Falling Prey

by M. C. Norris

  “I ain’t suggesting or proposing anything. We either do it, or we die.”

  “We should probably start making some spears,” Peanut said, “just in case.”

  “I don’t think that a pointed stick is going to be very effective against a howler.”

  “I’m not just talking about howlers,” Peanut replied. “We don’t know what’s in these woods, but we need to be ready to defend ourselves against whatever.”

  “I agree,” Dale said. “We’ll work on making us some weapons tonight, around the fire.”

  “But what if something attacks us this afternoon?”

  Dale reached into his pocket. He fished around for a few seconds, and then produced a pocket knife. “Here,” he said, tossing it to Peanut.

  Peanut’s eyes lit up. A hint of a smile curled his mouth as he flipped open the gleaming blade. He tilted it in the sunlight, and snapped it closed again. “Do I get to keep it?”

  Dale placed a hand on the kid’s shoulder, and gave him a shake. “I pronounce you our designated hunter and warrior. Yes, you can keep it, but I might need to borrow it from you now and then. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “Sharpen a good stick later on, if you like, but right now, finding water is what’s most important. We ain’t got time to waste. I don’t know about y’all, but I don’t want to be stuck out here in these woods much after sundown.”

  The trail ascended a steep ridge. Nate tried to step wherever Dale stepped, following closely, but not so close that he’d catch another whipped branch across the face. That was a lesson that only needed learned once. He still couldn’t get over how quiet the island became during the daylight hours. It was probably the absence of songbirds that made the jungle seem so deafeningly still. You didn’t realize how much they contributed to the background noise of an ordinary day until their voices were removed from the ambiance. There was no wind. The only disturbance to challenge the profound stillness was the rustle of their own footsteps through the litter. When they stopped walking, the silence was profound.

  Where were the howlers? Something that huge would have to have trouble finding itself a place to hide during the day, unless there were only a few of them on the island. What about the other animals? Obviously, there were other forms of life, or they wouldn’t be walking along a beaten trail. Nate scanned the trampled mud beneath their feet. There were plenty of footprints, alright. They were three-toed, like the howler, but much smaller, about the size of a human handprint. There was something vaguely familiar about them. He supposed that they reminded him of shorebird tracks, only larger. Based on their comparative size, Nate imagined a bird roughly the size and shape of an emu.

  Cresting the ridge, they paused to peer down into the depths of the succeeding hollow. The jungle plummeted into a dark rift where trees grew sideways, reaching horizontally to snatch at rays of sunlight. More impressive than the canyon below, however, was the sight of endless ridges and hollows rippling the land before them to the reaches of their visual limits. Nate felt suddenly very small. As he gaped over the boundless expanse of rainforest, he found himself wondering if this was not an island at all, but just the very edge of an entire lost world.

  “Hey,” Nate whispered, slapping at Dale’s arm. “Look right there.” He could see something, an animal of some sort, clear down in the paunch of the hollow. It was pale, mottled, and covered with downy plumage that draped over its humped back. Through the thick vegetation, he only managed to steal a glimpse of whatever it was before the mysterious creature shuffled off.

  “Look!” Peanut pointed at the horizon’s edge, where scythe wings carved slices through the sky. Their villous forms spiraled over the jungle in a dark promenade.

  “What are they?” Nate whispered.

  “Dragons,” Peanut replied.

  They sure did look like dragons. With their ornamented heads, and their long, whip-like tails, they looked every bit like sky dragons. It felt as though they were living in the cover art of a fantasy novel, and for that moment, at least, their lost world felt amazing. God, he wished that Dawn could’ve been there to share the moment with him. Her adoration for nature’s wonders would’ve enabled her to appreciate a sight like this one on a level that the others couldn’t even begin to comprehend. She would’ve seen so much more than the shapes of dragons in the sky. She’d have seen living history, animal heritage, and biological links, expanding her whole comprehension of the living world in an almost mathematical orgasm that would’ve stolen her breath away.

  “Well,” Dale said, snorting and lobbing a wad of sputum far out over the hollow, “let’s go find that watering hole.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  21-A

  A cool drink from cupped hands would be just the remedy. A splash over his flushed face would bring him back around, and chase the darkness away. That’s what Alonzo had hoped would happen, but when he finally collapsed on the bank of a crystalline stream, he realized that water alone could not save him. He was too far gone.

  He gazed down at his own reflection, distorted by the water’s flow, and by the ruby droplets raining from his open throat. Alonzo watched what little remained of his natural essence be spirited away by the current, until there was nothing left. His injury had ceased to throb. That was strange. The dangling flag of skin was numb to the touch, yet it churned like a net full of eels. He felt the flap of skin jiggle wetly against his shoulder as he spun around to scan the jungle for his pursuer, and saw nothing of the shackled man.

  Once again, the jungle had pinned him down for a death stroke, and at the penultimate moment, she’d changed her mind. It was her deadly games, her flippant nuances that assured Alonzo that the jungle was female. Alonzo tried to keep her at arm’s length and out of his head, but like any woman, she would have no less than the whole of him. She wanted him in her, alive and bestial in his entirety, while some dark part of her yearned for him to die in her arms, just to see what it would feel like to lose him forever. Today, she would have it both ways.

  He could feel himself evolving. The transformation was happening right now. Evolution only confused a teaching dog’s fundamental lesson in the pointlessness of existence. A new visage would mean new lessons, and the underlying message would become complex. Lessons within lessons evaded Alonzo’s understanding, leaving his mind to flounder in the vagaries of strange, new layers of life’s ultimate truth. Perhaps it was not as simple as it once had seemed, back on that smoldering hilltop in Vietnam. Do we all just go until we stop, or were there those amongst us who stopped, then got back up, and kept on going?

  The humanoid form that attacked him was not just a man. There was more to him. Alonzo sensed a vastness about him, as though he too was a thing that had managed to keep going when it was supposed to have stopped. The mysterious possibilities of the universe were expanding in Alonzo’s mind. His jungle goddess was behind it all. He was sure of that. Something of her essence had been imparted into him, delivered through one savage bite. What secret had his lover, creator and destroyer whispered into him through the mouth-hole of a new breed of teaching dog?

  Alonzo tapped the water’s surface with a trembling index finger. His face appeared so deathly wan, his eyes so vacant yet shimmering with a new sort of madness that he didn’t recognize. Enough battlefield casualties had taught him well to know the face of a dead man, and the face leering up from the stream was that of a corpse. When he collapsed at its edge, his body had bled out. He’d gone until he stopped. His life was done.

  Chirring insects in the trees kept him aroused, hovering by a thread over death’s brink. He’d twitched, shivered on the end of that thread cast down into the precipice like a baited fishing line. That’s when something ascended from the dark abyss. It rushed up from below, yawned its vast maw, and it swallowed him whole. Enveloped in the darkness of its gut, Alonzo wriggled with larval futility as the entity digested him, assimilated him, until two bodies and souls had merged into one.

  They were speaking
to him, those insects. He could hear their collective voices as she reeled him back up from the netherworld’s depths, but he was unable to comprehend their cacophony of alien tongues. At the moment he erupted to the surface, sucking air as his stiffened form writhed in coagulated blood, the words of insects made strange and sudden sense to him. Theirs was a singsong dialect of ancient anthems that proclaimed their allegiance to one of a million sects.

  They were his friends, the ones inside of him. There were lots of them hard at work to preserve a body fit for only for death, all brewing some necromancer’s formula that refilled his shriveled veins. It was a gift, but he sensed that it wouldn’t free. No gift ever was. They’d restored him in exchange for some favors that only he could provide for them. This would be a symbiotic relationship of give and take, not unlike that between spouses.

  “It’s you,” he whispered, awing down into her eyes gazing back at him from behind his own reflection in the wishing pool. It was God herself manifested in a new and clever way, one in which she would at last have the whole of him. Thoughts, flesh, and thoughts of flesh would be shared, forever merged with his jungle lover as one creature divine.

  ###

  28-D

  They ran, paired, and single-minded for the chase. They ran as one with a forest world that contorted around their hurtling forms. Outgrowths seemed to lift, bow, and recede from their path with every juke through that labyrinth of light and shadow. Theirs was a predatory privilege known only to the wild things that bounded over feral plateaus towering over the fearful lowlands of their prey. They alone knew the steps to the instinctual dance, gyrating over the huddled masses they’d soon invite to a timeless climax where the stage would invariably be soaked with one performer’s blood.

  Panting, heaving, they leapt thorny barricades with effortless grace. They jagged around one another, forever jostling for that coveted spot in the lead where they knew first blood would be spilled. Bursting into a clearing, some groaning thing stirred from its diurnal slumber to swivel its massive head, but it did not give chase. Just as the great bear pardons the pack of wolves, the shaggy beast recognized them as fellows in blood sport, and it had no urge to quarrel. Through its black shag of down, one saucer eye parted wrinkled lids. A translucent membrane slid away from a burning portal straight to hell. The round pupil constricted to a pinhole in the sunlight.

  Hart threw back his head and howled as they thundered past the stinking hulk, and he heard the shackled man echo with his own mournful bale. They’d no need for words in this game, because theirs was a bond forged over thousands of generations of deadly pursuit. These were ancient lessons coursing through their veins, and somehow they knew all the ways of taking lives just as completely as the author of the killing book.

  Crashing back into the trees, they resumed their quarry’s trail. Crimson spatters bejeweled the leaves, and smeared branches wherever he’d passed. Great pools splashed the ground wherever he’d paused to catch his breath. Here was a red handprint stamped onto the trunk of a tree. There was a lake of gore where he’d stumbled and fell. They were nearing the end of the trail, and the shackled man gibbered with excitement. No greater thrill in this world exceeded that of the final reckoning, when they at last bore down on their terrified prey.

  The shrieks of surprise were met with growls, primal roars, as Hart and the shackled man slammed into their flank. He felt some ribs shatter beneath the force of his impact. It felt so natural, so right, his teeth rending flesh, and squeaking against bone. The warrior’s painted faces were twisted into masks of horror. Hart threw his arms around two skinny necks, and he squeezed their heads together until he heard two pops. The worms didn’t approve of fatalities, but both Hart and the shackled man somehow understood the art of pushing violence to the brink, of satisfying those primal urges imbued by the ancestral savages of their strange lineage, while staying within the graces of their handlers. They would obey their hidden masters, and pass on their precious eggs, while still relishing the destructive power of their enhanced attributes. Skulls cracked, teeth rained into the leaves, limbs dangled, and eyeballs bulged strangely from crushed orbits.

  The shackled man gave a yelp through his mouthful of flesh as one lunged, blindsiding him with a thrusting spear that reamed him through. His flesh tented and popped. A glistening spearhead emerged briefly, and then retracted. It plunged again into his ribs. The shackled man fell skewered and snarling into the mud.

  Trembling the jungle all around him with a primeval roar, Hart smashed through the knot of puny defenders. A jawbone split. A nose crushed beneath his fist like a bloody bug. A stone hatchet impacted with the base of Hart’s skull, blinding him with agony. Whirling on his attacker with a woof, and a great slap of his hand, he ruined the symmetry of the painted man’s face. With that, the skirmish was over. Painted people writhed in the leaves all around them. Only one escaped. His left arm swinging at an unnatural angle, he crashed away into the forest, leaving the pair of battered predators to lick their wounds.

  ###

  23-E

  She emerged from the trees, oozing sweat, with clouds of gnats fizzing around her head. Her legs buckled drunkenly beneath the weight of all the logs slung over her back, lashed together with strips of airliner upholstery. With every step through the powdery sand, her ankles threatened to roll, as she heaved her way down the beach in the direction of the cliffs. Beneath her feet were the retreating tracks of the enormous monster that she’d driven away. Unable to go a step further, she released her burden with a small cry of exhaustion, ringing her burning and bandaged hands. Sandy thought she might vomit. Having worked in the suffocating humidity since dawn with only her sip of rationed soda around noon, her blood had thickened to the consistency of hot gravy.

  She doubled over, placing her hands on her knees, and just breathed, watching droplets of sweat pock the sand. In her condition, she couldn’t afford to throw up. She needed every ounce of liquid that remained in her body. However, the acrid stench of campfire smoke hanging in the humid air only worsened her nausea, recalling the reek of burning feathers, the sickening purrs of the monster as it crunched Dr. Kimura’s bones. Rising, she staggered away from the spot, as if all of those bad memories were somehow affixed to it, and she lumbered in the direction of the roaring sea. A little swim would draw some of the heat from her body. As she neared the shore, she hesitated, pausing to stare at a black column of smoke that was billowing up from behind the limestone wall.

  It didn’t look right. Something was wrong back at camp. When she and Donovan left an hour ago, their campfire had almost burned down to a pile of white ash. They’d agreed to conserve wood during the daylight hours, to save it all for a bonfire that they’d need to build nightly to block the narrow path against any threats that might come lurking in the darkness. By the size of the plume gushing into the sky, it looked as though their entire stockpile had somehow gone ablaze.

  “Oh, no.”

  Foregoing her afternoon bath, Sandy turned from the sea, and began to jog. Her next thoughts were for her patients, Dr. Kimura and John, who might’ve lacked the strength to move to safety if a spark from the untended fire had somehow ignited the nearby woodpile. How bad would she feel if anything had happened to them? She was especially worried about Dr. Kimura, who couldn’t possibly escape the blaze on his own. Her pace increased to a run. As she tore down the narrow path between the cliffs and the sea, awful scenarios flashed through her mind. However, when she rounded the final bend, nothing she’d imagined even came close to matching the sight before her eyes.

  Donovan sat alone on the beach, gazing out to sea. He held a full beer in his hand. Crushed cans, catching the light of the afternoon sun, glimmered in the sand all around him. In the center of camp, an inferno raged. Every log that they’d gathered since sunrise, every stick and twig, were consumed by flames.

  “Donovan?” Sandy plodded up to the young man. His countenance was slackened by the effects of alcohol on his dehydrated body. He pul
led a swig of beer without looking her way. “What the hell is going on?”

  Her heart pounding in her chest, she whirled in all directions, appraising the madness of the situation through unbelieving eyes. Both patients lay prone in a new location at the base of the cliff wall. The clear ruts through the sand suggested that they’d been dragged to the furthest point from camp. To Sandy, it appeared as though they’d just been thrown out like yesterday’s garbage. The girls were nowhere to be seen. “Why are you drinking? Where are Margot and Tara?”

  Donovan shook his head.

  “What do you mean you don’t know? Who moved the patients? Why is all the wood burning?” She stormed around in front of him, and squatted down so she could look into his bleary eyes. “Donovan,” she said, lowering her voice to a steady tone, “tell me what happened here.”

  “We need to get rescued,” he said, averting his eyes, gazing past her to the farthest reaches of the sea. “Got to signal a ship.”

  Sandy noted the number of scattered beer cans. She was fairly certain that he’d consumed them all. What was he thinking? The other guys were going to kill him when they returned. “Donovan, where are the girls?”

  “Gone.”

  Sandy leaned to the side to make eye contact. “What do you mean, gone?”

  Donovan shook his head.

  It was then that she noticed all of his injuries. His face and arms were covered with scratches. Claw marks. A chill whistled up through her core. Something terrible had happened.

  Donovan took another drink from his can, and pointed seaward. “Thought I saw a ship out there earlier. Tried to signal them with some smoke, but I don’t see it no more.”

  He didn’t look right. It was more than just the alcohol. Something inside him seemed to have devolved to a state of weird complacency. She rose, and marched across the campsite, past the intense heat of the roaring bonfire. She noticed a few peanut wrappers dancing in the swirling thermals. How had Donovan managed to completely lose his mind in the space of the hour or so that she was gone? None of this seemed possible, even for a man with a fiery temperament like him.