The first ten metres of Mark’s run produced no signs of the creatures from the ravine ledge. He began to harbour some hope of making it to his destination, but when he hit the halfway mark, he was struck with a sense of foreboding so strong that it caused him to instinctively swung his staff around and duck off to the side.
Something smashed into Mark’s staff, the impact taking the thing off course and causing it to crash shoulder-to-shoulder into Mark. Much to Mark’s surprise, he seemed to get the better of the collision, able to stay on his feet while the creature was sent tumbling along the ground. When Mark managed to get a good look at the creature, he realized why.
Instead of a large, bulky beast like the dire rat, this new assailant was of a completely different build. Only around 40 pounds, it had a low body and long limbs that would have seemed gangly if Mark hadn’t already witnessed them slipping silently through the forest terrain. Its head was squat and triangular, sitting atop a long neck and boasting big, wide-set red eyes over teeth that looked like they had been stolen from a lion.
If pressed, Mark would have said it looked like a 4-legged spider with a praying mantis head that had been shoved inside the skin of a hairless cat the size of a Doberman pincer.
“Wow, are you ugly,” Mark said, his jaw-dropping. He couldn’t stop staring. “Seriously, by every objective measure, you are hideous. I mean, maybe among your species you’re handsome, but where I come from, you look like a flaccid syphilitic penis with teeth.”
Mark realized he was babbling, but for some reason, the creature wasn’t attacking, so he continued talking while simultaneously backing towards the wall of cloud.
“So, uh, where are your friends? You guys hang out a lot? Where’d you meet?” He snapped his fingers. “I know! You met at church, didn’t you? The one where you worship whatever deity got hammered and did the drinking dice equivalent of creature creation? Because let me tell you: There is no way anyone—even a god—is creative enough to have invented something as hideous as you off the top of their head. It had to be an accident. Hell, that’s probably how your species procreates. You wake up one morning with a massive hangover and look next to you on the bed and go, ‘Man, how drunk was I?’ Next thing you know, boom! More penis mantises running around the house.”
“Why does the food speak?” a voice said from behind Mark, causing him to halt abruptly. The sound was harsh and guttural, but the creature clearly understood what Mark was saying. Which, considering the content of Mark’s monologue, represented a serious oversight on Mark’s part.
Mark turned around slowly. There were two more of the creatures there, one of which had blue stripes on its body. As Mark investigated the newcomers, two more creatures came out of the mist to his left and another three to his right. Mark glanced forlornly at the fog wall. So close yet so far.
The blue-striped creature followed Mark’s gaze and then looked back at him. “Food always runs. But not into the fog. Never into the fog.”
Great, the fog is haunted. Of course it is. What kind of fantasy world has banks of fog that aren’t haunted?
Mark glared at the creature. “Maybe I want to die in the fog? Maybe I think that the fog would be better than getting sliced up by you guys?”
The creature jerked its head at an angle. “We would kill you quickly. You would nourish our young, and your gods could retrieve your soul. Not in the fog. Even gods do not escape the fog.”
Mark looked at the creature. Then back at the fog. Then back at the creature. Then at his surroundings. Then back at the creature.
Getting eaten by these things can’t seriously be my best option, right?
Disturbingly, it seemed like the creature legitimately expected Mark to just lay down and die. Which suggested others had made that decision before—hardly a good sign. Avoiding a confrontation was obviously in their best interests as well. Despite the certainty that Mark would lose, they had no idea how capable he was with his makeshift staff. For all they knew, he was a ninja with the thing and would kill a couple of them before he went down.
Mark began to ask a question, but the words came out jumbled, and he felt a lightness inside his head, followed by a twitch in his hands.
No…
Given how Mark’s day was going, the onset of another grand mal was hardly surprising. What was surprising was the way the fog pulsed, thumping outwards with each shake of his hands. As much the movement of the fog confused Mark, it elicited utter pandemonium from the creatures.
The blue-striped leader shrieked a question at Mark as his followers jumped around in agitation, but the words were twisted into incomprehensibility by Mark’s seizure. Even still, it seemed like the creature was placing blame on Mark, which left him staring in bewilderment. How was this his fault?
Another twitch came, longer in duration, and this time gray-white tendrils burst from the wall of fog, stretching a dozen metres out before collapsing back with each shiver of Mark’s limbs.
The creature’s panicked narrative reached a fevered pitch that was no more intelligible than before. When Mark’s pleas came out garbled as well, the creature sprang towards him with claws outstretched.
The last thing Mark saw was the entire wall of fog surging around them, and the last sound he heard was harsh screams that needed no translation.
Chapter 11
Ambush
A small fire burned in Jack’s campsite, just enough for him to cook the small brook trout he’d caught. It wasn’t much of a meal, but it would have to do for now. Without any familiarity with the local plants, meat was the best bet for safe food. Although he had seen some things that were pretty similar to Earth’s plants. Even the fish looked close enough to a trout that he was willing to call it one. For now though, he’d stick with meat and save his rations until he wasn’t able to find some game. Eventually, he would need a more balanced nutritional profile, but a couple days as a carnivore wouldn’t kill him. Besides, he’d probably get one of those damn pieces of flying paper if malnutrition was setting in. He could save the hardtack until then.
With his meal done, Jack wiped off his hands on his pants and gathered up the sticks he’d set to drying out around the edges of the flames before kicking some dirt on the fire to put it out. Hopefully, the snares he’d set with some fishing line would net a bit of game that he could cook for breakfast. If not, well, that was life. Better to have dry tinder and no reason for a fire than to need a fire and have no tinder.
Jack took the sticks and tossed them inside a large hole in the bole of the tree so that they’d stay dry if it rained, then cinched up his backpack and set about climbing up into the higher branches. It was a larger tree than the pines where he’d landed, close to his height in diameter, but by knotting one end of his rope into a saddle and tossing the other end over the lowest branch, around 10 metres up, he was able to lean back and shuffle-step his way into the canopy. During the climb, he had another one of those little paper pieces pop up and vanish right away, but he’d discovered a while back that by drawing a big “X” through the different sections of his Tome it would stop the papers from automatically intruding into his mind, which was nice. One less pain in the ass to deal with.
Once Jack reached a stable branch, he found a comfortable position and peered down at his campsite.
Jack wasn’t an idiot. He knew this was a dangerous world he’d landed in, and he was no stranger to spending nights in hostile territory. There were two keys to nighttime survival. The second was the easier of the two: Find a place to sleep where you wouldn’t be discovered. So far, he’d managed that by using small caves or hollowed-out trees where he could barricade himself for the night.
The first key though, and the far harder one, was knowing when you’d already been discovered. Once that happened, you needed to get intel, then eliminate the threat through evasion or direct engagement.
Which is why he was up in a tree, waiting to see what had found him.
After maybe an hour, there was a rustle in t
he bushes, and Jack tensed. Even in low-light conditions, his sight was excellent, so he could make out the figures that emerged from the bushes with relative ease. If that magic book with all his personal information hadn’t convinced him this was a different world, then these things would have done the trick.
They were humanoid but came in two distinctly different sizes. The little guys were only around 4-feet tall and nimble as hell, but the taller ones were a minimum of 8-feet in height and built like a brick outhouse. They had animal skin clothing that was sturdily made, and the parts of them that weren’t covered in clothing had a layer of coarse, light brown hair with a green tinge to it, like the algae-covered hair of a sloth. In fact, they kinda looked like a gorilla with the claws and colouring of a sloth, but with a slightly more pronounced maw. They didn’t move like sloths, though. There was a smooth efficiency that suggested an intelligent, trained team. He watched with interest as the larger creatures set up a perimeter while the smaller ones darted around, uncovering every trace of Jack’s movement. They even found the wood he’d dried and retrieved his snares, one of which had already caught a decent-sized squirrel. Their speech was clipped and staccato, with unmodulated notes punctuated by low bumps and breathy pops. Still, it didn’t feel like they were using a primitive language so much as speaking in the abbreviated style he remembered from wartime patrols.
After some time spent searching the campsite, three of the creatures—two of the larger and one of the smaller—gathered together in hushed conversation.
While they were speaking, the hoot of an owl sounded off in the distant trees, followed shortly by another hoot in a different location. The hoots continued, and as they did, the creatures below paused to listen to the sound. It was only when a hoot came from directly above Jack that he realized what was happening.
“Damn it!” he said, spinning around just in time to see one of the smaller creatures drop down on him from the upper branches. The creature hit him with enough velocity to knock Jack off the tree, but before he fell completely off the branch, he managed to get a grip on the creature’s hide shirt. It wasn’t enough for Jack to regain his balance, but he knew that ship had sailed already. Instead, he pulled the strange humanoid into a bear hug and—in the last moment before losing contact with the tree—pushed hard enough to take the creature with him and rotate it beneath his body.
When Jack was in the war, he’d met some Airborne troopers whose job it was to drop behind enemy lines and wreak havoc, allowing the ground troops to advance. They were some hard-ass soldiers, and one of them had once talked about the odd sensation of floating to the ground, helpless but knowing that the moment you hit the ground, you’d have to spring into action. Jack doubted he’d ever fully appreciate what that paratrooper was describing, but he sure as hell knew that when he hit the ground, he’d better be ready to wreak some havoc of his own.
Jack and the creature hit the ground with a sickening thump, the creature landing flat on its back underneath Jack and cushioning his fall. Jack immediately rolled off sideways and sprung to his feet, surveying his surroundings. Spotting one of the larger types standing by the edge of the forest, Jack sprinted at the creature before it even had a chance to draw its sword. Taken off-guard by Jack’s charge, the thing was slow to react and took a step back, but before it could place its foot on the ground, Jack barreled into it, grabbing the creature’s sleeve as he went past while simultaneously using his leg to reap the creature’s feet out from under it. O-soto-gari was as basic a judo throw as there was, generally the first technique a new practitioner learned, but it was also a devastating weapon at even the highest levels of the sport.
The creature’s legs went flying up in the air. Jack drove his weight down on top of the thing, hammering its back into the ground and knocking the wind out of it despite its significant size advantage. Jack used the momentum from his attack to roll across the creature and onto his knees, never releasing his grip on the creature’s arm in the process. Lacking any time for subtlety, Jack simply pulled the creature’s arm straight and drove his knee into the back of the thing’s elbow as he stood up, shattering the limb with a sickening crunch.
Jack had picked his assault deliberately, intending to break their perimeter and then sprint into the woods. It would take a massive dose of luck to shake the creatures in the woods, but those hopes were dashed when Jack looked up and discovered that one of the smaller varieties was already upon him, swinging its dagger in an overhead stab at Jack’s head.
Jack reacted without thought. Quickly stepping to the side, he jabbed one palm face-up into the creature’s armpit and the other face-down on the hand with the dagger, using the fulcrum he’d created to take control of the weapon’s momentum. Using that tiny bit of control, Jack was able to redirect the knife’s motion past his face. Once it was clear, Jack pushed hard downwards, forcing the weapon’s arc to continue in a sweeping curve that only terminated when the knife was driven into the creature’s own meaty thigh.
The creature screamed as the blade pierced its flesh, and it instinctively yanked the knife out of its leg. Jack wasn’t inclined to let this thing stab him on a second attempt, so he tightened his grip on the creature’s hand and used his superior weight to drive the blade back into the creature’s leg, eliciting another howl of pain. He followed that up with a solid kick to the creature’s chest, knocking it away and leaving it writhing in pain on the ground.
Before Jack could attempt any further action, a sharp voice of command snapped through the air. Jack whipped his head around to see which of the creatures had spoken, only to discover that he was surrounded by a half-dozen armed and angry creatures.
Well, it was worth a try, he thought.
“Alright, gents. You got me,” Jack said on the off chance the creatures would understand him. “I hope I’m not in your territory or somethin’, but if so, I’d been happy to leave. Didn’t need to get these guys hurt.” He gestured to the downed creatures receiving medical attention from one of the smallest creatures in the bunch.
A massive creature stepped through the ring of creatures to stand in front of Jack. This one dwarfed his fellows by a wide margin. At least 10-feet tall by Jack’s guess and intimidating as hell. Bad as they looked from far away, now that Jack was close to one and not fighting for his life, he could see that the creatures had a stubby, protruding maw containing a set of vicious, baboon-like teeth, as well as musculature that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a gorilla. The damn thing looked like it could tear off Jack’s arm and beat him to death with it. The fact that they carried weapons as well would have seemed ridiculous if it wasn’t so terrifying.
The creature in front of Jack—presumably the leader—stretched its maw wide and unleashed a roar that reverberated through the dark forest. He then grabbed the sword out of the hands of one of the other creatures and tossed it at Jack’s feet, gesturing with his own weapon for Jack to pick it up.
Jack looked down at the sword, his bushy eyebrows pulling together. “What in the hell am I supposed to do with that thing?”
The creature roared at him again, this time pushing the blade towards Jack with the point of its own sword.
“Again, not interested,” Jack said as he nudged the sword back towards the massive creature with his foot.
The moment Jack’s boot made contact, the creature to the leader's right exploded into motion. Before Jack could react, the creature swung its large mace in a savage, lateral blow that caught Jack squarely in the temple and launched him sideways across the clearing.
Condition “BROKEN SKULL” resisted (Well-Aged)
Condition “PARALYZED” resisted (Well-Aged)
Condition “BRAIN DEGENERATION” resisted (Well-Aged)
Condition “SCALP WOUND” resisted (Well-Aged)
The blow came as such a surprise that Jack didn’t have the wherewithal to suppress the message that flashed past his consciousness. Not that it helped—if anything, the text left him more confused. By all rights
, he should be dead.
Jack cracked open one eye. Across the clearing, the leader was squaring off across from the one who had hit Jack, and both of them were making a hell of a lot of noise. The leader looked furious, while the other one somehow managed to appear smug even while roaring. The other creatures had devolved into two groups that seemed to be supporting one or the other of the belligerents, but as Jack watched, he could see some of the creatures leaving the bigger creature’s group and moving to the other camp. The tribal spectacle clearly had some great significance within the group, but that was irrelevant for Jack. He was pissed about what had happened, and rather than take the opportunity to run away, he let his temper get the better of him.
Climbing back to his feet, Jack stormed over to the group of roaring creatures.
“Hey!” he shouted, glaring at the creature who had hit him. “Where I come from, that’s called a cheap shot, and the first rule of a cheap shot is that if you’re gonna put someone down, they damn well better stay down!”
As soon as Jack spoke, all of the other creatures’ heads swung towards him, their mouths agape. Surprisingly, the one that had hit Jack seemed to panic, but before it could do anything, the leader emitted a roar of triumph, drew its sword, and lopped off the challenger’s head in one perfect stroke.
Jack’s eyes went wide at the sight of the head flying through the air, utterly shocked at the effect of his words. Blood flew from the open wound, and Jack’s heart rate accelerated into a frantic staccato as his memories took him back to another forest on a different world…
“How bad is it, Jack?”
Barty’s words were barely audible over the sound of mortars shredding the trees and sending fountains of dirt and shrapnel through the air.
Arrival Page 12