Part 2

She tossed another one back at him, and he missed, and they both grinned.

Then he grunted, remembering something from the dim past. He picked up a small fallen branch from the ground.

When he looked up, she was poised to run.

This time he shook his head, waving the stick gently. "Play," he said.

She threw another stone, eyes warily on the stick. He swung, missed.

He hit the next one, and the sharp crack, and the noise the stone made rattling off into the bushes, flattened him to the ground, eyes searching for sign of men.

She was beside him. He smelled her body and her breath.

They saw no one.

He looked at her lying beside him. She was grinning again.

Then she laughed; and, without knowing what he was doing or why--he could hardly remember ever doing it before--he laughed too.

It felt good. Like the snarl that wasn't a snarl, only better. It seemed to come from way inside. He laughed again, sitting up. He laughed a third time, tight hesitant sounds that came out of his throat and stretched his lips until they wouldn't stretch any more.

Tears were on his cheeks, and he was laughing very tightly, very steadily, and she was laughing the same way, and they lay that way for a few minutes until they were trembling and their stomachs ached, and the laughter was almost crying.

He saw her face, so close by, and felt an impulse. He rolled over and started to scuffle with her. When she realized that he wasn't trying to kill her, that he was playing, she scuffled back, rubbing his face in the dirt harder than he had hers, because she was stronger.

He spat dirt and grass and grinned at her, and they fell apart.

Footsteps.

* * * * *

His knife was out and ready, and so was hers.

Legs moved on the other side of the bushes, stopped.

Silently, almost stepping between the leaves on the ground, Steven and the girl crawled out the other side of the bushes and took up positions against treetrunks, just enough of their heads protruding to see around.

A man came probing into the head-high bushes from the path side ... stood there a moment looking around, only a vague brown shape through the leaves.

He grunted, went out to the path again, walked on.

Steven and the girl followed him by his sounds, trailing about twenty feet behind, until Steven got a good look at him when he passed an open space between the bushes.

He was a big man in brownish-green clothes--new-looking clothes, not full of holes. He walked almost carelessly, as if he didn't care who heard him.

And Steven saw the reason for that.

Men with guns always walked louder. This man wore a holstered gun at his belt, and carried another one--a long gun something like a rifle, only bulkier.

Steven's lips curled. He darted a look at the girl. Across his mind flashed the vague idea of sharing whatever the man had with her, but he didn't know how to let her know.

She was looking at the guns, eyes wide. Afraid. She shook her head.

Steven snarled silently at her, put a hand on her chest, shoved gently.

She stayed there as he moved on.

Silently he drifted from tree to tree, bush to bush, getting ahead of his quarry. The big man's shoes clumped noisily along. Steven had no trouble telling where he was.

At last Steven spotted a good tree, a thick-foliaged one about forty feet up the path, where the sun would be in the man's eyes.

If the man kept following the path--

He did.

And when he passed below the tree, Steven was waiting on the low branch that overhung the path--waiting with his face taut and his eyes staring and his knife ready. One stab at the base of the skull, and the guns would be his.

He jumped.

* * * * *

They brought them into the camp. By this time Steven and the girl had found that their captors were far too strong and too many to escape from, and quite adept at protecting themselves from the foulest of blows. But still the two of them struggled now and then, panting like animals.

Everything at the camp, which was over on Long Island, near Flushing Bay, was neat and trim and olive-drab, and it was almost evening now, and as the jeep rolled up the avenue between the rows of tents Steven and the girl stopped struggling to blink at the first artificial lights they'd seen in a very long time.

In the lieutenant's tent, the big man Steven had tried to kill said to the man behind the desk, "Like a jaguar, sir. Right out of the tree he came. I had him spotted, of course, but he did a peach of a job of trailing me. If I _hadn't_ been ready for him, I'd be a dogtag."

The lieutenant looked at Steven and the girl, standing before him, and the four soldiers who stood behind them, one to each strong dirty young arm.

"The others got the girl, eh?" he said.

"Yessir. When we first heard 'em, I started making enough noise to cover the rest of the boys." The sergeant grinned. "I swear, he came at me as neat as any commando ever did."

"God," said the lieutenant, and closed his eyes for a moment. "What a thing. Let this war be the last one, Sipich. So _this_ is what happened to New York in six years. Maniacs. Murderers. Worst of all, wolf-children. And the rest of the country...."

"Well, we're back now, sir. We can start putting it all back together--"

"God," said the lieutenant again. "Do you think the pieces will fit?" He looked at Steven. "What is your name, son?"

Steven snarled.

"Take them away," said the lieutenant wearily. "Feed them. Delouse them. Send them to the Georgia camp."

"They'll be okay, sir. In a year or so they'll be smiling all over the place, taking an interest in things. Kids are kids, sir."

"_Are_ they? _These_ kids, Sipich? ... I don't know. I just don't know."

The sergeant gave an order, and the four soldiers urged Steven and the girl out of the tent. There was a bleat of pain as one of the children placed a kick.

The sergeant started to follow his men out. At the tent flaps he paused. "Sir ... maybe you'd like to know: we found these two because they were playing and laughing. We were scouting the park, and heard them laughing."

"They were?" said the lieutenant, looking up from the forms he was filling out. "_Playing?_"

"It's still there, sir. Deep down. It has to be."

"I see," said the lieutenant slowly. "Yes, I suppose it is. And now we've got to dig it up."

"Well ... we buried it, sir."