“Stop looking at me like that,” she said.
“I'm not looking at you.” He caught a blow dart aimed at her in midair between his fingers, inches from her face. His tight, form-fitting leather gloves, the only thing protecting his own skin. “That's the problem with telling a story these days.” He sniffed the dart. “If there's too much idle chitchat and not enough action, people fall asleep. Personally, I think it leaves precious little time for unfolding character dynamics.”
He buried her face in his chest, hugged her tight and turned his body into the line of fire in a single movement.
About a dozen more darts pelted his back. She could hear the thwack, thwack, thwack of the darts as they peppered him.
As she lost it, screaming and crying in one, Leon softly said, “Shush.” He kissed the top of her head.
“Where are your men?!”
***
At the edge of Leon’s encampment, as one of Jacko's men got ready to blow on his dart, the tree covered with creeping vines behind him moved. The even more concealed soldier, one of Leon's, sliced at the neck of Jacko's only slightly less camouflaged man.
He finished cutting the head off the tribal warrior and mounted it on a stick as a warning. He picked up the blow-gun and stuck it in his pocket.
Just then, it was as if their movement in the forest had disturbed a flock of birds. The "birds" turned out to be boomerangs hurtling towards the enemy, launched by Leon's men in hiding.
Before the boomerangs could make contact with their intended victims, the human targets disappeared. It didn’t matter. The hi-tech boomerangs came with tracking abilities. The nano-edged metals slicing through trees if need be or simply flying around them if the onboard telemetry decided it would be faster to do so. Their flexi-metal composite bodies allowing them to turn angular momentum into a redirectable force. Still, despite their search-and-destroy programming, and their heat-seeking, human-target-isolating abilities, many returned to their throwers without a smidgeon of blood. Somehow the tools that couldn’t fail had, for the most part, failed. Some of the boomerangs, many looking more saucer-shaped, and all of them flashing lights like tiny UFOs, bounced off occasional trees or got stuck in them. Apparently, some of the hardwood in these parts was unimpressed with nanotech.
Several of the soldiers caught the returning boomerangs, eying them for blood, while others pried them out of the trees they were wedged in.
One "tree" turned out to be a native, killed by the boomerang to the forehead. Leon's soldier didn't realize this until he pulled the boomerang out and the native fell. The native’s back to him, the soldier had mistaken the tattooed brown and black bird feathers running from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet as tree bark.
Leon whistled to his men using the call of some local bird, and they disappeared back into the greenery again.
“You brought more men with you than you let on,” Laney said, making sure her voice didn’t carry any further than Leon’s ears.
“ALPHA UNIT,” he said, keeping his eyes on the woods. “They have our backs for now.”
“ALPHA UNIT?”
“Engineers cross-trained as soldiers.”
“You ever have their backs?”
“Things get too hi-tech for us, we sometimes let them take the lead. At least until they can get a handle on how best to combat what we’re up against.”
***
Laney, standing in Leon’s shadow, still unable to get her breathing or her voice under control, said, “Where'd they go?” She was referring to Leon’s soldiers.
“They see I'm sweet on you, and that I could use a little privacy.”
As she glared at him with eyes of fire, he pulled her by the arm and led her to cover.
Natty, perfectly camouflaged in the tree above them, crawled down the trunk like a lizard, head first. He froze, watching Leon and Laney.
Leon smeared camo colors on Laney's face as he had her pressed against the tree. Natty continued crawling down towards them.
“Not too many women look just as beautiful painted over as a hedge-hog,” Leon said, putting away the rest of the camo paint in his pocket.
“Stop it, I said.”
He leaned into kiss her. She pulled a dart out of the Kevlar shielding on his back, pressed it up against his neck. He stopped briefly to eye the dart, then checked her face for intent.
“You want to raise kids so much, we can have a couple together.”
“He had the courage to face his demons by coming out here. Seems like he deserves at least that much from us.”
He thought about it, and released her.
The rain let up. Its incessant pounding more of a drizzle now. Laney put two and two together in her head. “They attacked during the rain to conceal their movements.”
“The strobe effect of the lightning was just a bonus. Freeze-framing and searing tableaus of horror into our minds to see nobody sleeps anytime soon. The ensuing fatigue meant to dull our senses and slow our reflexes, as theirs continue to jack up with rising blood lust.”
Leon drew his knife. “It's time for the tiger to pounce. Let's see how these natives like facing my demons.”
By the time Leon broke away from Laney, the tears were welling in Natty’s eyes. They splashed Laney’s cheek. “Damn rain,” she said, wiping her cheek, and heading back to camp.
TWELVE
Leon knifed through the woods, cutting a quiet, narrow path through the dead of night. The intent: to avoid disturbing branches and to better track his human prey. They weren’t making it particularly hard for him with their night-glow skin, but then again, they weren’t the ones usually fleeing.
And this time proved to be no exception.
Before he could get his hands on a native, one of the bird men jumped him from above. A thin, wiry sort. Leon tossed him as readily as he removed one of his tee shirts. Lanky landed against the trunk of a tree upside down, standing on his head. Smiling. Maintaining his upside down orientation, he scampered up the tree like a spider. Leon could attest to the fact that using the arm and leg muscles in that manner to move that nimbly and quickly was not easy. Not without practice.
Once the native was looking down on him he sprang with such speed and force that Leon barely had time to react. Just like a jumping spider; the Amazon rainforest had many varieties. And clearly these bastards had no trouble learning from nature in the way the Chinese did in developing their praying mantis and crouching tiger Kung Fu styles—also inspired from detailed observation of insect and animal life. He should have anticipated this, he thought as he grabbed hold of the bird man, intent on raising him over his head and slamming him down on his knee to see how well he moved with a broken spine. Only, the native moved faster and lifted Leon—at twice his size and weight—over his head so fast Leon felt light-headed, his heart not able to keep the blood going to where it needed to in time to prevent the sensation.
Leon got tossed with such force he ended up acting on the moist dead leaves of the forest floor like a tractor scoop. By the time he was done “collecting leaves” he was entirely buried alive under them. Ignoring the cloying sensation of being digested in the stomach of the forest with the goopy secretions of countless bacteria and fungi, and muscles protesting that they would prefer a proper warm up first, he burst out of the mound of leaves like a baby performing its own Cesarean section from the inside.
The native seemed caught up in a bizarre dance, perhaps celebrating his victory prematurely. Spinning his long ponytail about his head as if determined to propeller himself off the ground with it. He even attempted to whip Leon with the braid, but Leon leaned back instinctively.
“Here, got a little gift for you,” Leon said. With the aid of the skin-tight leather gloves covering his hands, he hurled one of the eight species of Brazilian wandering spider at the bird man, fetched out of the pile of leaves. He was ashamed to say he didn’t have time properly identify the exact sub-classification of spider. He was just thankful that the section
of the forest the Bird Men inhabited fluoresced enough at night to expose the night stalkers, of which the wandering spider was one of many.
The arachnid did his job and the native went down. Even as paralysis set in and he lost the capacity to breathe, the native refused to surrender the menacing smile.
Leon didn’t exactly have a chance to savor the moment. He was having his own problems. He’d been drugged somehow. He noticed the native had spiked the end of his ponytail to use it as a weapon. Explaining some of the what appeared at the time to be comic efforts to whip him with it earlier. The darts must have been dipped in something just as deadly as the wandering spider’s venom; curare, possibly. The indigene had a lot of options to choose from. But if Leon had been hit by that he’d have gone down even faster. The native may have built up a tolerance, but he sure as hell hadn’t—not to that degree.
He glanced down at his arms and realized he was glowing from where he’d tussled with the bird man. So, that was the source of the drug. It was not meant to harm, it was meant to enhance the native’s performance. What Leon thought to be the product of more light-headedness turned out to be expanded night vision. Suddenly he could see the halos around all living things, including the fading one on the native. The auras or energy emissions that it typically required Kurlian photography to expose.
When in Rome, he thought... He stripped off his shirt and pants both, suddenly looking every bit the WWF wrestler in his black briefs the guys in his unit chided him for being. He rolled the native, scraping every bit of glow-goo off him and rubbing it on himself. He noticed he was feeling better; the earlier muscle pains from their wrestling match were gone. With any luck, this was the source of the wiry man’s strength as well. He’d soon find out.
He continued further into the jungle and deeper into the dark of night. His new best friend riding him like brown on rice.
Having learned his lesson earlier, he made sure to look up as much as he looked forward. The bird men, much like the birds they revered, had a thing for perching in tree branches. Fine, if it was a habit, then it was something that could be turned against them; the predictable was never your friend in war.
He didn’t see the next four coming at him, though he was looking right at them. What he saw was a suspiciously vibrant Hyacinth Macaw for this time of night, alongside a King Vulture the next tree over spreading its wings wide, a Yellow Headed Caracara with one of its favorite foods in its mouth, a frog, and a Crimson Topaz with its iridescent purple gold plumage.
The birds all took “flight” at once. Heading straight for Leon. The biggest one, the King Vulture landed closest to him. The indigene flexed his muscles like a young Schwarzenegger posing for Mr. Olympia. The stance had a way of spreading the King Vulture’s wings across his chest and making him look intimidating. As comical as the sight was to Leon, he had to admit it wasn’t without a certain sales appeal if the point was to wow your victim.
Leon used the Kodak moment to flick his whip at him, catching the end of the whip around his opponent’s neck. Enough so that when he pulled back, the nano-tipped line scisssored off his head and sent it rolling.
He seldom used the whip during the day; too easy to see coming at you. But at night, it was often an effective weapon. With the head rolling on the ground, he expected the natives to jump back, gasp, if not head for the hills. Instead they all charged him at once, emitting the peculiar bird cries associated with the species tattooed on their bodies.
Their index and middle fingers arched like bird claws and wielded with the intent of poking out his eyes and ripping his flesh. Their talon-like nails proved fairly effective at scratching him even when he was able to keep their fingers clear of his eyes.
Their fingernails were drugged. But the goop he’d spread on him was mitigating their effects. Still, time was not his friend. He had to move fast.
Wrestling with the three men proved difficult, being as it was hard to get any traction with the goop they had spread all over them. Just when he got one in a crushing bear hug with the intent of compacting some vertebrae, he’d slip away like an eel. Meanwhile they were every bit as good wielding their toenails against him as their fingernails. He may as well have been fighting off large birds for all their peckish tactics. He was beyond condescending at this point, as any one of those cuts was lethal and his body was now covered in scrapes. Some of the gouging ran like the grooves in a topographical map of the Grand Canyon over his body. All it took was one to become ripe with infection in the jungle…
Suddenly they pulled back. Why? They weren’t exactly losing.
The mystery didn’t take long to resolve itself.
Leon found himself besieged by vampire bats. Sure, the birds were just following their instincts. But to be this ruthless, to charge in with this kind of number, to refuse to back off, even when he was crushing every one he got his hands on with just one squeeze, and backhanding others into trees so hard their guts popped out? The bastards had clearly been trained, like guard dogs.
He dove to the ground and rolled, half hoping his body weight would be enough to crush a fair amount of them and get the others to feel the pinch enough to back off, permanently. With a bit of luck he got a casual assist from a swarm of bullet ants. The bastards had a bite that stung like a gun shot. The paralytic would just cause temporary paralysis of the bitten area in someone his size. But they’d do a lot more damage to the vampire bats. Besides, he didn’t have all that much surface area exposed to them at the moment, being as he was covered in bats.
Between the squeeze play and the stinger play, he was now sufficiently bat free to consider his next move. Of the three remaining natives, only one remained on the ground. The Yellow Headed Carcara, which indeed spent most of its time walking on the ground. These natives took their animal reverence seriously. The bird man opened his mouth wide as he lunged his head forward with lightning speed, much as a bird might, with the intent perhaps of biting off his nose. Leon did him one better; he poked out his enemy’s eyes, closed his hand around them and ripped them out of the sockets. He wasn’t the only one working with jacked up speed at this point thanks to their witch doctor’s own private concoction, now gooped all over him.
The native should have been in pain and shock enough to slow his assault. But he didn’t. There was no reaction at all, other than to commence tracking Leon with his hearing, which evidently was keen enough to keep him out of Leon’s reach and attempts to finish him off. He was beginning to think that maybe the Chinese martial artists had gotten their bad ass ways from crossing paths with these guys however many ages ago. Some of the tribes had oral teaching traditions that went back thousands of years. The Aborigine of Australia boasted 60,000 years of oral traditions they referred to as The Dreaming. The Dreaming was the spiritual realm that bound the past, present, and future together. It was supposed to be inhabited by incredible creatures and spirits. Had he stumbled into something similar here? A body of learning that extended back millennia. Primitives to the rest of the world, maybe. But when it came to surviving and thriving in the Amazon rainforest, these guys may well have evolved their own path to self-transcendence that was every match for Natty’s transhumanist ways and every bit of human-upgrade technology that Leon cared to throw at them. They were showing him right now that they weren’t in short supply of some human upgrade technology of their own—albeit herbal drug related.
One of the birdmen that had retreated into the trees lunged for him. Leon was faster, sending the whip crackling his way and catching him in a hangman’s noose dangling from the branch above. The more he struggled against it, the more the nano-edged whip sliced through his neck. When nothing remained but gravity to resist the hold of the whip, it turned out that was enough. And the body fell, the head landing on it shortly thereafter, smiling, like a bit of patio staging for kids on Halloween.
Blind Man was kicking at Leon’s knees from the side, intending to break one or both legs at the knee. The only thing that had saved him so far was t
hat the leaves were slippery to stand on. To fight on them meant that a kick to the side of the knee might just take him down, forcing him to lose traction, as opposed to blowing out his knee. But he couldn’t depend on that working every time.
Meanwhile, the remaining native was screeching from a tree branch high above, calling his friends, with a variant of the Hyacinth Macaw’s call that was possibly close enough to fool a Hyacinth Macaw but not his fellow bird men, who’d no doubt be rushing to reinforce the two survivors. Leon had to work fast or succumb to what would soon be a numbers game.
Tired dancing around Blind Man who could move better and faster than he could, even sans his eyes, he waited for his moment to deliver one straight hard kick that depended more on force than speed. When that moment came, he sent his foot into the man’s rib cage at his sternum, breaking the sternal bone and sending it directly into the heart in the shape of a shark’s tooth.
That left the one in the tree.
The whip wasn’t going to reach him. So he picked up the most lethal weapon known to man. Given sufficient velocity. Hurtling the apricot seed-size rock at him. It wedged in his forehead far enough in to send skull fragments into his brain. Dead or not, he dropped like an overripe avocado. One way or another, OMEGA FORCE was going to find out what this body-goop the natives rubbed on themselves was and add it to their portfolio. Proving once again that humility, not experience, was the best teacher. And knowing when to learn from your superiors.
He melted back into the forest. Not sure how well his disappearing act was going to work with the woods lit up like Mardi Gras between the glow worms and fire flies and his own bioluminescent body.
The further he ventured back to camp the more he noticed he was losing his radiance. At first that seemed natural; phosphorescence needed to be recharged from time to time with a good blast of light. But the natives didn’t lose their luminescence. It was only then that it occurred to him. He was sweating like a pig, diluting the gel, effectively washing it off. By the time he put two and two together to make five, it was too late. And how did two and two make five? The natives didn’t sweat! Even in battle. What the hell? Some other concoction they imbibed from studying reptiles and amphibians so they could turn cold-blooded as needed? Or did they guzzle so much herb tea that if the gel rubbed off, they’d just secrete more? What he’d do to get one of their shamanic elders on his team. Too bad they were harder to negotiate with than the devil.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 8