by Steve Vera
Skip rubbed his eyes one more time, decided he was not seeing things at all, and walked backward, carefully, to his original guarding spot. Curiosity wasn’t going to kill this cat. Some things, like bear dens and twinkling lights in alien forests, were best left untouched. Skip took comfort in the Shardyns’ presences around him, felt less like he was the last human being in the world. All he had to do was sit tight a bit longer.
And then came a night bird. A tree lark.
Its warble was beautiful, if not familiar by now, but this time its song seemed slightly off key. Like a damaged jack-in-the-box. He heard another rustle and recognized the scratching little hops of a bird just beneath the drone of the river below. Another warble came, louder, closer. Haunting.
So he did what any self-respecting former special operator would do when confronted with an off-kilter songbird—he raised his cannon and waited. Come out, come out wherever you are. The lights seemed a little brighter. A little closer.
“Now would be a good time to come back, guys.”
Splashing river and high-pitched silence.
When his arms began to ache, he slid to his butt and aimed over his knees, eyes narrowed. A couple of times he thought he heard a voice in the trees, but it was too faint and distant for him to make out. Besides, who’d be out here in the middle of nowhere? Then he heard it again. Crying. He leaned forward in disbelief, focusing every ounce of his perception, and heard a muffled sob, a whimpering that seemed to come and go with the wind, barely audible over the serene rush of water. A restless breeze whipped off the river and stirred the branches around them, releasing another cascade of blossoms that seemed to whisper names as they fell, and once again...a sob.
Skip’s heart boomed in his chest. Damn if it didn’t sound like a kid. It had to be an animal, some kind of Theian fauna that sounded like crying babies. I got this. I’m all right. Just sit tight and all will be well. There are no crying babies in the forest.
Skip watched in dismay as the mist from the forest began to slowly spill inward, filling the campsite with crawling whirls of vapor and encroaching fog. From within it, he could see the twinkling of lights.
“All right, nap time’s over, guys. Wake the hell up, we got incoming,” Skip barked. His voice sounded too loud and brittle in the silence. He trained his revolver on nothing and everything. What the hell was he going to shoot at? Fog? Lights? “The hell with this,” he muttered and holstered his Python. “I’m going thermal.”
The whimpering came again, only this time, Skip could hear the fear in it, the pain—a sort of panting, desperate mewl. A child.
He reached down, grabbed the Bronto-killer lying next him and in a rapid series of well-oiled motions unfolded the bipod, chose his spot, set it on the ground and slid behind the stock in the classic prone position, on his belly. He then depressed the rubber cap surrounding the eyepiece of the AN/PAS-13 Thermal Weapon Sight attached to the rail to engage the display, let out his breath and gave it a look.
What he saw congealed his blood.
That can’t be real. No way.
“For crying out loud, will you guys get your asses back here!”
At his shout the forest erupted into a clamor of shrill cries, angry caws and the hideous screaming of a giant baby being mauled. Skip crunched down on his teeth and tried to pick a target. But what?
In the white hot setting of the thermal scope he saw formless fields of swirling heat arrayed in front of him like the gathering of crows. Each registered in his scope as a diaphanous blob with two pinpoints of heat right about where the eyes should be.
He looked away from the scope—he had to see it with his own eyes—and was witness to a nightmare come to life. Dozens of pairs of reflected firelight glared at him from the trees, some high in branches, some low to the ground and others floating somewhere in the middle. Hovering.
This is not happening, I am not seeing this. He waved his hand through the thickening mist and returned to the scope. Not fifteen feet in front of him a tendril of heat broke off from a blob and whirled through the underbrush like a miniature tornado. On contact, the unmistakable creeping rustle he’d heard earlier manifested.
He could taste his own fear, metallic and rotten. All you gotta do is make sure we’re not disturbed, won’t be gone long—
A hand grabbed his shoulder. Skip yelled pretty damn near as loud as he could, jumped a good foot and twirled on his assailant. Noah. She seemed alarmed, yes, but there was a smile lurking under there. Tarsidion and Cirena walked past him, hoods drawn, and flung out their arms in a backward arc, letting loose a string of blue-light blossoms that lit up the forest like an air strike, rippling thunder.
An explosion of flapping wings and furious caws beat at the air. With a word, Tarsidion summoned a gale right off the river and whipped it through the campsite, scattering the creeping fog like a leaf blower through smoke. When all was finally calm, and the forest’s dissonance had abated, the silence was like a vibration.
“It took you guys long enough,” Skip grumped.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody scream quite that loud before,” Noah said by way of answer. “At least not a man.”
“Hardy har har, where the hell were you guys?”
Nobody answered. Tarsidion was still investigating, Quaranai alight, while Gavin simply stood, hood drawn, head slightly down. He was breathing hard. What little Skip could see of his expression was not very heartening.
“Don’t everybody answer at once. What were those things?”
“Will-o’-the-wisps,” Cirena answered. “Minor elementals, a nuisance for those who know better, downright deadly for those who don’t.”
“Well, next time show a little alacrity, huh? I almost got bum-rushed by a bunch of floating lights. Did you guys find out anything?”
It was only a couple of seconds, but a Sequoia tree could have lived and died by the time Gavin shifted his attention to him. Only his chin and bottom lip was visible from his hood. The rest dissolved in darkness.
“We just found out we’re on the wrong side of the world.”
Chapter 11
When Amanda woke from her shallow sleep, the first thing she saw were two dead rabbits hanging upside down from a branch. There was a pool of drying blood congealing a couple of feet from her head. Nice. At least they were familiar though, because everything else she’d seen here had been otherworldly.
She wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed gingerly, trying not to inflict any more pain on her damaged body while coaxing her blood into pumping. Her sleep—if she could call it that—had been troubled and restless, punctuated by sharp stabs of misery anytime she was foolish enough to want to move.
She looked past the dead rabbits and absorbed her first Theian pre-dawn. It was cool and damp, but the suggestion of sunlight shaded the blackness of night to deep blue—leaving only a couple of stars to peek through a small formation of fast moving clouds, thin enough to be smoke. As if to make room for the approaching sun, the smaller, red moon sat swollen on the western horizon like a ripe slice of red cantaloupe, sinking slowly to the other side of the world.
Donovan was already up. She could see him in the clearing beyond their ruins stretched out in a ridiculous split. His legs were spread out so far that they breached one hundred eighty degrees, and his head was lying flat on the ground. She didn’t even know the human body was capable of such things. From there, he released and rose from his seated position in one graceful motion, twirling slowly as he ascended into a stance reminiscent of some animal. If he was aware that she was awake, he made no sign. His right leg arced slowly through the air, controlled and fluid in a sweeping crescent. With a slight pivot of his hips his left leg followed, mirroring the motion of the right with more balance than an acrobat.
She considered calling out but dismissed the thought; she had no
idea if he was a morning person or not. When in doubt, leave Donovan alone. So she just watched him carve the air with his body. He speared his foot directly above his head, his foot angled so that the knife edge jutted out. The effect was essentially doing a split without the ground. With silky grace he retracted his leg and repeated with the other.
Fluid as water, his body spun and whirled at different velocities in a sequence of stances and movements, some of them too fast for her to follow. It was the first time she’d ever seen him without his jacket. Though he still wore a black wife-beater, the array of his muscles rippled with every movement—the masterpiece of some cosmic artist.
“Morning, Satan,” she said as he came to a pause, both fists holstered at the sides of his hips.
“I presume you can cook,” he said, head swiveling toward her as he leaped impossibly high, his foot a scythe cleaving the air.
“What would give you such a silly notion?”
“You are a woman, aren’t you?”
Amanda made a choking sound. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I do not kid, Amanda. I catch it, you cook it. That is how it will be.”
“Well, sorry to rain on your parade, but I don’t know how to cook dead rabbits, though I can toast bread pretty good.”
Donovan kicked out in a flurry of punches and kicks, so fast her eyes never got the chance to focus on them. He spun and jumped, landing in a cat-like crouch. “Then you will learn. I will show you once, so take note.” Finished, he walked toward her, his breathing undisturbed as he took a knife from the sheath strapped to the side of his leg. She hated it when he did that; it looked as if he were coming for her.
“Right now?” she asked dubiously.
“Right now.”
The scar across his neck, visible above the low collar of his wife-beater, jumped out at her—a pale cord of shiny scar-tissue smiling brutally across his neck.
“Don’t be so obvious when you stare,” he said as he grabbed the first of the two rabbits by its hind legs and cut it down from the branch. “It makes you look stupid.”
“Sorry,” Amanda said and studied her feet.
When she looked back up he was already at the sun-bleached stump just off the path they’d come through last night. He flopped one of the lifeless rabbits on the stump, and the other he pinned to a tree right beside it, driving a knife through its ears so the corpse hung rump down.
“Spread the rabbit’s legs for tension,” he said, taking out two more knives from sheaths in his fatigues, and pinned the rabbit spread-eagle to the side of the now bloody-tree. “Then cut around its shitter and tie it off so there’s no contamination.” He took out some nylon twine and deftly tied a knot around its rectum. “Then just split it down the middle.” With one simple movement, his knife slit down its soft torso, and the entrails of the poor critter fell to the ground like wet, bloody noodles.
“Don’t get sick,” he said, reading her mind. “I’m only going to show you this once.”
Coffee, that was what she needed. Not bloody Velveteen rabbits.
He took the gutted rabbit, set it on the stump next to the other and cut off its head with one hack of his big knife. Her stomach jumped for her throat, but somehow she didn’t gag and continued to watch, gnawing her lip.
Donovan took the now decapitated rabbit and pinned it back to the tree by one hind leg. From there he cut off the forefeet and with his giant knife carved the skin around the hock joints. When he was done he made an incision across the lower part of its body, cut out the tail, and in one motion peeled the skin down and forward over the body. The exposed muscle and flesh glistened with a bloody, viscous glaze. He unpinned it from the tree and flopped it next to the unskinned rabbit.
“Your turn.”
“Already?” she asked in a small voice.
“Do it correctly. Or you’re not eating.”
Amanda cycled through excuses and ploys she might implement to somehow get out of this. Each died on her tongue. With a profound and breathy sigh, she took the knife he offered, hilt first, and then studied the bunny corpse.
“Just grab it by its ears,” Donovan rasped.
She obeyed, let out a final sigh and drove the point of the knife through its ears and into the tree so that its body dangled like a crucified traitor to the state. From there she went to work.
She didn’t vomit, which was nice, but the real surprise came from Donovan himself. He talked her through the procedure in his rasping, hair-raising monotone and, believe it or not...he was a halfway descent instructor, just so long as she didn’t fuck up. Distantly her mind registered the soft fur of the carcass, the light, almost bird-like feeling of its bones beneath her fingers, the slimy texture of raw meat and the smell of blood in the spring morning.
All of it was disgusting, but the crunching of its spine as she cut off its head was definitely the worst. She turned, braced herself for the convulsion of her diaphragm, and dry heaved to the side of the stump, half expecting the sting of his hand across her face. It never came.
“Continue,” he ordered.
Wiping a watery strand of saliva from her mouth, she obeyed. When she was done, she flopped the remains of her mutilated rabbit next to his neat and tidy carcass.
He breathed out of his nose and inspected her work. “Though this is a pitiful excuse for a butchering, you properly tied off its asshole and did not contaminate the meat. You need more practice.”
Amanda nodded through shallow breaths that passed solely through her mouth. She only had a couple more seconds. “If it’s alright with you, I think I need to go and toss my cookies in the trees.”
He nodded. “Be quick about it. You still have to cook them.”
“Can’t wait,” she said weakly and then stumbled up the trail to pick her spot to puke. This’ll do, she thought, put her hands on her knees and cringed. She hated throwing up. Her stomach convulsed and released a splash of acid in her esophagus. She stood several feet in the trees, hands still on knees, aware of the murmur of a brook or creek, and heard something else. She cocked her head, nausea on pause.
Unless Amanda had just lost her mind, she could have sworn she’d just heard laughing. It was soft, high-pitched and reminded her of wind chimes. Just a little farther in the trees. Remembering her little adventure with the lights from last night she didn’t go far, just a couple of yards into the trees.
What she saw frolicking within those trees froze her to the ground like a pillar of salt.
Donovan! she thought fiercely in her head, afraid to make a sound. If he could actually read minds, now was the time. She didn’t dare divert her eyes, for fear the vision would evaporate. Instead she waved her hand lowly but urgently, hoping he would see it.
“What?” he sighed in her ear, no louder than a breeze.
“Tell me you see them. Tell me I’m not going crazy.”
“I saw them earlier,” he said as if commenting on a couple of squirrels.
Incredulous, she turned her attention back to them, disbelieving and enamored at the same time. How could he be so...unmoved by them? They were witnessing something every schoolgirl ever born would have given her imaginary pony for.
Nestled between two great, white-barked trunks was a spring enclosed in tall grass, ferns and long-stemmed flowers. Patches of lilypads and toadstools floated on top, and in the middle of the spring was a long, giant flower that shimmered in the shrouded dawn, granules of light glowing and falling from golden petals into the water.
Hovering around the fantastic flower were four tiny creatures with wings of butterflies and the bodies of...people. There could be no other explanation. Amanda was witnessing real. Live. Fairies.
They twirled and hummed in the air around the flower, settling lightly on the petals to reach into the pistil and pull out handfuls of sugary light, nibbling delica
tely at the strange, glimmering substance. She could hear their high, musical laughs, watched them mill about playfully, oblivious to the eyes watching them.
Donovan withdrew but did not leave. “Amanda,” he said. “Cook the rabbits.”
Dammit. He’d spoken too loudly. The little creatures froze in mid-hover and stared right at her; she actually met the eyes of one of them, a beautiful, tiny little thing with chestnut hair that glittered with silver and a smattering of freckles under almond brown eyes that would have put any doe to shame. Butterfly wings pumped gently behind her. Amanda saw terror in the fairy’s face and realized what she must look like—a giant, bloody, crazy-haired rabbit-slayer. The next instant they were all gone, zipping away at the speed of light.
“What is wrong with you!” she demanded, furious that he would trample on the one glimmer of wonder and happiness she’d had through this whole damn ordeal.
Donovan’s left hand twitched.
“Okay, okay, I’m coming,” Amanda said immediately, recognizing the warning signs of a beating in the making. For a second she thought it was too late, that she was going to get pummeled right there, but after a long moment and the clenching of his fists, he stepped to the side and let her pass.
“Now you will learn how to start a fire,” he said in a grim, chilly whisper as he walked behind her.
“Sounds good to me,” she said, nervously walking in front of him.
From behind her his shadow followed but there was no sound.
* * *
Gavin stared at the small fuzzy feather lodged into the bark of the tree in front of him. Whatever it had belonged to had been young...a duckling or water fowl if he had to guess. He hadn’t slept much, hadn’t eaten a thing and felt as if there were a nest of eels squirming through his stomach. The tents and rucksacks were already broken down and packed. Except for Skip’s. Gavin was letting the chief sleep in a bit, God knew he was going to need it.