Cutter pushed himself up to his feet and sheathed the machete.
“Well, something had it in for her, by the looks of it,” Blaine said, stating the obvious. The perfect predator had been humbled by something considerably more lethal. Cutter poked and prodded the tears; some were ragged, others clinically smooth. There were clusters of puncture wounds where the animal’s hide had been pierced, over and over.
But the most disturbing — even bizarre — of all of the Thylacosmilus’ wounds was over its heart. The thick fur was discoloured, and appeared to have been twisted to the point of ripping, almost as though a pincer had grasped and ratcheted round, again and again, until the hide had ruptured, exposing the still-beating organ. There was no way a tribesman’s blade had caused the creature’s wounds. Some, perhaps, but not all, and not the worst of them.
The first flies had already begun to gather around the open wounds, drawn by the turning meat. In a few short hours death would make way for so much more life, as the bloated white maggots fed themselves into a frenzy.
“Poachers?” Lucas asked, though he obviously didn’t believe it himself.
“Not a prayer,” Cutter said, ending that line of speculation before it had begun. A man would never have been able to get in close enough to inflict those clustered puncture wounds, not without the Thylacosmilus’ fangs piercing his body in the process. Whatever had killed the animal was faster, and deadlier than the beast itself — and that left them with a short list of hunter-killers in any epoch.
Before he could dwell too much on the nature of the beast, the distant sound of a scream shredded his nerves. Cutter’s first thought was: But that’s impossible, we buried everyone! Who’s left to die?Which was just wrong on so many levels. He turned, scanning the faces of his team. No one was mis-sing. He felt a huge tidal surge of relief wash over him then, only for it to evaporate in the vacuum where his heart ought to have been beating.
“Chaplin,” he said, the name a death knell as it stained his lips.
Lucas and Blaine reacted first. The two men turned and charged back toward the settlement, leading the way with gunmetal and testosterone as they burst from the trees. Cutter and the others chased after them, sweeping Nando and Genaro, who were just joining them, along with them, fighting through the tangled undergrowth, as it tried to trap them in its smothering embrace.
They left the flies behind, but the buzzing showed no sign of abating.
Mosquitoes, Cutter realised. They hadn’t been in evidence while they had dug the grave, but now that the sun was going down, they had risen in a new cycle of life. He felt the first one against his face. Beside him, Connor slapped at his own forehead, smearing the insect across his hairline.
Chaplin’s body lay sprawled at an impossible angle beyond the stones of the well, legs and arms twisted as though he had tried to burrow into the earth to escape his attacker.
“Oh, God,” Jenny uttered, her hand pressed to her mouth as she stared down at the ruined corpse. Then she peered at Cutter, fear dominating her features. “We can’t stay here,” she said pleadingly. “They’ll pick us off one by one.”
“Ten Little Indians,” Connor said, his arm curling around Abby’s shoulder protectively. Abby just stared mutely down at the man who had brought them out into the wilderness.
Cutter turned to the soldiers. “Let’s get out of here.”
“What about him?”
“I don’t think we’ve got time for the niceties, do you?”
Lucas shook his head.
“But we can’t just leave him there like that,” Jenny objected. She looked horrified at the notion of simply leaving Chaplin as food for the birds and the worms.
“At least he’s biodegradable,” Cutter said, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
“No man gets left behind, isn’t that the motto?” she protested. “Would you leave methere if that was my body?”
Cutter stared at her, but this time he wasn’t seeing Jenny. He was seeing Claudia Brown, staring at him through her eyes, accusing him of doing just that: leaving her behind to rot in his memory. He felt his heart shiver, a tiny crack opening in it.
“I didn’t... I couldn’t...” But he had no words, not to convey the hundreds of emotions that suddenly crowded his mind. It all came crashing back down over him.
“Oh God, Claudia. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t call me that,” Jenny said, but for once there was no harshness in her voice as she did. He saw himself haunted in her eyes. He had tried so hard to put it behind him, to move on — to do just what she had accused him of, to leave her behind in a different forest, in a different history. And the realisation of his betrayal threatened to crush him.
Cutter stumbled forward. It was Stephen who stopped him from falling.
“There’s just so much senseless death,” Cutter said, so quietly that only Stephen could hear him. “Their world should never have been this way.”
“Neither should ours,” Stephen said, “but it is.”
For a moment it was as though his angst might paralyse him, but that moment did not last long. Something inside of him pulled itself together, and Cutter followed suit physically by straightening, drawing himself up, becoming what he needed to be for them.
“I’ll bury him,” Connor said. Cutter saw that he had one of the makeshift shovels in his hand already. He nodded.
“Good man.”
“We don’t have time,” Blaine told him. “The sun’s almost down. It’ll take forty minutes or so to get back to the Land Rovers — longer, if we can’t see where we’re going. The last thing we want is to be blundering about in the dark with whatever it is out there stalking us.”
Connor drove the shovel into the dirt, not listening.
“I’ll help,” Abby said.
Jenny nodded. The two women went back to the larger grave and picked up the tools.
“If we do it together we’ll have it done in just a few minutes,” she said, tossing what looked like a hybrid shovel-pick to Blaine. The soldier didn’t argue, and instead joined the effort.
This time they broke the earth with something approaching frenzy, each of them scooping up as much of the rich black soil as they could, and shovelling it aside, over and over again. In a few minutes they were standing around a shallow grave. Blaine and Lucas rolled the corpse into the hole, took his wallet, identification, and keys, and then unceremoniously filled it back over him.
It took less then ten minutes to remove all physical traces of Alexander Chaplin. Barely enough time to boil an egg and eat it, Cutter thought. Was it the sum of the man’s worth? Ten minutes to dig a hole and fill it again? It was a chilling notion. He wanted to believe in all of the other things — the minutiae of life that made it whole — but right then and there, standing over another shallow grave, he couldn’t.
Life came down to its most basic elements: carbon and decay.
Perhaps there was nothing left to believe in.
“We need to go,” he said.
This time they did.
NINETEEN
They could feel the eyes on them.
They moved slowly but steadily, hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them, forming a snake in the darkness. The encroaching night was a far cry from the lethargic heat of the day. There was a chill to it that defied all the memories of even an hour before. The cold had closed in that quickly, and that absolutely.
Cutter cursed himself for a fool. He had gone off running stupidly, and now Chaplin was dead. There had been too much carnage today, and too much stupidity. He needed to clear his head and think. At the moment everything they were doing was reactive. He needed to change the nature of the game, go on the offensive.
But first he needed to get everyone to safety.
They were four miles away from the Land Rovers in what would soon be pitch black forest. The camping gear was all back in the cars. They had to continue to move, even just to stay warm, but movement brought with it its own dangers. The dar
kness crept and crawled with unseen hunters, drawn to them by the rich pulse of fear that throbbed beneath their skin.
The whisper of the trees was a chilling promise of what lay just out of sight, behind the leaves and dragging vines. Every so often the deep-throated rumble — it couldn’t be called a purr no matter how cat-like the pouch-blades were — would remind them that they were not alone.
But the creatures didn’t attack, which only served to make it worse. Instead of confrontation, the pumping adrenalin of survival or failure, there was this constant nagging uncertainty, the doubt that promised demons and devils lurking out in the darkness.
None of them spoke.
They had nothing to say.
The clammy press of Stephen’s hand against his skin sent a shiver through Cutter’s exhausted body. Nights without proper sleep, jet-lag, and the spiritual crucifixion of the last few hours left him feeling like a shell of himself. How appropriate, he mused. It was all a shell game, he thought, his mind too tired to really focus. He was a shell, Jenny was a shell, Chaplin was a shell, and none of them were the shells they had been a day, a week, or a month before.
What made the man or the woman? The soul? The flesh? The...
He stumbled. The hand on his shoulder was the only thing that stopped him from falling. He came back to the moment, and he was determined to stay there. He wouldn’t allow his brain to fool him into hiding elsewhere. He needed to be clear-headed for a while longer, at least. He could sleep tomorrow.
Tonight he needed to stay alive.
“Stop for a minute,” he said, fumbling to get his pack off his back even as he stopped walking. He uncapped the last of his water bottles and drained it dry in three long chugs. He wiped the back of his hand over his lips.
They were out there.
He could feel them. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see them. He was a scientist; he lived in a world full of things he couldn’t see, that he still knew to be irrefutably true.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
It was Genaro who answered, the young ranger pragmatic as ever.
“Going back to the vehicles.”
That was true, but it was only part of what was going on. They were also running away from what they had seen back at the village; they were blundering about in the dark, so close to being lost; they were reacting to the predatory growls of the creatures that lurked out there. They were moving instinctively away from the sounds of their hunters — and that was what ate away at his subconscious. He knew how these creatures worked. He knew how they hunted. And now they were breaking all of the rules.
Cutter and his group were being steered slowly away from their path, away from the Land Rovers and toward the Thylacosmilus’ chosen hunting ground.
“Check our compass reading, because I don’t think we are,” he said.
Genaro fumbled in his pocket for the small device, and read it by the glow of his Maglite. The ranger scratched at his scalp then looked at Cutter.
“Eighteen degrees off,” he said, sounding as if he didn’t quite believe it.
“They’re steering us away from where we want to go.” It was time to take charge again. Here we go... “We need to start thinking. I’m tired; you’re tired. After what we’ve been through today, my soul is bloody empty. But that’s no excuse for stupidity. Not thinking is going to get us killed.”
“What do you propose, Professor?” Connor asked — at least he thought it was Connor. The speaker was no more than ten feet away from him, but he was completely swallowed by the darkness.
He swung his own torch around. The beam roved across the leaves, distorting the world around them as it settled on Connor.
“We need to go back to basics. What do animals fear?”
“Fire,” Connor said.
“Fire,” Cutter agreed. “Not torches. We need burning brands. Something we can use to tilt the balance back in our favour.”
“Only problem is I don’t think my Zippo will do much against the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal out there.”
“No, but it’s a start.” Cutter reached back into his pack, rummaging around for something burnable. There was nothing that fitted what he had in mind, so he pulled his shirt off and tore away the sleeves. He shone the beam of his torch across the ground, looking for suitable deadfall. It took a few passes of the torch, but he found two fairly straight branches. He wrapped and tied the material around the ends. “Lighter?” he said to Connor, holding out both brands.
“Burn, baby, burn,” Connor said, igniting the Zippo. He touched the small blue and yellow flame to the cloth and watched it blacken, smoulder, and finally ignite.
Cutter tossed one of the flaming brands to Genaro and the other to Nando. “You know this place, get us back to the vehicles. We are not staying out here all night.”
“He who turns and runs away lives to fight another day,” Connor joked.
“Precisely. Now, come on.”
Cutter gathered up his things and shouldered his pack. The natural light of the burning torches was very different to the channelled beam of the battery-powered ones. The brands crackled and spat, throwing shadows and phantom shapes all across the wall of vegetation. The brands brought warmth with them, too. They found themselves clustering around the two rangers. Still, beyond the ever-shifting shadows they could feel the darkness rise.
Cutter caught the scent of a peculiarly out-of-place aroma, not cookie dough this time, but strong, and unmistakably coffee. The fragrance intensified as he walked deep into the darkness, peering forward. It was enough to raise the hackles on his neck.
Someone was out there, watching.
It all happened in an instant, that frozen moment between seconds.
The Thylacosmilus came roaring out of the darkness, feral lips curled back on those enormous teeth.
It was on them, then, so much worse for the fire that turned the scene nightmarish with the erratic light. The great black-shadow beast pounced, and huge claws raked toward Abby’s face.
Only Blaine’s instincts saved her. The SAS man caught the flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye and reacted without a second thought. As the barbed claws slashed out, Blaine threw himself at her, hitting Abby so hard the impact hurled her from her feet and left her sprawling on her stomach in the dirt. The claws sliced through the thin material of his shirt, gouging out huge bloody runnels along his forearm and into his bicep. He came down on top of Abby, driving the air from her lungs.
A sudden and blisteringly painful heat seared across the length of his spine. He gritted his teeth through the agony, only for a second vicious cut on his shoulder blade to tear the sounds of agony from his throat.
Screaming himself hoarse, Blaine rolled off Abby as the great pouch-blade delivered another scything blow aimed at cleaving into his brainpan. He felt the sizzle of claws that raked across the back of his scalp as he barely avoided them.
All around him the world exploded into light and angry sound as the rangers came charging toward him. One of them — he couldn’t see who — lunged, the flaming tip of his firebrand scorching the side of the Thylacosmilus’ head. The beast howled in pain but didn’t flee. Enraged, it threw itself at him with renewed purpose.
The beast’s jaws snapped at Blaine’s face savagely, so close that he tasted its foul breath in the back of his throat.
He brought up his wounded arm to ward off any bites, and reached down for the long blade he had sheathed at his side. Before he could draw the knife, however, the beast’s incisors clamped down on the soft meat of his already bloody forearm, piercing through to the bone. The pouch-blade seemed incensed by the heady tang of blood in the air, and the promise of flesh.
Blaine’s cries went beyond screams into an agony of silence. As the pain threatened to overwhelm him, turning the world to black, he lashed out wildly, hammering his free hand into the side of the creature’s face brutally once, twice, three times, until its head snapped back.
The blackness reced
ed momentarily.
The pain did not.
Blaine wrenched his arm free, the sharp teeth taking lumps of muscle and tendon with them as he tore himself out of its grip.
And then three sharp cracks drove the beast off; the gunshots resonating throughout the heart of the darkness.
Blaine rolled over onto his back and looked up at the black canopy of the trees and the ghostly flickers of the torchlight. His heart lurched wildly in his chest. He could feel the creeping loss of feeling moving down from his fingers. He tried to turn his head, but it hurt too much. Sweat and blood chilled his skin.
“Well,” he said, grunting through the pain, “that kitty’s got some nasty claws.”
“Shhh, lie still,” one of the women said.
He could see them. The fog was rising. At least he thought it was the fog. White tendrils crept across his chest. Lung-shaped plumes leaked between his lips, forming wraiths above him.
He saw Lucas standing over him.
The rising mist made it look as though coils of gun smoke were drifting from the muzzle of his SIG-Sauer P226.
He had never been so pleased to see a still-smoking gun.
He tried to move — and then the pain took him
TWENTY
There was no air.
“We’ve got to get him to a hospital,” Abby said. She crouched down beside the wounded SAS man, unravelling the gauze and bandages from the small first-aid kit she carried. Lucas stood over her with a Maglite, shining down so that she had illumination to work by.
Her heart still hammered unevenly against her breastbone, as it had ever since the attack. She bunched up the gauze to make a compress, wadding it against the worst of his cuts. The white cloth turned red too quickly.
“Press it down hard,” she instructed, taking Blaine’s cold hand in hers and pressing it down against the cut to try and staunch the bleeding.
Shadow of the Jaguar Page 20
