Blood Beast Read online

Part IV

  Silence reigns in the muddy water of the river. You can sense the distant vibrations of many large vehicles moving on shore and the vibrations of more of the helicopters overhead. From time to time the sky is split by the roar of very fast low-flying machines and for an instant you pierce the opaque surface of the water, raising one eye and a couple of sensory tendrils for a brief glimpse into the night sky. Several of these new kind of aircraft roar overhead at incredible speed. You have stirred the humans into a frenzy and goaded them into revealing much about their capabilities as an adversary. Now as you gently drift downstream you consider all you have learned.

  In the millions of years of your existence broken up into stretches of a few years, decades or centuries of roaming between vastly long hibernations in the depths of the earth you have experienced much. You periodically would wake from stasis to find the world changed in one way or another and you would have to adapt to it and modify your technique each time. All the same yours has always been a uniformly simple existence. For a creature as perfectly adaptable as you the challenges were always fairly undemanding: hunt prey, kill it and eat it.

  In less than twenty hours you have encountered more that was new and unfamiliar to you than in all the previous long span of time. The humans clearly dominate the world. Everywhere you can see the bright lights that mark their creations. On each bank of the river are many more of the wires with the strong magnetic fields like the ones you encountered earlier. You see the horizon broken by the square, straight-lined shapes that you now know is the sign of the human.

  You consider what this means. You look back on the events since you woke in your cavern under the lake and your changing perceptions.

  At first you were fixated on the kill, simply filling your belly. It seemed that despite the fact the huge lumbering prey you once had hunted was gone, the abundance of these weak creatures and the other prey they kept trapped behind fences would provide you with the easiest hunting you had ever encountered. You slew them at will, for the simple pleasure of hearing their death cries and smelling their blood.

  Now you understand that in doing so you have brought yourself to the attention of the humans and they are swarming like hornets.

  But the memories of your early years, so old, so long irrelevant to the simple needs of your body are reactivating. You had always remembered your mother and the things she taught you, but you realize your awareness of things is growing rapidly and there are more memories coming all the time. You think about the ways in which you know things, the things you assumed about the humans, the things you seemingly instinctively understood about their machines and their weapons, the way you recognized the magnetic field of the power lines and knew that it could be used as a weapon. The way you knew how to throw things to bring down the flying machines.

  You think about these things as you drift down the river, gently bumping along the muddy bottom. Portions of your brain that were never needed before are being brought to life by the new challenges you are facing.

  Something your mother showed you when you were very young. Fast glimpses of it, disconnected impressions, memories, the sense of the magnetic field. She took you to the crashed alien spacecraft. She had not meant to destroy it. She had only known the beings which had captured her were busy and preoccupied. She saw her chance and took it, breaking free and killing them all.

  She told you about this as the two of you explored the colossal wreck. She told you about the home world of your kind. She told you about what she knew of the alien spacecraft, what it was, and you felt the nature of its workings, examined the desiccated corpses of the aliens, those that your mother had left uneaten and other creatures had not been able to get at and scavenge. A pang of disappointment tears through you. Now you remember. The aliens were very different beings from these bipeds that now dominate the earth. The spacecraft must be long gone and none on this world are likely to know the way to get to the hot blue star with its three-mooned planet that was the birthplace of your mother.

  Still there is hope. These creatures have much ability. Though you sense there are great differences in the type of technology they use compared to what you remember your mother showing you long ago. It is reasonable the aliens would have created machines that are very different in form and materials, after all, the humans are very different in form from the aliens. Like the aliens, they are weak yet cunning. Perhaps they are able to travel through space as well. Perhaps when forced, they will take you there.

  You rise to the surface again. You can hear the aircraft swarming in the distance. Soon it will be day-break. You gorged yourself almost hourly since your awakening, but now your metabolism is operating at its full rate. You need to eat again. This time there will be no excess. You will not lose yourself in the blood frenzy as you did earlier in the simple joy of once more being free to hunt and make your kill.

  More of the large four-legged beasts of the kind you slaughtered so freely only a few hours ago are clustered on a bluff above the river. You carefully creep up the bank, keeping downwind of them. This time you use all your hunting skill. Where before you simply charged indiscriminately, slaying and maiming as many as you could, now you simply take one. You make no sound and nor does it. You leave no blood. Its neck is broken before they are even aware of you. You drag it back to the river to using its body to obliterate your tracks. If the humans notice it is gone and come looking, they will see that something happened here, but they may not know what.

  Before when the prey was plentiful you slew as much as you could and reveled in the gore, scattering body parts and bits of flesh, the bony and unsatisfying parts of the carcass. Now, standing in the shallow water you carefully eat every scrap of the cow, crunching its skull and pelvis, devouring its hooves. Nothing is wasted. Your body needs meat to survive and you know you will need to eat again in hours or else find a place where you can safely return to hibernation.

  You slip back beneath the muddy water and continue downstream, conserving energy and considering what you will do. From now on you will attract no attention from the humans. You resolve to leave no trace of those you eat.

  Rapid vibrations in the form of a high-pitched whine pierce the water’s silence. You triangulate the sound and find that it comes from something moving rapidly on the surface.

  You rise to the surface and see some distance down river from you a small, brightly-lit object moving towards you. A light mounted on it sweeps the banks of the river. You remember the first humans you encountered long ago in their carved out tree. It makes sense that the humans would have craft for moving quickly over water. You can see this is a fairly small craft that the humans are using to search for you. You consider the power of the flying machines they deployed against you and decide they must not seriously believe you are in the river. This search of the water must be merely a precaution.

  You can hear a sharp pinging noise echoing through the water and immediately recognize it as similar to the noises made by ancient creatures of the sea which you long ago fought. They must use the echo to see underwater the way you use vibrations, smell and your sense of the magnetic field of things. You dive to the bottom and bury yourself in the mud until the craft is long past. It is hard to resist the urge to destroy it and make an easy meal of the humans aboard, but you know you must not attract attention. There will be others, ones that are not hunting you, ones that are not communicating and that will not be missed.

  Some time after dawn you find your self in a backwater slough. Hiding amongst a pile of drift logs you see two of the humans in a small boat. They are casting lines into the water with what look like thin branches. This was the chance you were looking for. It is absurdly easy. You quietly swim up underneath and flip the boat, spilling the humans into the water, and then snap them up. You drag the boat under and jam it under the pile of logs so it will not be found and resume your slow, easy journey down stream.

  You spend most of the day drifting down the river, st
aying near the bottom, conserving energy. On the occasions you do surface you see that the scale of the construction done by the humans is enormous. As dusk falls the river shines in the thousands of lights of the city springing up on either side. You see many more boats on the river and note that none of them seem to behave like they were hunting.

  Your hunger gnaws at you again. You must feed. You consider going ashore, you can feel the vibrations of thousands of the humans’ vehicles, you can even see them walking on brightly–lit platforms along the riverbank. It would be so easy to take a few, they are such helpless, easy prey, but you know with your size and the enormous number of the humans around, you will be seen and your location will quickly communicated to the ones that are able to fight. Still your jaws open and close involuntarily at the thought of tearing into the soft flesh and easily crushed bones of the little bipeds. You know your need and desire for blood and meat could override your higher brain. You know you must not act impulsively, but the prey beckons to you, so close, so unaware of your presence in the dark water below them, so easily caught.

  The vibrations of a boat are slowly approaching you and you can hear and feel the rapid sweep of its propeller. It is pulling a large raft of logs. You know there will be humans aboard it. You swim under it to investigate; it is too large to flip the way you threw over the little boat early this morning. You feel its magnetic signature, the field generated by the moving engine inside, the thickness of the steel that it is constructed out of. You can tell it is just a little too thick to punch through with your tentacle claws.

  There is much debris on the river-bottom, not unlike the metal that littered the forest and the clearing you were in last night. The scattered wreckage cast away by the humans stands out brightly in the magnetic spectrum as you look at the bottom through the pitch-black murk of the water. A long piece of steel pipe lies on the bottom below you and suddenly you see clearly what is to be done. Something similar worked to bring down the helicopter.

  You swim to the bottom and grab it and swim back up to the boat. You can feel the power of the engine vibrating through the steel hull. But despite the huge thrust of the propeller, the boat moves slowly, dragged by the mass of the enormous raft of logs it pulls. Easy prey. You punch the steel pipe into the hull, it makes a neat round hole, but you realize at once it is too small to sink the craft quickly. Suddenly you get a better idea. You punch the long piece of pipe in again and this time wrench violently on the end. The leverage produced by the length of pipe easily flips the boat.

  The engine roars now that the propeller is free from the water, over-speeding until it abruptly seizes in the shock of the cold water pouring in. Humans are struggling to get out of the cabin. You simply wait by the cabin door until they swim out to you. You clamp down on the first one, crushing its torso and you suck its writhing body down your gullet, nearly eating it whole. The second one you eat with a little more leisure, biting it into three pieces. The struggles of a third can be felt by your tendril-feelers as weak vibrations in now silent the water. One more is trapped inside the hull. You extend one of your tentacles through the opening into the upside down boat and feel around until you find it. It knows something is inside the hull with it and its struggles become pleasingly desperate. You play with the creature for a few moments, dragging it under and releasing it, but you are aware of the possibility that the boat may be seen by other humans from the shore, so you cut short your pleasure and impale the human on your barbed tentacle claw and drag its franticly kicking form out of the boat and into the open water. You eat it quickly, before the heart stops beating, to savour the spurting blood.

  You sense the boat is being kept afloat by air still trapped in the hull so you swim to the bow of the vessel and pull it down enough to release a large bubble and the hull quickly sinks to the bottom. The raft of logs is still tied to the boat and is beginning to swing around in the current. You find the steel cable tying the boat to the log-boom and bite through it so it can drift freely down stream. You raise one of your optic sensors above the water and scan the shore. Cars drive by unhurriedly. Humans are walking under the lights and show no sign of excitement or agitation. It has only been a few minutes since you first punched the steel through the hull of the boat and no one appears to have noticed. It is likely that the humans will soon discover something has happened here, but once more, you are certain they will not know what.