Read Ebook: Rough Beast by Aycock Roger D Barberis Illustrator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 125 lines and 7221 words, and 3 pages

"Aliens are off the air," he said. "But I can't feel Ellis."

"Maybe he isn't wearing his Telethink. I'll try his launch radio."

Weyman said incredulously, "They'll blow the key to bits. What about Ellis and the hermit?"

"Ellis is to evacuate him if possible. They're giving us twenty minutes before the jets come. After that--"

He didn't have to finish.

At midnight old Charlie Trask was wading knee-deep in the eastside grass flats of his private lagoon, methodically netting shrimp that darted to the ooze-clouded area stirred up by his ragged wading shoes. An empty gunny sack hung across one shoulder, ready for the coon oysters he would pick from mangrove roots on his way back to his shack.

In his dour and antisocial way, Charlie was content. He had nearly enough shrimp for boiling and for bait, with the prospect of coon oyster stew in the offing. He had tobacco for his pipe and cartridges for his single-shot .22 rifle and a batch of potent homebrew ready for the bottling.

What more could a man want?

The blast and glare of the Morid's landing on the western fringe of his key jarred Charlie from his mellow mood like a clear-sky thunderbolt. The concussion rattled what teeth remained to him and brought a distant squall from his cat, a scarred and cynical old tom named Max, at the shack.

The rosy phosphorescence drifting up from the mangroves a quarter of a mile away colored his resentment with alarm. A blast like that could start a fire, burn across the key and gut his shack.

Grumbling at the interruption of his midnight foray, Charlie crimped the lid tight on his shrimp bucket and stalked back along the lagoon toward his shack. The coon oysters would have to wait.

Five minutes later he reached his personal castle, perched on precarious piling in a gap hewn from the mangroves. The moon made it, to Charlie, a thing of black-and-silver beauty, with Max's yellow eyes gleaming from the porch floor like wicked, welcoming beacons.

Still muttering, Charlie waded out of the shallow-water ooze and stumped in squishing shoes up the ladder to his shack. The shrimp bucket he hung on a wall peg out of Max's calculating reach. He found his pipe in the kitchen and loaded and lighted it, deliberately because the capacity for haste was not in him. His homebrew crock bubbled seductively and he took time out to raise the grimy toweling that covered it and sniff appreciatively.

"Ready to cap by the time I come back and get the shrimp graded," he told Max.

He changed his dripping brogans for a pair of snake-proof boots and took down his .22 rifle from its pegs, not because he really imagined that anyone might have lived through such a blast but because strangers--them radio fellows two keys east, for instance--might take it into their heads to come prying around.

He was halfway across the key when the drone of Ellis' launch entering his lagoon justified his suspicions.

Charlie's investigation was soon over.

A dying plume of steam rising from a circle of battered mangroves told him that no danger of fire impended, and he turned back in relief. It did not occur to him that the pilot of his hypothetical rocket might be lying desperately injured in the shallow water, at the mercy of sharks and crocodiles. If it had, he would not have moved to help. Any fool who got himself into such a spot, in Charlie's rude philosophy, could get himself out.

The drone of the launch's engine was loud when he reached his shack. The boat, handled by a pilot grotesque in what Charlie took at first for a diver's helmet, was heading directly for his landing at an unsafe speed.

"Serve him right if he shoals on a oyster bed and rips his bottom," Charlie said.

As if on cue, the boat swerved sharply. Its pilot came half erect, arms flung wide in a convulsive gesture. The engine roared wildly; the boat heeled, slamming its occupant against the right gunwale, and blasted straight for Charlie's shack.

Miraculously, it missed the shack's piling and lunged half its length upon the sand. The engine-roar died instantly. The pilot was thrown headlong overside, goldberg helmet flying off in mid-arc, to lie stunned at the foot of Charlie's ladder.

Callously, Charlie stepped over Ellis' twitching form and stumped up the ladder to his shack. Max, who had taken to the porch rafters at the crash of the launch, came meowing gingerly down to meet him.

"It's all right," Charlie told him. "Just some fool that don't know how to handle a boat."

He leaned his rifle against the wall and brought a split-bamboo chair from the kitchen. He was not too late; the bucket, when he took it from its peg, still slithered satisfactorily with live shrimp.

The squawking of the launch radio roused Ellis. He groaned and sat up, dazed and disoriented by the combined shock of Xaxtol's telepathic bombshell and his own rude landing, just as Weyman gave up his attempt at radio contact. In the silence that fell, Ellis would have fainted again except for the chilling knowledge that he was unarmed and afoot on the same key with a man-eating alien monster that might make its appearance at any moment.

He collected wits and breath to stave off the black pall of shock that still threatened.

"Come down from there and help me push the launch off," he called up to Charlie Trask. "We've got to get off this key. Fast!"

Charlie separated a menu-sized shrimp from his bucket.

"You grounded her," he said sourly. "Push her off yourself."

"Listen," Ellis said desperately. "That blast was a ship from space, from another star. A wild animal escaped from it, something worse than you ever dreamed of. We've got to get out of here before it finds us."

Charlie grunted and chose another shrimp.

The Morid, as Xaxtol had pictured it, rose vividly in Ellis' memory, fanged and shaggy and insatiably voracious, a magenta-furred ursine embodiment of blood-lust made the worst by its near-human intelligence.

He described it in dogged haste, his eyes frozen to the tangle of inland underbrush behind the shack.

"No such varmint in these kays," old Charlie said.

The launch radio blared again in Weyman's voice, speaking urgently of jet bombers and deadlines. A glance at his watch brought Ellis up from the sand in galvanic resolution.

"In twelve minutes," he said grimly, "a squadron of planes will pinpoint this key and blast it out of the water. I'm not going to be eaten alive or blown to bits arguing with you. If I can't push the launch off alone, I'll swim."

He scooped up his fallen Telethink helmet and ran for the launch. At the fourth step his foot caught in the iron-hard stump of a mangrove root that had been chopped off inches above the sand and he fell heavily. Pain blinded him; his right ankle lanced with fire and went numb.

He fought to rise and fell again when the ankle collapsed under him.

His twelve minutes had dwindled to seven when Ellis roused. He tried to stand, his twisted ankle momentarily forgotten, and gave it up when the mangroves spun dizzily before his eyes. He couldn't afford to pass out again.

He made one last-ditch bid for help.

"My leg's broken," he yelled up at old Charlie Trask. "Get down here and lend a hand!"

Charlie glowered and said nothing.

Max bounded down the ladder, tail stiffly erect and scarred ears cocked at the underbrush in baleful curiosity.

"The thing is coming this way," Ellis called. "Your cat scents it. Will you let us all be killed?"

Charlie Trask graded another shrimp.

Swearing bitterly, Ellis caught up his Telethink helmet and slid it over his head. He found the net in a welter of confusion. Washington demanded further information; Vann, at the station, was calling him frantically. His own scramble for help-images only added to the mental babel.

On the Federation ship, confusion was nearly as rampant.

Xaxtol's dilemma still held: he could not make planetfall--time was too short for aid now, in any case--but neither could he, with clear Galactic conscience, desert the harried primitives below while hope remained.

Ellis' predicament forced Xaxtol to decision; he could only follow the Morid's aura and relay its progress.

It could not be helped that the relayed image was blurred of definition and weirdly askew; the Morid's visual and auditory range differed so sharply from either human or Galactic that even over the ship's wonderfully selective telecommunicator little of the Morid's immediate surroundings came through clearly. Its aura arrived with a burning intensity that turned Xaxtol and his group faint with empathetic horror, but the fact that the Morid had just made its first kill obliterated all detail for the moment beyond a shocking welter of blood and torn flesh.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet