by Jay Stringer
“It’s healing me.” Chase ran her finger across where the scar had been. “It’s rewriting my… oh God.”
She looked at Hass, who nodded sadly. Now she understood his fear. The water could fix “damage”; it could undo cuts, breaks, changes to the body. To Chase, what was the biggest risk? She splashed around a bit and took miles off the clock. But Hass was trans. He’d put in a lot of years, a lot of work, into becoming himself. Would the properties in the water, whatever they were, be able to distinguish between the unwelcome damage Chase had done to her own body and the changes Hass had chosen to make to his own?
“I’m sorry, Doc.” She touched his arm again. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Hass had tears in his eyes. “I’m scared. This whole place hates me. It can make me into… it can turn me into something I’m not.”
“Head back to the camp. The soil out there looked normal. You can wait for me.”
Hass laughed. “You think that’s enough to stop me backing you up?”
Now it was Chase’s turn to tear up. She thought of all the relationships she’d shut down. The people she’d pushed away, only to remember them as tattoos, scars, or mean jokes. She’d finally let go of decades’ worth of built-up grief a couple of years ago, but she hadn’t filled that space with anything, or anyone, else.
Wait… tattoos.
She ran her hand along her arm, over her collection of ink. “I still have these,” she said. “The water isn’t healing these. So maybe it’s not a total reset to factory settings, you know?”
Hass sniffed away his tears, laughed. “Let’s not find out.”
They heard the growl at the same time. The familiar rumble from the night before. Chase and Hass both crouched down, shuffling away from the door. Something large moved just outside. It rubbed against the wall. Chase saw the tail. A mix of gray and black. It was held high, like a house cat patrolling its territory, but the base of the tail was four feet off the ground. The rumble came again. Beneath all Chase’s elation, beneath this cloud of health or happiness that she’s been feeling, grew a very basic fear.
The thing outside moved away. Chase leaned across, putting her weight on what had recently been a fractured wrist, to peer out of the doorway. She saw the thing. The whole thing. From the rear, its tail swished cautiously as it walked toward the cliff face. It looked like a large tiger or leopard. Its fur was gray, covered in black stripes, just like the drawing. It moved with a terrifying grace, the body rocking gently as its giant shoulders moved. She could see its forelegs. Huge, muscular. Almost more like a bear than a cat. This was a creature built for climbing and tearing. At the cliff top, the large beast paused to drink the water, then sniffed at the air, turning its head to the side. As it stood profile now, Chase could see one of its large sabre-teeth. She knew what this was.
Yes, she was staring at Mngwa. The large cat of local myth. But more than that. She knew exactly what species of animal she was looking at. The implications of this made everything else start to make a very real, very scary, very impossible kind of sense.
The Mngwa growled again, as if picking up a scent, and jumped down off the cliff. They both heard it splash down at the bottom, then a few soft steps followed by the moving of branches.
“That was a Dinofelis,” Chase whispered.
“A what?”
“Dinofelis. ‘Terrible cat.’ Basically the African and European version of the sabre-toothed tiger.”
“I think we should go in the opposition direction.”
“Yeah.”
They stepped quietly out of the hut and looked up the hill, facing away from the direction the Mngwa had gone. A narrow trail led around the side of the overgrown village and farther up the hill, between bushes and rocks. Chase paused to notice the clearing the huts had been built on appeared to be part of a meandering line that led up the mountain, vanishing into the shade of the trees up ahead.
“I think this was all part of a river’s course,” she said. “I think the huts were built on land that used to be underwater.”
“You mean after the river stopped flowing.”
“Right. Whoever those people were, I think they were late settlers.”
They continued the climb, through more bushes, and then another dense layer of trees. They were going up the mountain in steps, following the path of the ancient river. Chase could see a cliff maybe two hundred feet above them, with water trickling over the edge, dropping down to form the narrow brook that ran down through the path of the dry river. The edge of that cliff looked unnatural. It was human-made. Someone had deliberately blocked the path of the river. Were they previous settlers? An earlier group than the people who’d built the huts below? Had someone wanted to keep the water for themselves? Or had they wanted to stop it flowing for a different reason? Was this selfishness or protection?
They came to another clearing, maybe a mile above the last one. Here they found a large bush in the middle, with small, red, apple-like fruit. Chase could feel the pull. Eat them. Eat them.
“I suppose all of these plants are prehistoric, too,” Hass said. “Holdovers. They’ve died off everywhere else but survived here.”
Chase agreed. “This whole forest is a throwback. This spot on the mountain, it’s high enough to have avoided floods, low enough to have been away from the cloud caused by the Sumatra eruption. The humans here could have survived, along with everything else. The Mngwa, the plants. I saw an owl last night that was bigger than a dog. But why are they all still here, when everything else has run away? And why have they always stuck to this patch?”
“Addiction.” Hass reached out to put his hand over Chase’s. She was holding one of the apples. It was only now that she realized she’d picked it, been about to bite into it.
No, that’s not true, she thought. You knew you were doing it.
How could she know and not know at the same time? And then, through it all, another flush of anger at Hass. How dare he stop me. I’ll do what I—
She threw the fruit away. It landed in a distant bush with a faint rustle.
This was followed by another sound from back down the trail. Padding. Four feet. The low growl. The Mngwa was following them. Chase scanned around the clearing for cover. They were out in the open, this bush the only thing nearby.
Hass whispered, “Up in the trees.”
Chase looked up. Then finally, even through the layer of drugged euphoria, she felt total panic. Resting up in the branches, watching them, were three more Mngwa, two on the left, one on the right. Their large forelimbs were stretched out ahead of them, claws showing. The fourth, the one that had passed them down at the hut, wandered into view on the trail and growled.
Chase thought back to the night before, at camp. Creatures like this, you only heard them when they wanted you to. She and Hass had been herded this way. It was a trap.
The shepherd Mngwa took a couple of steps forward and then lowered itself into a sitting position, paws forward like the Sphinx, watching them. The watchers stirred in the trees. The two on the left stretched, yawned. They dropped down to the ground with fearful grace and circled around the edge of the clearing, blocking the far path. For a moment, Chase laughed at the absurdity of it all, picturing the times they’d practiced this. “No, Bob, I told you, on the count of three, you go left. No, that’s right. No, I said on three… what are you… Bob…”
Hass looked at her, puzzled by the laughter. She saw his hands twitching, readying to pull his weapons. She dropped her own hands to her sides, feeling the metal of her Blackhawks, cool to the touch.
“I don’t think our guns will stop them,” she said.
“Enough bullets will stop anything.” Hass didn’t sound like he believed his own words. “But if you get a chance, run.”
“You think I’m leaving you?”
“If it comes to it, you can heal up a wound in the water.”
There was no way Chase was going to take any chance that presented itself, but it was pointless arg
uing. The Mngwa on the right, still in the tree, roared but didn’t move. The two newcomers took three slow steps forward, closing the gap between them and their prey. This wasn’t the type of pack behavior Chase had ever imaged from big cats, but she’d never studied lions or tigers in the wild. Maybe this was typical? She made a note to ask an expert when they got back. And that prompted a second bout of laughter.
The two advancing cats roared. They both leapt forward.
THIRTY-SIX
The crocodile snapped again, its large jaws closing only a couple of feet from where Nash and Lauren were pressed against the wall. The head was the size of a small car. The only thing saving them was the height of the ledge. The croc couldn’t get up high enough to gain purchase, which kept it from getting any closer.
Nash found himself caught in time. He needed to panic, to run, to survive. But he couldn’t help staring at the mouth, the teeth, the head of this thing that shouldn’t exist. The roar that followed sounded more like Godzilla than anything natural. The head thrashed from side to side. He heard a splash and saw a tail whipping about in the water. The tip looked to be a full twenty-five feet behind the snout, almost stretching all the way across the cave. The head pulled back. The tail whipped again. Nash realized it was preparing to jump. They had seconds before they died. He pulled a second flare from his belt, cracked it into life, and threw it toward the back of the cave. As the light traveled, it illuminated the walls, but the rear of the cave remained buried in shadow. There was no telling how deep into the volcano this thing went. The crocodile turned to follow the flare, diving into the water and vanishing beneath the surface.
Nash pushed Lauren back in the other direction. “Go. Go. Go.”
They ran along the path. The splashing behind them announced the croc had turned to follow, mounting the lower section of the path. It ripped through the remaining bushes in their wake, moving at frightening speed. Lauren and Nash rounded the statue on different sides. Nash turned back to see the crocodile bust straight through the statue, cracking it into chunks like it was nothing.
Nash had his Glock at his side. The shotgun on his back. But what good would either of them do against a creature of this size? Nothing at all, except make it angry. He needed to get back to his bag.
They cleared the lip of the cave, crashing back into the strange green glow that passed for daylight. Up ahead he could see the drones. They weren’t going to make it. They needed something to slow the croc down. He pulled another flare, lit it, and threw it backward without looking. He went into a baseball slide as he neared the bag, reached in for a grenade, and pulled the pin in the same movement as lining up the throw. The croc, which had paused for a few seconds to watch the flare, was now charging again. Nash waited.
Lauren slid in behind him, screaming, “Throw it.”
Nash still waited. One more second. Two more seconds. The croc was close now. It opened its mouth. Nash threw the grenade, then turned and jumped backward, taking Lauren with him into the nearest bush. The explosion was muffled, coming with a wet sound, then splatter. Blood and flesh rained down on them. The grenade had landed in the beast’s mouth, and the whole roof of its head was lost to the explosion. They climbed out of the bush to find the dead crocodile only a few feet from them and the smell of barbecued meat hanging in the air.
Lauren raised her hand, gesturing at something, but it was a few seconds before the ringing in Nash’s ears died down enough for him to make sense of it. She wasn’t gesturing with her hand but at it. There was no blood. No mark. The spot where she had cut herself was completely healed.
They both turned to stare at the water.
The sound of gunshots broke the moment, ringing out from somewhere in the valley. Then growls and something like a lion’s roar. Then a human scream.
* * *
The Mngwa was on Hass, the weight pinning him to the floor. A scream filled the air. Was it him or Chase? He didn’t know. It didn’t feel like there was enough air in his lungs for that kind of sound. If Chase was dying, he was no help to her right now. The large claws tore into his right shoulder. He couldn’t feel anything at all down that side after the cut. The large predator growled. Hass focused only on the sounds of the creature on top of him, the feel of his skin slicing, and those jaws, those giant jaws, rushing down at his face. The rest of the world vanished.
Was this his time?
Had he come to Eden to be judged? To fail?
His right arm was gone. He couldn’t feel it, so he had to count on not having it. But God had given him two arms. If he was to be tested, he still had answers. His left arm was pinned, and he could feel claws from the large paw touching his skin but not yet digging in. He couldn’t pull his gun from the holster, but he could grip the handle, slip his finger into the trigger. He angled the gun up, hoped for the best, and started squeezing the trigger. Again. Again. Again. The thing on top of him whimpered, suddenly sounding very much like a cat, a large, hurt cat. Hass didn’t have time to feel guilty. As the claws came out of his shoulder, he gained a small degree of feeling in his right arm, enough to pull his large hunting knife from the scabbard. He didn’t have any strength in the arm to use the weapon. He grabbed the blade with his left, feeling the edge cutting into his palm. He dropped it onto his belly, and then gripped the handle, and stabbed up, again, again. The Mngwa fell against him, dead.
No time to celebrate, because there were other Mngwa in the clearing. And Chase, what was happening to Chase? He needed to move. This test hadn’t killed him. No guarantees about the next one. He rolled onto his good shoulder, the one that could take weight, and tried to shrug off the dead Mngwa. The weight was too much. He pulled half free, but his legs were still pinned, and without the use of his right arm, there was nothing he could do.
The world around him came into focus now. Behind him, Chase was down on one knee, clicking on empty with both guns. Her left leg was a mess of blood and ripped fabric. The Mngwa that had charged her was dead at her feet. She made eye contact with Hass and nodded, crawling over to him and pulling on the dead beast, helping him wriggle loose.
The fourth Mngwa, the one that had followed them up the trail, was pacing slowly forward, wary of the damage they’d just done. Had it seen guns before? Had it been alive when Gilmore was here or when the Nazis arrived? The commander in the tree was standing up now, its hind legs coiled, ready to jump.
Chase holstered her guns and clutched her injured leg. Hass refused to look at his arm, but he couldn’t move it. He dropped the knife and picked up his Glock again. Chase leaned over to pull the one from his shoulder holster and froze, looking behind him.
Hass could hear the sound of the bush shaking, rattling. Something large moved past them, fast, and there was a growl followed by a yelp. Hass shuffled around to see what Chase had been staring at. It was a snake—some kind of rock python maybe, but he’d never seen one this big. Forty feet in length, possibly more, and four feet across. It had wrapped around the Mngwa and was squeezing the life out of it. The lead Mngwa, up in the tree, roared and attacked, scratching at the python before darting away, avoiding the coils of its tail. It hurried in for a second go.
Hass found the strength to get the hell out of there. He crawled under the bush, joining Chase on the other side. She took his good arm and helped him to his feet. As she turned, he saw her back was in a bad way, claw marks slashed across her skin, deeper at the top, near her shoulder. Now, finally, he steeled himself to look at his own injury. His right arm was limp. There were chunks of muscle missing, simply ripped off. He could see bone, and blood covered the remaining skin in a thick layer. If his survival instincts had allowed him to faint, he would have dropped right there, but they needed to move.
They ran on up the trail, leaving the monsters fighting behind them. Hass could already feel himself slowing with each step. His battery was running down, but he didn’t want to say anything. Chase kept shooting concerned glances at him. The path wound away from the old creek and up aroun
d a large clump of damp rocks. Chase took his good hand in hers, squeezed, and kept moving ahead, leading him along the trail as they climbed a steep slope. She paused to be his anchor when he needed it, to lend her body weight in place of his dead arm. The climb became trickier, and Hass almost fell, motivated to stay on his feet only by the sounds of roaring and tearing that still came to them from farther down the trail.
The path veered right again, through another large cluster of blue and red bushes, and they were back beside the water. This was a small pool at the base of the waterfall they’d gotten glimpses of on the way up. The pool collected the water trickling down from above; then the water split in two directions. The largest runoff was straight down, into the valley, and the river path that led down to the adobe settlement. A smaller brook ran off to the left. Hass’s sense of direction was all scrambled up, but he wondered if, somehow, this smaller creek led back out the way they’d come.
Chase squeezed his hand. He turned to look in the same direction as her. On the far bank of the pool, frozen with its head low, was a black-backed jackal. Hass and Chase had both seen this species before in other parts of Africa. This one wasn’t even particularly large. The jackal felt like a brief, welcome moment of normality. It stared at them for a few seconds more, then turned and disappeared into the foliage.
“Those things are survivors, you know,” Chase said, easing Hass down onto a rock. She looked around them, then up at the lip of the waterfall above. “If this is the right spot, the right height to survive floods, droughts, volcanic clouds… if there’s something in the soil or the water here that regrows living cells.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, I just got attacked by a dinosaur cat. I might just be hallucinating.”
“Altitude sickness,” Hass agreed. “I think that would be preferable to this.”
“There are viruses that rewrite DNA, you know that? Natural viruses. They can be carried in plants.”
