Alter

by Jeremy Robinson

  Her brows furrow.

  I point to two locations where no one is, and then shrug.

  She’s not getting it.

  Ashan mimics my gestures, going through the motions of pointing and counting and then stabbing her finger at two empty locations.

  Her eyebrows reverse direction. She ducks lower and looks about. She’s understood, but her effort to find the missing men is futile. Close to the fire now, seeing anything beyond the meager light’s reach is impossible. Our eyes have adjusted to the light. Everything beyond it is invisible.

  She points at the two men nearest me, putting a lot of force into the motion.

  I give a nod and move on. She wants to do this quickly. My next target obliges. He’s so drunk that he’s probably halfway to being dead already. I cup a hand over his mouth and help him the rest of way into the afterlife. The only thought I give my action is to note how simple it is. I feel a strange sense of pride, knowing that I’m not the snowflake my Republican friends would have me believe I am. I can do what needs doing, and I don’t even need a gun.

  Upon reaching my final target, I look over his face. Like my previous kills, the man is a stranger to me. I look over the rest of the dead men, including the man over whom Ashan is crouched. I don’t recognize any of them, which is to say, the only man I would recognize—the father—is one of the two missing men.

  Ashan and I dispatch the final two hunters with equal ease, staying still and quiet as we monitor their lives coming to an end.

  Eleven men dead in just a few minutes, four of them at my hands, one of them brutally so.

  “Where hunters?” I whisper.

  Ashan scans the darkness. “Tracks. Find.”

  The barren earth is covered with footprints left in the wake of the drunken hunters. But they haven’t left the village since they arrived. All we need to do is locate the footprints headed away from the village.

  We separate, crawling into the darkness. Personally, I hope we discover the men sleeping further from the fire. My gut says that’s not going to happen. But where could they have gone? From a distance it looked like all the men were inebriated. Why would they leave?

  I don’t find answers to my questions, or any signs of the two men. What I do find, are more bodies, or what little remains of them. Given the size, the skeleton I’ve stumbled upon was a woman. The bundle in her arms contains a small collection of human bones. A baby. A newborn.

  Did they kill the child? Did they let it starve to death in her slain mother’s arms?

  Emotions seep back into my psyche, powerful and mind-numbing. I’m not regretting my actions, or feeling guilty for being part of so much death and violence. On the contrary, I find myself hoping the missing men turn up, so I can help Ashan bring justice to the jungle.

  These men deserve to die.

  They need to die.

  Allowing them to live would be like condoning genocide and the murder of children.

  I nearly stab Ashan in the neck when she sneaks up beside me. I pull up short when I see her face, but her raised arm would have blocked the blow anyway. She looks ready to deliver a counter strike, but then notes the anger in my eyes and the bundle beneath me.

  This is the first time I’ve seen anything close to despair from Ashan. She reaches for the bundle, opening it up to reveal the bones inside, picked clean by insects, some of which fall out and flee into the night.

  She plucks the small head from the wrapped cloth and pets the smooth, white skull. “Chulo.” She holds the hollow head up to me. Points at it. “Chulo.”

  “Sorry, Chulo,” I say.

  Ashan nods her thanks for my apology and returns the skull to its resting place. I’m not sure what the burial customs are, but there’s no time for that now. Not with two men still on the loose.

  “Good,” Ashan says, patting my arm and pointing at the dead men. “Greg, good.”

  I appreciate her praise and show it with a simple nod. Looking over the men, I see the scene like she does, not as a massacre or a gut-wrenching mass murder, but as a job well done.

  A dry whack noise followed by a spray of grit on my face snaps my eyes from the scene and down to the ground between us. A long arrow has punctured the earth, just inches from my foot.

  Ashan and I turn in the direction from which the arrow flew. A wall of darkness greets us and is made more ominous when a chorus of hooting voices rises up.

  That’s more than two men.

  “Hunters,” Ashan says, a trace of fear in her voice. “Friends. Kill us.”

  “No shit,” I say.

  Our eyes linger on each other for a moment. Then we both look down at Chulo’s small body, wrapped against its dead mother’s ribcage. “No…” I grip Ashan’s shoulder. “We kill hunters.”

  Her eyes flare with a thirst for blood.

  “Machete,” she growls. “Gun! Now!”

  Then she dives away, rolling toward the fire. Arrows fly, chasing her as she moves, but they don’t stop her from reaching the slain men, or from picking one of them up and tossing his body over the lingering flames, smothering the fire, and plunging us into darkness.

  19

  Close to the clearing’s fringe, I trip. I’m not sure what my foot snagged on—branch, the remains of a hut, or the scavenged limb of a dead villager—but it takes me down all the same. There’s a loud crack and a sharp pain in my leg. My first thought upon hitting the dusty ground is that my leg is broken. My second is, I can’t breathe.

  With the wind knocked out of me, I sit up gasping and reaching for my tibia. It’s already swelling, but not nearly enough to suggest a break. To confirm the prognosis, I give my leg a squeeze. The pain is manageable. Definitely not a break.

  The shouts of onrushing hunters spur me back into action.

  Lungs half empty, leg throbbing, I throw myself through the foliage and into the dense jungle. My eyes are adjusting to the darkness again, but it’s taking time I don’t have.

  Without my help, Ashan will not survive.

  I have no way of knowing how many warriors have come to claim our lives, but the chorus of shouting says there are too many.

  For Ashan.

  For me.

  But maybe not for the gun.

  I need to find our supplies, wrapped together in a tight bundle, tucked into the nook of a tree, and covered by leaves the size of my torso. During the day, it would be hard to spot. Now…my gear could be a few feet in front of me and I might not see it.

  Slow down. Think. Focus.

  My eyes continue to adjust, irises opening to capture the meager amount of leaf-filtered moonlight and starlight.

  Find the tree.

  Most of the trees on the village’s outskirts are tall and straight, topped with green clouds, but the tree cradling our only hope of survival is a shorter species adapted to low light conditions and full of twisting roots and limbs. Ashan seemed to have an affection for the tree. She sought it out. Accepted its comfort. I got the distinct impression that the branches, perfect for climbing, were not strangers to the weight of her body, now and as a child swinging, climbing, and practicing for a life in the wild.

  I find the tree by careening into one of its lower branches, repeating the doomed Cessna’s crash with my face.

  I’m knocked backward, the air pushed from my lungs a moment after they’d been filled anew. I cough hard, and suck in mouthfuls of air, willing the squadron of Tinkerbells in my vision to either sprinkle their pixie dust and gift me with flight, or get the hell out of the way.

  They retreat, slowly, and I’m able to find the tree’s network of roots. I crawl around them, feeling the twisting, gnarled shapes, hoping to find something familiar.

  “Damnit,” I grumble.

  A scream tears from the clearing. My body tenses until I realize it’s a man. When the explosion of noise screeches to a stop, I see the man in my mind’s eye, clutching his throat as Ashan’s poison takes hold.

  Being outnumbered, she’ll eventually fall, but he
r body count will be higher in the end. While the hunters have one opponent to find in the dark, Ashan can fire blindly in the mass of men rushing toward her and is far more likely to strike a target.

  It won’t be enough.

  “Damnit…”

  I grip a cable of root and thrash it up and down, like an enraged wrestler from the 1980s. When I release the wood, I fall forward and reach out to catch myself. Roots and ribs collide, further battering my lungs, but my outstretched hands brush against something smooth and out of place.

  I scramble through the roots, find the large flat leaves, and tear them away. My pants resist me like an angry anaconda, twisting in my hands as I search for the pocket in which the gun resides. I find the weapon, draw it free, and start to move away.

  A scream flinches me to a stop—another man—and triggers my memory.

  The machete!

  I slip the blade out from between my pants and belt, and then, wielding two weapons, I find my way back out of the roots and start up the hill toward the clearing.

  Halfway there, my thoughts clear again. I should have retrieved the spare magazine as well.

  Too late, I decide. Finding the gear again will take too long.

  Before I can resume my charge, the sound of feet sliding over leaves freezes me in place. Is the battle moving from the clearing to the forest? Is Ashan retreating?

  A shadow moves through the night, small and graceful despite the darkness.

  “Ashan!”

  The figure alters course, heading directly toward me.

  “Ashan?”

  The runner doesn’t slow down, reply, or adjust course.

  It’s not Ashan.

  When he shouts a battle cry, there is no doubt. There is also no time to think.

  So I react.

  Rather than aiming and shooting, I swing. It’s more of a flinch. Barehanded it would have been a failed attempt at a backhanded slap. Armed with the machete, it’s a deadly slice, first through the air, and then through skin, muscle, and arteries.

  I’ve struck the man’s neck.

  I don’t see it happen, but the spray of hot blood against my face and torso, as the man tumbles into me, tells a story. He gurgles as I catch him, instinct guiding me to aid the man I’ve just slain. When I realize he’s already dead, I leap back and let him fall.

  My lungs fill for the first time since fleeing the clearing.

  I feel…alive. Emboldened by the primal taking of a life.

  A justified killing, I tell myself. Righteous. And it feels…good.

  Is this blood lust? a small voice from deep inside ponders. The rest of me doesn’t have an answer. Doesn’t care to dwell on shifting moralities.

  I’m done thinking.

  Done caring.

  The man I was—gentle, empathetic, compassionate—has no place in the Amazon. So I bury those things and decide to become something else.

  My feet slip over slick earth like a cartoon character building up speed. Traction is delivered by a clump of leaves, and I’m propelled up the hillside. My breaths come as grunts, like an overworked horse galloping through the cold.

  As I breach the clearing, I move the machete to my right hand and the gun to the left. I’m not sure why, it just feels right.

  My steps come as leaps. I will not trip again.

  The sound of shouting guides me.

  It’s not pained or angry. It’s excited. The hunters have subdued Ashan.

  “Greg!” she screams, revealing they’ve taken her alive, perhaps intent on finishing what the father and son started, driven by testosterone to kill and fuck, in the reverse order.

  They sent one man after me, perhaps taking my exit as cowardice or retreat. That was their first mistake. The second was turning their backs to me. The solid wall of tan flesh glows dull orange in the fire’s embers, still glowing beneath the fallen warrior’s weight. Soon, the blaze will burn again, fueled by his flesh. Already, the scent of burnt meat fills the air.

  Some part of me that understands strategy, and is still calculating the best way to handle things, says to sneak up on them. I project an image of myself, stabbing and slicing my way through three or four men before the group realizes they’re under assault.

  It’s not a bad plan.

  But it’s not what I do.

  An energy unlike anything I’ve felt before builds in my core and blossoms out through my limbs, building in my throat and expressing itself as an inhuman roar.

  I’ve only heard something like it once. At a zoo.

  It was a lion. A deep resounding, ‘Arroo!’ The intensity of it screamed, ‘danger’ in my mind despite being separated from the big cat by a moat, a wall, and a fence.

  These men experience the sound from me in the same way.

  Shock and fear greet me as they spin around, only a few of them thinking to reach for weapons. But there is no moat to hinder my leap. No wall to block my claws. No fence to slow my assault. There is just me and them.

  I see the men’s faces for the first time. Unlike the father’s tribe, painted in red, the newcomers are covered in a black, maze-like pattern. It differentiates the two tribes, but as I descend on them, they are unified in their terror.

  I catch sight of Ashan on the ground, bloodied, but not clutching her throat—not poisoned, not dying. For a flicker, she shares in the men’s fear.

  Then she sees me, coated in piss-mud and a dead man’s blood—and smiles.

  “Arroo!” I shout again, and I swing the machete.

  20

  The old me, that civilized man, would like to say I black out during what comes next, that I’m suffering from a psychotic break, but that wouldn’t be true. I’m present in the moment, experiencing every hack. The weight of the machete in my hand. The resistance when blade meets flesh. The audible ting and vibration when metal strikes bone.

  The hunters who scream in fear, cowering on the ground, survive the longest. They’re the lesser threat. The few who overcome their shock get my full attention.

  Machete cleaves bow in two as one of the three bravest men attempts to nock an arrow. The severed weapon falls apart, taking the man’s hand with it. A shrill cry rises above the din as the hunter reels back, wide eyes on the wound that he knows will claim his life. Without doctors, surgeons, the means to cauterize the wound, or to treat the resulting infection, bleeding out is just a matter of time.

  He stumbles away from the fight, defeated.

  A second warrior rushes in, jabbing a long arrow-like a spear. The sharp tip nearly pierces my skin. The man is faster than me and guided by experience. If he kills me, mine won’t be the first life he’s taken. The machete alone might not give me enough advantage.

  So I shoot him.

  The bullet, fired at close range from the hip, strikes his torso at an upward angle, slipping beneath his ribcage and sliding through something vital enough that he collapses and doesn’t move again.

  The third brave man rushes in low to tackle me around the waist.

  Head lowered, arms outstretched, he doesn’t see me side-step.

  Avoiding his strong arm and hooked fingers is impossible, but I’m not trying to avoid contact, not entirely. The machete resides where my body once stood. Instead of ramming his head into my gut, he strikes the lowered blade. The machete slips up over his forehead, over his skull and down his back, bouncing over vertebrae.

  The man’s grip on my waist slides away as he falls to the ground, opened up like unzippered fabric. He twitches in pain, unable to comprehend what’s happened to him. Even in my current mindset, I can’t help but feel empathy for the man. I step in close and bring the machete down on the back of his neck, ending his suffering.

  A flurry of shouts rises into the night, drawing my attention back to the remaining hunters who have encountered something they had not bargained for. When I step toward them, drenched in blood, fury still building, they flee into the night.

  “Arroo!” I scream before raising the gun and chasing the me
n with hot metal. I pull the trigger until the gun clicks empty. Two screams follow the fired rounds. The gun’s report is followed by silence, save for the sound of men careening through the jungle in a variety of directions.

  Chasing them all down is impossible. But maybe I can find one or two of them. I step toward the darkness, but am stopped by a hand on my shoulder.

  I roar and spin, raising the machete.

  The blade swings down, but stops just three inches short of Ashan’s face.

  She doesn’t flinch. She just smiles up at me with wide eyes. Her hand rises to my bearded cheek, thick with wet earth and warm blood. It’s like she’s seeing me for the first time. If I had a mirror, I might see myself in the same way.

  Who is this man who can emerge from the jungle with a roar? Who can dismember, stab, slice, and shoot men? Who can germinate in the jungle for a month and be reborn into something new?

  Something different.

  I look at my hands. In the darkness, they just look wet. But I can smell the blood. And Ashan’s lingering piss.

  Who is this man?

  This is me.

  I feel no shame about what I’ve done. About the lives I’ve taken. And not just because they were righteous. This is life on Earth. Outside the theater of war, mankind pretends that abject violence has no place in society, but it has always been the driving force that brings order.

  American democracy with its lofty ideals maintains its dominion because it wields the biggest military in the history of the planet, with enough firepower to destroy all of humanity—even without the use of nuclear weapons. While most of the population sits at home, taking this for granted—myself included—warriors bearing the United States flag stalk the jungles, deserts, and dangerous places of the world, doing the exact same thing I’ve just done.

  Vengeance.

  Pre-emptive violence.

  Justice through killing.

  If anything, my actions tonight are patriotic.

  I never saw it this way before. Judgement was my knee-jerk reaction when it came to taking lives for a cause. Holidays, like Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, and even the Fourth of July, always felt like a sham to me because they were made possible thanks to genocide.