Fear That Man / Toyman by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz [Koontz, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction; American
ISBN: 9780202314006
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1969-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

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IV

After a short but hot march, we made camp near the cross-way where the camera had caught him. Lotus took the first watch near evening, and I was halfway into the second when I heard something of more than medium size coming along from the right. Unholstering my pistol, I stretched out behind a heavy row of bushes and waited. My infrared goggles filtered away most of the night, giving me a view that was probably as good as the Beast’s.

In a way, I wished it were still dark. This fellow looked a great deal more formidable in person than seen from a little piece of film through the eye of an unemotional lens. First, in the short view it gave, the camera didn’t catch the easy loping motion of the mutant. I decided upon its ancestry pretty quickly: ape. There must have been a zoo around when the big bang wiped out the city and its suburbs-a zoo just far enough out to be saved from a mortal blow. Radiation did the rest. I watched, horrified, as it loped by in the night.

I was sweating profusely, yet the wind was cold.

Pushing up from the ground, I stepped back to my previous waiting post. I had not fired, for I wanted to judge how much it would take to stop this Beast before I leaped out firing my little toy-like gun. Now I had that figured out, and I could wait for its reappearance. I was in the process of sitting down when I saw, from the corner of my eye, that the Beast had returned and was standing a dozen yards away, squinting at me. I cursed myself for forgetting the curiosity and cunning of the apes.

Suddenly, it started for me.

I brought up my pistol, fired.

Blue-white, blue-white!

But when the flash was gone and the night had angrily rushed back in to claim its territory, there was no ape-alive or dead. If I had killed it, it would be lying there, a blackened corpse. Had I wounded it, it certainly could not have gotten away that quickly. Which meant that it was still alive, somewhere near.

The night seemed exceptionally black, even with the goggles.

I stood very still, listening. Then it struck me that the Beast might be hunched below the dense brush line, moving along the pathway to a point where it could more easily leap-and dismember me. I cursed myself for missing, tried to reassure myself that it had moved too fast for any marksman to hit. Rather than wait for the attack, I began moving backward through the brush, gun drawn, eyes watering as I kept them pinned to the weeds and flowers, trying to sight anything that would give me a target.

Behind me, a hundred yards away, a small knoll rose in a clearing. If I could back to that, I would be looking down on this area and could spot the mutant as it stalked me, blast it before it could get close. Carefully, I moved toward that knoll.

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