The Outpost Read Online Free PDF Page B

when and how he stopped being Hellfire Carson.

    Getting back to my story (said Hellfire Van Winkle), I stayed on Peponi for a few years after the massacre at the Bukwa Enclave, picking up some money here and there as a guide, or from time to time as a meat hunter for the new towns that were springing up, and in all that time I never saw a Landship. Neither had any of the other hunters or explorers, and we just all assumed that the last of ’em had been killed in the Enclave.
    Then one day I was out in the bush, hunting Demoncats for the trophy market, when I heard this mournful wailing sound off in the distance. Only sound I’d ever heard even remotely like it was years ago—the lonesome, heartbroken sound a baby Landship made when you killed its mother. This was kind of like it, only much louder.
    I followed the sound to its source, and came upon the biggest Landship I’d ever seen. He must’ve stood close to twenty feet at the shoulder, and he was standing all alone in the middle of the forest, howling his misery. I couldn’t see any wounds on him, so I decided to follow him for a while to discover the cause of all this unhappiness.
    Also, truth to tell, I kind of half-believed the old legend of a Landships’ Graveyard, and I wouldn’t have minded a bit if he’d led me to it so I could go around gathering eyestones, but he didn’t. He just kept howling out his pain and his misery as he moved from one spot to another, and after a couple of days it dawned on me that he was searching for another of his kind, that he’d probably been looking for another Landship for years now, and he’d pretty much figured out that he wasn’t going to find one—that he was the last of his kind.
    Oh, he went through the motions, traveled to the most likely places to find his brothers and sisters, but I could tell by the way he carried himself that he didn’t expect to find anything except more empty spaces where herds of his kind were once so large that it took them a full day to travel past, start to finish.
    He spotted me on the fifth day, and though I was sure he’d been hunted in the past and knew the range and power of a Man’s weapons, he just stood there and stared at me, as if begging me to put him out of his misery. I didn’t do it—I have nothing against breaking the law, but I didn’t want to be remembered as the man who killed the last Landship—and after a while he went back to his endless search. I didn’t make any attempt to keep my presence a secret, and he just kind of tolerated me. Never tried to charge me, never tried to hide from me, just acted like I was simply one more burden to bear in his already over-burdened existence.
    We spent close to two months wandering from forest to savannah to scrub bush, and by the end of that time I was as anxious to find some more of his kind as he was, if only to stop that mournful wailing every time we hit a new area and realized we’d come up blank again.
    Then one day we crossed the track of a safari. I could tell by the signs that they were no more than eight or nine hours ahead of us. I wanted to turn aside so there’d be no chance of running into them, but convincing a wild Landship to turn away when he doesn’t want to takes more skills than I’ve got. My Landship was so desperate that the instant he picked up the scent of the safari, he headed off in their direction. I knew he couldn’t sense any other Landships up ahead, and he had to know there were hunters and guns at the end of the track, but who knows how a Landship’s mind works, especially one that’s been slowly going crazy with loneliness for years and years?
    A couple of hours later I found a discarded laser battery, and I could tell from the customized casing that it belonged to Catamount Greene, and I knew that if Greene saw the Landship nothing could stop him from killing it for its eyestones.
    And suddenly I realized that I didn’t want the last Landship to die for the same stupid reason