by Paul Monette
Schaefer was well downstream now, caught in a swirl of white water a mile from where the alien poised itself. As the major struggled toward shore he was helpless as a baby, totally at the mercy of cross currents and rapids which pulled him farther and farther till he was finally sucked into an undertow and hurled over a thirty-foot falls, plummeting down and driven deep underwater by the thundering force of the river.
Seconds later, in the wide pool at the base of the falls, the deafening explosion of currents was behind him, Schaefer rolled at the bottom of the pool, his mind spinning in confusion, unaware of where he was or how to reach air. By the last stroke of his luck the opposing currents gently propelled him to the surface, just in time to take a feeble breath. He was nearly finished, his energy sapped. But the surface water was sweet and reviving, and a few strokes with his good arm brought him into the shallows where he was at last able to grip his toes in the muddy riverbed.
As he tried to stand he pitched forward headlong into the gray muck by the riverbank. Then, with a final heave that drained the last shred of force he could muster, he crawled gasping and panting onto a sheltered mud overhang, settling into the tentacled root system of a dead tree, his body completely covered in thick gray sludge. He was fully primeval now, like the deepest beasts of the forest.
Nearly unconscious but still alert to his enemy, he raised his head and looked through glazed eyes to the opposite side of the river, scanning the bank. Seeing no sign of the alien he collapsed in relief, his eyes roiling up into his head as the waves of fatigue and pain took over. His last delirious thought was that he’d escaped, though just now in his battered state it was an escape that seemed strangely like death.
But the moment the major relaxed and was about to slip into unconsciousness he heard a shattering splash in the pool below the falls. The alien had leaped from the branches of an overhanging tree and landed on Schaefer’s side of the river, throwing up a muddy wave that washed onto the major’s feet. But even the reserve adrenalin was gone now. Dutch couldn’t move a muscle as he saw the huge creature stand, water shimmering on its glowing body, its skin tone and texture swirling gray and brown and green in an attempt to match the surrounding river foliage. The glaring yellow orbs stared directly at the spot where Schaefer lay helplessly trapped in the tangle of roots.
As the predator surged forward, standing tall in the shallows of the river, the major’s last conscious thought was that he’d lost. All he could do was stare in horror and fear, paralyzed with shock and fatigue as the monster closed in on him. He waited for the sting of death, too exhausted to fight, defenseless and alone.
The alien rippled slowly through the water until only a few feet remained between them. Then it stopped, towering above, as if to inspect its prey for one last full moment before the annihilation. Images of Hawkins’s, Blain’s, and Davis’s mangled bodies collided in Schaefer’s mind as he lay there motionless, helpless. He closed his eyes to wait for the final blow, his dignity intact.
Seconds dragged by. Nothing. Schaefer dared open one muddy eye and saw the alien still standing as before, impatiently turning its head from left to right. It looked up and down the riverbank, back and forth among the tree roots, yet acted as if it didn’t see him.
It didn’t. It was trying to tune into Schaefer’s heat source, but its optic scanning system couldn’t penetrate the thick paste of cold mud that coated him. After a moment the creature uttered a skirl of irritation and bewilderment and turned aside. It moved heavily down-stream from the battered Schaefer, searching the jungle clutches for its prey.
The major now opened his other eye as if to doublecheck what he saw with the first. He was speechless with disbelief. Staggered that he was still alive he watched the creature wander away, its prehensile spurs making a sucking sound in the mud. Then it rounded a bend and disappeared. Astonished and confused Schaefer tried to raise up on his elbows, but a sudden jab of pain in his shoulder caused him to collapse again. He fell on his side and slipped into a troubled semi-coma, shivering now in the chill mud.
A minute later the slapping of helicopter blades grew louder over the top of the ridge. Then the steel bird flared into Schaefer’s view as it followed the course of the river down the canyon. It maintained a holding pattern as a U.S. soldier leaned out the open side, scanning the riverbank with binoculars. Seeing no signs of life the chopper moved on, disappearing up the opposite rim of the canyon.
Anna ran and ran frantically through the jungle, her hair and clothes catching on brambles that ripped the coarse green cotton fatigues and bloodied her face. Her heart beat like a rabbit’s from sheer exhaustion and panic as she gulped in great quantities of thick jungle air. She didn’t have a breath left over to scream, and screaming was all that made any sense anymore. Her imagination was a kaleidoscope of blazing yellow eyes, and she felt the creature chasing her, reaching out a long three-fingered hand to grip her neck. But she kept on running, as if something far, far back had taught her to fight for even an hour more of life.
During the course of Schaefer’s quaking paralysis he had a momentary nightmare in which the alien lanced him with its spearhead. The bleary-eyed mud-choked commando awoke abruptly and with a groan grappled up out of his swampy bed like some kind of being returned from the grave. He was hovering at the edge of delirium now, and his mind hammered with fantasies of the alien gorging his heart out. Then, still in an incoherent stupor, he swayed on his naked and bruised feet and began to stumble along the riverbank, slogging through mud like quicksand.
His shoulder flared with pain, and his temperature boiled at a hundred and three from the deep wound, the stress, and the chill of the mud. He lost his balance as he passed a clear shallow pool, staggering backward, suddenly finding himself waist-deep in the cool water. The soothing quiet shook him back to his senses, and his vision cleared. He stopped for a second to gather his wits. Then he waded over to the spongy moss-covered bank of the pool and sat down heavily, breathing slowly as if to recover his center of gravity.
The ripples he’d made on the water’s surface as he pushed toward shore flattened now as he rested in the shallows. When the water calmed he noticed his shimmering reflection growing sharper and sharper, the waves of distortion gradually cohering into a true mirror image of his face and torso. His hair was matted flat with a thick coating of gray mud, and his face and chest were streaked with the pasty slate-colored sludge. He stared, mesmerized at his wild reflection. All the props of a soldier were gone.
Slowly, as if in a dream, he lifted his arm from the water and with his fingertips wiped clean a patch of skin along his cheek. He studied the sticky pungent mud on his hand, then looked back at the face in the water and saw the vivid contrast between the muddy camouflage and the lightly tanned skin beneath. As he stared, a wave of realization rushed over him so powerfully it dizzied him for a second.
“My God,” he breathed aloud, his eyes widening with recognition. “You couldn’t see me!” Awestruck he addressed the absent alien, each syllable crisp and precise, as if the insight were being engraved forever in his mind. Now he understood that the creature saw differently than the animals of earth. Maybe this could be its Achilles’ heel. He chuckled almost hysterically, a combination of relief, exhausted tension, and the renewal of courage.
Schaefer gazed up into the failing light, at the tree-line of the darkening forest, realizing fate had given him a second chance, an unexpected new weapon—his own chameleon challenge. The recognition of a possible defense stirred the commando in him. Vigorously he slapped up a handful of mud and carefully repainted the patches of skin he had earlier wiped clean.
“You couldn’t see me,” the major repeated with grinning delight, whispering the words this time as he stroked the side of his face with clay. His soldiering instincts quickened to life, the major’s mind flared up like a stoked furnace, burning with ideas for a final combat.
The only weapon he still had left was his machete. His clothes, his shoes, everything had been
lost to the rapids and falls. Naked now as the most primitive savage, he was stripped down to his instincts and wits and decided there was a certain irony to it all. He’d have to draw from the jungle now to build an arsenal with which to fight the creature. But the primitive twist didn’t really disturb him, because all the high-tech fancy equipment the commandos had used thus far hadn’t so much as made the creature flinch.
The newly charged warrior clambered out of the trench beside the pool, Olympian in size and with his coat of mud as ancient as a caveman. Immediately he set to work making a bow. First he carved magnesium shavings from a volcanic rock and swept them into a pile of kindling. Removing a dry match from the hollow handle of his knife—which also contained a coil of piano wire, a roll of green tape, and a couple of cyanide capsules—he lighted the shavings and watched them burn to a brilliant ice-white glow. Then he ripped a banana leaf from a nearby tree and sheltered the fire till the flame burned down in order to shield it from the alien’s sensors. Gradually he fed the fire more kindling, fanning it rhythmically with the leaf.
Twenty minutes later he was twirling a seven-foot section of fire-hardened sapling between his feet and his good shoulder, scraping the char from the seasoned wood with his knife. Then he bent the bow and attached a long strand of piano wire to one end, carefully winding it for strength, using strips of green tape to cover the wire where the nock of the arrow would fit.
With fishing line he attached split parrot feathers to an arrow he’d whittled from a branch, its tip fashioned into a series of barbs, and rubbed it to a polished hardness against a smooth stone. Then he made three more just like it, methodically, one after the next. The arrows alone took him over an hour. But even as he lay the last of them neatly next to the others he knew he would have only one chance to win this battle—perhaps only one shot.
The sun disappeared behind the ridge of a dead volcano west of the Conta Mana border as Schaefer pounded a peeled root between two stones. He paused to drool saliva into the pulpy mass, scraping the milky substance onto a banana leaf. Mixing it with sticky sap from the banana tree he held it over the coals till the concoction began to steam. Then he opened the two cyanide capsules and tapped the powder into the bubbling liquid. He coated the arrow tips with the sticky poison, holding them over the coals so the sap bubbled and smoked as he spun the arrow in his hands, blowing steadily on the tips to cool and harden the mixture.
Using the blade of his machete he pried open the casing on one of the 40mm grenades that had washed ashore in his sodden gunbelt. Discarding the warhead, he dumped the dry propellant powder from the shell onto a leaf, mixing it with a mound of magnesium shavings. He opened the narrow, tight roll of gauze that had wrapped the cyanide capsules, fluffing it into a loose bundle the size of a golf ball, then poured the powder mixture over it, working it into the fabric.
Dutch was absolutely clear-headed now as he transferred the ball of explosive-laden gauze to a pliable dry leaf, closing it into a bundle and binding it at the top with a long strand of jungle grass. He twisted the remaining gauze around a match, leaving the head exposed, forming a self-striking fuse that he coated with sap. This too he thickly covered with powder from the grenade and poked the fuse into the leaf. Taking another blade of jungle grass he made a large loop, tied it about the grenade, and slipped the loop over his head.
Finally, using several sections of bamboo of different diameters, he fashioned a crude antipersonnel spear-bomb. The sharpened tongue of his belt buckle served as a firing pin, and a 40mm shell from his belt pouch as the explosive charge.
When he was done two hours later, Schaefer was a totally new kind of commando, outfitted by the natural guts of his planet. He would find out now which world was tougher, his own or the alien’s. But as he slung his new-fashioned weapons about him and stood on the brink of the dark river, he had a pang of poignant memory for Billy. Whatever it was the Sioux had believed in, Schaefer was its last repository now. He was the only priest the world had left, this soldier of fortune who believed in nothing at all. And the poor defenseless planet was just going to have to make do with him.
S I X T E E N
A saucer-shaped moon of heavy gold rose into the blackening sky as the last traces of a crimson-purple sunset liquefied into the Carribbean. In the dim light streaming from the early moon and late sun the silhouette of a lone, naked warrior appeared over a jagged ridge of rock. Dutch Schaefer was bathed in the gold of the moon on his left and the blood-red flickerings of the fading sun on his right. He had swathed his naked body entirely in clay and ochre, creating a mottled earthen camouflage pattern. He looked like an idol risen from a tomb. Holding his makeshift bow in one hand he moved up the canyon, ascending into a rising field of boulders like the fragments of a meteor.
The river below him flowed into a series of falls and pools, surrounded by massive table-top rocks, their crevices jammed with driftwood swept down at high water from forests above.
On a flattened section of the ridge Schaefer dragged a large tangle of branches into view, adding it to a growing mound of firewood. He knelt, tending to a pile of dried grass, leaves, and other tinder. Using the last of his precious matches he set a fire cupped in his hands, gently breathing and coaxing the tiny blaze into a slowly gathering fire, flames starting to lick upward through the dry pyre.
He stood now, staring into the rapidly growing blaze, turned and faced the canyon rim, raising his weapons high in one hand. From the depths of his blood a war cry burst, and as he threw back his head it rushed through his lungs and windpipe like a howl. It transcended time and worlds, primitive and visceral, as if from a wounded animal in a pain beyond pain.
The wail echoed for miles through the jungle canyons and silenced all the prowlers and night birds around him. It was the commando’s beckoning invitation to the alien. His eyes flared in the yellow-orange glow of flames, and in that moment he looked unconquerable and terrifying, his mud-painted muscles tensed and ready.
The alien had retreated to its ship and was standing in the open doorway as Schaefer’s echo came piercing through the trees within earshot. The cry was universally translatable—not just between peoples but between all worlds, wherever war had meaning. The creature craned its neck and lifted its head into the night looking like a wolf cussing the moon as it heard the cry and instantly understood its meaning. Instinctively it responded, but with a snakelike hiss that no one heard. Still, the seething noise boiling in its throat was an acceptance of Schaefer’s call to battle.
It turned back into the ship, raising its weapon in one hand, while in the other it held a U-shaped sharpening device rather like a tuning fork. As the alien passed the tip of the weapon through the fork the spear that had slain all the other commandos flashed to life, emitting a deep harmonic hum as the blade glowed with energy, growing hotter and hotter with each stroke. The creature drew the now white-hot blade through the sharpener one last time, then lifted it to its golden eyes, studying its balance, the flashing alloy of the blade illuminating its humanoid face. The weapon meant something deeper than any mere object. To the alien it was a kind of extension of its will.
Emerging now from its interplanetary womb, the creature swung up to the tree line, climbing to the uppermost branches. It traveled silently from crown to crown, arriving at last at the canyon rim where far below it could see Schaefer’s bonfire in the valley, the leaping, shifting, multicolored collage of heat waves and flares luring the alien onward, spellbound like a moth.
As the bait drew the predator, Schaefer hid back from the flames, tucked in a crevasse of rock and broken tree stumps on the slope above the bonfire. His eyes shifted trancelike, moving from side to side, watching the approaches to the fire below. His senses were alert, his nerves on a wire edge.
The alien began its descent, its shadow-form descending through the canyon, a rippling movement of grays and blacks passing across the shifting light patterns on the canyon walls cast by the growing flames below. Its golden eyes probed the cany
on, hungry to get closer to the swirling patterns of heat thrown off by the gaseous flames of the bonfire.
Schaefer sat motionless in an Indian crouch, waiting for destiny to arrive, nearly invisible in his mud camouflage, one with the darkness of the trees and rocks. Suddenly, all around him, he noticed the buzz and click of insects and the croak of frogs had stopped. He immediately recognized this as a sign of the alien’s presence, for he’d come to understand that all creatures sensed and feared the invader.
Schaefer drew his makeshift bow to full arch, his wounded shoulder trembling, the blood beginning to seep through the bandage again from the muscle strain. With the bow at full draw he stared intently, concentrating, searching for the alien’s iridescent form in the dancing light below.
Then, like a giant insect, it dropped from above, rocketing down as if from the sky, its steellike spurs digging deep into a tree stump.
Schaefer froze at the sound, his mud-rimmed eyes wide with fascination and fear. He couldn’t tell how far away the creature was in the darkness—maybe fifty, seventy-five feet. The major knew that the slightest movement on his part would bring on an instant attack, so he waited as still as a stump himself. At that moment he felt a weird comfort to know he was more at one with the jungle than his enemy.
Enticed by the heat patterns vibrating from the fire and lacing into the canyon darkness, the alien dropped another thirty feet closer to the flaming lure. It raised its weapon, still white as steel newly tempered, like a mythic warrior’s sword. The yellow optic cells glittered like a honeycomb in the reflection from the fire as the alien looked around slowly. The quiet hissing sound escaped from its tensed mouth like a burning fuse, an instinctive signal that it was in a battle mode.