Shadow of the Jaguar

by Steven Savile

  Cutter stopped dead in his tracks as he reached the first.

  The hanging mist shredded to reveal a crystalline sky. The light streamed down like something holy, bathing the slaughter in a radiance that was almost perverse for its beauty. Cutter stood in a field of gold looking down on one of the most shocking and brutal images he had ever witnessed. The juxtaposition of ugliness and beauty made him feel sick to the bone.

  He could not tell whether the body was male or female, so extreme was the damage.

  He knelt beside it.

  Like the sloth, the body had been split from stem to sternum, guts spilled like some vile lesson in the secrets of anatomy. There were no eyes left to close.

  Cutter saw Connor on his knees, head down, heaving into the long grasses. Stephen stood beside him, and a step behind. Abby knelt beside him, drawing him into a comforting embrace. She rocked him slightly, whispering soft words to soothe him.

  Neither Blaine nor Lucas stopped. Instinct took over. They drew their weapons. There was a brutal economy to the sign-language that passed between them. Lucas gestured right, then left, then brought his finger around in a small arc — you go left, I’ll go right, sweep the village and meet back at the centre. Blaine nodded, and together they broke rank and ran into the spectral heart of the village.

  Nando and Genaro drew their own weapons, but did not follow. Strange expressions played across Nando’s face. He’s probably wondering if this is what happened to his brother Esteban, Cutter guessed. Unfortunately, it probably was.

  “There’s no need. They’re gone,” He said, meaning the Thylacosmilus or whatever predator had slipped through the anomaly, though he might as easily have been condemning the villagers.

  Nando unclipped the radio from his belt and spoke into it rapidly. His voice was greeted by a burst of static, and then a voice barking what might have been commands or questions, it was impossible to tell.

  Cutter caught wind of a peculiar scent on the air; something out of place and quite unlike anything else he had smelled since they entered the forest. It was a potent and intoxicating fragrance that seemed to somehow inhabit his lungs as he inhaled it. Yes, that was the word for it, inhabit. He didn’t merely breathe it in, it in turn breathed him in. It took him a moment to realise what it reminded him of. Burnt cookie dough. It wasn’t a fragrance he expected to encounter in the middle of the Amazon.

  He continued down the short slope to the settlement proper. There were no trees now. Ahead of him he saw a hand-pumped water well, the body of a woman hunched over it. Her legs had been severed by powerful jaws. It was a mess. Blood pooled around the foot of the well. Cutter stared at the tableau. It seemed almost artfully arranged, as if to strike fear into the hearts of those who stumbled upon it. It was more than a killing, it was a promise that so much more death waited beyond it.

  And there were more bodies.

  Twenty.

  Thirty.

  The exact number didn’t matter. There were too many of them for Cutter to make sense of.

  The smell of burnt biscuits was almost overpowering now.

  He had seen death before, of course. From the intimate grief of Ryan and Tom, to the more abstract loss of strangers unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the very wrong time. He had visited desecrated tombs, crept through the crypts beneath Vienna, and seen the thousands upon thousands of bones piled one on top of another. It wasn’t like the kids’ nursery rhyme. There the thigh bone connected with somebody else’s skull bone and the ankle bone connected with a wrist bone and back bone and so many other bones that the notion of identity lost all meaning.

  This was different. This was new death. This was fresh, and on a scale that beggared understanding. He had heard them screaming. He knew he would never forget that sound.

  Cutter stumbled into the centre of what had been a thriving community only an hour before. Now it was a ghost town in the most horrible and tragic sense of the word. The men hadn’t had time to defend themselves from the sudden ferocity of the creatures’ attack. They had run out of their homesteads wielding whatever they could lay their hands on, to meet the predators so intent on their doom.

  Still, it was all wrong.

  He wrestled with the things he saw, trying to make sense of them against what he knew, or thoughthe knew.

  Everything about this slaughter was wrong. Cutter could read incredible organisation in the scuffed tracks. There were signs aplenty of blood frenzy, but there was also evidence of awesome restraint. It was hard to stand in the middle of so much blood and think of the word restraint when looking at the slaughter, but it was evidenced everywhere. The creatures hadn’t given over to a wild mêlée; they hadn’t revelled in the corpses, feasting on the flesh. They had killed and moved on, killed and moved on. It was ruthless and efficient and utterly wrong.

  This death did not fit the pattern he understood. It was more like the killing spree of a mass-murderer. Beyond the blood and the gore it was disturbing on a psychological level. He had pegged the predator as a relatively predictable hunter-killer. The scene around him shifted that perception alarmingly.

  And then there was the smell, the burnt cookie dough. It didn’t fit with the primitive surroundings, the tribesmen or the predators. The fragrance nagged away at him, sickly sweet as he breathed it in.

  There were survivors. Somehow that was the worst of it. Seeing them cradling the bodies of the dead, weeping uncontrollably, their simple world in tatters. Walking between them as he moved from house to house, Cutter could not help but share their grief.

  He saw Jenny walking toward him, tears staining her cheeks. She looked like a little girl as she held out her arms for him, sobbing. Cutter took her in and held her close, sharing her emotions instinctively. Normal people were not equipped to face such mindless tragedy. She shuddered against him. For a moment her natural musk masked the burnt biscuits.

  She sobbed into his shoulder, then pushed him away, wiping at her eyes and — as quickly and as completely as that — the vulnerability was replaced by practicality and efficiency.

  “We should bury them,” she said.

  He didn’t know what to say to that. It made sense, in the most pragmatic of ways. They did not need thirty bodies coming back to haunt them. Bodies seldom stayed hidden, it was one of the immutable laws of the universe; corpses bobbed to the surface of the river or were dug up by dogs in copses of trees. But out here it was different. The entire village, houses, bodies, dreams, lives, loves and hopes, angers and vendettas, could simply disappear if enough dirt was thrown over them.

  They had seen the alternative on the front page of the newspaper the day before. Nothing would be served by more sensationalism, save the budding El Chupacabra industry. Low-key it most certainly was not.

  And Cutter could imagine Lester picking up the memo, reading through the recitation of events, and the paroxysms of apoplexy. Lots of ranting and raving and tight gestures as he wanted to lash out but refused to lose even that much control of himself.

  Burying them made sense, not least because it was the right thing to do.

  “We should,” he agreed, “but it’s not our place. They will mourn the village and bury their dead.”

  Blaine came back. He had talked to one of the women, as best he could. She told him the story of the attack. The animals had swept down out of the trees and through the village, killing occasionally and herding them with ruthless efficiency toward the well, where the slaughter began in earnest. He shared the story with the others. There was blood on his hands from where he had handled the bodies. Lucas joined them from the other direction. Similarly, he shook his head. Then something caught his eye and he went down on one knee to examine the dirt.

  The air was thick with the tang of blood and the filthier smells of death. The bodies would turn quickly in the heat, and stink like rancid meat.

  Cutter tried to think it through: the predators had come not as primitive hunters but as a force as elemental as the death they brought w
ith them, surging out of the trees. Between Blaine’s story and his reading of the tracks, they had hit the village from left and right, driving the frightened tribesmen like sheep. He could visualise it clearly, the powerful creatures descending upon their frightened prey, the panic.

  But as his mind began to picture the frenzied attacks of a jaguar or panther, the rending teeth of a sabre-toothed tiger or the crushing power of a Thylacosmilus’ claws, he had to stop. Not because it was too bloody or vile, but because the attack hadn’t been like that. It had been dispassionate, almost humanly calculated. It seemed instinctive, like any predator attack, but something about the nature of the violence, the heightened aggression, made it appear certainly not animalistic in nature.

  What could have caused a primitive predator to function in such an uncharacteristic manner?

  He wiped the sweat from his face.

  The peculiar aroma of cookie dough was fading; dispersing on the air.

  He turned his back on the dead, but he could feel the tribal spirits fleeing toward what they thought was safety, the bitter residual energy of their fears playing out their slaughter over and over. The very air was tainted by their visceral deaths.

  The hairs across his body prickled.

  The day wore on, the digging reaching deeper into the earth. The rangers had found primitive shovels in the village huts, enough for everyone, and conveyed to the remaining villagers their willingness to share their sad labour.

  The mist thickened around the peaks and again filled the valley with fog. They could no longer see the sky or the river, or even many of the adobe huts.

  By the time they had helped the survivors bury the dead, the sun was low, and the shadows were becoming long. Soon, it would be dark.

  Lucas didn’t relish the thought of making camp in the village, but it made sense. There were buildings and beds. There was no need to freeze in the night. Their emergency bags and tents were back in the Land Rovers, so the choice was a dead man’s bed or a very hard, very cold mattress of leaves beneath a misty blanket of sky. That was one of the peculiarities of the Amazon — the temperature change between day and night was more extreme than the shift between winter and summer.

  The last thing any of them needed to be doing was blundering about in the dark trying to find their way back to the Land Rovers.

  Lucas pulled Cutter aside. What he had seen by the well had been nagging him for a while, and he had finally worked it out.

  “Prof., I reckon there’s something left to see here.”

  He led Cutter back to the side of the well, then knelt. He gestured for Cutter to kneel beside him, and pointed out the blood spatter.

  The answers were always in the blood.

  Cutter followed the direction of his fingers, squinting at the dirt in the failing light. Darkness was closing in quickly.

  “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

  “This,” Lucas said, pointing at the at-first seemingly random splatter darkening the earth.

  “And this.” He pushed himself to his feet and walked four steps forward, pointing down at the cluster of animal tracks, and a second dark stain.

  “And this,” he walked six places this time, before tapping the earth.

  The tracks — and the blood — disappeared toward the line of trees. There were other tracks that didn’t make sense in terms of what they knew, but these bloody prints were far more compelling in terms of what they had just been through.

  “The villagers wounded one of them,” Cutter said breathlessly.

  “Looks that way,” Lucas agreed.

  “Well now,” Cutter muttered. He pushed himself to his feet and walked in the footsteps of blood, following them back toward the trees.

  Lucas walked behind him.

  “You want to be careful, Prof. I wouldn’t want to come face to face with something capable of doing all this,” he gestured over his shoulder, “in a hurry.”

  He saw Cutter slide the machete from the sheath at his hip. It wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind. He couldn’t help but smile, though. For a man of science, Cutter was willing to get his hands dirty, and wasn’t frightened of getting physical. He liked that in a man.

  Lucas put his fingers to his lips and whistled long, high and sharp, causing the others to look his way instinctively. “Come on boys and girls, the Professor’s found something.”

  Blaine was the first to reach him. Together they took off after Cutter, both moving hard, fast and low, their guns clasped in sweaty palms as they plunged into the trees. The others followed.

  Ahead of them, they could hear Cutter’s laboured breathing as he slashed and cut a swath through the thickening tangle of vegetation. There was a crack, then a branch whipped back from Cutter’s blade, slashing toward Lucas’ face. The soldier reacted instinctively, ducking under it before a stray thorn could take his eye out. He hit the dirt hard, his knees grinding over fragments of stone and twisted root. Pain rose up from one of his knees in a dark black surge. Through it all, though, he could see that the trail of blood had thickened in front of him. Lucas stayed on his knees, examining the low lying leaves that were smeared redly with the stuff where the wounded creature had plunged through the undergrowth.

  It was difficult to tell how badly it was hurt, but if the blood trail was anything to go by, it wasn’t in a good way.

  Lucas stood, straining to separate the sounds of Cutter’s hacking from the tell-tale rustle of leaves that would betray the creature as it lumbered away through the claustrophobic press of trees. The air was colder now, the sweat chilled as it prickled his skin. The team was making such a racket as they charged recklessly through the tangle of twisted thorns and choking weeds that it was impossible to hear anything else.

  Then Cutter pulled up short, and Lucas saw the dark shape of the animal at his feet.

  SIXTEEN

  Almost two hours from the charnel house of a village, the windows in the reading room of the ambassador’s summer residence rattled, bowing inwards from the shockwave that followed Jack Stark’s not-so-silent alarm.

  A heartbeat later the sound of the detonation caught up with the physical wave.

  Stark slipped the catch off the holster on his Browning and drew the gun. He crossed the room silently, careful to stay out of sight of the window. He didn’t want any stray glance to catch his movement and betray him. Someone was out there in the black, beyond the floodlights of the patio and the neat lawn spotlights. Whether they were still alive was another matter. An incendiary device blowing up in your face wasn’t exactly conducive to longevity.

  He chuckled bleakly at the thought, then moved silently up the stairs, knowing he had perhaps two or three minutes until the house was breached. They’d be a little more cautious now, unsure of what was and what wasn’t booby trapped. A little insecurity was good for the soul.

  He knocked once, sharply, on Cam Bairstow’s door and entered the room. The young man was sitting upright in bed, wild eyed and vulnerable.

  “We knew they were going to come,” Stark said. He drew a second pistol from his ankle strap, and made sure the safety was off before he handed it across to Cam. “Six shots. It’s not much more than a peashooter, so make sure they’re really close before you let rip.”

  Cam cradled the pistol in his lap as though it were a snake that might just as soon turn on him.

  ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” he said timidly.

  “I don’t traffic in hope, lad. It’s all about eventualities. I’m going out there now. If you hear shooting, get yourself hidden as best you can. If they can’t find you, they can’t kill you.”

  “I’m frightened, Stark,” Cam admitted.

  “Good, you should be. If you weren’t, I’d be worried. I do this for a living. I’m not going to bullshit you, I’ve got no idea how many of them there are out there, but if I were running the show I’d be using two teams of two, with a fifth in reserve to co-ordinate things. Assuming that hand grenade just upset one of them, that
would leave four unaccounted for. Four against one seems hardly fair to me.”

  “They haven’t got a chance,” Cam said, smiling weakly.

  “Something like that, lad,” Stark said. “Just remember, wait until you see the whites of the bastards’ eyes.”

  Cam nodded again. “Whites of the eyes,” he repeated, focusing on the detail to help push aside all of the other fears pressing in on his mind.

  “Good lad.”

  Stark closed the door behind him, the game of hide and seek starting in earnest as he slipped quietly down the stairs to the kitchen, then through to the utility area. He had scoped the place out early, locating the junction boxes and the fuse housings. He pulled the switch, plunging the huge house into absolute darkness. Pulling a second switch he disabled the floodlights, which were on a different circuit. A third switch turned off the lawn spotlights.

  And all around him, there wasn’t a sound.

  Until he heard the faint scratching of a cutter on the glass of the patio doors.

  Stark’s smile was cold. What they couldn’t know was that he had been waiting for them. That first little tripwire was hardly the most inventive surprise he had lined up. They wouldn’t know what hit them. To quote Bruce Willis: he was the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in the ass.

  This was the kind of thing he lived for.

  “Yippee ki-yay,” Jack Stark muttered, clicking off the Browning’s safety. The darkness was his friend.

  * * *

  Stark crouched low, watching them come. He had ordered the residence’s staff to hide in the cellar, since he couldn’t worry about them and become distracted.

  He could see the enemy, three darker outlines against the black glass of the doors. The diamond bit of the glass cutter did its job, opening a small circular hole in the door wide enough for the intruder to reach through and fiddle with the lock mechanism. It happened in a single swift motion; these were professionals.