Falling Prey

by M. C. Norris

  Best friends from Day One, when Peanut was still the little kid across the street. He was present in Alex’s earliest memories, and in almost all of his best memories thereafter. Alex could still remember looking out the front windows of his home, back when he was still probably just a toddler. He’d press his nose against the glass, stare at that house across the street, and wonder where in the world that other kid could possibly be? He was accustomed to playing in the front yard with him on sunny days when their moms would get together, so when Alex observed that the other child wasn’t always out there in the lawn where he’d left him, his whereabouts was the greatest mystery.

  One rainy morning, Alex slipped out the front door, and went on a little recon mission to find his missing friend. He remembered hearing the screen door close behind him with a squeal and a bang as he made his way down the drive, and out into the street Somehow, he made it safely across without incident. He remembered searching the boy’s yard, peering through the slats in their fence. At any minute, he expected to catch a glimpse of his little friend when all of a sudden, he heard his mama shout from the other side of the street. She looked really angry, and she was marching at him fast. Looked like a heap of trouble headed his way. You’d think that the memory of a spanking would lodge more deeply in a child’s head than the unsolved mystery of where little friends go when they’re not playing in their yards, but that was not to be the case. Even though he learned that all children eventually go back inside their houses, he never forgot what it was like to not know such a common thing. If he was ever punished for crossing the street, he did not remember.

  Alex was the only kid in Southeast High who knew the true origin of Matthew’s nickname. When he lied to an inquiring lunchroom full of kids that he’d earned the nickname “Peanut” because of his love of peanut butter, it inspired the adoption of more than a few other nicknames around the table. By the end of the lunch hour, Dan Minor became “Taco,” Mitch McAlister became “Bacon,” and Jeff Ruse became “Sardine,” which was ironic, because Jeff’s gym locker smelled just like a dead fish. However, the true story was that back in Cub Scouts, Alex dared his lifelong friend to stick a peanut up his nose, which resulted in a trip to the emergency room when the peanut got stuck, along with his new nickname.

  “So, where do you guys think we are, anyway?” Brett asked, lagging a few paces behind them. “Wonder how long we’re all going to be stuck here?”

  As if Brett cared. It was probably Brett’s dream come true to find himself stranded on a desert island with Tara Riley, but he was acting like it was some kind of an inconvenience for the sake of hearing himself speak. Alex and Peanut didn’t need to speak. Not really. They had that psychic bond that best friends achieve after spending every minute of nearly every day together for almost seventeen years.

  “Does it really matter?” Tara replied. “Like, odds are we’re going to get rescued first thing in the morning, you know? We ought to be soaking up every minute of this beach while we still can, because once they rescue us, our whole trip is over.”

  “Why? You don’t think they’d just put us on the next flight to San Fran?”

  “Are you kidding?” Tara made a scoffing sound in the pit of her throat. “No way, Jose. This thing is a total bust. We’re headed straight back to Baltimore.”

  “Man …” Brett said, letting his feigned disappointment hang in the air for a few seconds. “I’ve been looking forward to San Francisco for a whole year.”

  What a load of crud. Brett had no interest in San Francisco or the Art Institute. He was the worst artist in the whole Junior class. His interest was Tara. That’s it. She was the whole reason he’d started taking art classes in the first place. When Alex and Peanut learned that he was even going to tag along for the class trip to the Art Institute, taking his fakery to a new and mind-blowing level, it just about made them both want to puke.

  Tara was the hottest girl in Southeast High’s whole art program, maybe even the whole school, and although they’d never admit it, she was probably part of the reason why Alex and Peanut had developed their artistic talents. Since clear back in the fifth grade when she’d transferred from upstate, they’d spent many a late night discussing Tara’s finer attributes. Peanut was particularly smitten. Sometimes it seemed as though Tara was all that the poor kid ever thought about. Peanut wasn’t exactly a ladies’ man, so all that he had to get him through puberty were his Tara Riley fantasies, along with half the other kids in Southeast High. If that girl had any idea … one had to wonder if any of the guys on this trip would have ever become art students if it weren’t for her. Alex guessed that they were all a bunch of phonies. Funny, Tara might’ve been the only real artist among them.

  “Full moon,” Peanut said, hitching his chin at the silvery dome rising over the distant peaks of the mountains.

  “Whoa, look how much bigger it looks than usual.”

  “That is so crazy!”

  It was the biggest and brightest moon he’d ever seen. It was impossibly enormous. Every crater and shadow leapt into stunning detail, as though they weren’t gazing upon it with their eyes alone, but through the lens of some powerful telescope.

  “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” Tara whispered.

  “Me neither,” Brett was quick to reply.

  Alex rolled his eyes, and turned to face the group. “Alright, so where in the hell are we? The moon doesn’t look anything like that in Baltimore.”

  “Auntie Em! Auntie Em! I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

  “Shut up,” Peanut growled at Brett.

  “Really and truly. Ideas, gang?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that I just love this beach, and I wish that this moon could last forever.”

  “Me too.”

  Alex threw up his hands, and he began to walk again. He wasn’t getting anywhere with them, and he couldn’t take another second of Brett’s swooning. Brett probably had just as much of a shot with Tara Riley as any of them, which wasn’t much at all, but any attempt to match or surpass his level of adoration would be ridiculous. Alex knew that Peanut would follow him away from Brett and Tara, and of course he did.

  “Okay, let’s look at the facts, man,” Peanut said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “We were in a plane.”

  “We were definitely in a plane.”

  “We were in the air for what, like a couple minutes?”

  “Maybe ten.”

  “Five to ten.”

  “Then all hell breaks loose!” Peanut produced gunshot sound effects, swinging his fingers through the air like a couple of smoking pistols. “Guys are getting shot and people are dying. Pow-pow-pow … blahhhh. Then, all of a sudden, the lights go out.”

  “The lights flickered on and off, then w—”

  “Then boom! There’s a bright flash of green light!”

  Alex snickered, as Peanut cowered in an exaggerated pantomime, shielding his face from some imaginary brilliance. Part of what he loved about Peanut was his limitless supply of energy. His theatrics made everyday life more interesting.

  “Then, the plane came apart.”

  “Yeah, the plane came apart.”

  “And what do you know? Suddenly, we’re in Bora Bora.”

  “Yes. Bora Bora. It seems so obvious to me, now that you mention it.”

  They walked together in silence. What more to the mystery were they overlooking? Dramatically recapped, but those were all of the important details. That was it.

  “What about, like wormholes?”

  “Huh?” Peanut wrinkled his nose.

  “You know. What if we went through like a time warp or something?”

  “Like, Doctor Who?”

  “Not exactly, because we’re not really in control of anything, you know? I’m thinking more like in Star Trek: The City on the Edge of Forever, except that we never actually get to meet the Guardian of Forever. We just passed right through his time warp all on our own.�
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  “Well, there’s a big problem with time warps, man,” Peanut said.

  “What’s that?”

  “They’re impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the whole time travel paradox thing.” Peanut halted in his tracks. “Just like in The City on the Edge of Forever, anytime you go back in time you’re going to alter history in some way, to the point that you couldn’t have ever existed to have been able to go back in time in the first place.”

  “That would make you the impossibility. Not time travel.”

  “No-no. If a paradox is possible, then time travel is not. Like, for example, say that they sent you back in time to kill your own grandpa.”

  “Why in the heck would I want to kill my own grandpa?” Alex snickered at the idea of going back in time to assassinate his favorite fishing buddy.

  “I’m just saying, okay, that’s the mission. If you succeed, then you never would’ve existed, and never therefore never could’ve been sent back in time. That, my friend, is a paradox, and when a paradox exists, the concept that created it cannot.”

  “But, you’re overlooking one very important detail, my friend,” Alex said, placing his hand on Peanut’s shoulder.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nobody in their right mind would ever kill their own grandpa, so time travel might still be possible.”

  “You don’t even get what I’m saying, you lamebrain.” Peanut shoved Alex, and Alex pushed him back. It was pretty great how even though they might’ve been dropped through a time warp, they were still managing to have the same fun together as always.

  “Whoa! Guys-guys-guys!”

  The boys turned in the direction of Brett’s shout. He was still standing in the spot where they’d left the two of them. Awash in the moonlight, he stood rigid as a stick, his eyes bugging halfway out of his skull. In his shadow, Tara was crouched with her hands clasped over her mouth. She fawned to the heavens like some awestruck acolyte genuflecting before her creator“What are you freaking out about?” Peanut shouted.

  All Brett could do was point. They’d never known that motor-mouth to be speechless. Poised like a weathercock with an accusatory finger aimed up at the eastern sky, he could only manage to say one word. “Two!”

  ###

  28-D

  Insects feasted around wet holes in his flesh, dabbing their abdomens in his wounds, depositing yellow clutches of eggs. He could see and feel this happening, but he hadn’t the strength to shoo them away. It felt as though Mother Nature had made an executive decision to pronounce him dead, and his body had been condemned for decomposition. All of her little demolition specialists were marching through his infrastructure. Moving in even the smallest way had become almost impossible. Having crawled through the jungle on his hands and knees all afternoon, he’d finally collapsed, and while he rested, his shredded muscles had stiffened and swelled. Hart was finished. If he managed to live through the night, he guessed that the next morning would find him prone and bloated to an unfathomable state of agony, prepared like a living banquet for jungle vermin.

  Hart closed his eyes, and just breathed the loamy bouquet of moist earth. Even in a strange forest, the soil itself remained a familiar and comforting smell. There was always some comfort in a certainty. Dirt was one of those certainties. It would always be down there to catch you when you fell, and it always smelled the same.

  Sweat rolled down his brow. A murky droplet quavered from the end of his nose, but refused to fall. The better part of him felt ready to die, but some stubborn and nagging instinct insisted that if he didn’t try to get back up now, then he would never rise again. Gritting his teeth, he tried to prop himself up on one elbow, but the pain was unbearable. Despite the fact that Hart was still alive, the qualities that he was exhibiting were rapidly shifting toward a set of attributes more closely associated with the dead. For years, he’d cheated death in every game they’d ever played, but at last, it looked like the dark angel had come to collect its due.

  He’d screwed up. He shouldn’t have slunk off into the jungle alone, hoping to hide from the other survivors. Whether or not he’d made the right decision in standing up to those hijackers, he should’ve at least faced the music for his actions. It would’ve been better to die with a clean conscience. That was the most unfortunate aspect of the situation. Neither God nor man ever had anything against him until the moment he’d squeezed that trigger, and that last act would be the one to ferry him into the hereafter in a tormented state of mind. As a result of one bad decision, he was sentenced to die alone, to be eaten alive by the lowliest forms of life. He could hear the bugs clicking. Shuffling wing covers, cleaning blood from their antennae, they stepped robotically over his skin. Things squirmed beneath him in the leaf litter. Things walked over him. He could feel their prickly legs, their chirring mouthparts in his wounds.

  He thought about his mother’s struggle in her final months, when she’d withered away in her hospital bed. Hart wondered if the cancer that had slowly chewed away her insides felt anything like the bugs that were chewing on him now. She’d been gone a long time, but it didn’t seem so long. It was through pain, horror, the rawest forms of shared experience, that Hart had managed to remain connected to her in his own way. Despite all of the crashes, burns, and surgeries that he’d endured, his mother still seemed to have been the stronger one. She’d never once complained, not once during all of those treatments, not once during his formative years when it was just the two of them scraping out a living. The man who’d fathered him had only reached out to him once in his life. That was a few days after his ninth birthday, when Hart received an envelope in the mail with his name on it. Inside was a little bit of cash to put toward the purchase of a blood-red Cleveland Roadmaster.

  Hart would never forget that bike. He smiled in the darkness, as a large insect crept its way up his cheek. From the moment that his sneakers had settled onto those pedals, Hart personified a missing bond with an absent father to a lifelong passion for vehicles, and to the controllable pain that came with them.

  Hart blinked his eyes. It was difficult to discern what he was seeing up there in the sky through all of the vegetation in the upper canopy, but it almost looked like he was seeing double. Was that a symptom of dying? He squinted an eye closed, but the strange effect did not disappear. He saw two moons floating up there in the heavens, like a couple of bullet holes in the sky. It was becoming difficult to concentrate.

  Hart spat as the insect crawled over his lips, trying to focus on the sounds of the jungle. There was that repetitive noise again. Right there. He’d been hearing the same sound ever since he regained consciousness. It was almost like a tapping, a soft pattering in the leaves, always emanating from the same spot.

  Had to get up. An attempt to roll onto his side delivered an electrifying bolt of pain. It felt as though the blade of a sword was being reamed straight up through the marrow of his femur, all the way into his spine. Hart arched his back, trembling in agony, but he refused to impart a sound. Whenever he was hurt, there was always a small part of him that always wanted to cry out. As always, Hart denied his inner-child permission to succumb to that impulse. Never again. Not since the afternoon that a nine-year-old version of himself had writhed bawling in the dirt beside the twisted wreckage of his brand-new, Cleveland Roadmaster.

  “I’m over here,” he whispered. “Just come and get me.”

  So many signs of life that weren’t noticeable while he was dragging himself through the underbrush were evident now. All around him, there was movement. Things crashed through the underbrush. Leaves scraped and slapped against the skin of passing bodies. The wings of unseen creatures hummed through the night air. Hart narrowed his eyes at the spot where he could still hear a rhythmic tapping. He was surprised to see that could see them, dried leaves, hopping all about on the jungle floor as falling droplets struck them.

  Hart’s gaze tracked upward, following the vertical trajectory from that patch o
f dancing litter through glistening threads that stretched, snapped and fell. Higher, through ropes of falling mucous, his gaze climbed into the forest canopy to settle upon a fringed tussock of a head large enough to eclipse one of the moons. It was monstrous, worshipped by swarms of flying pests in such numbers as to make the jungle drone. With a toss of its massive, feathered crown, the horror took a tentative plod forward, parting the trees like weeds before its breast.

  Hart heard his breath escape with an audible pop, as the monster opened its throat, and flattened the jungle with an earsplitting blast. With every decibel of an air raid siren, the ascending howl shook the forest to the tips of its roots before terminating in a series of glottal croaks. At last, his Dark Angel had arrived.

  ###

  24-D

  “What in the hell—was that?” Margot said. She stopped picking at her nails by the light of the campfire, and shot a fierce glance down the beach, in the direction of the jungle. Behind her, Sandy’s fingers stopped braiding her hair.

  “Sounded like a wolf,” said Donovan, after a few intense seconds.

  “A wolf?” Dale lifted his head from the sand, where he’d been blowing gently on the coals. He looked across the bed of embers that he’d somehow coaxed back to life to sneer at the hawkish man in the tattered suit. “Don-boy. I know you’re kind of a city dandy, but you know that wasn’t no wolf.”

  “Oh, so now you’re a wolf expert, too. That’s great. That’s really good. We needed a damned wolf expert out here.”

  “It might’ve been a train,” Sandy said, still clinging to an unfinished braid of Margot’s hair.

  “Yeah, it was a train, Sandy. Trainload of fucking wolves.”