Chapter Twenty-Two

THE RAIN CONTINUED throughout the night and into the early morning. None of us slept a wink, and even after the storm receded, there was nowhere decent to sleep. So, following a bland meal-in-a-bag, Caspersen gave the order to move out.

Again, it occurred to me that the civilians seemed to be handling matters very well. We were wet, cold, and generally miserable, but they barely complained and remained largely cooperative.

We trudged through the day in this manner. Thick, heavy humidity hung in the air. Our clothes refused to dry, and even breathing came with an effort. Everywhere we stepped, mud oozed and sloshed around our soaked feet.

The chattering overhead picked up midday and continued after we set up camp. Our half-hearted attempts at lighting a fire met with failure since we had nothing dry enough to ignite. We settled in for another long, unpleasant night with the knowledge there’d be no smoke to drive away our unwelcome observers this time.

Sleep proved evasive, coming in little, uneasy spurts here and there. My watch was one long, constant battle against nodding off, and no sooner had it ended than I was fighting to nod off.

My companions seemed to struggle in similar fashion because they tossed and turned and fussed all through the night.

This wakefulness had one benefit, though; I was able to mark the time when the cooing ceased. It happened an hour or so before dawn, preceded by the briefest uptick in pitch. And then, quite suddenly, all was still.

The abruptness of this change alarmed us all, and I think for a while, we assumed the worst. Caspersen gave the order to take up defensive positions, and we held them for some time. A tense hour of near-absolute silence followed, seeming now more terrifying than the noise had ever been. It amplified every noise. Every droplet falling from above, every snapped twig as one of our companions shifted their weight, and every rustle of the wind put our hearts in our mouths.

But nothing happened. No onslaught of attackers dropped down on us; no mysterious forms materialized in our camp. Neither did any kind of explanation show up. So as soon as it was light enough to move, we did, skipping breakfast in our haste to get the hell out of there.

This morning proved no more congenial than the previous. We seemed to be stuck in a kind of perpetual twilight. A thick layer of mist diminished what little light managed to filter down through the clouds and treetops, and we wandered on, nearly blind to the world around us. None of the moisture had left the air, and consequently, nothing we wore had a chance to dry. We were only slightly less wet than we’d been the day before. A profound stillness settled all around and an odor of dankness that seemed to permeate every inch of the forest. Again, I remembered my theory that hell had nothing to do with fire and brimstone.

The only remotely good thing about the morning chill was that at least we didn’t have heat to compound the misery of the humidity. Even with our masks, breathing was a chore. I couldn’t imagine what heat would have done.

Not that any of us felt particularly lucky, even with things being slightly less miserable than they might otherwise have been. Not with beads of cold sweat running down every inch of our skin and wet clothes clinging, chafing us raw. Not with the air itself a chore to breathe. It was hard to see the good, even where it existed.

Not even the professor’s observation that we were about two day’s march from the ship helped much. We sloshed through the soggy expanse of endless trees in grim, fearful silence for some several hours.

Midmorning rolled around by the time we heard the first sounds. Caspersen heard them before anyone, and she drew up short, her hand raised to signal a halt. Matt nearly ran into her and half of us into the pair of them. She silenced the inevitable queries with a sign and craned her neck toward a distant point.

We weren’t long left wondering about the cause of her interest, however. A distant cacophony of sounds, like excited hooting, rolled across the horizon. Mist and distance hid the source, but we could hear an ever-rising stream of raw, animalistic jeering.

My skin crawled. There was something so soulless, so malicious in those tones that I felt a preternatural terror set in, as if those strange, alien voices had triggered the oldest part of my primate brain. I didn’t know what manner of beasts approached, but all I could think of were two possible responses: fight or flight. It was the most primitive instinct programmed into our minds…a purely binary response: kill or be killed.

I think the mist, and the place, and all the uncertainty around it all, amplified my terror. I could count at least half a dozen distinct pitches among those strange voices, which I took to be half a dozen separate alien animals. And I stood there, battling the urge to run.

Then Caspersen offered a quick, low command to take cover. Instinct told me to run, but I’d been trained better than that. I followed her order, as did everyone else. We hid behind the slim undergrowth where available and the broad tree trunks elsewhere. The military personnel and Matt took up defensive positions a few paces before the civilians, who sheltered out of sight. We formed a sort of half circle, facing the approaching hostiles.

And I didn’t doubt that they were hostiles. I couldn’t speak for anyone else, of course. But I felt it on an almost cellular level.

We waited, our guns trained on the distant mist. I lay on my belly in the mud, behind a great fern that still dripped residual rainwater. Every now and again, a ball of water accumulating at the edge of one of the leaves grew too large, and gravity sent a great, icy droplet plummeting toward my back.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

It was damn near maddening, and more than once, I considered moving. But the sounds booming out through the mist seemed too close. I didn’t dare.

And yet, minute after minute crawled by, and nothing came into sight. The noises grew distinct, and I started to pick out individual hollers and hoots. My count increased. I figured we had a dozen incoming, possibly more.

The sound made my skin crawl all the more, and not only because the approaching party had doubled in size in my imagination. The edge of malice I’d noticed so many minutes ago came through loud and clear now, interspersed with occasional shrieks of what could only be amusement. I’d never seen a hyena in real life, but I remembered watching them on a nature show once, shrieking with laughter as they tore some poor creature to pieces. The laughter rippling through the mist reminded me very much of that pack of beasts, and their cruel meal.

I think Caspersen had guessed at what was only vaguely beginning to creep into my mind. She warned us all to be silent and still and seemed more confident than she had only minutes earlier. But at the time, the thought had not yet taken form for me. The unnerving sense of familiarity, of terrible comprehension, flitted about the corners of my mind—there but just out of reach. I almost got it, but I didn’t know what these creatures were. She did though.

Soon enough, we all knew. A dark, indistinct mass appeared in the distance, moving as of one impulse between the trees and through the shrubbery. Then the figures grew distinct.

Even now, it took me longer than it should have to realize what I was seeing. But when light finally did dawn on marble, it happened at the end of a series of observations, all of which occurred in quick succession.

They’re tall.

Walk on two legs. Upright.

Furry.

No, not furry. Not all of them. Are they…wearing furs?

And then it all clicked. These were no strange creatures, no alien beasts. These were men. Flesh and blood human beings.

And yet, beasts all the same. The malevolent laughter, the high, cruel tones, and jeering pitches made that plain enough. The words were lost to me, but the import of those tones? I had known that from the first, long before I’d even recognized it as human.

A breath of relief sounded around me, and there was even a bit of movement from somewhere to the rear; but a fierce glance and a hand signal from Caspersen put an end to that. She seemed to sense what I did and what some of our companions apparently did not. These were not friendlies.

They moved and spoke, however, as if they were completely unaware of our presence. I, for one, was keen to keep it that way, at least until we got a better measure of what we were dealing with.

That didn’t take long either. By now, they’d come within a few hundred feet from us, and they grew more distinct with each step. The party was hauling a number of bundles, some small and dragged behind a single person, and others larger and slung over several shoulders. As they drew up closer, hooting and hollering like hyenas, the mist rolled back a little. I got a glimpse of one of those grisly bundles.

It wasn’t a sack or hunted game. This was, or had been, a youngish human being thrown over one of the other’s shoulder, hanging lifeless. And as I glanced around the party, I saw more of the same—dead men, women, and children, thrown over a shoulder or dragged through the mud like sacks of potatoes.

I’d only just come to that realization when a second and more terrible one hit me. There was at least one live captive among these strange men—a tall child, bound and dragged on a tether. He seemed to be the focal point of much of the jeering we’d heard. As we watched, his captors took turns unleashing abuse of one form or another on him to the amusement of their companions: here a kick, there a blow upside the head, another time, a jerking of the cord that bound him.

The boy remained quiet throughout, but whether his silence was borne of terror or dignity, I could only speculate. His face was ashen, but, stumbling under a blow or pushing himself out of the mud below, he uttered not a sound and set his jaw resolutely, almost defiantly. This attitude seemed to amuse his captors to no end, and they hooted and hollered with laughter with every new round.

They’d come close enough now that I could make out something of their features. They were all big men, tall like the boy but broad as well, with thick ropes of sinew running down their legs and arms. No one among them was small or weak, save the captive.

They wore furs, as I had earlier observed, but now I saw leathers as well. The colors ranged from shades of green to shades of purple. That, I supposed, depended on the animals from which they’d been harvested. The vestments were rough in composition and rougher in cut, and they seemed to vary from man to man. I saw no commonality between them, except they were made of similar stuff and, in general, served to cover the groin area. Beyond that, they diverged wildly. A combination of furs and leathers comprised some, while some were only made up of one or the other. One man’s garments covered his entire body, from his head to his feet, in a patchwork of furs of a similar dark gray hue; another’s was nothing more than a piece of leather hanging around the front-most portion of his body, secured by a rough cord tied at his waist. Some seemed to be offering their best wolf-man impressions, while others mooned the world.

They carried a host of weapons, too, ranging from spears to hatchets. These had been fashioned mostly from wood and bits of metal or stone. But every man, whatever else he carried, had a blowgun strapped to his back and, at his waist, a leather pouch. From a distance, I couldn’t tell what the pouches contained. But I surmised they probably related to the blowguns since the weapon and pouch were the only constant to be found among these otherwise vastly dissimilar wretches.

Though they dressed peculiarly, and despite the visceral revulsion that the cruelty and coarseness I witnessed stirred in the pit of my stomach, I could not deny these men were as human as any of our own party.

Drenched in the blood of their victims, hauling away, for what purpose I couldn’t fathom, the corpses of their enemies, and mocking the plight of their captive, they were as sorry a set of representatives for humanity as I could envision. But the cruel light in their eyes bore the color of human intelligence and human reason. The biting malice tinging their laughter rang with a human understanding of suffering. These were men before us.

Men, and monsters.