic on the gash, wrapped some gauze around it. Hixon was still glazed with shock, so they moved him over against one of the rocks, in the shade. Then they went to look at what they'd killed.

It was a man, all right. Six feet, two hundred pounds, black beard and hair so thick and matted that it all but hid his features. Fingernails as long and sharp as talons. The one eye that was left was a muddy brown, the white of it so veined it looked bloody. Skins from different animals, roughly sewn together, draped part of the thick-muscled body; the skins and the man's bare flesh were encrusted with filth, months or years of it. The stench that came off the corpse made Larrabee want to puke.

DeVries said hoarsely, "You ever in your life see anything like that?"

"I never want to see anything like it again."

"Crazy—he must've been crazy as hell. The way he come out of that cave . . ."

"Yeah," Larrabee said.

"He'd have killed you if I hadn't shot him. You and Charley and then me, all three of us. It was in his eyes . . . a goddamn madman."

Larrabee didn't respond to that. After a few seconds he turned and started away.

"Where you going?" DeVries said behind him.

"Find out what's inside that cave."

. . . I am one of the old breed—not the most fearsome of Us. And sickened by the things I'm compelled to do; that is why I'm warning you. The new breed . . . it is with the new breed that the ultimate terror lies.

We are not all the same. . . .

DeVries wouldn't go into the cave, wouldn't even go near the mouth, so Larrabee went in alone. He took the Savage as well as the flashlight, and he went in slow and wary. He didn't want any more surprises.

He had to walk hunched over for the first few feet. Then the cave opened up into a chamber nearly six feet high and not much larger than a prison cell. He put the light on the walls, on the floor: more animal skins, heaps of flesh-rotted bones, splatters and streaks of dried blood everywhere. Things had been killed as well as eaten in here, Christ knew what things.

The stink was so bad that he couldn't stand it for more than a few seconds. When he turned to get out of there, the flash beam illuminated a kind of natural shelf in the wall. There were some things on the shelf—the stub of a candle stuck in a clot of its own grease, what appeared to be a ragged pocket notebook, other things he didn't want to examine too closely. On impulse he caught up the notebook by one edge, brought it out with him into the hot clean air.