Zoe's Tale (Old Man's War, #4)(40)

"I'll take that under advisement, Zoe," Magdy said, and turned to go back to his pals.

"Fine," Gretchen said. "Take this under advisement, too: You tell your pals there about what followed us out there in the woods, and I'll tell them the part where you ended up eating dirt because Hickory dropped you to the ground after you panicked and took a shot at him."

"A really lousy shot," I said. "One where you almost blew off your own toe."

"Good point," Gretchen said. "We'll have fun telling that part."

Magdy narrowed his eyes at both of us and stomped off toward his pals without another word.

"Think it'll work?" I asked.

"Of course it'll work," Gretchen said. "Magdy's ego is the size of a planet. The amount of time and effort he puts into doing things to make himself look good is astounding. He's not going to let us mess with that."

As if on cue, Magdy glanced over at Gretchen. She waved and smiled. Magdy surreptitiously flipped her off and started talking to his friends. "See," Gretchen said. "He's not that hard to understand."

"You liked him once," I reminded her.

"I still like him," Gretchen said. "He's very cute, you know. And funny. He just needs to pull his head out of a certain part of his anatomy. Maybe in another year he'll be tolerable."

"Or two," I said.

"I'm optimistic," Gretchen said. "Anyway, that's one rumor squashed for now."

"It's not really a rumor," I said. "We really were followed that night. Hickory said so."

"I know," Gretchen said. "And it's going to come out sooner or later. I'd just rather not have it involve us. My dad still doesn't know I did all that sneaking out, and he's the sort of guy that believes in retroactive punishment."

"So you're not really worried about avoiding panic," I said. "You're just covering your own tail."

"Guilty," Gretchen said. "But avoiding panic is how I'm rationalizing it."

But as it happens, we didn't avoid panic for long.

Paulo Gutierrez was a member of the colonial council, and it was there he found out that Joe Loong had not only been killed, but that he'd been murdered - and not by a human being. There really was something else out there. Something smart enough to make spears and knives. Something smart enough to turn poor Joe Loong into food.

The council members had been ordered by my parents not to talk about this fact yet, in order to avoid a panic. Paulo Gutierrez ignored them. Or, actually, defied them.

"They told me it was covered by something called the State Secrets Act, and that I couldn't tell you about it," Gutierrez told a group that surrounded him and a few other men, all carrying rifles. "I say to hell with that. There's something that's out there right now, killing us. They have weapons. They say they follow the fantie herds, but I think they could have just been in the woods all this time, sizing us up, so they would know how to hunt us. They hunted Joe Loong. Hunted him and killed him. Me and the boys here are planning to return the favor." And then Gutierrez and his hunting party tromped off in the direction of the woods.

Gutierrez's declaration and news of his hunting party raced through the colony. I heard about it as kids came running up to the community center with all the latest; by that time Gutierrez and his crew had already been in the woods for a while. I went to tell my parents, but John and Jane were already off to bring back the hunting party. The two of them were former military; I didn't think they would have any trouble bringing them back.

But I was wrong. John and Jane found the hunting party, but before they could drag them back, the creatures in the woods ambushed them all. Gutierrez and all his men were killed in the attack. Jane was stabbed in the gut. John chased after the fleeing creatures and caught up with them at the tree line, where they attacked another colonist at his homestead. That colonist was Hiram Yoder, one of the Mennonites who helped save the colony by training the rest of us how to plant and farm without the help of computerized machinery. He was a pacifist and didn't try to fight the creatures. They killed him anyway.

In the space of a couple of hours, six colonists were dead, and we learned that we weren't alone on Roanoke - and what was here with us was getting used to hunting us.

But I was more worried about my mom.

"You can't see her yet," Dad said to me. "Dr. Tsao is working on her right now."

"Is she going to be okay?" I asked.

"She'll be okay," Dad said. "She said it was not as bad as it looked."

"How bad did it look?" I asked him.

"It looked bad," Dad said, and then realized that honesty wasn't really what I was looking for at the moment. "But, look, she ran after those things after she'd been wounded. If she had been really injured, she wouldn't have been able to do that, right? Your mom knows her own body. I think she'll be fine. And anyway, she's being worked on right now. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she's walking around like nothing happened by this time tomorrow."

"You don't have to lie to me," I said, although per the previous comment he was actually telling me what I wanted to hear.

"I'm not lying," Dad said. "Dr. Tsao is excellent at what she does. And your mom is a very fast healer these days."