For Love of Mother-Not - Alan Dean Foster [54]
She nodded once, appearing as competent as she was beautiful. Lodge manager, he thought. She ought to know what she was talking about. He could trust her for a few minutes, anyway.
“What’s so important to show me?” he asked.
“Come with me.” Her tone was still soaked with anger.
She led him back into the lodge, across the porch and back into the dining room. Several members of her staff were treating one of the women who had been dining when the lights had gone out and the guns had gone off. Her husband and companions were hovering anxiously over her; and she was panting heavily, holding one hand to her chest.
“Heart condition,” Lauren explained tersely.
Flinx looked around. Tables and chairs were still overturned, but there was no other indication that a desperate fight had been fought in the room. Paralysis beams did not damage inanimate objects. The man he had slain had been moved by lodge personnel. He was glad of that.
Lauren led him toward the kitchen. Lying next to the doorway were the pair of furry shapes he had noticed when he had first entered the room. Up close, he could see their round faces, twisted in agony. The short stubby legs were curled tightly beneath the fuzzy bodies. Their fur was a rust red except for yellow circles around the eyes, which were shut tight. Permanently.
“Sennar and Soba.” Lauren spoke while gazing at the dead animals with a mixture of fury and hurt. “They’re wervils—or were,” she added bitterly. “I raised them from kittens. Found them abandoned in the woods. They liked to sleep here by the kitchen. Everybody liked to feed them. They must have moved at the wrong time. In the dark, one of those”—she used a word Flinx didn’t recognize, which was unusual in itself—“must have mistaken them for you. They were firing at anything that moved, I’ve been told.” She paused a moment, then added, “You must have the luck of a pregnant Yax’m. They hit just about everything in the room except you.”
“I was down on the floor,” Flinx explained. “I only stand up when I have to.”
“Yes, as that one found out.” She jerked a thumb in the direction of the main hall. Flinx could see attendants wrapping a body in lodge sheets. He was a little startled to see how big his opponent had actually been. In the dark, though, it’s only the size of your knife that matters.
“They didn’t have to do this,” the manager was murmuring, staring at the dead animals. “They didn’t have to be so damned indiscriminate. Four years I’ve coddled those two. Four years. They never showed anything but love to anyone who ever went near them.” Flinx waited quietly.
After a while, she gestured for him to follow her. They walked out into the main hall, down a side corridor, and entered a storeroom. Lauren unlocked a transparent wall case and removed a large, complex-looking rifle and a couple of small, wheel-shaped plastic containers. She snapped one of them into the large slot set in the underside of the rifle. The weapon seemed too bulky for her, but she swung it easily across her back and set her right arm through the support strap. She added a pistol to her service belt, then led him back out into the corridor.
“I’ve never seen a gun like that before.” Flinx indicated the rifle. “What do you hunt with it?”
“It’s not for hunting,” she told him. “Fishing gear. Each of those clips”—and she gestured at the wheel-shapes she had handed over to Flinx—“holds about a thousand darts. Each dart carries a few milliliters of an extremely potent neurotoxin. Prick your finger on one end . . .” She shrugged meaningfully.
“The darts are loaded into the clips at the factory in Drallar, and then the clips are sealed. You can’t get a dart out unless you fire it through this.” She patted the butt of the rifle, then turned a corner. They were back in the main hallway.
“You use a gun to kill fish?”
She smiled across at him. Not much of a smile but a first, he thought. “You’ve never been up to The-Blue-That-Blinded