Lost and found_ a novel - Alan Dean Foster [6]
Parting words of reassurance notwithstanding, maybe just seeing off his besotted gravid sister’s temporary gentleman friend hadn’t been enough to satisfy Shorty Snakeyes’s beleaguered ego. How had they found him? Slipping out of the sleeping bag as noiselessly as possible, Walker dressed in silence, working out of a crouch as he fought with the jeans that kept trying to trip him, staring through the gauzy tent material at every imagined shape and shadow.
It wouldn’t have been too hard to track him down. With Cawley Lake as deserted as it was now, close to the end of the season, there were only so many places a visiting camper was likely to pitch a tent. Doubtless a few local fishermen or hikers had seen him up here. In a small town, word about lingering visitors would get around fast.
He felt better when he was fully dressed. Somehow, the thought of getting beaten up while stark naked was far more unsettling. Not that it would matter to his doctor. Or to his friends, who upon his return and reappearance in Chicago would torment him mercilessly for weeks with chorused fusillades of well-meaning “I told you so’s.”
Fumbling in the dark, he found the fisherman’s steel multitool he’d brought with him and unfolded the long blade. Sometimes just a show of resistance would be enough to put off potential assailants. It was one thing to jump some poor tourist caught half asleep in the sack, quite another to confront a fully awake 220-pound opponent holding a knife. If they had guns, however, he would just have to resign himself to taking a beating.
More rustling noises, near the front of the tent this time. Reaching down, Walker picked up the compact high-beam flashlight. Flash them in the eyes, startle ’em, and then stare them down, he thought rapidly. They shouldn’t be expecting it.
That the bent-over figure that quickly unzipped the tent flap and thrust its head inside was not expecting to have a bright light shined in its eyes was made immediately clear by its reaction. It let out a startled roar, covered both horizontally flattened eyes with the sucker-studded, flexible flaps that comprised the forward third of its upper appendages, sharply retracted the membranous hearing sensor that protruded from near the top of its conical skull, and jerked back out of the shelter.
Gaping open-mouthed at the unzipped entrance flap, Walker was somehow not reassured by the sudden retreat of the intruder. He did, finally, remember to breathe.
“What in the hell . . . ?”
It was not yet October. Therefore, it was still a while until Halloween. It did not matter. Whatever had pushed the forepart of its outrageous self into his tent had not been in costume. You could tell these things. Yet, it could not be real, either. So, if it was not real, then why was he shaking so badly that the inside of the tent looked as if it was under attack by a flotilla of fireflies?
When his trembling hand finally steadied, so did the flashlight it clutched in a death grip. The firefly armada resolved once again into a single circlet of illumination that waited patiently on the inner lining of the pop-up shelter. Wishing he was at that moment anywhere else, even in Bug Jump’s only tavern, Walker extended a tentative hand toward the tent flap, pulled it aside, and peered out through the resultant opening.
The creature whose unprotected eyes had taken the full brunt of his flashlight’s LEDs was folded on the ground next to the lakeshore. Standing over it was another of the nocturnal apparitions. This one was holding a device that blinked some sort of dull brown beam rapidly off and on into its companion’s face. The standing being was slightly under seven feet tall and, assuming its density was not unlike that of a terrestrial creature, between three and four hundred pounds in weight. Its enormous eyes were perhaps two inches high and six or seven long. Nearly meeting in the center of the sloping face, where a nose ought to have been, they curved almost around to the sides of the tapering head. Moonlight gleaming