The Upright Man by Michael Marshall Read Free Book Online

scaring a bunch of corporate types and also myself.
    Relent finally showed me this was no way to live. As a girl had told me three months before—a girl who had firsthand experience of what the Upright Man was capable of—there was only one person for the job I had to do. I had to stop running. I had to turn around, and chase.
    By four o’clock the next day I was in San Francisco, and by the end of the evening I finally had a trail.

C HAPTER THREE
    DAWN FOUND T OM CROUCHED AT THE BOTTOM OF a tree, wild-eyed and frozen solid. It found him and tried to put him back, but he was awake and couldn’t be returned. He wasn’t going to be denied a morning now, even if this was a day he hadn’t expected to see.
    When he’d woken in the night everything had happened fast. His back brain found the flight pedal and stamped with all its weight. It didn’t allow for rampant malfunction in all other quarters, and Tom was sprawling before he was even on his feet. With awareness came a terrible understanding of how badly messed up he was, but then the smell cut through again and the naming part of his mind woke up like a siren— B EAR ! B EAR ! B EAR !—and he was moving.
    At first he was on hands and knees more than his feet, but claw-fear got him upright fast. He ricocheted off the sides of the gully until it came up to reach the forest floor, and then scrambled up over the muddy lip and was good to go. He went.
    Not looking back was easy. He didn’t want to see. Reports came in from distant outposts—head messed up, ankle screaming, don’t have the flashlight—but he overrodethem and went twisting into the darkness. All pains and disappointments were as nothing to what it would be like to be caught by the B EAR !, and he ran in a way that short-circuited everything his species had learned since the ice age before last. He ran like an animal, driven by pure body magic. He ran like a fit. He ran like diarrhea. He pinballed through bushes and over logs, tripping and running, eventually bursting out into an area where the trees were more widely spread.
    As he scrabbled toward higher ground he noticed it had snowed again, long after the information had filtered to him through the loud crunching of his feet. This combined with the whacks of thin branches and the wailing in his lungs to make such a cacophony of panic that it took him a while to realize these were the only sounds he could hear. He slipped, crashed down on hands and one knee. Struggled up but slipped again, momentum lost. He stopped, turned around. He was near the top of a small rise in the forest floor. Ready to run again, or die, whichever came first.
    No bear.
    He quick-panned his eyes back and forth across the low hill. Thin moonlight, blue-white reflections, no depth of field. He couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t hear anything, either, even when he held his breath to stop the panting. His chest hurt like fire.
    He backed up a little, into the proximity of a large tree. He knew trying to climb it wouldn’t help. The bear would be far more adept than he, not least because it probably wouldn’t be so close to passing out. But being near the tree felt better.
    He waited. It stayed quiet.
    Then he thought he heard something.
    Something down at the bottom of the rise, deep in the inky darkness and frosty shadows. A cracking of twigs.
    His body went frigid with toxic dismay, but he couldn’t move. He’d run out of panic and had only terror left. Terror didn’t know how to work his limbs.
    He just stood, absolutely still, and didn’t hear the noise again.
    Finally he turned, making a full circle, staring and listening. Nothing. All he could see was snow and shadows. All he heard were dripping sounds, a soft nearby whoosh as a handful of snow sloughed off a branch. He didn’t know what to do.
    So he stayed where he was.
     
    BY SIX A . M . HE FELT APPALLING . H E COULD HAVE balled up all the other hangovers in his life and dropped them into this without touching