Read Hunter's Run for Free Online

and devilwood to the local conifer-equivalents: iceroot,
creeping willow, hierba. At last, there was no one around to bother him.
For the first time that day, his stomach had almost stopped hurting.
     
    Almost.
     
    With every hour that passed,
every forest and lake that appeared, drew near, and slipped away, the thought
of the European he’d killed grew in Ramon’s mind, his presence sharpening pixel
by pixel, becoming more real, until he could almost, almost, see him sitting in
the copilot’s seat, that stupid look of dumb surprise at his own mortality
still stamped on his big pale face - and the more real his ghostly presence
became, the deeper Ramon’s hatred for him grew.
     
    He hadn’t hated him back at the El
Rey; the man had just been another bastard looking for trouble and finding
Ramon. It had happened before more times than he could recall. It was part of
how things worked. He came to town, he drank, he and some rabid asshole found
each other, and one of them walked away. Maybe it was Ramon, maybe it was the
other guy. Rage, yes, rage had something to do with it, but not hatred. Hatred
meant you knew a man, you cared about him. Rage lifted you up above everything
- morality, fear, yourself. Hatred meant that someone had control over you.
     
    This was the place that usually
brought him peace, the outback, the remote territory, the unpeopled places. The
tension that came with being around people loosened. In the city - Diegotown
or Nuevo Janeiro or any place where too many people came together - Ramon had
always felt the press of people against him. The voices just out of earshot,
the laughter that might or might not have been directed at him, the impersonal
stares of men and women, Elena’s lush body and her uncertain mind; they were
why Ramon drank when he was in the city and stayed sober in the field. In the
field there was no reason to drink.
     
    But here, where that peace should
have been, the European was with him. Ramon would look out into the limitless
bowl of the sky, and his mind would turn back to that night at the El Rey, the
sudden awed silence of the crowd. The blood pouring from the European’s mouth.
His heels drumming against the ground. He checked his maps, and instead of
letting his mind run freely across the fissures and plates of the planetary
surface, he thought of where the police might go to search for him. He could
not let go of what had happened, and the frustration of that was almost as
enraging as the guilt itself.
     
    But guilt was for weaklings and
fools. Everything would be all right. He would spend his time in the field,
communing with the stone and the sky, and when he returned to the city, the
European would be last season’s news. Something half remembered and retold in a
thousand different versions, none of them true. It was one little death among
all the hundreds of millions - natural and otherwise - that happened every year
throughout the known universe. The dead man’s absence would be like taking a
finger out of water; it wouldn’t leave a hole.
     
    Mountains made a line across the
world before him: ice and iron, iron and ice.
     
    Those would be the Sawtooths,
which meant that he’d already overflown Fiddler’s Jump. When he checked the
navigation transponders, there was no signal. He was gone, out of human
contact, off the incomplete communication network of the colony. On his own. He
made the adjustments he’d planned, altering his flight path to throw off any
human hounds that the law might set after him, but even as he did so, the
gesture seemed pointless. He wouldn’t be followed. No one would care.
     
    He set the autopilot, tilted his
chair back until it was almost flat as his cot, and, in spite of the
reproachful almost-presence of the European, let the miles rolling by beneath
him lull him to sleep.
     
    When he woke, the even-grander
peaks of the Sierra Hueso range were thrusting above the horizon, and the sunwas getting low in the sky,