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.Instant response.Aim.Relax under pressure.Multiple targets.Automatic scanning for a second, third, fourth predator.On and on.The intent is to groove one neurological response pattern.Cadmann has told him:The grendel depends upon its speed.But unless you have been foolish indeed, you will have a second or two before it is on you.We will train you to respond in less than two-fifths of a second.We will train you to bring your weapon to bear, to evaluate risk, to fire twice in precisely the correct pattern, it will be a reflex, completely unconscious.We can give you this gift.You will survive.Pale death came at him in a whorl of snowspray.Justin’s hands moved faster than his brain could follow, lining up with perfect coordination.The thing accelerated to over 120 klicks an hour in the time it would have taken him to blink.If he had blinked.But that was training too.Calm breath.Don’t blink.Fire twice.The first bullet tore into the grendel’s throat, carrying enough shock to drive it sideways, off line, so that he wouldn’t be bowled over by its charge.The second was an incendiary round, heat for the heated, to jolt the beast across an invisible metabolic line.It reeled back, torn, bleeding, dying.Its eyes locked with his, its feet splayed, bright red blood staining the snow which whirled and pelted between them.Grendel flash, left! He shot it again, between its eyes, and tore off the top of its head.He spun left—The grendel above Stu was gone.Not gone: he caught its madly whipping tail following it into a snowbank.Someone fired from behind him, twice.Derik.Justin said, “Hold off.”“Why?”“All the other grendels are hamburger.” Justin was still taking it in.A mistake in judgment here could be terribly embarrassing.Stu’s ravaged corpse lay in a pit in the snow.The grendel had been terribly injured; he’d seen its intestines hanging in coils.Its spraying blood, nearly boiling, had melted cubic meters of snow.Three or four more dark pits led to the snowbank: more splashed blood.The grendel had disappeared into snow there, and Stu’s two exploding bullets were interlocked pocks right in the middle of that; but Justin had seen snow shift to the right, and now he saw it shift again.The grendel wasn’t moving now—huddling, he thought—but the heaped snow was melting.Justin said, “I’d like to give Chaka an intact corpse.”“It’s still dangerous.”“Sure, we have to kill it, not study it.Do I hear the voice of Zack Moskowitz? Cover me.”Rifle at the ready, he ran to the skeeter as Derik covered him.Katya was cowering in the back, somehow wedged behind the seat.Her arms were wrapped around her chest, and a rictus of terror distorted her face.She looked at him without seeing.He put his hand across hers.“Come on,” he said.“You’re safe.”She clutched at his hand.He bent to the floor of the wrecked skeeter, picked up Stu’s grendel gun, and wrapped her hands around it.And that settled that.The weirds did cooperate.Speed was seeping into Old Grendel’s blood despite all she could do.In all her life she’d never seen anything like this.The Cold Ones too could cooperate, it seemed, when there was prey enough to feed all.But against the weirds—The last of them had fled.The smallest, she hadn’t even tried to kill anything.The small Cold One had watched, and now, steaming with speed, was fleeing up toward the highest snowbank on the hill.Toward Old Grendel, buried in snow but for snorkel and eyes.Old Grendel smashed into her flank, sank teeth just ahead of her hind leg, and ripped flesh away.The snow grendel, turning with the impact, smacked sideways into the snowbank.In a blur of snow she clawed her way out, but Old Grendel was a blurred hot streak, receding.She went straight downhill in the shadow of a gully.The weirds would not see her.Dying snow grendels and their own wounded would hold their attention.She was running over heaped snow, but the snow stopped at the trees.Short of that point.Old Grendel turned and rolled.Snow was not enough—she really wanted water—but this would do.She spun across the snow, exhilarated, boiling with speed.Her roll stopped in a snowbank.As the snow began to melt, she looked back for the first time.The snow grendel was far above her.It lurched toward her, on speed but terribly clumsy, spraying blood from her flank.All grendels had that in common: on speed their hearts churned like the motor wings of an Avalon birdie.They lost blood fast.Old Grendel let the speed seep from her blood.She crawled backward now, over snow that melted at her touch, backward and into the shadowed forest.The snow grendel floundered after her, slowing; obscuring her track.Would the weirds bother to track the last snow grendel? They might.Weirds left no question unanswered.If they looked, they would not find Old Grendel; only her prey.If they did not, a day from now the snow grendel would make fine eating.Old Grendel was beginning to believe.God had not trained her parasites.The answer was madder yet.As meat the weirds were no longer interesting.The weirds had enslaved God.Old Grendel intended to learn how to do that.Chapter 23CONQUESTNow what about those incidents in which some person seems to go beyond what we supposed were the normal bounds of endurance, strength, or tolerance of pain? We like to believe this demonstrates that the force of will can overrule the physical laws that govern the world.But a person’s ability to persist in circumstances we hadn’t thought were tolerable need not indicate anything supernatural [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]