Read Online Work Done for Hire by Joe Haldeman - Free Book Online Page B

adult.
    There had been four, but on the eve of their tenth birthday they went into the pit together, and only two were allowed to come out. He could still taste his brothers’ blood, and feel it splashing on his face.
    He would not dishonor that memory by eating humans raw. Their taste was insipid anyhow, and needed cooking with spices and herbs. Especially the taste of their sexual parts, pallid and tame. They fought fiercely over that part, the last birthday, thinking it gave strength and courage.
    After the tenth, they didn’t count birthdays. You lived until you died, and that would be a long time.
    He was not sure how he had gotten to Earth, or what his purpose was here. He was content to wait, and hunt, and eat.
    He sat there unmoving through the night, neither asleep nor awake. At first light, he took a shovel with a sharp square blade and cut out a rectangle of turf. He carefully squared out the hole, depositing the dirt on a canvas drop cloth. When the hole was handle-deep, he went into the trailer and brought out the inedible remnants of the luckless jogger. Before covering it with dirt he undressed, straddled the hole, and evacuated generously into it. Then he filled the grave, stamping the soil down tightly, and carefully replaced the turf. He saturated the area with his alien urine, which he knew contained butyric acid. No bloodhound would come near it.
    He went back into his trailer and turned the heat up to a comfortable hundred degrees. Then he carefully eased himself onto the oversized recliner and opened up his paperback book:
The Pawns of Null-A
, by A. E. Van Vogt.
    He had read it before, but that was all right. He didn’t read for information.

4.
    K it stared at the last page and set it down carefully. “So he eats this guy’s balls and then shits on his bones and pisses on his grave. Couldn’t you be a little less tasteful?”
    â€œWell, actually, it’s his brother’s balls.”
    â€œOh, okay. That’s all right.” She laughed. “Keep it in the family.”
    I had to laugh, too. “Hey, if you can’t appreciate good literature, you don’t have to expose yourself to it.”
    â€œIt’s not me who’s exposing myself. Are you going to let your mother read this? Your
shrink
?”
    â€œI wouldn’t show it to the shrink. Mother would say, ‘Can’t you sex it up a little? Have him jerk off into the grave?’”
    â€œNo wonder you’re such a delicate soul.”
    â€œEverything I am today, I owe to dear old Mom.”
    I loaded up on carbs with a double stack of pancakes—or used the bike as an excuse to stuff myself, take your pick—and then Kit drove me back to where the weather and road had stopped us the night before. The plan was for her to keep the van while I completed the loop to Des Moines and back; if I ran into trouble she would come rescue me.
    I wasn’t going to rough it; I had a map with all the motels on the route and their phone numbers, so when I decided to quit for the day I could call ahead. (That seemed prudent because there weren’t all that many places to stay.)
    When she dropped me off and drove away, I felt a guilty glow of freedom. Four or five days of being a carefree bachelor, the wind at my back and nothing in front of me but the road.
    The carefree feeling ended with a bang after an hour and ten minutes. I had somehow managed to run over a nail more than two inches long. It wasn’t even the same color as the road, cruddy with rust. But sharp enough to blow me out.
    I was carrying two spare tubes, but repaired the flat one out of prudence and pessimism, remembering one day I managed to have three flats in three hours. All of them less dramatic than this one, relatively slow leaks, which can take longer to fix—not obvious where the hole is. Or it turns out to be the valve, unfixable.
    I let the glue on the repaired tube rest and pumped up a new one and was