Jared’s foot was still in it. It terminated just above the ankle in a ragged, bloody stump. A stream of blood poured out as he turned it over again, like dumping out a flat soda.
Besides Colby, there were four other guys present when he found the foot: Harper, Moretz, Bock, and Steinman. Of the four, only Bock kept his breakfast. The rest of them bent over and retched at the sight of the dismembered foot. The bugs had gotten to it, but it was too soon for the maggots to start. As it was, flies crawled all over it, sampling it and laying their eggs in the skin, with little or no regard for the giant humans who stood around them. Even when Colby gave the foot a little shake to try and scare the flies away, most of the little bastards didn’t give up their turf. Several drops of blood sprayed out and splattered Bock and Harper on the chest and face. Harper retched again – Colby wondered how he still had anything left in his stomach – but Bock just glared.
“Great idea, dipshit!” Bock snapped, wiping at the blood on his face with a piece of cloth from his pocket. Colby lowered the foot and placed it into a plastic bag. He didn’t bother to respond.
“Ready to go back?” Colby asked the group.
Bock and Moretz nodded, but Harper was still bent over behind a bush. He sounded like he was choking on his own tongue, but managed to give a thumbs up.
“I think he needs a minute,” Moretz said.
***
Back at camp, Colby announced his discovery to the rest of the team. He showed them the foot, and, as expected, several of them vomited all over the camp. Colby kept quiet. What was with these science types? They spend their whole day carving up dead animals for experiments and then they get all squeamish at the sight of a dismembered human foot. Not one of them (with the possible exception of Bock) would have lasted a week in the military. Colby’s Drill Sergeant would have eaten them alive and served their remains to the recruits.
After puking his guts up, Edison, a chubby little botanist from Encino, grabbed his cell phone and tried to call for help. Useless. Colby could have told him there wouldn’t be a signal out here. His own phone wasn’t even on; he knew better. Edison stared at the No Signal icon on the faceplate and swore.
“Damn it,” Edison said. “I knew we should have brought a sat phone!”
Colby knew it, too. He’d told Anzer the same thing prior to disembarking, but the fucker refused, saying the group wouldn’t be gone long and he really couldn’t afford to give them one. Which meant they were on their own for the next week.
“Well, we didn’t,” Colby said, “So there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Edison glared at him. Colby tensed, not wanting trouble within the team if he could avoid it. He didn’t particularly want to beat the shit out of Edison, but the situation had just gone from bad to very bad, and he couldn’t afford to coddle anyone. He needn’t have worried; Edison soon cooled off and turned back to his workstation, flicking a glance at Janice as he did so. Colby thought he saw a glint of something strange there. Jealousy? Anger? No matter. He had more important things to worry about.
Colby went into his tent and grabbed his rifle. He also grabbed his .45 auto and two extra clips for both. He stepped out of the tent while stuffing the .45 and extra clips into his belt and slinging the rifle over his shoulder. Upon exiting, he pointed at Edison, Allen, and the last member of the team – and only woman – Janice. “You three start packing up the camp, this expedition is officially over. Bock, Harper, Steinman, and Moretz, you’re with me. We’re gonna see if we can find the rest of Jared.”
“Fuck you. I’m not going out there.”
It was Moretz. Colby looked at his unusually pale face and thought the poor bastard might faint any minute. He considered his options, then realized Moretz probably wouldn’t be much help anyway. Short and painfully slight, Moretz would have trouble lugging the supplies he’d need on a hike, let alone battling a man-eating whatever. Colby looked at the olive skinned man and nodded.
“Ok, Moretz,” Colby said. “You stay here and help pack up the camp. Anyone else want to stay?”
Steinman raised his hand as though he were in a classroom. He didn’t look much better than Moretz, but he was big and burly, with arms almost as big around as Colby’s. Colby hated to lose him, but he couldn’t exactly put the .45 to the guy’s head and force him to come along.
“Fine. You stay, too. How about you Harper? Bock? You guys coming?”
Both nodded, and Colby breathed a sigh of relief. He really didn’t want to go out there by himself, and was especially glad to have Bock along. Bock was tough, strong, and he could keep his head in a crisis. Colby wasn’t sure what Bock did for a living, but for a scientist he was surprisingly sturdy, and would look more at home in an MMA fight than behind a computer screen. Harper was okay, too, but for the most part he was just an extra body. Strength in numbers, and all that.
They were ready to leave by 3pm. All of them carried enough food and water for two days, sleeping bags, spare clothes, and matches. Bock even brought one of the tents along.
“It’s the bugs,” he said. “I can’t stand the little bastards.”
Colby didn’t argue. Besides, he was right, the woods in high summer are usually swamped with millions of biting, crawling, and stinging insects. Who wanted to get eaten alive by mosquitoes? Especially when there was something bigger out there to do it.
“Fine,” Colby said. “You guys ready?”
Bock and Harper both nodded.
“OK then. Let’s go find Jared.”
“Watch out for bears,” Allen called out.
Colby grunted and turned his back on the camp.
“If you find any bear feces, bring some back, would you?”
Colby ignored him and stepped into the woods, Bock and Harper trailing behind him. In all the excitement, Colby forgot to grab the radios. Anzer had given them eight Motorola two-way radios so the team could talk to each other in case they got separated. The small devices were light, portable, and tough, designed to withstand the rigors of a hike. Up until that morning, they’d had no reason to use them, and he forgot they were there. So when Colby, Bock, and Harper left camp that day, they went without having any means of communicating back to the others, or vice-versa.
***
“What do you see in that guy?” Edison asked Janice after the search party left.
“He’s not you,” Janice replied. “That’s good enough for me.”
Edison frowned, his ample cheeks quivering. “Did you see how he practically ordered you to stay behind and clean up the campsite?”
Janice snorted and turned away. Often, Edison’s jealousy was more amusing than annoying, but he could have picked a better time. Jared was most likely dead, after all.
“Listen here, little lady,” Edison said in his best Colby impression. “It’s dangerous out there and you’re just a woman. So stay behind and do some woman’s work until I get back. I’ll be smelly and dirty by then, so what do you say I grab you by the hair and drag you back to my tent?”
As Janice stifled a giggle, Edison grunted behind her back like a gorilla. She couldn’t see him, but he was probably impersonating a gorilla, too. Scratching his armpits, beating his chest, and bouncing around on bowed legs. What a child he could be. A funny child, but a child, nonetheless.
“Geez, Edison,” Steinman said from somewhere behind her. “And you wonder why she broke up with you.” She smiled and walked the rest of the way to her tent while Edison and Steinman argued about who needed to mind their own business and who was just an idiot. Janice’s vote for both went to Edison.
***
Moretz watched Janice slip into her tent. Edison was half-right; Colby was obviously on some sort of alpha male kick and wanted to boss everyone around. Who gave a fuck if the guy was a marine once? He certainly wasn’t one anymore, and Moretz had more intelligence in his little finger than Colby had in his whole brain. Why Anzer, a relatively smart guy, would hire such a dimwitted goon was beyond him.
But
Edison only said that to try and get Janice back, and that was his mistake. Janice would never take him back, and why would she? Janice belonged with Moretz. Sooner or later she’d figure that out, too, and then the rest of the guys could stop fawning all over her.
Moretz stood at the window of his and Steinman’s tent and stared at the half-open flap of Janice’s. What was she doing in there? Changing clothes, maybe? Getting her things together for a shower in the community stall? He pictured her naked for the thousandth time. What would her nipples look like when she got undressed? Would they poke out? Probably. His hand found its way to his crotch. He wasn’t surprised to note the bulge hiding underneath his khakis. After all, that’s what happened when a man got aroused, wasn’t it? His dick got hard.
In this case, it was hard as a fucking rock. Moretz unzipped his pants and stroked himself as he watched Janice’s tent, imagining all sorts of scenarios in which the two of them could find ecstasy. He pictured tying her to a tree and taking her. She would wriggle against the ropes and push back against him with her hips. Sure, she might pretend she didn’t want it, but he knew better. He saw how she looked at him sometimes.
He stroked himself harder and felt the building sensation in his nethers that signaled his upcoming climax. When it came, his whole body shuddered as his semen spilled over the fingers of his right hand and plopped onto the floor of his tent.
As his breathing returned to normal, he looked around for something to clean up with. He settled on a towel and started to wipe up his mess when Allen poked his head into the tent.
“Hey Moretz,” Allen said. “We’re going to need some help with - oh, come on! Not again. What are you, a spider monkey?”
Moretz scrambled to cover his naked crotch and clean his spooge off the tent wall at the same time. “Go away, Allen.”
“The guys just came back with Jared’s severed foot, for crying out loud. How can you be so amorous at a time—”
“Leave me alone, Allen.”
“That can’t be good for you, Moretz. You’re going to burn out your testicles or something. They could—”
“Go the fuck away, I said!” Moretz shot the portly entomologist the finger.
“Not to mention the extra strain on your biceps, triceps, and—”
“Go away, damn it!” Moretz threw a shoe at Allen’s head and missed.
Allen grunted and pulled his head out of the tent. Moretz heard his footsteps in the dirt as he walked away. “Just make sure you clean it up. You know how Steinman is.”
Moretz mouthed a swear word at Allen’s back as the fat bastard walked away. What would he know, anyway? He hadn’t been with a woman since his Senior Prom, if even then. Moretz finished cleaning up the rest of his cum and pulled his underwear back over his cock.
He shivered as the tip, still sensitive, brushed against the cotton of his boxers. As he zipped up his khakis he imagined what it would feel like to have Janice’s tongue clean up the rest of his sperm, milking his cock with her lips in order to get the last few drops. The thought nearly sent his hand to his crotch again, but he restrained himself; he had work to do. He promised himself he would do it again later, and longed for the time when he would no longer have to service himself like this.
Oh, yeah, he thought. The sooner Janice realizes she wants me, the better.
Chapter Two
Two hours away from camp, Harper screamed and puked again. Colby shook his head. He would have thought Harper’s guts would be empty by that point, but apparently he still had a little left.
“What is it, Harper?” he asked.
Harper covered his mouth with his left hand and pointed into some bushes with his right. Colby stepped over a dead tree and looked where Harper pointed.
A human hand hung from the low branches of a bush. A gold class ring sparkled from one of the fingers. Garnet, maybe, or a really dark ruby. It looked like the kind of ring Jared had worn. Maggots crawled all over it, wriggling through the flesh and under the fingernails like they were eating themselves into a new home. Hundreds of the little fuckers squirmed and crawled over the palms and fingers.
Harper made a choking noise and turned away, but his stomach must have been empty because the only sound he made was a dry heave. Bock, after leaning in close to get a good look at the ring, reached behind him and got a plastic sample bag out of his backpack. He snapped it open, then gestured to Colby.
“Would you mind?” Bock asked. “My hands are full.”
Colby looked from Bock to the hand for a moment, not quite understanding. Then the realization of what Bock asked hit him.
“Oh, fuck me,” Colby said, and reached out to pluck the hand from the bush. Several of the maggots fell from the hand and hit the dried twigs and leaves of the forest floor with a wet plop. “Fucking gross. Why are there so many goddamn maggots? And how did they hatch so early?”
“Harper,” Bock said. “Get a hold of yourself and look at these things. What kind of larvae are they?”
Harper nodded, and turned to get a better look at the hand. “I don’t know,” he said. “But those aren’t regular maggots, they’re grubs. They’re too big, for one thing. Most maggots are little things, but these are almost an inch and a half long, maybe two. Plus the coloration is wrong. The heads and asses of maggots aren’t usually red. They look more like beetle larvae, but not quite. I’ve never seen anything like them. They’re probably an undocumented species.”
“You’re not an entomologist,” Bock noted. “They could be in a journal you haven’t read yet.”
“No, I don’t think so. I’d have — Holy Fuck! Did you see that?”
Colby did see it. A couple of the larvae jumped from Jared’s hand to one of the spots of blood on Bock’s shirt; a distance of about two feet. How the fuck did they do that?
Bock dropped the sample bag and slapped the critters off his chest, but as soon as he touched them with his bare skin he jerked his hand back. “Ow! Those fuckers bite!”
“Do grubs usually jump?” Colby asked.
“Oh come on,” Harper said. “Fly larvae only eat dead tissue, they don’t have strong enough jaws to bite.”
“I’m telling you, the little bastards bit me.”
“Do grubs usually jump like that?” Colby asked again.
Harper shook his head and leaned in close, his anxiety over the severed hand silenced by his scientific curiosity. As he did so, Colby noted a spot of Jared’s blood on his shirt collar.
“Harper, don’t—” Colby began, but it was too late. A dozen or so of the larvae jumped from Jared’s hand to Harper’s collar and squirmed their way up to his neck. Harper screamed and started slapping the worms off his collar, then he jerked his hand back, too. A few drops of blood trickled from a small wound on his thumb.
“You weren’t kidding, Bock.”
“Told you,” Bock said, brushing the bugs off his shirt with a small stick, and taking care not to get too close to the hand, which seemed to have even more of the little buggers on it now than it had before, if that was possible.
“Here,” Colby said, “Give me the bag.”
Bock tossed it over, and Colby put the hand inside it and sealed it up, careful not to get too close to the grubs. He sealed the plastic sample bag in a field bag – those things are tough – and shoved the whole works into his backpack.
“Think they’ll be okay in there?” Harper asked. “I’d like to take some samples back to my lab in Orono.”
Colby glared at him. The guy was worried about bug samples! He’d just put a colleague’s severed hand in his backpack and all Harper could think about was being the first to classify the bugs. Typical. Colby turned his attention to the foliage, looking for another sign of Jared, while Bock told Harper he was an asshole. Colby agreed.
Harper grunted, but didn’t say anything else.
That night they made camp in a small clearing. Colby estimated they were about ten miles from the main camp. That’s a lot of miles in the deep woods; the search pa
rt had covered a lot of ground. Since finding the hand, they’d gone the entire day without seeing another sign of Jared.
Bock set up his tent, and as Colby unrolled his sleeping bag he felt a twinge of jealousy. A tent would be nice tonight, especially with jumping, biting grubs running around. Even better if Janice could be there. The thought of what he was missing out on by being out in the woods instead of back at camp made him wish he’d stayed behind. Bock must have picked up on it, because he winked at Colby in the firelight, said goodnight, and then crawled inside and zipped up the flap, whistling as he did.
“And he called me an asshole,” Harper said.
“You are an asshole,” Colby replied.
Harper grunted something in response, then turned away and headed toward the edge of the clearing, leaving Colby alone with his thoughts.
One team member severely injured and most likely dead. That was the score. One life ruined because Colby had failed in his duty to protect his charges. It was like Desert Storm all over again. Colby knew what his papers said: Honorable Discharge. But that was bullshit, and everyone knew it, even Colby. All eight men under his command had died under fire from the Republican Guard, and Colby hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about it. Even today, he still saw Malcolm’s head explode right next to him, the victim of a .50 caliber round to the left temple.
Colby grimaced at the memory, which remained vivid even after eighteen years. Once you’ve picked pieces of a man’s brain and skull off your fatigues, the image tended to stay with you.
Nasty Little F___ers-Kindle Page 2
