Read Online Hunter's Run by George R. R. Martin - Free Book Online

turned away, took a few
inhumanly graceful strides, then shifted its torso back toward Ramon and
gestured again. Follow me. The other two aliens were still as stone except
for the restless twitching of their snouts.
     
    ‘I get taken captive by aliens,
and they’re too stupid to talk,’ Ramon said, bravado and anger filling him. ‘Hey,
you. Pendejo. Why the fuck would I follow you, eh? Give me a good
fucking reason.’
     
    The alien stood motionless. Ramon
spat, the sputum vanishing as soon as it struck the black tongue-like platform,
which seemed to absorb it with a slurping noise. Ramon shook his head in
disgust, but in fact there didn’t seem to be anything else for him to do but
follow. He came forward slowly, his footing unreliable on the disturbing wet,
velvety ground, which gave under him with every step, looking warily all around
him, wondering if he should try to run. Run to where, though? And some of the
objects suspended from the alien’s belt were almost certainly weapons . . .
     
    Ahead was a door cut through the
naked rock of the cavern wall, into which the alien disappeared, looking back
once again to make its favorite gesture.
     
    Trying to wear his nakedness like
a suit of clothes, Ramon followed the alien into the darkness. The other two
beasts fell in close behind.
     
    * * * *

 
    CHAPTER SIX
     
     
    Afterward, Ramon could not clearly remember that trip. He was led
through tunnels barely wide and tall enough to allow the alien to pass. The
tunnels slanted steeply up and down, and doubled back on themselves, seemingly
at random. The rock was slightly phosphorescent, providing just enough light to
let him see his footing. He refused to look behind at the following shapes,
although his nerves were crawling like worms.
     
    The silence was heavy here in the
belly of the hill, although occasionally a far-away hooting could be heard
through many thicknesses of rock, sounding to Ramon like the noise damned souls
might make crying unheeded to a cold and distant God. Sometimes they passed
through pockets of light and activity, rooms full of chattering noise and rich
rotten smells, rooms drenched in glaring red or blue or green illumination,
rooms dark as ink but for the faint silver line of the path they followed. Once
they stood motionless for long moments in such a room, while Ramon’s stomach
dropped and he wondered if they could be in an elevator.
     
    Each chamber they passed through
seemed more surreal than the last. In one, things that looked like oversized
spiders lay in a clump in the center of what looked like a sluggishly moving
pool of glowing blue oil. Another high-ceilinged chamber teemed with aliens,
swarming over terraced layers of strange objects on the cavern floor.
Equipment, perhaps, machines, computers, although most things here were so
unfamiliar that they registered only as indecipherable blurs, weird amalgams of
shape and shadow and winking light. Far across the cave, two giant aliens -
similar to his three companions, but fifteen or twenty feet tall - labored in
gloom, lifting and stacking what looked like huge sections of honeycomb, moving
with ponderous grace, as unreal and hallucinatorily beautiful as stop-motion
dinosaurs in old horror movies. To one side, a smaller alien was herding a flow
of what looked like spongy molasses down a stairstep fall of boulders, touching
the flowing mass occasionally with a long black rod, as if to urge it along.
     
    It was too much to take in. Ramon’s
conscious mind was spinning too fast in desperate attempts to make sense of
what he saw. The nightmare walk became an interminable series of
incomprehensibilities. A great gray tentacle reached out from one wall,
caressing the alien before him, and then dropped to the ground and slithered
away like a snake. A scent like cardamom and fried onions and rubbing alcohol
filled the air and vanished. The deep throbbing booms that he had heard earlier
filled the air at intervals that seemed to have