Instinct

by Jeremy Robinson

  Knight picked up the notebook, flipped to the first page, and was surprised to see the college-ruled lines filled with English. The writing was chicken scratches, really, but readable. He started to read the first entry.

  Dr. Anthony Weston

  06/17/1995

  The flight to Laos—awful. The food—abysmal. The adventure—high! Despite my poor accommodations I am nonetheless excited for my impending trip into the Annamite range. The wonders that are just waiting to be discovered in that deep, dark, and foreboding land will change the way the scientific community (and my ex-wife) view cryptozoology. To think that because we inhabit the land means we have seen everything on it is absurd! I may be fifty pounds lighter on my return trip back to Oregon, but I will make up for it with the weight of my discoveries. Discoveries that I hope will heal the pain of the past and make those missing the future proud of me. It is for this reason that I . . .

  Knight stopped reading. It was clear that this Weston guy was going to continue his rant for several pages. He flipped through the notebook until he saw a drawing. He recognized the figure immediately as one of the primal woman, hunched in a mass of flattened reeds, as seen from a safe distance.

  Knight read the text beneath the drawing.

  In this, my fifth day of recording the activities of the Nguoi Rung, one of them sat still long enough for me to draw a picture. I have considered taking photos, but would most likely be detected. I have risked enough getting this close. If they find my perch high above them I fear they will flee.

  Knight chuckled. The guy had no idea. Flee? They’d make a meal of him. Probably did.

  He turned the pages, looking over more drawings and their accompanying notes. This Weston guy fancied himself as the next Jane Goodall, recording everything about the creatures he called the Nguoi Rung. When and how they hunted, which Knight had experienced firsthand. How they interacted with each other, what he believed to be a language. It was all there. He had chronicled everything about them that he could see without getting too close.

  Knight turned the page and frowned. The wrinkled page lacked any text, but was covered in a mix of old mud and blood. He turned to the next page. Weston’s writing returned, but there was no date and the man’s written voice had changed.

  Two months. God. I have been captive for two months and have only now retrieved my belongings. I have been humiliated, tortured, demoralized in unspeakable ways. The Nguoi are evil. God, please, kill me or save me.

  He turned to the next page, expecting more of the same, but discovered something even more revolting.

  A litter was born today. To the alpha female I have named Red. A true litter. Six tiny babies. I witnessed the birth, having gained some freedom of movement throughout the group. The gentleness of the mothers was impressive as they birthed the children one at a time, pausing between each so that each new child might have opportunity to suckle before the next arrived. I was allowed to see them after much complaining by the others, but Red allowed me closer. They were my children after all, and by God, they have my eyes!

  Knight dropped the notebook. They had not only captured and raped Weston, but they had given birth to his children. It was unthinkable. Unbelievable. Tense and disturbed, Knight held his breath and listened. Shaken by what he’d read, he now feared that the Ngoui Rung would recapture him. And then what? Would a similar fate await him?

  No, he thought, they were going to eat me.

  And that was a preferable fate to what Weston described. It wasn’t just the things Weston had endured that disturbed him, it was the new change in his voice. He no longer mentioned being saved or killed. The half-human spawn were his children and had his eyes! Without needing to read any further Knight knew that Weston had stayed with the Ngoui Rung. Any good father would. With the notebook discarded in the maze long ago, he might now be dead, but Knight was positive that Weston had discovered the necropolis and this maze. He had become part of the Nguoi Rung and father to something inhuman.

  Returning to the notebook, Knight skimmed through the pages, glimpsing keywords like “children,” “love,” and “happy.” He’d really gone native. And had learned to enjoy it. As he flipped through, Knight paused at another keyword, “fucking,” and read the entry.

  The fucking old mothers beat me again today. They are teaching the children to behave like savages. Killing indiscriminately. Eating human flesh from the nearby villages. It is vile. I cannot stand it much longer. I must make a stand or flee this place . . . but I cannot bear to leave the children behind, not now, not with grandchildren being born.

  Grandchildren? Knight thought. If this had been written this year the oldest child would only be fifteen years old. But the notebook had been discarded long ago, years ago. How could there already be grandchildren?

  Knight pushed the thought from his mind. Dwelling on the twisted tale of Dr. Weston would have to wait. He was more interested in what Weston had discovered about the language filling this chamber. He flipped through the pages, not reading the text, just looking for images. He stopped at a page where a symbol had been drawn. The following pages documented how Weston had found the symbols inside the tunnels, his subsequent discovery of the necropolis and then this room, which he called the Rosetta Chamber.

  Skimming again, Knight marveled as, over the course of one hundred notebook pages, Weston slowly worked out the symbols’ meanings. After what had to have been years of work, the last ten pages of the notebook were filled with a translation of the stones, which told a story starting on the maze wall on the left side of the staircase and read all the way through the maze until it ended back at the same staircase on the right side. Knight read the first line of the translation:

  This is the history of the Nguoi Rung—Note: I cannot say what the name truly is, but I believe it was a tribal designation of some kind. Note! Having read further on I have deduced the Nguoi Rungs’ ancestry! Neanderthals!!!

  FORTY-FOUR

  WATER GURGLED PAST the body that lay half on the sandy shore and half in the lazy river. It had been pulled almost a mile downstream by the current before catching on a fallen tree, spinning out into a surge of rapids where it was shoved onto the beach. Fish inspected the body and found that the legs and feet were clothed and inedible. But had they been able to taste the man’s flesh, they would have found it a replenishing food source; just as two rats on shore were helping themselves to a feast on the large open wound.

  Despite the massive damage to his neck, Bishop lived. Though the near-fatal wound had slowed down his body’s unnatural ability to heal, it hadn’t stopped it. Rebuilding nerve bundles to a functional level took more time than rebuilding simple muscle. After several hours on the shore, the work on his spine was complete.

  The muscles of Bishop’s neck grew quickly and stretched out, finding and connecting with the muscles and skin of his head. His jugular vein grew, spraying blood as it lengthened and reunited with its other half. The inside of his throat re-formed and had yet to finish when a new layer of skin grew over it.

  The only remaining injury was on the side of his neck, where the two rats continued to munch on the regenerating meal.

  Bishop sat up violently as his body expelled the water that filled his stomach and lungs. Three mighty heaves cleared the liquid from his system. He looked around. Eyes wide.

  A breeze tickled his neck. He swatted at it.

  A bubble popped on the river. He kicked at it.

  One of the hungry rats, still thirsting for Bishop’s blood, bit his finger. The wound healed quickly, but the pain registered even faster. Bishop roared and reached out, snagging the rat by a hind leg. It squealed and scratched. Unable to free itself, the rat leaned up and buried its incisors into Bishop’s palm. Screaming, he brought the rat up and grabbed its chestnut-sized head. He yanked its head off his hand and then raised the body to his mouth like a corncob fresh off the grill. And he bit into it as if he could taste the dripping butter.

  The rat squealed for just a mo
ment before falling silent, before Bishop bit through its back, ribs, and spine, taking an apple-sized chunk out of its back. He devoured the flesh and bones, his insides healing quickly as the sharp ribs sliced his throat and stomach.

  Movement caught his eye. Another rat. Rage filled him again and he discarded the dead rodent in his hands, giving chase to the second, pursuing it without cause, without thought, without hesitation—upstream.

  FORTY-FIVE

  KING HAD NEVER wanted to know what a piece of luggage felt like, but he knew now. He’d been carried recklessly through a network of tunnels, slammed into walls, dropped, picked back up, and sometimes dragged by a leg. But the humiliation of being so easily manhandled never found a firm grasp. The creatures, sights, and sounds he passed in the hallways were far too distracting.

  The Nguoi Rung were everywhere, inhabiting the caves just below the mountain exterior. Some, like Lucy, were young women, performing what looked like ordinary household chores. But there were others. Happy children. Serious adults—young adults. The oldest, in human years, could only be as old as Weston had been here. Fifteen years. While the females all appeared to be wide-hipped and ready for childbearing, the males ranged in size and stature. Some, skinny and diminutive, sat on logs, scratching with sharpened rocks on long smooth ones. Writing. Others, with bulging muscles and low brows, carved out cubbies in the cave walls or fashioned weapons.

  Lucy dragged King up a winding stone staircase. With his hands still bound behind his back, he tried his best to hop up the stairs on his arms, but Lucy moved too quickly. More often than not, his back pounded into the next stair. As they passed by a row of circular windows that looked out over the jungle, King realized exactly how massive Weston’s tribe, family, whatever he called them, had become. This wasn’t a village. It was a city.

  The staircase ended and the floor evened out. Apparently, Lucy’s favored status granted her a room separate from the cubbyholes the others lived in below. They entered a room shaped like a slice of pie. Light streamed in from two large-hulahoop-sized, ten-foot-deep holes in the rock wall through which a blazing blue sky could be seen. And while moisture clung to the torrid air outside, the interior of the mountain felt cool and dry. If not for the smell of rotting flesh, he might have imagined this as a theme resort for the rich and bored.

  Lucy casually discarded King onto a stone platform about the size and height of a coffee table. Its rough stone surface was scarred with a variety of scratches, like a cutting board, and smelled like an odd mix of every imaginable bodily fluid. What had taken place on this surface before his arrival, he couldn’t say, and he didn’t dare entertain the thought. Turning his attention back to the room, he watched Lucy walk toward a kind of stone table. It jutted from the wall, apparently part of the mountain itself. The five-foot-deep, six-foot-wide counter was simple enough, but something odd caught King’s attention. A small rounded depression, perhaps an inch deep, surrounded the outside edge, coming together at a small hole in the center of the table. King glanced down. A hole had been drilled in the floor. A dark brown stain clung to the stone around the hole.

  Lucy turned from the table, revealing a row of sharpened stones that had been hidden by her body, similarly stained. She opened a handmade wooden chest, covered in symbols similar to the ones he’d seen in the tunnels with Queen while in pursuit of the VPLA and Sara. At the time, the Death Volunteers had seemed like the largest danger he would face on this mission, and they’d almost killed him, Queen, and Sara. But the Death Volunteers would be like a holiday weekend compared to the hell in which he now found himself in. A hell that was about to get hotter.

  Arms full of straw, sticks, and a few logs collected from the chest, Lucy set to work arranging them expertly in a fire pit built into the floor. Once she had a bottom layer of straw, covered by sticks, housed beneath a pyramid of four logs, Lucy struck a flint stone to the floor, sending up a cascade of sparks. After two more attempts and a lot of blowing, the blaze came to life.

  “What’s for dinner?” King asked.

  “You,” Lucy said casually as though talking to a head of lettuce about to be hacked into a salad. Lucy began testing the sharpness of her stone blade collection, rubbing them against her fingers.

  King realized that the comparison to lettuce might not be far off the mark. He examined the scratches etched into the surface of the stone on which he sat. His eyes widened a bit more. He was sitting on a cutting board. A very large cutting board.

  “I don’t think eating me is what your father had in mind when he asked you to watch me,” King said.

  Lucy squinted at him like only an angry teenage girl can. “Father doesn’t know everything. I have been taught by the old mothers, too.”

  “I thought they were banished.”

  “I see them when I want. Across the river. Father does not know.”

  In his heart, King didn’t want to know, but had to ask. “And the old mothers have taught you . . . what?”

  Lucy smiled. The little girl was gone, replaced by something feral. Though he had not seen them yet, King imagined the old mothers looked something like the girl in front of him now. “How to cook.”

  Lucy might be intelligent. She could speak, maybe even read or write. But any knowledge she had was taught to her by Weston and the old mothers, including morality. Her moral compass, so immature and tutored by inhuman minds, had been corrupted. He was sure that the Nguoi Rung, being intelligent ancestors of modern humanity, could be taught right and wrong. But like humans, they could also be taught to hate. To be evil.

  “It doesn’t bother you that I’m talking to you?” King asked.

  Lucy stopped with a rock blade in hand. “Why should it?”

  “Because I’m like you.”

  Lucy raised an eyebrow, which was more of a start to the hair on her head than an actual eyebrow. She smiled, revealing her sharp canines. “You’re nothing like me.” She squatted next to him, playing with the rock blade. “I’m strong. You’re weak. I’m smart. You’re dumb.” She thumped her chest. “I’m Nguoi Rung. You’re human.”

  “Weston is human.”

  “Father is alpha. Not human.”

  King sighed. She was totally brainwashed.

  Lucy stood and hunched out a hip. “You’re food. I’m hungry.” Then she laughed. Her voice sounded like any other teenage girl’s.

  “How old are you, Lucy?”

  Lucy sharpened the stone on another, chipping off flecks and creating a fresh sharpened edge. “Three.”

  “You’re not three,” King said.

  Lucy spun on him. Angry. “Am too! Father explained it to the other man before I killed him.”

  King did his best to hide his growing concern. “What other man?”

  “Big. Bigger than you. Dark skin.”

  Bishop.

  “How did you kill him?” Bishop would be hard to kill. Short of—

  “I took off his head.”

  King’s shoulders fell, along with his resolve.

  Bishop was dead.

  King fought back his mix of despair and anger, focusing on the problem at hand like he’d been trained to do. Let her think she’s three. Maybe they aged differently. She still acted like a teenager.

  “Is this a kitchen? Do you know what a kitchen is?”

  She huffed. “This is my room. Not a kitchen.”

  “Well, I like your room,” he said quickly, fearing he’d offended her. “It’s very pretty.”

  Lucy paused. The slightest of smiles shone on her face.

  “Do you have a bed?”

  A confused look slowly appeared on her face. Then she looked at him like he’d just pissed his pants. “You’re sitting on my bed.”

  Despite King’s internal revulsion at this Neanderthal girl sleeping on what undoubtedly served as both cutting board and bed, he managed to force out, “And your bed is very comfortable.”

  Lucy looked at him. “I don’t like it. It’s hard.”

  “Why don’
t you get a new one?”

  Lucy scrunched her face. “A new one?”

  King nodded. “A nice soft one.”

  “Father says this bed is good enough. Fit for a princess.”

  “My bed is soft,” King said. “Like sleeping on a cloud.”

  Lucy sat at the edge of the stone bed. She rubbed her hand on the surface.

  She’s hooked, King thought. Now to reel her in. “You know if we got married, you could sleep on my bed.”

  “What is married?” Lucy asked.

  “It’s what people do when they love each other. You’re not married?”

  Lucy shook her head no. Her face grew serious.

  “Father wears a wedding ring. He must be married to someone.”

  Lucy looked baffled. She wasn’t bright enough to figure out she was being played, but she had enough sense to put together the puzzle pieces he’d laid out for her. Marriage equals love, which she apparently understood, and Weston was married. Ipso facto, Weston was loved, and she wanted what the father had. She wanted to be loved that way, despite having no idea what that meant. She looked in King’s eyes. “And you would marry me?”

  “Absolutely.” The conviction in King’s voice was convincing, but not quite enough.

  “Why?”

  King smiled. “You have pretty eyes, for one.”

  Lucy looked away, the faint bit of cheek not covered in fur revealing her blush.

  “And like you said. You’re smart. I’m dumb. You’re strong. I’m weak. You’re Nguoi Rung . . . and I want to be.” Lucy looked at him again. “What’s not to love?”

  “But I am a princess here. A favored child.”

  “You listened to Weston speaking to me in the cave, right?”