by R. Lee Smith
Olivia’s mind reeled desperately and called up an image—an aura of golden light. She screamed, pushing her power up through her pores, and felt Urga shoved violently away.
Now it was Urga’s turn to scream, not with pain, which would have been nice, but with animal frustration. Olivia huddled within the protection of her armor, her eyes tightly shut. She could feel a faint sense of pressure whenever Urga struck or slashed at her, but her aura remained intact. She had no desire to look and see what the goddess had become, but when Urga’s furious tirade suddenly silenced, she could not stop herself.
She might have screamed. One of them did, at any rate, but whether it was Urga in a rage or Olivia in horror, she honestly did not know. She could be aware of nothing but the abomination rearing over her. It had no symmetry, and that alone scarred her eyes. There was nothing of a female or even an earthly nature about it. It was a distorted mass of black, bony plates; a nightmarish figure quilled with insectile arms and hideously jointed limbs. When it reared back to savage the armor over Olivia’s horrified face, the act revealed a grotesquely gnarled horn, hooked and barbed and dripping, both longer and thicker than Olivia’s arm until it came to its killing point.
To let the punishment fit the crime, Olivia thought, and then she was on her feet and blindly running.
Urga bounded after her on seven joined appendages, baying from three throats and a gaping, tooth-lined slit in her chest.
At the time, it felt very much as if the chase was a real danger. It never occurred to Olivia that Urga might easily catch her. Similarly, she did not think to wonder how long her magic armor could have withstood any serious attempt by Urga to penetrate it. Olivia just ran, concentrating on keeping the ground moving beneath her feet, and keeping that panting, snarling, chittering thing from getting any closer than it already was.
She ran without any regard to where she was going, ran until her sides, legs, and throat ached. Olivia ran in the dark until the inevitable happened and she tripped. There was an ageless, disorientating moment in which she was suspended in the air, without any sensation of flight or falling. Then she hit the ground and the ground broke away. She fell and thrashed her way through a slope of rocks, spiny branches, bushes and debris, and dropped into a shallow flow of icy water. She lay there, staring up at the stars, physically unable to move even though she knew her death followed her.
Moonlight, rising over the ridge. Then the blackness of a monstrous silhouette. It was not running, did not coil itself for a final pounce. It merely looked down at her, and in each of its terrible eyes, Olivia could see Urga’s hatred. One three-fingered hand gripped the lethal phallus that thrust from the ridged loins and stroked once, considering her.
Olivia waited, dragging up her hands and rallying for one more attack. She didn’t have one more left in her. She felt more than exhausted, more than defeated; she felt drained, as empty of power as a woman already dead. She held up her hands anyway. It was all over. She had nothing left but a bluff.
One by one, all of Urga’s monstrous faces began to grin.
Then, without warning, the thing vanished.
She was alone.
She was alive!
…And she was lost…
2
After Olivia had finished with the initial phase of her response, which was panic, she crawled out of the creek and tried to think of what to do next. She’d lost one of her travel-shoes in the chase, but beyond that and a few scrapes and bruises, she was fine. Being lost was the real issue and she needed to come up with a plan fast. Her first idea, which would have worked immediately in the movies, was to start a signal fire, but she didn’t have a lighter, or a gullan set of striking stones, or even a match. In the course of their Journey, the Great Spirit had started each and every fire, and he did so merely by waving his hand. Olivia knew that, theoretically, you could make a fire by rubbing sticks together, but all she got for the attempt was a sliver.
For an unknown length of time after she realized the futility of fire, Olivia simply sat on the bank of the creek and did nothing. She was lost and there was no way to be found. She was afraid to climb the ravine and find Urga waiting there. She was afraid to stay here by the running water. She was afraid of the dark, and she was afraid of the light.
She wasted some time by alternately sobbing and screaming for help, but the only answer came from crickets. She tried to use her power to some advantage, but her energies had been utterly depleted and rest alone wasn’t going to renew them. Even if she’d had some kind of charge and knew how to use it to make a beacon, Kodjunn would be too mortal to see it and the Great Spirit would be blind to it.
At last, she convinced herself that if Urga were still in the woods, she’d have leaped down and killed her by now. Bahgree, on the other hand, might realize she was there at any moment and come popping out of the creek, so the only thing to do was leave. Olivia ascended the ravine.
She tried to follow her own trail back to the clearing she’d escaped from, but that proved useless as well. Certainly, a monster as large as Urga should have left a clear path of destruction even in this dim light, but Urga was intangible whenever she wanted to be. As for the wake of Olivia’s own frantic flight, if she’d left footprints, she couldn’t see them in the dark, and all the trees looked the same. She found a few broken twigs, but looking around, she could see dozens of broken twigs hanging for nearly every bush and tree. Doru might be able to find her trail (her heart ached at the thought), but Olivia could not.
She walked anyway, even knowing it was the very worst thing to do when lost in the woods. Panic had left her long ago, and that strange, clear-headed determination that so often follows finally died away as well. She walked, no longer reacting when she tore her skin on the occasional spiny bush. She walked without flinching as her bare feet moved over bark and stones and pinecones. By the time she was able to see the sun rising through the pine trees, she had passed a scattering of unmistakably human leavings: beer cans, glass bottles, scrappy bits of water-bleached paper, strips of pale rubber which may or may not have begun existence as condoms, and a few shell casings, but she had processed none of these things. She just walked and waited to be found.
The first ray of sunlight that finally crowned the trees struck her directly in the eyes. Olivia put up one hand to fend it off, and then gave up.
She collapsed in a cross-legged pile and buried her face in her hands, dry-eyed, defeated. By her estimate, she had been lost for about six hours. At this time of day, it was impossible for Kodjunn to fly and so there was no hope of him swooping down to save her. The Great Spirit couldn’t see her unless he was looking at her with his own physical form, which of course, he couldn’t do because he couldn’t find her.
So much for the Great Journey, she thought. Now everyone would die. Beginning with her.
Olivia waited to see if she’d start crying, but she was too tired for that, it seemed. She looked once more into the empty morning sky, heaved a sigh, then curled herself into a ball and went to sleep.
3
She dreamed she was back in Hollow Mountain, walking the familiar mainway to the commons where she knew she would finally be able to meet with the other human women who had been taken. In her dream, they would all be strangers again, except that somehow she still knew they would all be there and they’d all be fine; even the crazy lady with her saucepan would wave to her and smile and be all right. She wanted to see this and so she was hurrying, but when she reached the wide mouth of the caverns, it changed to become the commons of Dark Mountain.
The human women were still there, but paired off with their mates. Most of them were lost in shadows, but Olivia could still see some of them, half in and out of firelight, even though none of them seemed to be aware of her. She watched, embarrassed and confused, as gullan bodies eclipsed human figures. She could see Bundel with the madwoman, riding her at a furious pace while she stared star-eyed into space; Gullnar had Tina on her hands and knees, swearing and cuffing
at her when she struggled, his fangs exposed in a grimace of animal pleasure. And all that might have been real once, as awful as it was, but she could also see Kodjunn sitting backwards on Cheyenne’s stomach, ramming the haft of his ritual knife between her kicking legs and grinning; and there was Sutung, standing over Carla where she’d been tied to a bench so that she could service him through her tears while other males used her. And overseeing it all was Vorgullum, his eyes moving restlessly from depravity to depravity, saying, “Think of healthy young,” as the air filled with grunts, sobs, and moans.
“Stop it!” Olivia shouted. “What are you doing? What is this?”
“This is why we brought you,” Bodual answered, rising from a limp and seemingly lifeless Karen. He spied Tobi, sprawled limply across a bench, and headed for her, already stiffening. “This is what you’re saving.”
Confused, Olivia backed up, but Doru’s hands slipped around her waist and held her, forcing her to watch as Bodual pulled Tobi’s legs open and pierced her unresisting body. “Stop it, just stop it!” she cried. “Doru, how can you do this? She’s your mate!”
“We share,” Doru murmured. His hands swept up to cup her breasts. It was not until that moment that Olivia realized she was naked. “The daughters of Bahgree belong to all of us,” he said, nipping at her shoulder.
His mouth was wet. She reached up to rub the moisture away, but water poured over her hand. Water was dripping from her hair, falling down her body in streams, pooling around her bare feet. She looked at Doru, tried to speak, but her mouth fell open and water gushed out across her chest in a frozen stream. Doru didn’t seem to notice. He wrapped his arms around the column of water she had become and maybe he even thrust inside it, but she couldn’t feel him. She couldn’t feel anything. Olivia looked across at Bodual, who was still feverishly riding Tobi, but Tobi had somehow become Cheyenne.
“No!” she said, or tried to say, but her mouth was full of water.
Cheyenne heard her anyway. She caught Olivia’s eye in a conspiratorial wink, then pointed one finger at Bodual’s head and cocked her thumb, making a gun of her hand. She grinned, pulled an imaginary trigger.
Bodual exploded.
4
Olivia thrashed herself awake, and realized two things at once. The first was that the sound still rolling through the sky was no dream but the echo of genuine gunfire. The second was that she could smell smoke.
She crammed her fist into her mouth to prevent a scream while she tried to sort out what was dream and what was real. Above the pounding of her heart, she could hear human voices shouting to each other, but they were too distant for her to make out what they were saying.
Humans. Her first instinct was to leap up and call for help. Mercifully, she was too tired and sore to act on her instincts; a second moment’s thought killed the urge entirely. If it was deer season out there, she was likely to catch a bullet from the first hunter who glimpsed her moving through the threes, and if it wasn’t, then she would be throwing herself into the arms of a bunch of men who thought it was fun to go off into the woods and shoot guns. Besides, even if they did want to help the crazy lady dressed in animal skins, what would they do with her but call the cops and send her off into town? No, human help was a very bad idea. She needed to get out of here as fast as she could.
Olivia crawled well clear of the fernbreak that had been her bed throughout the day and as soon as she dared, she scrambled to her feet and went rapidly away in what she hoped was the opposite direction.
It was late afternoon, and there was still plenty of light in the sky. She ran as long as her aching body could stand to, which was not long at all, then fell against the rough trunk of a tree and tried to catch her burning breath. There was no sign of her frantic flight from the night before anywhere around her. She supposed she really couldn’t have hoped there would be. All the same, she couldn’t be that far from Kodjunn, a few miles at most. She cupped her mouth, and then let her arms fall to her sides. Gullan ears were excellent, but if she was close enough to hear humans, they were close enough to hear her.
Another gunshot ricocheted through the forest. The voices, when they started whooping it up, sounded closer.
Olivia started away again, and then stopped, torn. Was she walking towards them? The way echoes rolled and bounced, it was difficult to tell. Was that a smudgy funnel of smoke over the trees, or just a thicker place in the clouds? Where were they? Where was she?
She kept walking, clutching her hands before her as she went, and casting nervous glances in the direction of what might or might not be a human camp. But wait. There was something ahead, caught on a tree. Something that fluttered in the light breeze. It wasn’t a scrap of leather from her travel breeches, though; it was a ribbon, carefully tied around the tree’s narrow trunk.
A marker? For the hunters? Was she walking down a game trail?
Olivia looked down, shifting her weight from foot to foot uneasily, as though her suspicions alone would reveal a helpful plaque or a map of the area, perhaps with a You Are Here tag and maybe even a Here Is Kodjunn.
Of course, there was nothing. The ground was dirt and pine needles, bark and rocks, and if there was a path, it was invisible to her ignorant senses. More uncertain than ever, Olivia coaxed her feet to continue moving her forward. Nightfall was hours away. She couldn’t afford to second-guess herself until then. Either she sat down under the heavy pattern of branches and hoped for a miracle, or she kept moving and hoped to stumble on Kodjunn, who was surely looking for her.
A rebel yell, from very nearby. Two more flat cracks of gunfire.
“Will you stop with that fucking thing?” someone shouted, more exasperated than angry, and quite obviously drunk. Dropping his voice, but still perfectly audible, he added, “Gimme that.”
Olivia was appalled. She hunted through the thick growth of pines, but couldn’t see anyone. She didn’t have to see them. That she could hear them even when they weren’t shouting was enough to tell her she was way too close.
“Fuck off,” someone said sulkily. “Gotta have a gun in the woods. Protection. Could be bears.”
Two or three others laughed contemptuously at this. Olivia cringed back against a tree. How many of them were there? And where were they? Was she walking right into their camp? They didn’t sound as though they were ahead of her, but it was so hard to tell for sure.
“Hey, give it back! Give it—Aw, fuck you all. I don’t need the fucking gun. I see a bear, I’ll just piss on it.”
“With that little pecker? What’s it gonna do, die laughing?”
“Gotta use it if you want it to grow, Reb,” a gravelly voice said sagely. “And I don’t mean pull on it your own self. Gotta find some pussy, get a good tight fuck once in a while.”
They’re just men, Olivia told herself, and made herself keep moving. Men on their own will talk big, say things they’d never say if they knew someone else was listening. It’s locker room talk, nothing more.
“You want to watch what you’re saying, Jimmy,” one of them said, cruelly interrupting another man’s stirring critique of the last ‘keg’ he’d ‘tapped’. “I been out here ten days with nothing to look at but beards and ball-sacks, I’m about horny enough to fuck the crack of dawn.”
“Yeah, so why do I have to watch it?”
“You’re the littlest,” came the smirking reply and everybody laughed. Manly kisses were blown, manly catcalls were made, and Jimmy, by the sound of it, retreated to where he could put his back against a solid tree and his ass firmly against the ground. “Hell, boy, why you think we brought you?”
Just men, Olivia thought again, but she was careful not to make a sound.
She had skulked another thirty feet when the hill abruptly ended and she found herself looking straight into the campsite, with only two trees between her and six men. Two of them were facing her direction, although one of them was cleaning a gun and the other perusing a magazine. Olivia found herself flat on her belly without any recol
lection of the dive that put her there. She listened, but heard nothing but coarse laughter and coarser conversation.
“Loreen knows better than to say shit to me,” one man was saying. “Hell, she came into the bedroom once when I was banging Rosie Harper, and she just turn around and left again. You got to train your woman like you train a dog. She bites, you give her a sock to the side of the head.”
“Rosie Harper’s a fucking whore.”
“Yeah, so what? You tellin’ me you ain’t never paid for it?”
“Jack Kaplan never pays for it.” A considering pause. “I been known to take it, but I ain’t never paid for it. Tell you what, if a woman walks out of her house with her tittybuds showing and her ass crammed into jeans too tight for her, there ain’t no such thing as ‘please no please stop.’”
Grunts of agreement. A bottle broke.
Olivia buried her head briefly in her arm and then started crawling faster. It seemed to her as though the woods opened up about two hundred feet ahead of her. It looked like the ground might drop off a little, too. It might even be the clearing she’d run from the night before.
She risked a glance over her shoulder. The trees still striped her view of the campsite, but she could still count all six humans. As she watched, one of them announced a call of nature, and her heart actually stopped as she thought he might come her way. If he had, he would have found her without any trouble at all. As it was, he went in exactly the opposite direction and vanished from sight.
Olivia jerked her head back around and started crawling again. She forced herself not to hurry. She was too close to them. The reptilian shush of pine needles sliding beneath her as she slithered on her belly seemed overloud. She couldn’t risk any sound greater than that.
Another ten feet, and she looked around again. More trees, more distance. Still no real cover.
