Nigel Findley

by Out Of Nippon

  “Two guards were outside the fence at night. They heard something in the jungle — one of them later said it sounded like a human scream. They thought maybe it was one of their colleagues who’d got himself in trouble. So of course, being good little corporate security guards, they went in to find out what was going down.

  “Picture this,” the pilot suggested. His voice was measured, steady … Emotionless, Nikki thought. This has really got to him.

  “Picture it,” O’Neil repeated, “two guys, armed to the teeth, in the jungle, looking for whoever it was they heard scream. It’s the middle of the night, pitch black, they probably can’t see more than a couple of feet — if that. They’ve probably got their flashlights out, flashing the beam around. One of them’s trying to call the security office, trying to whistle up some backup. But their radios just don’t seem to work. And then suddenly their flashlights stop working, just like that. They’re plunged into darkness, their night vision ruined by their own lights. For the first minute or two — it must have felt much longer to them — they’re blind. They turn back, try to head back to the compound …

  “And that’s when it happens.” O’Neil’s cool, controlled delivery was enough to raise goosebumps on the back of Nikki’s neck. “One of them hears a noise behind him, a noise like something large moving in the jungle, something close. In the darkness, he manages to see something right next to his partner. It looks like a snake, a big, dark snake, hanging down from a tree-branch.

  “Then, before he can react, the ‘snake’ moves — moves like lightning. It lashes out, wraps itself around his partner’s neck. It jerks once, hard, and he hears the dry crack as his colleague’s spine snaps. The ‘snake’ starts dragging the limp body away.

  “The survivor’s stunned for a moment, frozen.” O’Neil grunted. “Who wouldn’t be? But he’s well-trained, and he gets himself back under control fast. Gun at the ready, he runs after where the ‘snake’ dragged his partner.

  “He finds himself in a small clearing.” The pilot’s grew softer. “There’s his buddy’s corpse, there’s the snake still wrapped around its throat. And there’s something else: a nest of snakes, he thinks at first. A huge, writhing mass of long, dark snakes. It looks like the snake that killed his partner is dragging the body back to its nest. Then everything changes; for the first time, he really knows what he’s seeing.

  “The writhing mass — it isn’t a nest of snakes. It’s… something, something else. And the ‘snakes,’ of course they’re not snakes at all. They’re tentacles — long tentacles, a dozen of them, maybe more. And that means in the middle of the ‘nest’ must be the body of … of whatever it is.”

  O’Neil shrugged. “The man broke,” he said simply. “His control snapped, he dropped his gun, his useless radio, his failed flashlight, and he ran. It was sheer luck he headed in the direction of the compound. He ran like the devil was at his heels. He heard noises behind him, noises he didn’t want to dwell on, but he made it back in one piece. And he reported everything that had gone down.

  “His superiors ‘debriefed’ him, of course,” O’Neil went on. “They had him go through his story several times, grilled him on the details, recorded it … You know how efficient the Japanese are at that sort of thing.”

  “I know,” Nikki agreed. O’Neil heard the irony in her voice, raised an eyebrow quizzically. But she didn’t feel like enlightening him. “Go on,” she suggested.

  The pilot nodded. “Nobody wanted to believe him,” he continued. “Stories like that don’t fit into the neat, orderly corporate world-view, and anything that doesn’t fit is either forced to fit or ignored. They decided something had happened in the jungle, but the stuff about the ‘snakes?’” O’Neil shook his head firmly. “Forget it. The man lost it, started seeing things in the shadows of the jungle. He panicked, and he left his partner behind. That was the official conclusion.

  “They found the other guy the next day,” O’Neil continued, “not too far outside the compound. What was left of him, anyway. He’d been … well, to put it bluntly, he’d been torn apart, and much of the body was missing, like it had been eaten. What they did find, they examined. And you know what they concluded? He’d been killed by a panther. His neck was broken, but ‘obviously’ that was a result of the impact of the panther’s pounce. Forget the fact that the wounds in the body were obviously made by teeth several times the size of a panther’s. Forget the fact that there were marks on this throat indicating he’d been garrotted by something. Forget all that, officially speaking the man had been killed by a panther. His partner might have been able to save him, but he panicked and ran.”

  O’Neil shrugged. “They disciplined the survivor,” he said. “They might have wanted to ship him home, but they couldn’t spare any personnel. So they just put him on permanent night patrol — every night, they sent him out into the jungle that killed his partner. Nice, huh?” He shook his head in amazement. “What blows me away is that he did it, he followed his orders. No way I’d have gone along. I’d have bugged out, barricaded myself in my room, shot myself in the foot … something. Of course, he told everybody who’d listen his side of what went down. And even if nobody completely believed him, they certainly remembered what he had to say.” He smiled. “That’s how I learned all this, chatting with the security guards.”

  “What happened to the survivor?” Nikki asked. The knot of fear still twisted in her stomach, but O’Neil’s story had fascinated her. “Is he still here, or did they send him home when the new guards arrived?”

  “He’s dead,” the pilot said flatly. “He lasted about a week, then he disappeared one night. They found what was left of him the next day. Seems the ‘panther’ had come back for another meal.”

  Nikki found she’d been holding her breath, let it out in a long, hissing exhalation. “Wow,” she said simply. Then, after a moment, she asked, “Do you believe that?”

  O’Neil shrugged. “There are three — no, four — possibilities,” he said slowly. “One — the surviving security guard lied about the ‘snakes.’ Maybe he was covering up for the fact that he ran, or that he left his partner alone to get killed by a panther. It’s possible. But if you’re going to lie to protect yourself, why make something up that unbelievable? Particularly when there’s nobody left alive to contradict you?” He shook his head. “I don’t buy that.

  “Two — an honest mistake.” He grinned mirthlessly. “How likely is that? Mistaking a tiger for a panther in the jungle at night — that I can buy. But getting confused between a panther and something with a dozen tentacles … I don’t buy that either.

  “And three — the guy’s out of his mind, either naturally or chemically: drunk or drugged. You know who straight-arrow these guys are, Nikki. How likely is that?” Again he shook his head firmly. “I don’t buy it.”

  “You said there were four possibilities,” Nikki reminded him after a moment.

  “That’s right,” he confirmed. “Four — he was telling the truth. I don’t feel comfortable with it, it’s not something I can easily accept… But don’t you think it’s the most likely of the four?”

  They walked on in silence for a few moments. Out of the corner of her eye, Nikki regarded O’Neil. He really believes it, she told herself. But how can he believe it? Things like that just don’t happen …

  But maybe they do in Orrorsh. The thought sprung, unbidden, from some deep and secluded part of her brain. Even though the air was warm, she felt a sudden chill.

  O’Neil seemed to have sensed her discomfort, and smoothly changed the subject. He pointed to one of the outlying buildings — the one next to where Nikki’s quarters were. “What’s in there?” he asked casually. “I’ve been kinda doing an unofficial tour of the place, just scoping things out. I saw some of the workers loading equipment in there—weird-looking scientific stuff, I couldn’t recognize it. So I just went over for a look-see.”

  He snorted. “Two security guards just appeared out of nowhere, standing be
tween me and the door. ‘High-security area,’ they told me, ‘authorized personnel only.’ And all the while, there’s one of the scientists there too, staring at me like I’m something unpleasant he’d normally see only through a microscope. What the hell’s going on?”

  A sudden thought struck Nikki. “What did the scientist look like?”

  O’Neil shrugged. “Scrawny-looking guy. Greying hair, but still young.”

  She chuckled. Funakoshi. She knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of one of the arrogant young scientist’s looks.

  The pilot shot her a look. “You know him?”

  “You could say that.”

  He looked at her quizzically again, then visibly decided not to pursue the issue. “So what’s in the building?” he asked again.

  “That’s why we’re here,” she told him. “That’s the main lab; that’s where the main science team works.”

  He frowned, puzzled. “I thought you worked over there,” he said, pointing to Nikki’s building.

  She laughed again. “That’s right,” she agreed, “I work over there, while the important people work over there.” She indicated the two buildings.

  “But you’re workgroup leader …”

  “For the support team,” Nikki clarified. “We’re the second squad; it’s Funakoshi — the guy with the grey hair — and his crew that are the varsity.”

  “You mean I’ve wasted all this time schmoozing a second-stringer?” he demanded in mock outrage. “How the hell am I going to maintain my reputation that way?” He paused. “So what are the varsity up to?” he asked.

  Nikki smiled. “If you figure it out, tell me,” she suggested.

  *

  Another Goddamn nightmare. Nikki rolled over in the hard bed, breathed deeply to cleanse the adrenalin of fear from her body. She reached over to the night-table, flicked on the small reading light.

  The remnants of the nightmare vanished like shadows in the light. She sat up, ran her fingers through her hair.

  It wasn’t too bad, she thought, nowhere near as bad as it could be. Already, in the few seconds since she’d woken up, the details of the dream were fading away. But she could still remember — vaguely — that it lacked the hideous, blatant features of earlier nightmares. No blood-dripping specter of Toshikazu, no direct threat to her life, nothing overtly horrifying. Instead, the terror came more subtly, like an undercurrent, implied instead of stated outright. Like the difference between an Alfred Hitchcock movie and something by Stephen King, she thought. Certainly, there were elements that were disturbing in and of themselves — she remembered being in the jungle, with snake-like tentacles moving through the underbrush around her — but they were almost secondary to the overall atmosphere.

  Welcome to Orrorsh, she told herself wryly. Is this what I should expect for as long as I’m here?

  She’d had enough experience with the dreams by now to know that she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep immediately. (Or, more correctly, that if she did she’d probably find herself back in the nightmare landscape from which she’d just escaped.) She needed to do something to clear her head. Should I try and read? she asked herself, then immediately decided against it. For one thing, the only books she’d brought with her were technical journals and research material connected with her work. Definitely not the kind of thing she needed right now. That was dumb, she told herself, I should have brought some light reading. Something brainless — some lightweight adventure novels, or maybe a couple of pulp romances. Anything bid texts.

  A walk. A walk and some fresh air, that was what she needed. She swung herself out of bed, padded over to the metal wardrobe, and pulled out some clothes. Even with the air conditioning, it was warm in her quarters — easily warm enough for her to be comfortable sleeping in her underwear, with only a single sheet over her. That meant it’d also be warm outside. Quickly, she threw on a light shirt and shorts, slipped her bare feet into a pair of runners.

  The hallway outside her quarters was only partially lit—only every second fluorescent tube burning overhead — and she knew she was the only person in the entire lab building. That would change soon enough, she predicted. If they received the same kind of workload from Funakoshi and his prima donna scientists that the old Special Projects team had given them, they’d soon be working nights the way they had back in Tokyo. At the moment, though, everyone was still settling in. She figured things would be just as quiet over in the secure lab building as well — the only people moving over there would be the patrolling security personnel. She walked the length of the hallway and opened the door to the outside.

  Warm air washed over her like a wave. She checked her watch: Three in the morning, and it’s as hot as a sunny day in Tokyo. The door faced the stockade wall, maybe a hundred feet away, and beyond that—beyond the clear zone around the entire compound—was the jungle. The tops of the trees made an area of even darker black against the black of the sky. She looked up …

  And gasped in amazement. The sky was ablaze with stars — more stars than she’d ever seen before outside of a planetarium show. Crisp, brilliant, immediate … For the first time in her life, she understood why poets and writers had sometimes described the stars of the tropics as looking like diamonds. They weren’t just dots of light, like pinpricks in the canopy of the night. Here, they looked solid, like gems burning with their own strange inner light. They looked close — no more than a couple of hundred yards over her head — but when she focused her attention on the blackness between them, she felt like she was gazing into infinity. Wonderful, she thought in awe, magical.

  This —just this view — makes it all worthwhile.

  She took a deep breath. She could smell the jungle and the river, smell the incredible profusion of life around her — an unbelievably complex odor.

  And the night was alive with sound, too. Insects whirred and clicked, creatures she had no way of identifying chittered in the darkness. In the distance, she heard the roar of a hunting cat, the death-scream of the small animal that was its prey.

  I’m a long way from home, she realized, and not just in terms of distance. I don’t belong here. None of us do.

  That’s when she noticed the new sound. It wasn’t part of the strange, exotic music of the jungle. It was obviously manmade: the whir of an electric motor, coupled with the muted rattle of metal on metal.

  She started walking in the direction of the noise, roughly south, toward the great metal gates that were — apart from the river itself — the only way into the compound. What’s going on? she wondered.

  At first, her only emotion was curiosity. But then caution began to assert itself. She hesitated for a moment. Maybe it’s something I shouldn’t see …

  And then she laughed silently to herself — at herself. Paranoia yet again, she chided herself. I’m letting O’Neil’s horror stories get to me. She walked on.

  There was light around the gate, she saw — light cast by two powerful arc lamps mounted on the gatehouses. She could see clearly what was going on, although she didn’t at first fully understand it.

  She stopped. I can see them, but they can’t see me, she realized. Yes, the bright carbon arcs would have completely ruined their night vision. As long as she stayed in the pitch-black shadows around the buildings, she’d be invisible to them. And maybe that’s how I should keep it. Again she laughed silently at her fear: Stupid. But, stupid or not, she decided not to go any further.

  As she watched, the two big gates closed, and latched with a muffled clank of metal. There were almost a dozen people just inside the gate, she could see. Most were obviously Nagara Security guards, wearing dark-blue versions of their jumpsuits. They carried rifles of some kind, and pushed up onto their foreheads were bulky goggles. (Night vision goggles? she wondered.) The other three people she quickly recognized as members of the Matsushima Bay science team. Is Funakoshi with them?

  Yes, there he was, talking with a couple of the security guards. From where she was, she cou
ldn’t hear what they were discussing. For a moment she considered walking forward, making her presence known —I’ve got as much right to be out at night as they have, she told herself — but a tense feeling in her stomach persuaded her to decide against it.

  There wasn’t anyone else there … Yes, there was, she realized. Two other figures, dressed entirely in black. They were standing back out of the way, up against the gate itself. Only partially in the wash of light from the arc lamps, they were almost invisible. She saw Funakoshi raise his hand and gesture to them — it looked like a wave of thanks — and then the black figures really did vanish. One moment they were there, the next they were gone, as though they’d just dematerialized. Almost as if they were ghosts …

  Dematerialized? Ghosts? Nikki snorted. This place is getting to me. Obviously they were more security guards, dressed in some kind of night camouflage. Presumably they hadn’t walked out into the full brilliance of the lights because they knew what it would do to their dark-adapted eyes.

  The knot of people started to break up, and for the first time she could see what had been making the electronic whirring she’d initially heard. It was a vehicle, with an open bed at the back, and a small cab — big enough for only the driver — in front. Almost like a scaled-down pickup truck, except that instead of wheels it ran on caterpillar tracks, like a tank. It was painted dark brown-green, mottled with irregular patches of black — obviously jungle camouflage of some kind. Probably it’s an ideal vehicle for the jungle, Nikki thought.

  As the people started walking way, back to their quarters, the tracked pickup cruised off as well, heading toward the equipment shed near the helipad. The motor was so quiet that as soon as it was out of her line of sight, she couldn’t hear it any more.

  The group had broken up; the area in front of the gate was empty. The twin arc lamps were switched off, their blue-white fading quickly to dull yellow, and then to nothingness. In the darkness, the only sound she could hear was the irregular clicking as the metal of the lamps cooled.