The Wild Lands: Legend of the Wild Man by Joe Darris Read Free Book Online

assault on both the vultus and the biselk . The beast had shown
unbelievable fluidity and control of its shrouded body. Baucis knew
the thing understood the interplay of fear and its effects on the
mind better than he did. It probably used pheromones either
consciously or unconsciously. The VRCs did not have any control
over the powerful chemicals, they remained infuriatingly
intangible.
    There were too many unknowns for Baucis's
taste. He didn't know what the beast looked like, or why it had
bothered with the biselk skin. Hypotheses darted through his
mind. It could have been trying to protect itself from the vultus 's corrosive stomach acids. Perhaps it donned the
leather as a ruse to drive fear into the bird's brain. The most
troubling hypothesis was that it wore the skull and skin as a
disguise- a deliberate effort to hide its own identity. All he had
seen behind the remains of his most improved biselk was a
hand that used parts of its world as tools, as weapons. The hand
and what it implied sent a few scant molecular compounds of fear
from Baucis's own drug dealing brain to his body. His pulse did not
slow. His delicate hands felt clammy. Despite his immediate
discomfort, he was exhilarated. Baucis was unaccustomed to fear. It
represented a challenge.
    The beast may prove to be one of the most
important things ever discovered. It may be the link between
Spire City and the surface.
    The Scourge had bottled up Spire City. The
surface was still rife with the stuff. Even if they could manage to
get down, only disease and decay awaited them. Most citizens
assumed other parts of the world survived, but there was no way to
know. Even on the surface, they could never leave the
electromagnetic field of the Spire. Electricity was a kind
mistress, but she carried a short yoke.
    Baucis’s first theory (totally untestable)
was that the beast was somehow related to the apes that lived on
the other continents. Across the oceans there had been large apes
that used fairly primitive tools. The apes had been the closest
cousins of humans and one type, the chimpanzee, shared 98 percent
of their genetic code with humans. But the Master ecologist’s lab
would never test this biped against those. Speculation ruled this
theory. If the beast was one of the known apes, its species must
have mutated drastically to become the two legged creature. As far
as Baucis knew, those apes had traveled on their hind legs but
relied on their knuckles heavily. The knife-throwing beast most
surely did not. Still, it was a possibility. Extreme mutations were
necessary to survive in a world that produced little beyond
stillborn offspring or spectacularly adapted individuals. Baucis
had estimated the time needed to evolve such an intelligent
predator from the apes, and didn't think the century after the
Scourge would give enough time, but it remained a possibility. The biselk had changed much more in last century than the one
before and the howluchin s hadn't even existed a century ago!
Yet his continent was home to none of the great apes and the
ecologist had other ideas.
    There was the possibility that the thing was
human. Some could have survived the Scourge, but Baucis
didn't think so. There was too much chaos after its coming, too
much death. No one had ever tried to signal the citizenry of Spire
City. No radio messages, no lights, no smoke, nothing from the
surface to indicate a human population. If the beast was human, it
understood the savagery of the hunt more than civilization. Baucis
couldn’t dismiss the possibility, but if the beast didn't speak,
they would never know if it was their species' brother, or a
distant cousin.
    The most unsettling hypothesis was that the
thing was the Wild Man. The prospect sent shivers
down Baucis's spine. He had helped conceive the phrase, along with
the Scourge, decades ago with Ntelo, as a way to simplify the
dangers the surface represented. He had been as shocked as any when
the story gained traction and spiraled