Falling Prey

by M. C. Norris

  “Dr. Kimura? John?” Sandy felt the urge to run to them, as if she really believed that if she ran quickly enough to them, then somehow she might be able to change what some part of her already knew. A grimace twisted her face. Fists balled to her temples, she gawped down at their glazed and unblinking eyes. Insects wandered over their faces, rising and settling upon their lips, crawling in and out of their open mouths.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Her voice thinned to a tremulous whine, as a dark shadow of realization passed over. Her life was in danger. She had to leave, right now, and never come back here again.

  ###

  21-F

  “Come here, you guys! Get a load of this!” Peanut shouted, ripping away at the undergrowth that concealed his hidden treasure. He emitted a titter of delight when at last he exposed a large portion of the thing. He ran the palm of his hand over the rusted metal panel. It looked like it had been there for half a century, just rotting quietly in the middle of the jungle.

  “Guess this island might be inhabited after all,” Peanut said, beaming at the two men as they came sauntering up, and relishing the way their expressions heightened from annoyance to disbelief. A smile spread slowly across Dale’s face. Nate bent to examine the ancient ruin of what had once been an automobile.

  “I’ll be god-danged,” Dale muttered.

  “What kind of car is it?” Nate asked.

  “Says here it’s a ‘Hybrid,’ whatever that is,” Peanut replied, pointing to a rusty emblem with a peeling leaf on it.

  “Well, it’s a Ford,” Dale said.

  “It says ‘Escape’ down there.”

  “A Ford Escape Hybrid?”

  “What’s Hybrid mean?”

  “Two models combined into one, maybe?” Dale said, pulling at his nose. “Maybe it’s something Ford only markets overseas?”

  “How long do you think it’s been sitting here?” Peanut asked. “Looks like it’s been down here forever.”

  “Twenty years, at least,” Dale replied.

  “I’d guess longer than that,” Nate said. “Maybe closer to fifty.”

  “Fifty years? Hell, that’d be 1921. This look like a damned Model T to you?”

  Nate shrugged. “You said twenty years. It doesn’t look any more like a Model T than it does anything from the forties.”

  “You got me.” Dale shook his head. “To be honest, I ain’t never seen a car like it.”

  “Maybe something experimental.”

  “Got to be.”

  “How did it get here?” Peanut asked, polishing the leafy emblem with the pad of his thumb. “Looks like it fell right out of the sky.”

  The three guys stood and stared at the old wreck, hands on their hips. No one could come up with a better theory. There were no roads anywhere.

  “Maybe it fell off a ship, and a tidal wave came along and washed her clear up inland,” Dale said.

  “Or, it fell from a helicopter.”

  “If there’s choppers flying over this island, then that’d mean there’s civilization within a hundred miles or less,” Dale replied.

  “I like the sound of that.”

  “What if,” Peanut said, lifting his hands slowly before his chest, as if he were about to catch something between them, “this is some sort of experimental island where the government does all kinds of weird experiments on cars, animals, maybe even people. So, when the hijackers veered our airplane too close to it, they had to shoot it right out of the sky.”

  Nate hoisted his eyebrows.

  Dale glanced at Nate, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip.

  “Oh,” Peanut muttered, looking down at his feet.

  “Hmm?”

  “The two moons.”

  “Fuck.” Dale turned his head and spat. “Tell you what. I’m about getting sick of this.”

  “Sick of what?” Nate asked.

  Dale snorted, as though his question was highly amusing. “Sick of what?” He turned on a heel, laughing up at the sky. “Sweet Jesus.” He smeared his face with both hands. “Got me grinning like a mule eating green briars.” Dale laughed through his hands until they fell, revealing tear-filled eyes. “Holy shit, boys. I’d say break time is over. Come on. Let’s go find us some water before we all lose our ever-loving minds. Goodbye, Ford Escape Hybrid, whatever the hell you are.”

  “Still, it’s a good sign,” Peanut said, skipping to catch up with Dale.

  “And how’s that?”

  “It’s manmade. Doesn’t it feel kind of good to see something manmade after looking at nothing but leaves and dirt all day?”

  Dale stuck out his lip, raised his eyebrows, and nodded. “Yeah, I guess it kind of does, now that you mention it.”

  “Guys. Wait a second.”

  Peanut turned to the sound of Nate’s voice, just behind him.

  “Everybody stop for a second, and just listen.”

  Frowning into the jungle, all three stopped. Nobody moved, or even breathed. Peanut cocked an ear toward the bowels of the hollow, from which the beautiful music of flowing water was emanating. “Oh my gosh,” Peanut whispered, eyes brightening.

  Wordlessly departing, Dale half-ran, and half-slid down the slope of the ravine, grabbing for branches and tree trunks along the way to keep from tumbling into the abyss. Peanut and Nate dogged his heels, employing the same tactic. Peanut added a baseball slide into his repertoire for controlling speedy descents, while Nate implemented an occasional butt skid. The further they descended to the bottom, the more intimate the enchanting burble of liquid became.

  “Woohooo!”

  The shrillness of Dale’s whoop resounding through the forest prickled Peanut’s skin with a sort of electrified joy. He heard a weird squeak escape his throat as he tumbled down the slope’s footing, and through a soft bed of weeds. Dale was already up to his waist in the middle of the stream, throwing cascades of clear water into the air with great sweeps of his arms.

  “We found it, buddies!” he cried. “Come on in! The water’s fine!”

  A flattened spade head thrust up through the foam, splitting wide and pale in a bristled grin. Forelegs paddling the air, a slimy form lunged from the stream. Before the joyful smile had even melted from Dale’s face, he’d disappeared in a churning whirlpool of speckled coils and clouds of mud.

  “Jesus Christ … Jesus Christ almighty …” Nate’s mournful exclamations were muted by the vastness of the hollow, and the murmuring stream. Nate paced the riverbank with a mindless guise of some purpose, but already the cloud of dark debris was being harried downstream by the current, revealing none but the last set of tracks imprinted by Dale on the river’s muddy bottom. In a flash, their outdoorsman was gone.

  Peanut heard the rhythmic gasps of his own breaths, the buzzing insects in the forest canopy. He stared down into the water where seconds ago, a friend and mentor was clowning. As his mind gradually processed what had just transpired, he felt the shock of what he’d beheld start to simmer, and then to boil.

  “Hey, you need to step back away the edge of that water! Didn’t you see what just happened?”

  Peanut felt Nate’s grip on his arm, pulling him backwards, controlling him. In a sudden fit, he yanked his arm away, and turned to shove Nate harder than he’d ever shoved anyone in his life. Both hands slammed into the man’s chest, dumping him back onto his rump in the weeds. “Shut up! I told you we needed to make weapons!” Peanut screamed, feeling his eyes fill with hot tears. “I told you so! You stupid asshole, if we’d had spears then that wouldn’t have happened! He’d still be alive!”

  “Peanut …”

  “Don’t even!”

  “There’s nothing … if we’d even had a rifle, there’s nothing …”

  “Bullshit!” Peanut whirled away from Nate, wiping tears that he knew were more for his best friend Alex than for Dale, as he felt his throat start to constrict. He didn’t want to cry again. He’d cried enough for Alex already, and something was changing. He could feel it. Something inside
him was growing, while something smaller was dying in its shadow. Storming off into the jungle, he seized a thin tree with both hands, and he began to throttle it back and forth, grunting with every wrench of his hands. The feel of something strangled in his fists, the sound of splintering wood, it was darkly satisfying. The base of the tree gave an anguished snap, and he smashed it to the ground. Standing on it, he pulled Dale’s knife out of his pocket. The blade came open with a little click. Now, the tears were for Dale.

  “We couldn’t have known that thing was in there,” Nate said, in a low and steady voice.

  “We should have known. We should’ve expected it.” Peanut sliced away at the last strips of connecting bark. Once the base was free, he bent the opposite end beneath his shoe, and snapped it off it just beneath the canopy. “There’s always something. Always. You can’t go in these woods unarmed. You can’t ever let your guard down. There’s something that wants to kill you behind every tree, in every river, under every ocean wave.” He took the knife to the basal end, and began stripping away wood shavings with rapid thrusts of the blade, while rotating the handle of what would soon enough be his spear. “But you better believe I’m going to be ready when it happens the next time. I’m not going down without a fight. Alex and Dale didn’t even have a chance, but I will.”

  Through the corner of his eye, he saw Nate standing there with his arms dangling at his sides. He knew that it wasn’t Nate’s fault, and he also knew that Nate had lost somebody precious to him as well. It wasn’t fair to take it out on him, but Peanut felt like he needed to make it known to somebody where he stood in this world. He wasn’t going to be treated like a child any longer. He was through with that stage of his life. His childhood had come to a violent end at the exact moment when he’d watched the best friend in the whole universe die right in front of him.

  “We need to talk, whenever you’re ready,” Nate said, “about what to do next, and where we probably ought to go.”

  Peanut glowered down at the sharpening point of his spear, feeling a little bit better with every stroke of the knife. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Nate shuffled his feet in the leaf litter. “We’ll still need to fill our water cans. Those people back at camp are counting on us, and it’s getting late in the day. Trouble is, without Dale, I’m not one-hundred percent sure how to get back.”

  Peanut stopped scraping.

  “I mean, I know we have to climb back up that slope, but from there … well, Dale was pretty much leading the way all afternoon.”

  Peanut looked back up to the distant ridge line. It was a very long way back up. Nate was right. Dale had served as their unofficial leader, and on some level they were counting on him to lead them back. The game trail was forked in a hundred different places where other trails converged. It had seemed pretty straightforward on the way in, but using the same method to get back out, without Dale, was bound to be a much more difficult endeavor.

  “Here’s what I propose, and you can tell me what you think. I know that we travelled roughly northward, bearing northeast as we went up into the mountains. Rather than trying to follow the same winding game trail all the way back to camp, it might be smarter to follow this river downstream, where it will more than likely dump into the ocean. Then, we just follow the beach south back to camp.”

  Peanut nodded. “But down there on the beach, that’s where the howlers come out at sundown.”

  “That’s true. That seems to be a favored hunting ground of theirs, and that’s exactly why we need to move quickly, and get back to camp before nightfall.”

  Peanut looked off to the canting position of the sun in the western sky, shining through the leaves of the forest canopy. It was already starting to drop toward the horizon. “How much time do you think we have? About three hours of real daylight left?”

  “I’d say that’s probably a good guess.”

  “Alright.” Peanut nodded his head, and released a long sigh. He dabbed the pad of his thumb against the pale point of his new spear. Before they set off, part of him wanted to apologize to Nate for shoving him, for getting so angry. It felt like the right thing to do, but he wasn’t sure how to do it.

  “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about wanting to make a weapon,” Nate said. “You’re a young man, and an equal. I should’ve realized that, and let you make your own decision in that regard. I will from now on. You feel kind of like a son to me out here, and I guess I was just being overprotective. I don’t want to lose you, or anyone else.”

  Peanut cocked his head at Nate, and cleared his throat. “It’s okay. I’m sorry I acted like a jerk. It was nobody’s fault. It just happened.”

  They turned back to the river, and stared at what was once a vision of hope and joy, and was now just another source of despair. They were running out of chances to find hope in this land, and that was a crushing feeling. “I’m sorry you lost your wife,” Peanut said, glancing up at Nate.

  Nate put his hand on Peanut’s shoulder. “I’m sorry that you lost your best friend.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  23-E

  “Margot! Tara!” Sandy stood on the rim of a great precipice that seemed to drop straight down into the bowels of the jungle. It was getting late. She’d followed the trail of footprints and upturned leaves for more than an hour, and she’d still not heard a response to her cries, or any sign of humanity whatsoever except for one oddity that had looked like a rusty, old car.

  She wasn’t even sure whose tracks she was following anymore. Sometimes they looked human, and at other times, more like those of clawed animals. The jungle soil was spongy, and it didn’t leave the clear imprints, just dull depressions. The human prints could have been left by the girls, or just as easily, by the guys. Her only hope was that the tracks didn’t belong to that band of savages that John described, which could mean that she was following them straight into a hostile camp. Regardless, she couldn’t go back to the beach. She had to warn the girls, if she ever found them, that Donovan had revealed a very dangerous side of himself.

  Upon discovering the lifeless bodies of Dr. Kimura and John, she decided against pressing Donovan with any further questions. Her hunch was that Donovan had smothered them as soon as he had the chance, because he believed that they were taxing his own chances of survival by depleting the limited resources. To some extent she had to agree, but she would never agree to euthanize a person who had a desire to live. That was murder, plain and simple, and she believed that dehydration, hunger, and the stress of their situation had driven Donovan to murder. All it took was a little alcohol, and probably the voiced disapproval of Dr. Kimura. Some weak part inside of him had just snapped, and before he knew it, he was on top of the helpless doctor, choking the life out of him.

  Of course, it was also possible that the two men had simply passed away. It was unbearably hot, and those guys were dying from blood loss. She’d been gone over an hour, maybe closer to two. Hard telling exactly how long she’d been away. Dry wood was not easy to find in a humid jungle. Everything was either alive and green, or rotten and filled with termites. Nothing seemed to lie dead for very long here.

  Either way, Donovan had most definitely flipped his lid. He’d burned all the wood, drank all of the beer, and that kind of irrational behavior was enough to convince Sandy that she ought to not pester him anymore. With his back positioned to her, as he sat staring out to sea, she’d collected the last reserves of soda, and slipped quietly out of camp along the narrow trail. Sandy hadn’t felt very good about taking the last of her group’s rations, but her only other option would’ve been to leave them with Donovan, and in his confused mental state he’d surely have consumed every drop. If she ever found those who remained of her shrinking family of castaways, then she would redistribute what little she’d salvaged. She figured that if the guys made it back to camp, then they could deal with Donovan in their own way, but Sandy felt that it was her moral obligation to try and warn the girls.

  “Margot!” she crie
d, hearing her own desperation reverberating through the jungle. It was a heartless, aversive sort of place that had no love for human life. “Tara!”

  The sun hung low in the western sky. Probably not a good idea to keep yelling at this hour, or risk drawing unwanted attention to her location. No telling if those howlers had just happened to be on the move at that hour the night before, or if nightly hunts by those horrible creatures were something that she could always come to dread whenever the sun settled down into the sea.

  The trail slithered down into the hollow. She could see the turned stones, skid marks where people had slid and stumbled. It looked steep. Drawing a shaky breath, Sandy took the first step in what became an even more rapid descent than she’d anticipated. She could hardly move slowly enough to keep her eyes fixed on the footprints. A root caught her toe, and she shrieked as her ankle twisted, and folded beneath her leg. She grabbed for a tree trunk as she toppled, but her nails only raked the bark. Tumbling, rolling, her body quickly picked up speed, cartwheeling through brambles, and slamming over rocks, until she landed in a battered heap at the bottom.

  She clutched her sprained ankle, rolling back and forth in agony in a shock of weeds at the bottom. The pain was so intense that it took her breath away, made her start to perspire. She felt lightheaded, and nauseous. It was perhaps the dizzying effects of pain that made her question what she thought she was hearing as some sort of an auditory mirage. Closing her eyes, she controlled her breathing as best she could, and just listened to what sounded like the gentle burbling of a nearby brook.

  It couldn’t be.

  Sandy’s eyes flicked open. Her dry tongue lapped at her cracked lips. Wincing from sharp bolts of pain that stabbed at her ankle, which was already beginning to swell, she forced herself into an upright position. Right before her was beautiful, clear stream of flowing water. Whimpering, she dragged herself toward it. Her gaze hesitate on a pile of wood shavings next to a broken off sapling. She gave a weak laugh of relief. It was the guys she’d been tracking, no doubt about it. They’d been right here, sitting and whittling in this same spot, probably not much more than an hour ago. Sandy imagined the relief and joy that they too must have felt when they’d happened upon this friendly branch of fresh water.