Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  “I like this,” Natty said. “The damn polyester was making me itch. But you’re supposed to keep your skin covered in the jungle. Less exposure means fewer chances for scratches, which can get infected easily in the tropical heat.”

  “Special nano-infused body paint,” Crumley replied cryptically.

  Natty nodded, sporting his impressed face. “Scratches heal on the fly. Nice.”

  Crumley climbed the tree in front of them, nodding for Natty to follow him. The ease with which this gorilla of a guy climbed the tree was both curious and inspiring. If a creature so clearly meant to be on the ground could do it, so could he.

  Natty climbed after him. The bark scraping his skin. He felt like a racehorse getting a brutish brushing by an unaccomplished hand. If his skin got any rawer he’d have to pay “his groomer” for a face and body peel.

  Crumley situated Natty on a branch high up in the tree, positioning him in a pose he could hold for some time, and adding to his camouflage with leaves and twigs. “I want you to lie perfectly still and look at that spot.” Crumley pointed and Natty looked.

  “I don't know if I can do that.”

  “I'll show you how to make small adjustments without giving away your position, to keep you from cramping up.”

  Natty’s voice squeaked, “Yeah, okay.”

  He kept shifting his weight, unable to get comfortable. “I still don't understand why we're doing this.”

  ***

  Crumley, settled into hiding, studied the five natives at various heights in the trees playing the same laying in waiting game - only they were laying in waiting for the soldiers. His hairs stood on end.

  The long straight hair on each of the clansmen was bound in colored bands, meant to make you think you were looking at snakes slithering on the branches. One of the aborigines wrapped his hair like the bands of the coral snake, alternating regions of blue and red and black set off by thin yellow stripes. Another indigene’s hair was disguised as the common liana snake. One like a yellow and one like a chartreuse green pit viper. And the national with the thickest hair, had his bound and colored like a baby python.

  The natives splayed horizontally across the branches had their bodies tattooed so as to be indistinguishable as extensions of the tree branch they were on. And crowding among “the leaves” were a Spangled Cotina, a Paradise Tanager, various Collard birds, a Rainbow Lorikeet. The smaller birds chosen for tattoos because they were painted perpendicular to the flow of the limbs and so had to fit on the “narrow branches” just so.

  The indigenes standing vertically, aligned with the trunk of the tree, sported larger birds on their chests. Various colored Macaws, and Toucans with their wildly different painted beaks, standing on the “branches” just where they met the “tree trunks.”

  The three tribesmen and two tribeswomen managed to twitch individual muscle fibers and “tremor” entire groupings of fibers to make it look as if the birds’ feathers were simply responding to the wind’s ruffling of the trees.

  Crumley prayed his poker face was holding; he didn’t want the enemy to think they had any advantage, even a psychological one.

  ***

  Natty surrendered to the task at hand at last of still-motion nature observances from up in the tree, reconciling himself to feeling a little uncomfortable for the duration. When in Rome, he thought, sighing.

  ***

  At ground level, Leon's soldiers took a break from advancing through the forest. They immediately began building platforms so they could rest off the ground.

  Leon stopped Laney from unwittingly putting her heel on a foot-long slug. She looked up at him surprised. “Didn't figure you for a Buddhist. You know, never harm so much as an ant?”

  “It's an endangered species, like most everything else around here.” He crouched down with a twig to help with the creature's safe relocation. “Good habit to get into in any case, as stepping on things unawares could just as likely get you killed.”

  She watched as his soldiers gently relocated any number of exotic life forms in making their camp. Including some hissing poisonous snakes she could have done without knowing were there. “Wouldn't it be safer to kill the venomous life forms, rather than give them a chance to slither back?”

  “Not exactly the good neighbor policy I had in mind.” He redirected her attention to a camouflaged native against a tree.

  “I don't see anything.”

  “Keep looking. It's one of the locals keeping an eye on us, making sure we're on our good behavior.”

  The hairs on her forearms spiked like the needles on a porcupine as the figure registered on her retinas.

  She quickly put two and two together, looking skyward at where Natty disappeared into the canopy. “That's why you have him up there bird watching. You don't want him to know you're training him to go native.”

  Leon grunted. “It's best we keep that between us. He's a little higher strung than you.”

  “I'm suddenly feeling a little high strung myself.”

  He smiled more warmly. “We’re good for now. They’re doing recon, just like we are.”

  ***

  Up in the trees, Crumley whistled to Natty and pointed to the magnificent birds with tremendous wing-spans returning to feed their young, Natty's reward for being perfectly still. Natty smiled with glee.

  One hawk had a still-writhing snake in its mouth. The young went at it with an inborn savagery. Pecking holes in it as if carving out a flexible flute for themselves.

  Crumley whistled to cue him to tilt his head up, where another hawk caught a hummingbird in midair.

  The further up they climbed in the trees the more of the treetop dramas they observed. The pattern was becoming increasingly clear. The drab looking hawks with their grey or black plumage brought back to their nests smaller, more colorful birds, painted frogs and snakes. Color everywhere was being devoured by the drab. Natty didn’t much care for that. It was time for the color to rise up against the darkness.

  He’d had enough. He gestured to Crumley that he wanted to head down.

  On his way through the lower branches he passed a snake devouring another snake; once again the brown and black boa was taking into itself the far more colorful smaller tree snake after squeezing the life out of it.

  The dramas unfolding in the treetops finally hit home for Natty. He was one of the colorful creatures, not one of the drab ones. Maybe that had been Crumley’s intent all along, to get him to sober up to his place in the food chain. In the jungle, as in the real world, it wasn’t the good that died young; it was the colorful types that couldn’t blend.

  “We’ll see about that!”

  ELEVEN

  Later that first evening, the soldiers finished erecting one large commons area under a thatched roof. The floor was comprised of a bed of tree trunks raised off the ground. There was a makeshift dining table on the deck, the top manufactured from tree trunks stripped of their bark.

  DeWitt was giving Natty a crash course in local flora and fauna with freshly picked specimens, seated across from him at the table. “The sooner you memorize these, the sooner you get to go on living,” DeWitt said. Natty looked at him crosswise. “They're edible, and there are a ton of things that look just like them that will kill you. How good did you say your memory was?”

  Natty glanced at the complex mélange on the table. “Don't worry, I got it.”

  “No way! We haven't even begun to separate this stuff out.”

  “I got it, I said.”

  Natty saw DeWitt picking up a flower and going to eat it. He stopped him. He nodded to DeWitt so he knew to follow his eyes. DeWitt glimpsed the humongous phosphorescent blue butterfly with a twelve-inch wingspan.

  Natty took the flower from DeWitt's hand and held it out to entice the butterfly.

  The butterfly flitted towards the flower, landed on it, and stuck its long tendril into the cone of the flower for the nectar.

  Leon, keeping an eye on the two from a distance, looked
on, impressed.

  “How did you know?” DeWitt said.

  “I built the butterfly. Well, I took some of the genes from the extinct species in China and spliced them with a native version, somewhat smaller. It's a failed experiment actually. As something's already preying on it. Or there’d be a lot more of them.”

  Standing against one of the supporting poles at the edge of the shelter, overhearing, Leon’s eyebrows raised. He watched as the butterfly flitted away.

  DeWitt picked a fern-like leaf out of the pile on top the table, and matched it with another one from his pocket. After performing a little sleight of hand with both, he put the two specimens in front of Natty. “Which one will kill you?”

  “The one in your right hand,” Natty said with just a glance.

  DeWitt looked up at Leon. They smirked at one another. “Not bad, kid,” DeWitt said.

  Natty smiled, pleased to have scored some points for once with the soldiers.

  His warm feelings were stripped from him when, out of the blue, there was an explosion.

  Natty ducked under the table.

  DeWitt sighed, mumbling, “Two steps forward, one step back.”

  Just when Natty was emerging from his shelter…

  The sky opened up and it poured rain. The raindrops fell on the leaves like the pelting of machine guns. Once again Natty ducked under the table reflexively.

  As he was about to crawl out again, lightning struck, not once, not twice, but three times. Each time, like a flash-bang grenade going off in their faces. Each time he stuck his head back under the table like a turtle tucking in its head.

  DeWitt figured it was probably for the best Natty learned to distinguish the sounds of nature’s violence from the sounds of human violence on the horizon.

  Natty clambered out of his hiding place, standing fully erect again for the first time, rubbed his head from where he’d bumped it under the table. “Thunder. Rain. And. Lightning. They each sound different here than I’ve heard before. Way more intense. Everything is way more intense.”

  DeWitt nodded. “Need to adjust your high-strung nature accordingly, if you don’t want the strings to break.” He lowered his eyes and scratched the back of his head. “Though maybe I’m no one to talk. Kind of excitable myself, though it’s usually different things that set me off.”

  He left Natty observing the drama of the weather playing out from relative safety and walked up to Leon standing totem-like in the rain. “When do I get to play hero? I got a ten year old at home who thinks I’m Superman. It’s a lot of pressure to live under.”

  “Soon, DeWitt, soon. Though I’m not promising any pictures suitable for ten year olds.”

  “Got this software on my laptop that instantly converts lurid pictures into comic book graphics, so no worries there.” He pulled out his camera to show Leon. “Thing snaps pictures and records my voice, which the software then translates into those thought balloons.”

  Leon nodded. “Nice. With any luck, by the time we get out of here, you’ll have enough for a graphic novel.”

  “Don’t tease.”

  Leon gestured to Natty with a nod. “Take him out, show him how to start a fire in this.”

  DeWitt raised his voice to Natty. “You’re with me, kid. Fire-making time.”

  Natty put out his hands defensively, “Really, guys... I watch Survivorman, and Man Versus Wild. Huge Bear Grylls fan, huge.”

  Leon smiled halfheartedly, gave DeWitt another nod. DeWitt led Natty away by the hand.

  Natty regarded how he was being held, again, as if he were a kid. “What's with the hand thing?”

  ***

  Laney, making the most of the spill-over lantern light from the commons area—the LEDs chosen to avoid attracting insects—explored around the edges of the makeshift shelter. She picked up her latest find, regarded the exotic, colorful lizard in her hand, a species with which she was not familiar. Overhearing Natty’s and DeWitt’s exchange about the hand-holding, she smiled ruefully. She returned her eyes to her lizard, lest she be found out being both amused and saddened at her husband’s expense.

  “The lizards and the serpent class of creatures in general play a key role in the forest,” Leon said, regarding the rainbow lizard in her hand. She looked up to find him towering over her, correlated his sudden appearance with Natty’s sudden disappearance, and then put the thought out of her mind. “They keep the number of insects down to make the place livable for the rest of us, for starters. You could argue they hold the entire forest together. Some say it’s the tree-top canopies that shape the ecosystem down here. But I say no, it’s the damn lizards, every time.”

  He handed her a couple other colorful lizards she hadn’t seen before. Seeing her fascination with them, he must have absconded with a few on his way over to her. She smiled as they scampered up her arms from the palms of her hands and got lost in her hair. “You’ve gone seriously native now,” Leon said with a laugh at her living hair embroidery. The lizards poking their heads out from their makeshift caves of hair. “Braid in some bones and a shrunken head or two, and people will know better than to mess with you.”

  ***

  DeWitt hiked Natty about the nearby woods, looking for a Copal tree. Dusk was rapidly giving away to darkness, but it hadn’t given up the fight yet.

  When he eventually located a specimen, he scraped the sap, a black creosote, and had Natty ape his actions. DeWitt rubbed a stick's tip in the creosote and lit it with a match. He then showed off how heartily it burned even when exposed to the pouring rain.

  Natty did the same with his stick, then handed the burning torch to DeWitt. “Okay, so making fire mastered then?” DeWitt shook his head no. “Seriously, I'm way too proficient at way too many things already. You'll go to all this trouble only to hate me in the morning when you find out there is absolutely nothing I can't do.”

  “You absolutely sure you don't want to learn any more about building fires?”

  “Absolutely sure!”

  “Okay, then.” DeWitt folded his knife. “Crumley, he's all yours.”

  Natty lit up when he recognized Crumley stepping up to them. The familiar sight of the friendly gorilla of a guy set him at ease despite the creepy way he seemed to materialize out of nowhere. “Hey, you're the guy who taught me how to spar and to climb trees! You’re way more fun than this guy.”

  Natty extended his hand to shake, and Crumley took it and flipped him hard. Natty let out an anguished yelp. “How's lesson two in sparring coming?” Crumley asked.

  Natty gulped, made a pained face. “Come on, knock it off, you're hurting me.”

  He extended his hand for Crumley to pick him up. Crumley, took the hand, drawing him into an arm lock immediately and making Natty yell out again. “You're hurting me, I said!”

  “He'll hurt you more.”

  “Who he?”

  Crumley walked him towards the camouflaged native warrior. Natty took one look at him, and his eyes bugged out. “Oh shit!” He squirmed frantically to free himself from Crumley.

  “Calm down.”

  “Oh, like I can concentrate on what you have to teach me with that guy staring at me!”

  “I'll help you.” He put Natty in even more pain by further twisting up Natty's arm. Natty dropped to the ground. “Focus... eyes on me.” He pointed to himself as Natty's eyes went back to the scary native. Crumley applied more pressure. “Focus.”

  “Okay! Okay! I'm focused! I'm really focused.” He put his free hand in his pocket and retrieved his prescription bottle of antipsychotic meds, more misleadingly referred to as “anti-paranoia” pills. To confirm what his eyes had already relayed to his brain. He shook the empty bottle. “Christ, what a time to go cold turkey. Now I’ll be seeing these guys even when they aren’t there.”

  ***

  Back at the slapdash rain shelter and commons area she had been playfully referring to as “the lodge,” Laney and Leon regarded the complex picture puzzle of natives hidden in the trees all aro
und them, north, south, east, and west, trying to pick out how many.

  “I see six,” Laney said.

  “Not bad for an amateur. Keep looking.”

  She didn't like the sound of that, so peered further with the binoculars. “Aren't you worried?”

  “I'm very worried.”

  “You sure don't show it.” She returned her eyes to the binoculars and her scanning. “They've got to know we see them?”

  “Oh, they know.” Leon resumed his whittling. “That's what bothers me.” He peeled off another layer of wood with the bowie knife. “They know, and they don't care.” A miniature totem of stacked heads was taking shape in his hands. Some damn fine detail work, even if he did say so himself, considering the monstrously oversized bowie knife, an entirely wrong tool for the job.

  Laney, continuing with her camouflaged tribal warrior spotting, said, “See eight now. You want to explain that last remark?”

  “People in my line of work are good at sizing up their opponent,” he said, sizing her up. “A matter of survival.”

  She saw the hi-tech weaponry the tribe’s people—a healthy mix of men and women—were sporting through her field glasses. “Who armed them? And why?”

  Leon shaved a couple more slices off his stick. “Plenty of green movements happy to take their game to the next level to protect the rain forest.” Sipping his blender drink of tropical fruit juices, he said, “Then there are the little exercises corporations send their people on, when they want to teach them something.”

  Laney measured what Leon was saying, and his ominous tone with the last remark, didn't think she liked the implications. “Maybe you want to direct some of that strategic thinking at the real enemy, before you go chasing after imaginary ones.”

  Leon set down the hollowed out coconut shell he was using as a cup. “Fair enough.”

  He stepped to her side, eyed her suggestively.