Read Online Benighted by Kit Whitfield - Free Book Online Page A

am lying. I remember every single one.
    Marty takes my lighter out of the pack, and as he does so, there’s a soft wail from the left. His hand jumps, and my lighter falls on the floor.
    “Cool it,” I say, my voice snapping. This is tough enough if your partner’s calm, there’s no way I can keep my head if Marty starts panicking on me. “Check the tracker, will you?” I swing the wheel in the direction of the voice, and slow down.
    Marty draws a deep breath, and lets it go. “About eleven o’clock,” he says. “Just one.”
    He’s making an effort to brace himself. “Atta boy.” I say this very softly, and turn my attention to the road.
    I stop the van and take a look: it’s small, smaller than it should be. “Might just be a stray dog,” I say. My nails dig into the steering wheel as I say this. There are days when I dream of driving around all night, ignoring all pickups and just staying snug inside my own van. My fantasies are going to have to wait, though.
    This one is outside a park. Less common, more risky. We’ll have to fight it in the streets. I look at the map, and try to plan a route.
    “Maybe it’s a juvenile,” says Marty over the sound of the engine restarting.
    “You don’t miss much,” I tell him. “Or it could just be showing up smaller than it is, of course, that happens often enough. Or it really could be a stray. In which case, I’ll go to church tomorrow. You awake?”
    He rubs his eyes. “Yes.”
    “It’s past your bedtime, kid. Sure you don’t want any Pro-Plus?”
    “No, thank you anyway.” His manners do him credit.
    I look at the street ahead of us. Gray in the headlights, with no streetlamps burning, it looks rainswept, war-torn, faded. I turn at the junction, and try to stop imagining things.
    “Okay,” I say. “I want you to do this collar. I’ll be right behind you. Remember, if this is a juvenile, it’ll be more likely to be panicking, so you need to be efficient. No missing its head and swatting it with the collar or anything like that. I don’t want to be chasing it till sunrise. Clear?”
    “Yes.” He fingers his catcher. “What if I do miss?”
    I think he’s just covering all his bases, but the thought still chills me. There was a time when I wanted to do every collar for him, to spare him the dangers of being bitten and me the risk of him missing. I can’t, I’d be doing him no favors. He has to learn sometime. “Then we trank it and take the consequences.”
    “Is that bad? I mean, worse?” Marty chews his fingernail.
    “It’s not good.” They ought to teach him this kind of thing in classes. I’m not too surprised they don’t, though—they usually leave the worse facts to be found out by experience. “People don’t like the idea of tranking children. So they don’t make child-sized darts. It would be like admitting we might use them.” No one thinks baby lunes can possibly be dangerous. No one who hasn’t seen them. “If we trank it, we’ll just have to drag it to the nearest shelter that’s got someone who knows a damn thing about first aid.” As I say this, I find we’re nearly at the right street.
    I turn the corner and something sinks inside me. Not my heart, I think, that’s tethered into place, yet it still gives me a long second of dismay when I see that Marty was right. It’s a juvenile. A small one, not much bigger than a German shepherd, and it’s doing its best to dig through a pile of black garbage bags. Withered lettuce leaves and wet cereal boxes are scattered across the street; the smell of rot hits us at the same time as the sound of whimpering.
    I take my trank gun out and watch how Marty handles the pole. When he first started, he looked like he was conducting an orchestra for some slapstick number; I didn’t dare let him carry it outside. I was impressed, though: two catches along, and he’d progressed to just awkward, and now he’s managed some perfectly competent collars. He’s a quick learner.