X: SIXDAY EVENING
The rain stopped a half hour after Joe's Sun set. Betty Toal and I were a long distance from Joetropolis and the Young Farmer School. Although Toal had insisted upon carrying the hisser in addition to her firearm, I was ready to collapse under the combined mass of my pack and the robotic, which Rasmussen had left exposed to the rain.
The Hog moved with us. Where he stalked remained impossible to tell. The darkening of night amplified the ventriloquial quality of his grunting. At times, he seemed ahead of us, occasionally he walked on either side, but, most often, he trailed close behind.
"Are you sure there's only one?" I panted. "Sounds like a herd."
In the darkness, the Hog laughed. That is, he rapidly grunted, "Huh, huh, huh, huh!"
I stopped in the middle of the dirt road and squinted at indistinct shapes. A field bordered the road on one side, and an area of fresh stumps and scattered vinetrees, the other. "Do you have any night goggles?" I asked.
"No," Toal said.
"I may have a light in my pack."
"No light! The Hog will charge it. He tracks by scent, but has poor sight."
I imagined I saw a great shape in the brush. "Let's climb a tree," I said. "There's a big vine. We'll wait until someone comes for us."
"No one will search. Ordinance 921 forbids anyone to go outside the walls at night."
"Fine. Rasmussen deliberately left us for the Hog. I can understand he may dislike me, but why you?"
"Eeet oo Keenlogh!" the Hog squealed, almost shattering my eardrums.
"The hisser!" I yelled. I dropped the heavy robotic in the mud, jerked the hisser from Toal's arms, and shoved the woman behind me. I turned on the light under the barrel.
The Hog filled the road thirty meters away. His back was at least four meters above the road.
The Hog had only one glinting red eye. The other side of his head contained a ghastly socket. Half of one ear was missing, and his lower left tusk was broken. The bizarrely upswept, upper left tusk was twice the length of the right. Reddish bristles grew, like weeds among rocks, between the bony plates covering his creased hide. With snout touching the ground, he stood on cloven hoofs too small for his oily, swelling body. A stifling stench emanated from him. He moved.
"Run!" I barked. Pellets swished from the hisser's barrel. Some actually rebounded from the Hog's neck. I shot at the charging monster's skull. The hisser pinged empty. The Hog's tusks slashed upward.
I squawked like a space-happy maniac as a tusk ripped into my oversuit. I tumbled into the air and bounced through the branches of the nearby vinetree.
Hanging stunned in a snarl of creepers, I heard sharp cracks from Toal's firearm. The Hog squealed in rage. "Run, Toal!" I wheezed. "He's pellet-proof!"
The Hog stopped squealing. Mud splashed and brush broke.
"Ube Kinlock," Toal cried, "where are you?" Her cries became a mourning wail. I heard her stumbling in the undergrowth.
"Up here," I groaned. "Up here."
"Oh! Don't move. May have broken bones. Found your lantern." A light flashed across the road and countryside, then moved up the tree. "Badly injured?" Toal called.
Dangling in the vines, I became aware that I throbbed and burned all over. "Don't think so," I said. "He tossed me."
The light swayed. Toal crouched on a broad, living rope slightly above me. She unclipped the light from the neck of her sack and held it close to me. "Anything broken?" she asked.
"I don't know," I moaned. "How can anything so big move that fast?"
"You are scratched and bruised." Toal pulled apart a long rip in my oversuit. "Side is bleeding," she said. "Have to get you down."
"What about the Hog?"
"Ran. You hurt him, Kinlock. Blood on the road."
"Probably mine. A hundred pellets!" I sighed. "He kept coming."
"Said hissers won't stop him. Must cut that vine around your ankle."
Toal put her hand to the back of her neck and pulled it away clutching a small knife. She sawed at the vines. Far away, the Hog grunted, but the sounds had a new, bubbling quality. Toal said, "Going back to the swamp."
I said, "He can talk. He told me he would eat me."