Hunter's Run Read Free

the Governors. It perched above a butcher’s
shop, and the air that came in the back window was often fetid with old gore.
He considered sleeping in his van, but he felt sticky and exhausted. He wanted
a shower and a beer and a plate of something warm to keep his belly from
growling. He climbed the stairs slowly, trying to be quiet, but the lights were
burning in her windows. A shuttle was lifting from the spaceport far to the
north, tracking lights glowing blue and red as the vessel rose toward the
stars. Ramon tried to cover the click and hiss of the door with the throbbing
rumble of the shuttle’s lift drive. But it was no use.
     
    ‘Where the fuck have you
been?’ Elena yelled as he stepped inside. She wore a thin cotton dress with a
stain on the sleeve. Her hair was tied back into a knot of black darker than
the sky. Her teeth were bared in rage, her mouth almost square with it. Ramon
closed the door behind him, and heard her gasp. In an instant, the anger had
left her. He followed her gaze to where the European’s blood had soaked the
side of his shirt, the leg of his pants. He shrugged.
     
    ‘We’ll have to burn these,’ he
said.
     
    ‘Are you okay, mi bijo? What
happened?’
     
    He hated it when she called him
that. He was no one’s little boy. But it was better than fighting, so he
smiled, pulling at the tongue of his belt.
     
    ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘It was the
other cabron who took the worst of it.’
     
    ‘The police…will the police…?’
     
    ‘Probably not,’ Ramon said,
dropping his trousers around his knees. He pulled his shirt up over his head. ‘Still,
we should burn these.’
     
    She asked no more questions, only
took his clothes out to the incinerator that the apartments on the block all
shared, while Ramon took a shower. The time readout in the mirror told him that
dawn was still three or four hours away. He stood under the flow of warm water,
considering his scars - the wide white band on his belly where Martin Casaus
had slashed him with a sheet metal hook, the disfiguring lump below his elbow
where some drunken bastard had almost sheared through his bones with a machete.
Old scars. Some older than others. They didn’t bother him; in fact, he liked
them. They made him look strong.
     
    When he came out, Elena was
standing at her back window, arms crossed below her breasts. When she turned to
him, he was ready for the blast furnace of her rage. But instead, her mouth was
a tiny rosebud, her eyes wide and round. When she spoke, she sounded like a
child; worse, like a woman trying to be a child.
     
    ‘I was scared for you,’ she said.
     
    ‘You never have to be,’ he said. ‘I’m
tough as leather.’
     
    ‘But you’re just one man,’ she
said. ‘When Tomas Martinez got killed, there were eight men. They came right up
to him when he came out of his girlfriend’s house, and…’
     
    ‘Tomas was a little whore,’ Ramon
said and waved a hand dismissively, as if to say that any real man ought
to be able to stand up against eight thugs sent to even a score. Elena’s lips
relaxed into a smile, and she walked toward him, her hips shifting forward with
each step, as if her pussy were coming to him, the rest of her trailing behind
reluctantly. It could have gone the other way, he knew. They could as easily
have passed the night as they had so many others, shouting at each other,
throwing things, coming to blows. But even that might have ended in sex, and he
was tired enough that he was genuinely grateful that they could simply fuck and
then sleep, and forget about the wasted, empty day that had just gone by. Elena
lifted off her dress. Ramon took her familiar flesh in his arms. The scent of
old blood rose from the butcher’s shop below like an ugly perfume of Earth and
humanity that had followed them across the void.
     
    Afterward, Ramon lay spent in the
bed. Another shuttle was lifting off. Usually there was hardly more than one a
month. But the Enye were coming