The Roaring

by Eric S. Brown

  “You were right, ma’am,” Nicholson said. “He’s been poisoned, almost certainly with the venom of some type of local frog or some such, but there isn’t a lot I can do for him out here. Really, I am surprised he’s not dead already.”

  “How long does he have?” Heather growled and then caught herself. “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to—”

  “It’s all good. I get it. He dies, we got no one who knows about the device when we find it,” Nicholson assured her. “Not to mention what we’ll have to deal with from Braxton over it. But the truth is, he should be dead already and will be in a matter of minutes at most. His body’s systems are shutting down while we’re standing here talking.”

  “Anything you can do to bring him around, maybe pump some info about the device out of him?” Heather asked, looking over at Nelson’s twitching body.

  “Not a blasted thing.” Nicholson shook his head sadly. “The only real question is whether we take his body with us or not.”

  “That’s not an option,” Heather said firmly. “We need to move and fast.”

  Moving through an unknown jungle at night was a lot more dangerous than during the daylight hours, but Heather gave the order anyway. Staying put would only have been an added invite for the tribesmen to make another move at them before the sun came up. Walker and Roger took point, leading the squad together. Flagston again brought up the rear.

  There were four hours left until the sun rose by Heather’s best estimate. She figured that they would reach the crash site slightly ahead of dawn. Losing Nelson was bad. A lot of intel on the device that they were likely going to need died with him. Nicholson was a tech genius, but he hadn’t been briefed and trained to handle the device like Nelson had been. She could only hope that Nicholson would be able to figure things out as they went along when the time came.

  Nicholson was right about the speed of Nelson’s death. The man was dead already when Nicholson went to check on him again. Nelson’s rigid expression in death was a mixture of pain and fear with his eyes wide open. Nicholson gently shut them, running his the tips of his fingertips over Nelson’s lids, and then closed up the open med kit that rested on the ground near the man.

  “It’s over,” he told her as he rose to his feet. “He’s gone.”

  With the threat of another attack by the natives looming over them, the squad left Nelson’s body to the elements and set out for the crash site.

  They were two hours into their trek towards the crash site and pushing on through the darkness when Walker gave the signal for the squad to hold up. Heather joined him and Roger at the sharp end of the squad’s formation.

  “What’s up?” she whispered. “More trouble?”

  “Don’t you feel it?” Walker asked. “There’s something out here with us.”

  Heather stared at him. It wasn’t like Walker to make a bad call.

  “You’re not talking about the tribesmen, are you?” Heather whispered.

  “No,” Walker told her carefully. “This is something else. I can feel whatever it is watching us.”

  She wondered if the attack on the camp had rattled Walker, but that didn’t make sense. She had been by his side through a lot worse and he had always held steady. In many ways, he was the squad’s anchor more than she was. Walker was the sort that was born to be a soldier. It ran in his blood.

  “Look, I know it sounds crazy, Heather,” he said, “but I think we need to find another path to the crash site.”

  “We can’t do that,” Heather told him. “We’re running too big of a risk getting lost out here as it is. And this route is the shortest one there and back to the crash site according to all the data we looked at before heading out here in the first place.”

  “Heather,” Walker pleaded. “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.” Heather reached out to place a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s just get this done and get home, okay?”

  Walker looked like he was about to keep arguing, but Roger interrupted them. “You sure Nicholson will be able to handle the device when we find it?”

  “I heard that, you big idiot!” Nicholson’s voice called out over the com-link the squad shared via their combat helmets.

  “He’ll do fine,” Heather assured Roger, feigning more confidence than she felt in Nicholson’s abilities.

  She turned to look at Walker again. “You got yourself together?”

  Walker’s only answer was a sharp nod as he motioned to Roger and the two of them continued forward into the jungle side by side.

  Heather waited on Nicholson to catch up to her position before she followed after them. Whatever was going on with Walker deeply worried her. She didn’t allow herself to question the call she had made though. If there was trouble waiting for them along their path to the crash site, they would deal with it just like they always did.

  Walker stopped the squad only a few moments after they gotten again. Heather held her anger in check because she trusted Walker. She could see that both he and Roger were checking out something up ahead. Walker appeared to be squatting to examine something on the ground. When he rose up, he motioned for her. Heather approached the two men. Walker pointed at the jungle floor. Heather’s eyes had long adjusted to the starlight, but even so, it was difficult to make out what he was directing her to take a look at. She could see that there was some type of indention in damp soil.

  “Is that a track?” Heather asked, unsure because of the indention’s size. It was far too large to be made by anything human.

  “Yep,” Roger said.

  “And why are we stopping to look at it?” Heather narrowed her eyes at Walker.

  “It’s not like anything I’ve seen before,” Walker told her.

  “Okay, I get that,” Heather said, trying to keep her frustration held in check. “This is the bloody Amazon. Of course we’re going to run into some strange animals here. The Braxton Corporation isn’t paying us to—”

  “Heather,” Walker’s voice was calm and gentle as he spoke. “Whatever made this, it’s big and it walks on two legs.”

  “What?” Heather gawked at him, feeling her cheeks flush red with anger. “What do you mean by that? Are you saying these belong to a Sasquatch or something?”

  “Or something,” Roger grunted.

  Heather wasn’t sure how to take Roger’s comment. She couldn’t tell if he was agreeing with Walker or mocking him.

  “I don’t know what made these tracks, Heather,” Walker answered honestly, “but I would wager it’s something we don’t ever want to run across … and we very well might if we stay on the path we’re currently on.”

  “We’ve already had this discussion once, Walker,” Heather reminded him. “Some strange tracks in the mud doesn’t change anything.”

  “It changes everything,” Walker said firmly. “Look, Heather … None of us, not even you, really know what’s lurking about in this jungle, and we’ve already got one ticked-off tribe of cannibals after us. We can’t just ignore this. We could end up paying dearly for it if we do and it turns out that—”

  “Walker,” Heather snarled, cutting him off. “I expect better from you than this.”

  Walker stared at her in silence.

  “Get moving,” Heather ordered. “If you see a real threat to this squad, deal with it accordingly, but do not stop again for something like this or just because you’ve got a bad feeling.”

  ****

  The squad reached the crash site not long before sunrise. The darkness was still thick beneath the cover of the jungle. The plane had slashed a path through the foliage as it came down. Bits and pieces of the plane were scattered about the clearing it had carved amid the trees. There were several places where raging fires had once burned. All of them were out now and the jungle seemed as peaceful as it got around the site. Heather didn’t know exactly how many folks were aboard the plane when it went down. Braxton hadn’t been very forthcoming with that information for some reason.

  “Two pilots and a s
ecurity detail” were how the plane’s occupants had been described to her, and no more details than that had ever been shared. There were no intact bodies in the clearing among the wreckage. All of them had been stripped to bones by animals and insects of the jungle. It was impossible to get an accurate count of how many were aboard the plane when it crashed because not all of the skeletons were intact. Their bits were flung out from the center of the crash or carried away from it by whatever had eaten the meat from them. The most intact skeleton rested against the trunk of a tree near the edge of the crash site. Spent casings lay in the grass near the skeleton, but there was no sign of the pistol that fired them.

  Nicholson was moving around the crash site and the sections of the plane that had held together well enough for him to have to venture inside them in his search for the device that they were after. Walker and Roger secured the area, standing guard as she and Flagston checked out the rest of the site and tried to find out what they could about what had happened after the plane hit the ground. From the looks of things, the bulk of the folks aboard the plane had died in the crash itself. The only evidence that they found to the contrary was tied to the body propped against a tree at the edge of the crash site. Its skull was gone and the bone at the top of its neck appeared to have been bitten through by teeth strong enough to snap it and remove the man’s head. Based on the clothes that covered partly covered the skeleton, the man was one of the pilots. Heather’s best guess was that he was thrown clear of the plane’s main wreckage as it came down and then crawled to where he had met his end, which certainly wasn’t a peaceful one. The casings around where he lay suggested he had put a fight against something before it ended him.

  “Over here,” Flagston called. “I’ve found something.”

  Heather joined Flagston just outside the area of the crash site. He handed her what once was a pistol. It was little more than twisted and crushed metal now though. Heather took the mangled weapon from Flagston and turned it over in her hands, studying it.

  “Never heard of a cannibal that could do that to a handgun, ma’am,” Flagston said, concern in his eyes as he spoke.

  “Don’t tell me you think we’re up against some kind of monster out here too,” Heather said, staring at the little man.

  “You have to admit that this …” Flagston pointed at the trashed pistol she held, “… well, it does lend some credence to what Walker’s thinking. Ain’t nobody able to explain those tracks we found, ma’am.”

  Heather signed. Flagston was right. She couldn’t think of any animal that could or would do this to a pistol either and though she wasn’t a tracker, she knew too that the tracks they had come across were far outside the realm of anything she would consider normal even in a place like this one. Everything pointed to Walker being correct, but for some reason she couldn’t put her finger on, she was having a difficult time believing it all. It wasn’t denial exactly. It was something more. When she was a kid, growing up in the south, she had come face to face with something she couldn’t explain once. The memory was a deep one and tucked carefully away so that she only ever had to acknowledge its existence in her dreams … or rather nightmares, and they were rare, few and far between. When they did come though, they never failed to leave her waking up in a sweat, feeling like she had climbed out of the depths of Hell itself. She had never told a single soul about the nightmares in her adult life. Her parents had told her time and time again as a child that they weren’t real. They were just figments of her imagination and the lingering fear of when she had gotten lost in the woods above her family’s house.

  In the nightmares, when they came, she was a child again collecting flowers for her mother. Just as in real life when she had gotten lost, she wandered too far into the trees. By the time she had gathered all the flowers she could carry for her mother, the sun was setting. There had been no call to come in for dinner that she had heard to let her know how late it had gotten. When she looked around in the dying rays of the sun, Heather discovered that she didn’t know where she was. Fear had gripped her then so intensely she did what came naturally to her as child. She started crying out for help and running through the trees. Her trek had taken even farther into the woods though away from her home already so far below where she was on the side of the mountain. When darkness fell, the stars were bloated about by the limbs of the trees above her as she ran. Eventually, exhausted and sobbing, her body betrayed her. Heather curled up beneath a tall tree and huddled up to its trunk to wait for help to come or the sun to return with the dawn so that she would be able to see properly again as she searched for the way home.

  Long into the night, she heard the thing moving through the trees as she lay shivering from the chill of the early fall wind that blew through the woods. Heather had pulled her jacket tighter about her tiny frame and fought to stop her sobbing so that whatever it was wouldn’t hear her. She could tell that whatever it was moving through the woods wasn’t human. It snapped the branches of trees as it moved among them and she could hear its heavy breathing like the panting of an animal. When the thing shrieked in the night, her bladder released itself, soaking her and her pants in urine. The cry was so utterly monstrous it took all she could do not to scream in terror at the sound of it. Moments later, she noticed the yellow eyes of the beast as it stood only yards from where she rested against the trunk of the tree, staring at her from the shadows. The beast stood on two legs like a man, but it was gigantic. It was taller than anything she had ever seen in real life. Her father was close to six feet tall and the beast easily dwarfed his height. It was at least twice as tall as he was. She and the beast stared at each other for what seemed an eternity before it slowly lumbered towards her. Heather had wanted so badly to try to run or even to scream, but her fear kept her paralyzed and likely saved her life.

  The beast squatted before her, leaning over her curled-up form to sniff at her. Its breath was rancid and made bile rise up in her young throat. Still though, she had been unable to move. After a moment, the beast had risen back to its feet and turned away from her. She watched it crash through the forest at a pace triple that of a walking human’s until it vanished into the darkness and was gone from her sight. At that point, Heather figured she must have passed out because her next memory was of her father, squatting next to where she huddled, shotgun in hand, with the sun shining above him. Even though the beast had done nothing more than smell her, the memory of its size and power haunted her to this day whenever her subconscious mind opted to remind her of the experience in her nightmares.

  Heather shook herself, chasing away her thoughts of the past, and tried to focus on the present. Whatever she had encountered in those woods back then was surely dead by now and even if it wasn’t, there was no chance of it being in an Amazon jungle. That was impossible, she assured herself as she looked down at her knuckles and saw they were white from the grip she had on her weapon.

  “You okay, boss?” she heard Flagston ask.

  “I’m fine,” Heather lied, keeping her thoughts to herself.

  “Right then,” Flagston said in a tone that told her he didn’t believe what she had just told him. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to go help Nicholson out. The sooner we find that device he’s hunting for, the sooner we can get started back.”

  “Good idea,” Heather said gruffly, giving the little man a sharp nod.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Flagston paused, looking over his shoulder at her.

  “Let’s just get that device and get out of here,” Heather answered, moving to follow him as he headed back to the crash site where Nicholson was still wandering about in his search.

  ****

  “That’s it?” Heather asked, eying the small box Nicholson extended towards her for her to inspect.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Nicholson assured her proudly.

  The container wasn’t much bigger than a pack of cigarettes and was made out of solid metal. It vibrated slightly in the tech’s hand as he held it, and Heather coul
d almost swear that the thing was humming.

  “What is it?” she demanded.

  Nicholson shook his head. “No idea, but it’s for sure what we came after. The EM distortion around these parts is strongest around it and frankly, I’ve never seen anything like this little contraption before. You can feel the amount of power this little bugger has in it even without the gear to run a proper check on it.”

  “Is it dangerous to carry like that?” Heather asked. “I mean, we’re not being exposed to radiation or something without it being contained right?”

  “Unlikely,” Nicholson replied. “I found its original container that was ruptured in the crash and it appears to have been designed mainly to block this thing’s scrambling of electronics and such. I’ve got the container that Nelson had us bring along in my pack—”

  “Get it into the container and sealed away,” Heather ordered. “No sense in taking any chances we don’t need to.”

  “Roger that.” Nicholson smiled and then suddenly frowned as if remembering something else. “I need to warn you that this container may not block all of the device’s EM effect. Nelson was wrong about that. I don’t know if the device’s output has increased or if the techs who designed it just didn’t make it strong enough.”

  “Understood,” Heather answered.

  “Guess that means we can get out of here now,” Flagston said with a laugh.

  “Damn right it does,” Heather said over her helmet’s radio. “Walker, Roger, any signs of our new friends lurking around close by?”

  “Negative,” Roger answered. “We appear to be in the clear for the moment.”

  “Let’s not waste it then,” Heather said, grinning.

  ****

  Glen sat in the cockpit of the VTOL. He had landed it just outside the sphere of EM static being generated by the device Heather and her squad had been sent to retrieve. The VTOL’s primary systems were powered down, but many of its secondary ones were active, including its air conditioning. The AC was a blessing in the hot and humid conditions of the Amazon basin. Every time Wallace came inside to check on him, she was drenched with sweat. There was no keeping the red-headed warrior inside the plane though. She refused every offer he made along those lanes. He could understand where she was coming from. It was her job to protect the VTOL … and him. Glen couldn’t see that there was any real threat to be contended with, and he respected her devotion to her assignment, but there was no reason to believe anything would be coming at them here. The animals of the jungle sure weren’t going to mess with something the VTOL’s size that hummed with power, and if any cannibals did come their way, all they had to do was seal themselves up inside. Nothing in this jungle was getting through the VTOL’s armor and reinforced windows.