The effect on the chopper was even more drastic. Its engine screamed and its rotors lashed the air as O’Neil tried to hold position over the pad, but it was useless. Like a toy thrown by a petulant child, the machine was tossed backward, out over the stockade, out as far as the edge of the jungle. Another gust, even more violent than the first, struck it, tilting it so the plane of its rotors was almost vertical. The chopper dropped like a stone.
It was going to hit. There was no way O’Neil could correct in time, the chopper was going to crash in the jungle. Nikki screamed.
But O’Neil was a better pilot than she’d thought. At the last moment, the copter responded to him. Once more upright, it slowed its precipitous drop. Its landing skids struck the treetops, but everything was under control now. The ungainly machine started to climb again.
And that’s when the conceivable happened. Something — something — reached up out of the jungle, wrapped itself round the left landing skid. Something that could have been a thick, headless snake. The thing pulled downward …
And the helicopter plummeted again. This time there was nothing that O’Neil — or anyone else — could have done. Rotor blades windmilling wildly, the copter disappeared into the trees. Over the noise of the wind, Nikki could hear the machine die as metal bent and ruptured. The jungle itself seemed to scream, as the rotor blades hewed at the tree trunks like giant, flashing knives, then shattered into fragments. There was silence, just for a moment. Then a fireball climbed into the sky.
The wind howled again, this time in triumph.
Chapter Seven
Nikki stood just outside the open gate of the compound, staring into the jungle. The wind had blown her poncho hood back from her head, and warm, brackish rainwater was pouring from her hair, but she didn’t notice the discomfort.
The helicopter had gone down directly southwest of the outpost, she saw, twenty or so yards into the jungle. So thick were the trees and underbrush, however, that she couldn’t see any sign of the wreckage. No indication that the machine had crashed and exploded, no indication that two men had died …
Except for the smoke, of course, rising like a twisted totem pole — black, thick, shot through with lurid red flames. Even the heavy downpour seemed to have no effect on the fire below. The pyre, she told herself.
A team of security guards and mechanics were heading for the crash site, followed by the little cat-tracked pickup she’d seen last night. The men were armed with tools — shovels, prybars, sledgehammers and the like—and the bed of the pickup was filled with fire extinguishers.
Why bother? she asked herself dumbly. Nobody could have survived the impact, let alone the explosion. O’Neil and the scientist were dead; they had to be.
Orrorsh had killed them.
She began to shudder — not from the relative cold or the damp, they had nothing to do with it. In her mind’s eye she saw again the helicopter’s last moments. Righting itself at the last minute, its landing skids brushing the tree top. Starting to climb away. And then the thing from below, grabbing onto the landing skid and dragging the machine down to destruction. The wind, she thought, the wind helped it too. The wind blew the copter over the jnngle so it could kill them.
But no, that was ludicrous, she couldn’t believe that. For a moment she felt like she was in some kind of waking nightmare. What should I believe? she demanded of herself. That something in the jungle grabbed the helicopter? Or is that ludicrous, too? It would be so easy to refuse to accept what she saw, to convince herself that she’d imagined it…
No!! she declared mentally. No, I saw it. It was there.
But what was it? What could have done that? The tentacled thing from O’Neil’s story could… if she fully believed that story. And do I? she asked herself. She wasn’t completely sure.
What else could have done it? She remembered how the treetops had been flailing, under the double assault of the wind and the powerful downdraft of the struggling copter. That had been an instant before the thing appeared. Could the “tentacle” have been a vine of some kind — like a liana — torn loose and blown wildly by the wind? From her perspective, it had certainly seemed that the “tentacle” purposely wrapped itself round the landing skid. But a whip can wraparound something and it’s not alive, she reminded herself. Could that have been it, just a random event?
And what about the way the “tentacle” had seemed
to pull the copter down? How could a vine do that?
Maybe it hadn’t pulled it at all. The helicopter was climbing, she remembered, probably climbing as fast as its rotor could pull it upward. What would happen when it reached the full extension of the vine? It would be like… like riding a bike with a rope tied to the frame. Hit the end of the rope and what would happen? The rope would stretch a little, then snap back. The bike would be jerked backwards, wouldn’t it? That meant the helicopter would be jerked downward. And it would look just like the vine dragged it down. Wouldn’t it? Logically it made sense …
But there was no way that Nikki could make herself fully believe it.
*
The security guards had come up to her a few minutes later. Politely — gently, almost — they’d asked her to come with them, back to the security chief’s office.
And that’s where she was now, sitting numbly across the desk from the security chief — Issai Hongo was the name printed in kanji characters on the office door’s name plate. Behind Hongo stood two more senior security personnel. Another interview with Nagara security, she thought dully. This is getting too familiar.
Hongo was calm, his face expressionless, his manner completely under control. “Please tell us what you saw, Carrson-san,” he said for the second time.
Nikki just looked at him. She felt an aching emptiness in the pit of her stomach.
The security chief sighed. “Please understand, Carrson-san,” he said quietly, “I know that O’Neir-san was your friend, I sympathize with your pain. But we must know what happened, what it was you saw. Can you please tell us?”
Painfully, she forced herself to speak. “I saw something,” she said, her voice sounding dull and lifeless in her own ears. “Something … something reached up out of the jungle. It grabbed the helicopter, it pulled it down. That’s what it looked like.”
Hongo raised an eyebrow in surprise … Or was it surprise? “What did you see, Carrson-saw?”
“It …” She stopped. Her hands were shaking, she realized. She clenched her fists in her lap, and that stopped the shaking. “It looked like a vine,” she forced the words out. “It looked like a vine, but it wasn’t a vine. It was …” She searched for the right words. “It looked like a snake, or a tentacle.”
The security officers exchanged glances — guarded looks, Nikki thought. Then Hongo spoke again. “You saw a vine?” he echoed. “A vine tangled with the helicopter’s undercarriage, is that it?”
Nikki hesitated. That’s the logical explanation, but… she shook her head firmly. “I said it looked like a vine,” she said, “but it wasn’t. It was something else. It was a tentacle, it couldn’t have been anything else. It reached up, and it dragged the helicopter down.”
Hongo sighed again. “Of course that’s impossible, Carrson-san,” he pronounced. “It must have been a vine, neh? In the downdraft of the rotors, it was blown free and …”
“No,” Nikki cut him off forcefully. “I thought of that, but that’s not the way it happened. The … the tentacle, it grabbed the helicopter. It didn’t move randomly, it wasn’t blown by the wind. It moved purposefully.”
Again the security officers behind their chief exchanged strange looks. Something’s going on here, Nikki told herself.
Hongo shook his head slowly. “The storm was terrible,” he said slowly, as though to himself. “The wind gusted, it blew the helicopter back toward the jungle. The personnel on the helipad saw that happen.
The helicopter was out of control, neh? Falling toward the trees? It must have been horrible to see your fr
iend that close to death. You felt fear for him then, didn’t you, Carrson-san?”
The remembered fear, the horror, washed over Nikki like a dark wave. Not trusting herself to speak, she just nodded.
“Any one of us would feel fear for a friend,” Hongo went on gently. “That terrible fear …” He fixed Nikki with a steady gaze. “Fear plays strange games with the mind, wouldn’t you agree?”
With a cold shock, Nikki realized what the security chief was saying. Hot anger flared in her chest. “I didn’t imagine it, if that’s what you’re saying,” she snapped. “I saw what I saw. I saw the tentacle.”
Hongo was unmoved by her sudden emotion. “You saw a vine, Carrson-san,” he said calmly. “It was a tragic, random accident…”
“No!” Nikki shouted. Then she forced herself under some semblance of control. Emotion never convinces anybody, she told herself. Nobody ever believes just because they’ve got to. “No,” she said more calmly. “It wasn’t random, I told you that.” She looked into the eyes of the other security officers. Their faces were emotionless, like the faces of statues. But there was something in their eyes, something that denied their apparent disbelief.
“Didn’t anybody else see anything?” she asked. “The men on the helipad …?”
Hongo shook his head. “They were closer to the stockade fence than you were, Carrson-san,” he explained. “Their view was blocked. Nobody but you saw the helicopter actually go down.”
Nikki recreated the scene in her mind, tried to judge the sight lines. Kongo’s right, she had to admit, they couldn’t have seen anything. ‘Then my… my testimony is all you’ve got,” she stated flatly. “You’ve got to accept it.”
In seeming sorrow, Hongo shook his head. “But we can’t accept it, Carrson-san, can’t you see? What you claim you saw is impossible. When we take your emotional condition into account, how can we? No, you were afraid for your friend — justifiably so, of course—and that warped your perception.” He folded his hands on the desktop in front of him. “Domoarrigato gozaimas, Carrson-san,” he said formally, “thank you for your help in this painful duty …”
Nikki shot to her feet. “No!!” she shouted again. “Something’s out there. It killed O’Neil, just like it killed those two security guards.” Again the officers exchanged their strange looks. Maybe that got to them, she told herself. “Aren’t you going to do anything? Aren’t you going to go out and look for it, whatever it was? Before it kills anyone else …”
Hongo spoke calmly but firmly, overriding her voice. “We are currently retrieving the body and the wreckage, of course,” he told her. “The bodies will be treated with all due respect, and of course we’ll analyze the wreckage to determine the cause of the crash. But anything else? No. Our responsibility is the safety of all the personnel on this site. If we send teams out to comb the jungle for…” He visibly changed track. “We have no choice but to keep our teams on-site,” he concluded. “Doing anything else would compromise your security, Carrson-san, and the security of everyone else. You’ll understand we can’t do that. Neh?”
Nikki looked bleakly at Hongo. I think I understand,
she mused, but I don’t like it. 1 don’t like it a bit. *
The storm had cleared up as rapidly as it had appeared, Nikki noted with dull surprise. The cloud ceiling had broken, and in several places blue sky showed through. Beams of sunlight angled down to spotlight portions of the jungle and the coffee-colored river. There was still some wind, but now it was little more than a stiff breeze, not the powerful gusts that had howled through the outpost just a couple of hours before.
Just a couple of hours? Nikki checked her watch.
Yes, it was before three in the afternoon, not even two hours since she’d seen O’Neil die in the fiery crash. She shook her head in disbelief. It seems so much longer, she thought, it seems like days.
She wandered aimlessly away from the administration building. The air smelt clean, as though scrubbed by the heavy rain. Something’s missing, she suddenly thought, then the cold emptiness in the pit of her belly returned as she realized what it was. I can’t smell the smoke, she told herself, I was expecting to smell the smoke.
But of course that didn’t make sense. The fire had long since burned out, quenched finally by the rain and by the extinguishers of the security team. She’d overheard from the conversation of others that the bodies — or what’s left of them, she thought with a pang of loss —had been recovered from the wreckage, and taken to some storage area within the equipment shed. The security team had decided to leave the wrecked helicopter where it was, the people had gone on — there wasn’t enough left to make the effort of salvage worthwhile.
To her dull surprise, she realized that her aimless wandering had taken her in the direction of the helipad. It was empty, of course, apart from the now-useless tie-downs still attached to the eyebolts. Will they fly in another helicopter? she wondered. And another pilot? Or have they learned a lesson, learned that Orrorsh isn’t to be trifled with? She shivered and turned away.
The big gate was open.
It took a moment for the fact to penetrate her numbed mind. The gate was open, and there was nobody around it: no security guards, no mechanics. Did that mean there was a team out in the jungle after all? she wondered. Maybe Hongo had changed his mind, had decided to investigate what Nikki had seen.
Buthoiu likely is that? she asked herself. Not very, she had to conclude: the security chief had seemed adamant about discounting her report. No, it was more probable that another research group was out in the jungle, collecting … whatever it was they were after. No doubt the security contingent would be back any time to close the gate.
But at the moment the gate was open.
She stopped in her tracks, frozen in thought. Maybe…
Before she was even aware she’d made a decision, she found herself running for the gate. Running out of the compound into the cleared area outside the fence. Without stopping, she looked around her for some sign of the security personnel. If they see me they’ll stop me, she knew. Nobody goes out of the compound alone, that’s the rule.
There was nobody in sight, though. Slowing to a jog, she crossed the open area.
At the fringe of the jungle she stopped. Wliat the hell do I think I’m doing? she asked herself. If I’m right, that thing is out there.
But it doesn’t come out in the sunlight, another part of her mind told her. At night, yes. In the middle of a storm, yes. But not when the sun’s shining.
She stood, torn, trying to make up her mind. If it was out there, there’s got to be some sign, she told herself, some evidence. Something big enough to haul down a helicopter can’t move through the jungle without leaving some kind of trace. She took another couple of steps forward, then stopped again.
Then wouldn’t the security team have seen something when they were at the crash site? she reflected.
No, she answered herself immediately, they weren’t looking for any thing like that; they were just interested in the helicopter. They wouldn’t believe that it was anything but a random accident. They wouldn‘t let themselves believe anything else. Anger burned again deep in her chest.
And it was the anger that drove her forward, into the jungle.
Within a handful of yards, it was as if she was in another world. The canopy of foliage above was thick, so thick that it was no brighter than twilight beneath it. The heavy, complex odor of the jungle filled her nostrils and lungs, almost choking her. She could smell — could feel — the wild profusion of life all around her.
The jungle’s alive, she thought, every thing around me’s alive. Everything interrelated. Almost as if the jungle’s one huge, living being, and each tree, each bird, each animal is just one cell making up the body of a larger creature. It was a fascinating idea, but also a disturbing one. I don’t belong here, she told herself, I’m an invader, like … she searched for the right analogy. Like a pathogen, she decided even tually, like a bacterium invading
a human body.
Did that mean that the jungle would respond to her the way the body responds to a pathogen? The thought was enough to freeze her in her tracks for a moment. Would the jungle mobilize its defenses — analogous to the body’s immune system — to destroy the invader? Almost of its own volition, her hand reached down and unsnapped the flap of her pistol holster.
That action made her laugh wryly at herself. “Nikki Carlson, gunslinger,” she snorted. Damn, I’m letting my imagination run away with me.
Certainly, the jungle was one large, interlocking ecosystem; any high school biology student knew that. But so was a lake — like the one she swam in as a child. Had the lake sent forth “antibodies” to destroy the “pathogen” invading its body? Of course not. She forced herself on.
The ground underfoot was soft—not really muddy, as she’d expected, but more spongy than anything. It gave a little under her weight, with a faintly audible squish, but she didn’t sink into it like she would into mud. She looked down. As she put a foot down, she saw her shoe sink in about half an inch, saw water squeezed out of the ground by her weight. When she lifted the foot again, the print of her shoe remained for a couple of seconds, then vanished as the ground sprung back. The water was reabsorbed as well. That means no tracks, she realized. That makes it more difficult.
The jungle wasn’t alive with sounds as it was at night, but neither was it silent. She could hear water dripping, light a like rain — presumably falling from the rain-soaked upper foliage. There were the calls and songs of birds, and the background whirring of insects, but she could hear nothing large moving through the trees. That was good, she told herself: meeting up with a panther — or something worse — could ruin her whole day.
She stopped again, looking around her for some kind of landmarks to follow. She figured she couldn’t have gone more than twenty yards into the jungle, and already there was no hint that the outpost clearing even existed, let alone in which direction it lay. Fortunately for her, Nikki knew she had a good sense of direction — a “bump of direction,” her father had called it when she was growing up. She didn’t know how it worked, but she’d come to depend on it. In a strange city, and even in the woods —or the jungle — she always knew what direction she was heading, and how to get back where she came from. As a result she almost never got lost.
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