Fearful Symmetries

Nohar woke up to monochrome night and was instantly alert. He didn’t immediately know what had awakened him, but he felt an unease in his gut that he translated into threat. He tensed, unmoving, focusing on what he could perceive.

The wrongness quickly coalesced into a series of rapid realizations. He heard nothing, the forest had fallen into a silence that was unnatural. Something had startled the nearby insects and night birds into quiescence. Large predator, probably human. The second impression came rapidly upon the first, a smell that was alien to the woods. Petroleum-based, it made his nose itch.

The smell had him moving even before the final impression reached his conscious awareness. He rolled off the bed to take cover on the floor even as he realized that the shadow that the front window cast on the wall had acquired a new bulge at the base of the frame, as if someone had gently set something on the sill.

Nohar hugged the floor, curling up to expose as little of himself to the wash of heat as possible. He felt debris from the window scatter itself on his back like hot coals. He could smell the acrid scent of burning hair, then it became too painful to breathe through his nose.

The moment the explosion was over, he rolled, putting out half a dozen small fires on his back. Adrenaline was already coursing through his veins, awakening ancient programmed combat reflexes. The flames engulfing the ceiling took on an unnatural clarity. They seemed to roll from the front of the cabin like breakers on hell’s own ocean.

Nohar heard another explosion. There was little concussion, but he could taste the chemicals in the air. Another firebomb.

The blast from the front window had knocked his bow from the wall. He rolled across the floor, not daring to stand, and grabbed it and the two arrows that hadn’t spilled from its attached quiver.

Nohar’s cabin had turned into an oven, and he knew that in a few seconds it would become a crematorium. The doors and windows were useless for escape, engulfed in orange fire.

Nohar slammed his fist into the floor. The blow was partly martial art, partly adrenaline, and mostly desperation. Luck was with him. The board under his fist gave with an anemic crack and a puff of dry rot. He dropped the bow and grabbed the boards to either side, pulling up and out with all the strength his aged muscles could manage.

The boards came up with a squeal of protesting nails. Even so, it was almost too late. The air was searing his lungs, and he could smell his fur burning again.

Nohar grabbed the bow and dove through the hole, landing face first in the soft earth under the cabin. There was barely room for him to roll and put out his smoldering fur.

Nohar twisted away from the hole he’d made—he could feel it sucking air from underneath the cabin. He knew he’d only gained himself a few moments. Now that the dry wood of the cabin had caught, it had become a bomb itself. In a minute or two the heat would make the whole building combust into a fireball worse than any of the arsonist’s explosions.

Nohar looked around for an escape route. He didn’t have much choice. The cabin sat on four cinder-block posts, but the ground was sloped so that the rear and the left sides of the building were too close to the ground for him to wiggle out from. The front of the building was a mass of fire where debris had fallen.

That left one way out. Nohar crawled toward the right side of the building. When he reached the point where he could emerge, his brain finally caught up with events and asked, Who’s done this? Why?

Someone wanted him dead, and if they wanted it badly enough to torch his cabin, they probably wanted him dead enough to have a sniper watch the building for escapees. Luckily for him, the right side of the cabin was the route that offered the most cover. There were less than three meters between him and the lip of the bluff that curved around the clearing in front of his cabin.

Nohar pulled his bow out in front of him. It was awkward, but the sight had an infrared setting. He looked out at the woods, squinting through the IR noise that the fire was pumping out. Above him, the structure of the cabin groaned, as if it were in pain.

There was someone. A humanoid figure crouched on the crown of the bluff down toward the front of the house. He had a rifle, at the ready, pointed too close to Nohar’s location.

Then, above him, Nohar heard the sound of his cabin reaching its flashpoint, a roar that shook the ground beneath him. Nohar had no time for planning, his reflexes took over.

He rolled away from his house, across the three meters of exposure, dropping over the bluff and into the wooded area. He felt dirt spray him as shots from the woods missed him, thudding into the ground.

Even in the woods, he was way too exposed. The exploding fire lit everything like a spotlight and the bluff’s shadow was still rosily lit by reflected light.

He rose with an arrow fully taut in the bow. In a single fluid motion, he raised the bow to position, loosed the arrow, and began a scramble along the bluff toward the sniper’s position.

He heard other gunshots, but none connected with him. They were coming from places that weren’t covering his escape route, and the distraction of the cabin blowing up gave him a little leeway as he ran along the cover of the bluff.

He landed next to the rifleman. The man had taken a header backward after being struck by the arrow. An arm and a leg were bent at ugly angles. The rifle had spilled another four or five meters down the slope.

Nohar stopped next to him. He was human, dressed in black combat gear. He’d been wearing night-vision equipment that the fall had knocked askew. He wore an armored vest, from which Nohar’s arrow pointed up at the sky. While the armor might have prevented impalement, the man didn’t seem much better off. He was gasping for breath, and his lips were flecked with blood.

Nohar bent over the man, intending to shake some answers from him, find out why this attack was happening. But a look at the man’s face told Nohar it was hopeless. The man’s eyes didn’t track, and the pupils were fixed. There was no reaction when Nohar leaned over him.

Even as he bent over his would-be assassin, Nohar began sensing movement in the woods. They moved quietly, but not quietly enough. Whatever was going on wasn’t over yet.

Nohar dropped his bow and sidestepped to pick up the fallen man’s rifle. It wasn’t designed for hands his size, but it was manageable. He kept moving, quietly and low to the ground.

They were getting too close. The first time he’d had surprise going for him. Now, if these bastards got a clean shot at him, he was dead. He could hear them in front of him, closing. Between the light coming from the fire, and these guys’ night-vision equipment, Nohar gave it a minute or less before someone had that clean shot.

Nohar put a tree between him and the sounds, putting his back to it. He checked the rifle over. It was a Colt Special Operations rifle—Nohar had heard the thing called the “Black Widow.” It was American military issue, designed for covert operations. It was matte black, light, fired caseless ten-millimeter rifle ammo. It was made mostly of composite carbon fiber, and carried a combination silencer/flash suppressor that was built into a barrel that was almost as thick as the body of the gun. Even with the silencer, its shots could punch through the bad guy’s body armor as if it were balsa wood.

It had a digital scope with a night-vision setting. Nohar adjusted the sight, and flipped the Widow from single-shot to full auto.

He took a deep breath, and when he felt ready, he dove, flattening upon a bed of pine needles as he brought the rifle to bear.

Someone saw something, because Nohar could hear bullets whizzing through the trees above him. The silencer-muffled gunshots sounded like a fist slamming into wet concrete.

There were two of them, their motion—lit by the fire—was unmistakable to Nohar’s eye. Despite the flash suppressors, to the scope, every shot was an obvious flare. Nohar let go with two bursts.

He got up and ran toward the hole he’d made in the encircling enemy. He stayed low, using as much of the cover as he could. He avoided firing again because any more shots would be a signal flare to the Bad Guys, and he could hear the others closing on his location.

The world became a blood-tinted chaos as his engineered reflexes took over. Somehow he made it through the hole before the others closed on him. He jumped over the corpse of one human in a commando outfit and didn’t pause.

He could feel the presence of others in the woods around him, but he couldn’t stop to determine where they were. Instinct told him that if he ever stopped moving he was dead. He dodged tree after tree as the slope steepened on its way downward.

The forest floor was covered with pine needles that slid as he ran. Soon the slope was difficult enough that every third step was a near stumble down the side of the hill. In the distance he heard the humans, their pretense at silence gone. He heard their radios, their running steps through the woods, and eventually he heard the fans and smelled the ozone exhaust of an aircar somewhere above.

The aircar was unlit, and eventually it left Nohar’s hearing. If he was lucky, that meant that the canopy was too thick for whatever video equipment that was installed on it.

He ran for miles down the mountain, adrenaline fueling exertion far beyond what his body should have to endure. It was shortly after the aircar left his awareness that Nohar realized that he no longer felt the pursuit of the heavily armed humans.

He slowed, the panic fueling his muscles draining away with every step. The beast the genetic engineers had designed into him, the instinctual combat machine, confused his sense of time; minutes could be hours, or vice versa. It was sinking into him that what had seemed like a few minutes of panicked escape had been a run down the side of the mountain. The sky above him was lightening, and the slope was flattening out.

He could feel it in every muscle in his body. He looked at the weapon in his hand, the rifle he’d taken. It was empty. Somewhere during his escape he’d emptied the thing. He didn’t quite remember, the whole episode was a blood-tinged blur in his memory.

Nohar stumbled down the rest of the way to the highway. He didn’t leave the cover of the woods when he finally reached the roadway; a naked moreau would attract too much unwanted attention. Enough people were giving him that kind of attention.

After dawn had passed, and Nohar was walking in full daylight, he came in sight of a small rest stop off of the highway. There was little there but a scenic overlook and a set of restrooms, but what attracted Nohar’s attention was a public comm box.

He crouched in the woods across the highway from the rest stop. There was one blue Plymouth Ariel minivan sitting in the parking lot. Nohar stayed crouching, fatigue dripping from every pore of his body. Every muscle ached, all the way down to the base of his tail. He felt as if all his muscles had been torn off of his body and then reattached at random.

Staying awake was a major effort, but he kept his attention focused on the little family van. Eventually its little family returned. Two adults and a pair of kids. As he watched them, Nohar felt an irrational wave of enmity toward them, the two middle-class pinks and their children. The parents were probably his age, but with nearly half their lives in front of them. Their kids, happy, smiling, safe. . . .

Eventually the Plymouth and its family drove off, leaving the rest stop deserted. Once the car had disappeared around a bend in the road, Nohar dashed across the street to the comm box.