Evil Spirit

      Something heavy pressed him to the ground and sickeningly-painfully pressed on a certain part of his back. Irken barked in pain and fright, starting to crawl under something. The steel muzzle of the blaster bit painfully into his chest under pressure from above. This something was almost hot, it pressed the hapless hunter's head to the ground with a powerful limb. It wasn't that deadly animal… Father told him that they are cold, and their legs are thin. And this creature had a wide palm the width of the entire back of his head.       Rouge desperately kicked and growled, trying to get out and escape. He didn't want to die. He didn't want to leave his mother alone. Then someone took him by the antennae, making him go limp, as if paralyzed. Irken couldn't even say anything, he was just breathing hysterically.       “Keep quiet.” A rough, husky voice ordered dryly. The speech is understandable, he spoke in irken. Fear trembled in his veins, his body became colder than it had been before. This is clearly someone grown up and strong. A lot of frightening guesses crept into Ruge's head, he didn't even know which would be the best of the options that came to his mind. The real evil spirit from the forest? A mutated wild monster? A paratrooper? A psychopath from the village, hungry for a partner beyond his age? Only now the last guess began to melt: the voice was unfamiliar, senile and masculine. There were few such old male irkens in the settlement, even the tallest did not pull for this title. Only one invader, who remained disabled after the fall of the Empire, he would not have been able to follow him into the forest, knowing about the dangers.       “ Spare me ...” Ruge squeaked plaintively in a trembling voice, fearing the next second to feel the blaster beam burning his skin. From the side, the fire was extinguished with a sweeping wave of hand, buried by moist dirt pulled out by plants. The attacker fell silent and pressed the young irken's head to the ground harder, he obediently fell silent, believing that he was being forced to at least breathe more quietly.       “Everything is quiet.” Stated the one who pressed from above. Still trembling, Ruge began to count his fingers. There seemed to be three of them. Like Irken's. Was he attacked by another Irken? Are there really other communities, or is it a miraculously surviving hermit? An exile? “Why did you light the fire, you idiot? Didn't anyone teach you that it’s a rod for these chunky ones?” It took a while for Ruge to realize what chunky ones he was talking about. "Who are you... what are you going to do to me...?" - almost weeping, the poor hunter mumbled. The pressure on back eased, the pain disappeared, but there seemed to be an imprint on the pinched place. The head was still held.       “For the sake of Irk, don't whine, did I scare you that much?” - an unknown old irken from was fidgeting, doing something. “Let me let you go right now, and you calmly stand up without making too much noise?”       The pressure on head smoothly disappeared. Later, Ruge also felt how they moved away from him. He hesitantly lay still on his cold blaster, which still bit painfully into his chest. Irken anxiously reached for the blaster and, trembling, began to turn back.              There was a creature behind, looking in the dark with its glowing yellow eye. A barely noticeable dark yellow pupil slid down, catching the figure of a blaster.        “Did you come here to hunt or something? My starlight, do you even know how to shoot?” - the affectionate nickname from the Evil Spirit caused rejection. This giant, who called him the starlight, strangled his fellow tribesirken and pursued another to the settlement?       The stranger did not get an answer from Ruge and looked in the direction of the fire he had littered. Because of the movement of the Evil Spirit's head, the young hunter managed to see the antenna pressed against his back. Soon he realized that something was wrapped around the tall figure's head, which pressed the antennas. More and more the figure resembled irken. Here is a distinct figure, arms, legs. And the eye glows in the dark, as the Irken eyes should.       “You can't make bonfires.” - The Evil Spirit scolded. – “It only beckons them, they are not afraid of fire. You also poured wet foliage there, the smoke was falling so that I noticed it from afar. If you want to live, don't do it again.”       “Who are you...?” - he repeated his question, frowning defensively. The stranger looked at him appraisingly, causing an even greater need to pout and seem more threatening.       “I'm already nobody, in theory. The ghost...” - the figure began to go back into the thicket. Ruge realized that he was going to hide, and in order not to lose sight of him, he rushed after him, but literally behind the tree there was no one. Indeed, a ghost. He disappeared as if he had never been there. The hunter listened, but did not hear any unnecessary rustling or the sound of footsteps. It was dangerous to call, he almost did it, but he stopped himself in time: it can wake up all the animals.       Irken looked at the pile of sticks covered with dirt that had smothered the fire. There was nowhere else to warm up, the forest with its dark crowns closing over his head, pressed on the psyche. It was as if the darkness itself was trying to swallow him up. With a sorrowful sigh, with shame, he went home.       As he walked, he heard a strange rustling in the distance. Stopping and listening, he realized that someone was rummaging in the bushes. Quietly creeping up, hiding behind the trees, Ruge went on stage: in a low spreading plant, a silvery body was rustling, whose chitinous armor shone under the dim, sad light of the local moon. Turning over a dozen of its legs, divided into segments, the creature crawled out of the bush in reverse, crunching something with its jaws. It looks like it was eating a quiet animal that lives in the bushes. The descendant those monsters that hacked up the Irkens, in an upright position, would be as big as a Ruge’s leg. The creature was indeed stocky, but that's why it was strong. Irken slowly began to raise the muzzle of the blaster and aim at the animal. The claw was on the hook. His own breathing and squideelyspooch's beating... everything is so deafeningly loud… It seemed that the stuffed animal would certainly hear and rush to attack.       Unable to withstand such tension, Ruge fired and did not hit. Squideelyspooch suddenly froze, the body cooled down again. The monster screamed in fright and bounced off the burnt grass. It looked in his direction and rushed at him. Irken rushed away, trying to reload on the move, but his fingers slipped off the heavy blaster, and he stumbled over every root, not looking at the road at all. Hysterical, frightened thoughts raced through his head. Suddenly he thought he heard someone else running from the side. Fleetingly glancing there, he saw another such creature jumping at him on the move. Ruge ducked, but it still caught him with its legs and took him away with its whole carcass. Irken fell, clutching the blaster to his chest as if it was his only salvation. The beast itself barely turned over, preparing to attack again. Another one also caught up.       Feeling a rush of painfully cold despair, Ruge defended himself with a blaster. The stupid monster couldn't reach his face with its jaws. The other one finally reached and began to gnaw the toe of the shoe, the next moment biting through the material and cracking the irken's claw. From this terrible sound, Ruge shook, and he managed to hit the creature on the head with his other foot, which made it squeal and stagger away. But the monster that attacked him guessed to crawl further, which made it get closer and closer to his face, no matter how he moved the blaster away from him.       Then it slipped off and fell on his cheek with its open jaw. Ruge let out a long cry of pain. He dropped the blaster and began trying to push the massive, thick monster away from him, and it was twitching, aggravating the wound it had bitten through. But suddenly something pushed the two of them in the side. The jaws did not open much and with a sharp movement in the side tore the wound more. As soon as the monster fell behind, Ruge took hold of the injured cheek and began to crawl away. Hot tears appeared in his eyes, caused by terrible pain. Also, something hot and sticky splashed on his face. He didn't want to know what it was. Burying his back against a tree, he finally opened his eyes. From tears and pain, everything blurred.       Someone was standing with a long pole in front of two dead monsters. When they turned around, Ruge realized who had come to his aid.       There was a smell of blood and something else like that. The evil spirit shook the pole, and something wetly landed on the floor. Blood. Or something from the internal organs of those animals.       The blood was rapidly leaving the body, in a matter of seconds it filled the palm of Ruge and flowed down the forearm, dripping onto the tunic and tar leggings. Also, blood began to pour into his mouth. It was the worst injury he had ever received. He panicked and gasped, dumbfounded, trying to remove his palm from his cheek.       “Stop, press it back.” The Evil Spirit ordered and came closer, driving the pole into the ground. It entered without any problems, as if there was something sharp at the end. Most likely, it was, but the young irken was specifically not up to it. “How it gushes out of you… Come on, I'll patch you up. You won't get home that way. Come on, get up.”       The yellow-eyed irken pulled Ruge by the arm, lifting him to his weak legs. He took his own, as it turned out, spear.       “Did you come for them?” He waved his spear towards the two bodies. “They don't like the smell of their own blood anyway, they won't follow us. However, they can crawl to your cry. We need to get out.”       Trembling and not understanding anything, the hunter hung a blaster behind his back, and then took the fleshy monster's leg with his free hand, dragging it behind him. An Evil Spirit took a smaller one for himself.       “This will be a gift for me for saving your life.” The spirit commented and led the still unconscious irken behind him.        The forest began to grow in the middle of the city. All the buildings were either blocked and full of all kinds of corpses, or dilapidated due to falling ships, whose pilots were busy fighting for their lives, but not piloting. He was taken to one of these buildings. Everywhere on the floor there was construction debris in the form of paint that had fallen from the ceiling, packages of some food, bottles, wind-blown leaves. In the next room, there was a side of some kind of ship, which neatly plugged the same gap it made, because of which it was impossible to get into the building. The Evil spirit stopped, not letting the wounded hunter pass. Nothing rustled, everything was quiet.       The tall owner walked through this mountain of garbage, deliberately making noise. Then he stopped again. Ruge realized, with a barely thinking brain, that he was checking whether there were those creatures in chitin in the building. They willingly followed the sound. But now no one has come out. Then the Evil Spirit led Irken with a calm soul up the stairs to the second floor and into one of the rooms. It was dirty there too. It must have been a laboratory before. Sinks, strange non-working devices, a lot of lockers with transparent glass. The spirit threw the carcass at the aisle and began to look for something in the lockers, returning with something in his hands. Without a word, he removed the hunter's hand from his face and washed the wound with a painfully stinging liquid, in which some rag was deceived.       “Bite on something, it will hurt” – He said. “You can shout, the window is closed and the sound does not pass.”       Ruge broke off the creature's leg and put it in his mouth. Sometimes in smeetshood he was given this to sharpen his fangs. The spirit grunted and pressed something sharp. The pain beating all over the nervous system again. Irken growled, clutching chitinous leg with his already strengthened fangs. Whatever the Spirit did, he did it many, many times. After a while, he realized by the way the skin of his cheek was being squeezed that it was being sewn up. Ten schmeely-minutes later, the hell was over, and an ordinary plaster lay on top of the seam, however, which burned him sharply that he wanted to scream again. But later there was only pain from the burn, then there was nothing.       Irken fell silent, looking at the floor while the owner was busy. He wanted to spit out that unpleasant, spicy liquid that was still in my mouth. How could he not choke on it while he was screaming in pain? The Evil spirit understood and silently pointed into some kind of bucket, which seemed to contain garbage… Considering that garbage was lying around everywhere.       “Do you want to eat?” - Ruge shook his head, afraid even to open his mouth once again from the strained sensation in his cheek. He didn't even spit out the blood, but just let it flow out of his slightly open mouth. Although everything he ate during his rest seemed to have disappeared from his stomach. No satiety. “Can you at least get some sleep? Gain strength, rushing through the forest being tired is bad idea.”       “Have to be back before morning. They are awake during day.” - The hunter explained raggedly, however, because of the loss of blood and the shock he experienced, he wanted to lie down quietly and at least nap a little.       “Nonsense from the Cyberflox ditch ...” - the Evil Spirit shook his head. Ruge had never heard such expressions in his environment. “They live in intervals. In the afternoon and until the evening they sleep like a log. In the evening and the first half of the night they are awake, then they are interrupted for sleep for several hours, after which they are awake again in the second half of the night until the first half of the day. I have been following their behavior for many years. Everyone, as one, goes to sleep at the proper time. Now they’re at their active phase. You seem to have quietly sat out their sleepy phase with the campfire. It will be better for you if you wait for a safe hour and go home.”       “Aren’t you lying?” Half-sluggish irken asked doubtfully.       “If I wanted to harm you, I wouldn't even come. Come with me.” The spirit waved behind him and led the hunter into the next room. There was a thick canvas lying on the floor, surrounded by garbage. There was even something like a pillow. “You don't wear a PAK... but I do. I don't need sleep, you can sleep here.”       Ruge dropped his blaster and hesitantly lay down. He was still wary of the strange irken... if he was an Irken. He could get confused in the dark and see what he wanted. The hunter tried to lie down comfortably on a meager couch. However, his fatigue was enough and this level of sophistication.       “Why didn't you come to live in the settlement?” he asked suddenly, closing his eyes. The figure of the spirit sat down next to him, sticking out one leg forward and bending the other in knee. The light lay down so Ruge, slightly opening his eye, noticed two claws on someone else's leg. Definitely irken.       “There are reasons for that… I don't want to talk about them.” The Evil spirit sighed and closed his yellow eye. Now he could seem like a pile of some junk in the corner of the room. Looks like he's been exiled… For what? “You'd better tell me why you went hunting? You can't even hold a blaster with confidence in your hands.”       “The need. My father was hunting, he died. Mother earns poorly.” Ruge replied and sadly buried his face in the bed. Still, it was calmer in the presence of an unfamiliar relative. He might even have been able to sleep. “I had to steal to live…”       "A thief, then, huh?" The Evil Spirit grinned, and Ruge was ashamed, pursing his antennas and looking away. Now the hermit would have to tell him off for this. “I used to steal too… Slightly… Just one package per day…”       “And... and what did you steal?”  the hunter would not have thought that such a conversation would be started with him. He had a premonition of someone else's life story. And, perhaps, even touched upon the times when the Empire stood.       “Stole military rations… In particular, sugar... then sold it on the planet-the black market, with this money I was treated by one lovely person, and I gave her gifts… Ha…”       "And then what happened?" Ruge pushed shyly, standing up on his elbow. The Evil spirit sighed bitterly, lowering his head, and then raising and opening his eyes with longing.        “I flew back to the Irk in order to get more… And I managed just in time for the apocalypse... these chunky shells were dropped on us. The hull was damaged, and they got out. What a horror it was… You probably weren’t here yet… All the streets were covered in the bodies of both kinds. Everywhere the rustle of their limbs, screams and blaster shots, the crunch of bones… I have never seen such fierce chaos in military operations. I saved myself by deftly climbing vertically. They're too heavy to climb like that, and their claws are blunt, they can't cling. And that's the only way I hid from them, crawled over the walls of houses, that times I lost my gloves and shoes…       “ So you are… Moving through the trees?” Ruge guessed, remembering that there seemed to be no one around him, but the Evil Spirit managed to attack and knock him to the ground. He must have jumped on it from a tree.       “That's right. This is much safer, because even lighter descendants are not able to climb trees ... And I am able to… I advise you to learn how to do it, too. Feel the branch under you and estimate the distance. A useful skill… Especially in these conditions, since you are forced to work and follow in your father's footsteps… By the way, it's better to leave the blaster at home… It’s too noisy and might set something on fire… In both cases, the nearest chunky ones can come for you. You better be using something quiet and cold, like a spear, like mine…”       The evil spirit reached for his spear and rotated it in the light of the moon so that Ruge could see it better. It was a metal pipe sharpened at the end, wrapped with cloth in several places, most likely for better contact with the owner's hands. That was impressive.       Young irken felt a strange feeling towards the old hermit, known as something monstrous in his settlement. He taught him the wisdom of hunting instead of his father who had gone to eternal rest. Like the grandfather he never had. He even wanted to feel himself as a little smeet, sitting at home late at night, who can't sleep. And listen to stories from the life of an awakened older relative.       "Can you... tell me about that planet? Well, where did you sell sugar..." asked Ruge breathlessly, still not letting up. The aching, itchy pain in the cheek was forgotten, the hysteria from the attack of monsters was behind.       The evil spirit, after thinking, began to tell.       He told about how he came up with the idea of flying there in general. He explained that he decided to sell dry rations in order to escape from the elimination of old age in the Empire, "he was arranging a well-deserved pension for himself." He told about what he thought about the bloodthirsty empire, putting the young irken at confusion. How come? Everyone in the village were saying that the Empire was beautiful, and this old irken angrily declared that it did not value anyone, publicly executed all the objectionable, exposing them as traitors to the motherland, that arbitrariness was covered everywhere, with which he unsuccessfully fought. He proved: he listed the names, ages, professions and dates of death of slaves of the empire who died at the hands of their superiors. It was terrible.       Later, he calmed down, deciding that it was useless to waste his nerves. He told the rest with gentleness. About how he met the love of his life on that planet, what a bright euphoria he experienced. Whom he encountered, befriended and feuded with while living there. And about the strange irken traveler with a broken antenna, and about the nurse in the hospital of his lady squideelyspooch, and about his racing student, and about arrogant patients, and about arrogant investors. He told him everything about everyone.       It turns out that there is something else beyond this murdered planet. Trade, cultures, races, robbers, law enforcers, sweets and sournesses, crazy sincere love, not forced and boring, as here. But why did not sweet memories of unknown lands shine in the eyes of others? Why was he the only one who admired the other world, which he had known to the fullest for some time? He must be tormented by separation from the world in which he has found a home and peace. It was even difficult for Ruge to imagine what this Evil Spirit had been experiencing for twenty long years.       So far, no one has aspired to space. They tried at least to increase the population before returning to the cold, empty space, in the center of which there is life. Ruge didn't even have a chance to offer the old irken a ticket home – the masters didn't repair ships, they mastered other technical professions, like blaster collectors and others... Not a single transport worked on the planet anymore.       Suddenly losing all mood, Ruge lay down on the ill-fated bed.       “How is life there in your community? From the outside it seems that it is peaceful and calm” Suddenly the Evil Spirit spoke, again with his eyes closed. Hearing a slight rustle somewhere in the distance, he moved his antenna sticking out from under the headband, listening, but immediately relaxed.       “Usually everything is always quiet, but lately I've been making a fuss about stealing… Yesterday... or even today… In general, I stole money from an old irken. She chased me all over the market, and I was caught anyway…”       “Isn't she the one who is always with a bunch of smeets?” - the Evil Spirit asked, which made the unsuccessful hunter surprised.       “How do you know…”       “I've been observing your settlement for a long time, I've already memorized everyone, except that I don't know the names. Of the old irkens you have, I know several males and one female. Maybe the others just don't come out to my eyes… So, I always see the same one around smeets. At first, it seems, she raised her own smeets, and now she has grandsmeets. Were you talking about her?”       “ You are perceptive ...” - muttered Ruge, burying himself in an unpleasant cloth from shame. “Yes, I stole from her.”       “Isn't it hard for her to raise so much by any chance? I don't think stealing from her was a good idea. It is necessary to steal from those who are so rich that they do not notice the difference.”       “I... stole a lot of money…”       “ Tsk-tsk...! - the Evil Spirit scolded him passively and jokingly. – I wouldn't advise you to steal. You live in a small community, everyone knows you. It would have been better if you had begged forgiveness for yourself in a useful way.”       “They don't take me anywhere to work! How can I do this?”       “And whose carcass is lying here?” still without opening his eyes, irken in a blindfold pointed to a dead monster, turned upside down with its belly and sticking out its thin, disgusting legs.       “But it was you who killed it ...”  Ruge stood up, looking at the unpleasant figure illuminated by the moon. It seemed that it was about to jerk and attack.       “ And you don't tell anyone that. You killed him.”       “What about my cheek?” he put the claw on the plaster, his cheek suddenly ached.       “You found a first aid kit and an ambulance manual in the wrecked ship. Voila.” The Evil Spirit shrugged his shoulders with ease. It seemed that there was no way to make him a fool. “ Sleep for now, I'll take you home when the time comes. Then, if you decide to continue hunting, contact me, I will teach you. Then you'll teach your comrades, so that they don't run around like fools in the woods and shoot that the earth shakes.”       Ruge gave up and flopped back down, the firmness of the floor, not softened by the couch, warned that it was no longer worth doing so.       Perhaps this is the strangest hunt in his life.