Chyna Stone Adventures: The Complete 8-Book Series

by K. T. Tomb

  “Don’t give me that rubbish, Lux. This is the most important work I will ever do as an anthropologist. Look at this!”

  She looked to where he was pointing. The creatures did not bury like westerners. They dug narrow tubes straight down into the dark earth and left their dead to stand in their graves. The shafts were hard to find as the grave marker apparently gave no detail to where the body was in relation to it. North, east, south, or west, it seemed completely random. Lux got to her feet.

  “These aren’t some ancient human ancestors you’re digging up, Smith. These creatures are here, alive, and I don’t think they like us too much.” Samuel was about to retort, but Ben beat him to it.

  “I see both your points,” Ben said. “But you’re right, Lux, I don’t like it either. They aren’t stupid. They bury their dead.”

  “That makes them human, doesn’t it?” Julie said.

  “No,” Ben corrected. “It makes them sentient. It’s a human arrogance to assume that we have the monopoly on conscious thought.”

  Lux dug her toe into the ground and kicked dirt into the air. Sweat rolled down her neck, probably leaving a streak in the dirt that had collected there since the day before. Other traces that she had worked had not taken this long in the wild. Actually, that wasn’t true, she realized. She had once been in the Arizona desert for two weeks tailing one woman. But somehow, that had not been as bad. The woman had only been human. There had been nothing to be afraid of. Out here, fear had oozed its way into every tree and every root. It leeched out into the atmosphere like noxious gasses, possessing everything. She was tired of that fear, but everywhere she looked, there were green eyes to remind her that it was there for a reason. The woman in Arizona had been human, though she had truly been a master of the desert like no other. But these creatures, she couldn’t call them Bigfoot, they were different. There was true knowledge in their green haunting eyes, but they were animal, surely.

  They wore decoration, but no clothes. If she paid attention to her memory of the previous day’s encounter, she could see little beads in their mane-like hair or deliberate designs painted on their hairy skin.

  The temperature at noon that day was over a hundred degrees, and the wet air made it feel hotter. The men had long ago abandoned shirts and she wasn’t very far behind. Lux had to instruct Julie and Hal to keep Samuel from overheating as he dug enthusiastically into someone’s last resting place. Makarios, like herself, was more interested in keeping the live creatures at arms-length and getting out alive than bringing up a dead one.

  “We’re due back in town in three days,” Lux said. “It will take at least that to get back.”

  Ben gave Samuel a dark look over his shoulder.

  “I don’t like people with doctorates. This is a really, really bad idea. I don’t mind taking a look, but taking bones…”

  Lux snorted. “What if I told you I got my doctorate last year?”

  “I would ask if they did degrees in tracking and woodcraft.”

  “Have you ever been on a trip like this?” she said changing the subject. She also was uncomfortable with the mood in the camp.

  “No. I’ve worked pretty much strictly in the city until now. It doesn’t matter, I can read these woods well enough to know that the longer we stay here, the more likely we end up dead.”

  Makarios didn’t seem overly concerned about his own demise. Objective, really.

  Samuel photographed, sketched, measured, and took samples from the skeletons in what Lux was sure was every way possible. When he reburied them, every lump of dirt disappearing back into the dark depths was a relief. Lux did not like messing with the dead, human or animal. It felt taboo, and Lux did not want to anger the creatures.

  “I do believe they are what people call Bigfoot,” Samuel said, a little pompously. Ever the lecturer.

  Lux glared at him. “Well spotted.”

  “They are certainly a new species of hominid,” he continued as if Lux hadn’t spoken. “This research trip shall be documented in history!”

  Lux turned away from him and let him continue to prattle on to whoever was left behind her.

  The sky was a low burnished red, darkening in the evening. No time to move on today. Another night in the woods. She instructed the team to take turns at watch. Although she was sure that the creatures – whatever they really were, sentient primates like humans or not – must sleep at some time, it was unclear if they were nocturnal animals by nature, or even if they had a conventional sleep cycle at all. It was with these thoughts in her mind that Lux found sleep escaping her entirely. She perched in a forked branch just above her hammock and listened to the night. Now that they were leaving, she was remembering all the reasons why she loved the woods. The drone of insects in the distance could be a lovely sound. An owl in the distance. The almost silent rustle of small animals under the leaves. Movement.

  Lux straightened, all her senses trying to fire up at once giving her brain an overload. There was something moving below. She squinted through the night, thankful for the full moon. The mane of one of the creatures was visible in profile, identifiable by the arching of its horns. It moved slowly, not like it was old, just cautious almost. Her eyes followed it as it dodged through the trees, the moonlight shining on its horns.

  It went into the graveyard and Lux felt a chill run through her. Species didn’t matter; nighttime graveyard visits were always concerning. But all it did was sit. Still, she couldn’t help but feel that it was performing some ancient type of voodoo magic to bring the dead to life. She shook herself. There was enough going on without making matters worse by imagining things.

  “What are you watching?” Ben asked. He had somehow managed to scale from his hammock to her branch without her noticing.

  “There’s one of them in their graveyard,” she said very quietly.

  “How long has it been there?”

  “I dunno, ten minutes?”

  He followed her eyes. She watched his focus in on the creature and then relax again once he had found it.

  “It’s just sitting there?”

  “So far as I can see. I think Samuel really upset them.”

  Ben nodded. “We should have just left him,” he said, without bitterness.

  Lux watched her feet swing in midair. There was something entrancing about being in a tree so high up. The branches were thick and sturdy and could hold more weight than the team had to offer. It was so stable, yet an easy drop to serious injury if she wasn’t careful.

  The creature stood in the graveyard, the moon sending out a shadow making its already tall frame even longer. Samuel had estimated their average height to be about six foot for males, five-seven for females. They seemed to be just slightly taller than the average homo sapiens.

  “I feel like they’re planning something,” Ben said.

  “Why?”

  “What would you do if you watched some psychotic creatures come along and start digging up your dead?”

  She nodded. She would be planning something.

  “I really want to get out of here.”

  “Me, too,” Ben confessed.

  “I don’t like this,” she whispered. “I liked dealing with things that had rules. I mean, I broke them all the time, but they were there. Rules are nice, even if you don’t follow them.”

  Ben snorted. “You’ve got a way with words.”

  The creature was leaving the graveyard, its shadow warping in the night lines. It made its careful way back towards them, following the path it had arrived by, passing right beneath their feet without an upward glance, though Lux was sure that the beast knew exactly where the humans were. When it had finally erased itself into the darkness once again, she felt like she could breathe again.

  “Why aren’t you asleep?” she asked Ben.

  “Couldn’t,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

  Lux stared back out at the night. They needed to get out of the woods desperately. It was changing them, warping them like the shad
ows in the night. Lux wanted to walk free of the trees. Maybe she would go to New Mexico. She’d never been there, but she’d heard it was quite beautiful.

  “Where are you going after this?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe Washington State or New Mexico. I’m done with Texas,” she said. “What about you?”

  “Dallas for a week or two, then I’m going down on assignment in Australia.”

  “Another mythical animal hunt? Vampire kangaroos?”

  Ben’s white teeth flashed in the night.

  “Can’t tell you that or I’d have to kill you.”

  The thing was, she wasn’t entirely sure that he was joking, despite the half smile.

  “I’m not going to track again after this.”

  “Really?” He clearly didn’t believe her.

  “No. I think I’ll do something boring and normal like nursing school or agriculture, or be a cop or something.”

  “It’s not boring if you like it,” he said. Lux was sure that there was something sad hiding in his words, but she couldn’t find it.

  “Australia, huh? That’s exciting.”

  “Yeah, I thought so.” His eyes did not agree.

  Lux looked away. She was going to leave everything about this trip behind, Ben included. But Ben was like her, was her, but with ten more years in the business. Hiding out up in a tree, she knew that if they survived and made it back to civilization that she would slowly become like this vulture-man, predatory but impassive, doing the terrible things that no one else could or wanted to do because it was all he knew. All she knew.

  “I’m going to sleep,” she said eventually. The night had developed a pressure that she did not want to think about. Makarios said nothing, but shimmied back around the tree trunk to his own hammock.

  She was awakened by a scream. At first she thought it was part of her dream, a twisted half-nightmare about being trapped in a great green glass bottle she couldn’t climb out of, but then she realized the scream had not been her own. Dropping down the tree, she was on the ground at the same time as Ben and Hal, who had similarly been awakened, rubbing sleep out of their eyes, but alert. Looking around wildly, she yanked out her Bowie knife and thumbed the safety on her pistol, prepared to fend off a whole tribe of warrior monkey things descending down on them. There were none.

  At first all she saw was Julie, unconscious in the dirt by the banked fire which was now long fizzled out and cold.

  A half congealed pool of red in the dirt. A shadow swinging ever so slightly. A body. Lux wanted to puke. She wanted to pass out like Julie. She wanted to just run and not stop.

  Dead bodies were not foreign to her. She had touched her fair share of the recently deceased. But this was different. This was disgusting. She shivered, her fingers wrapping around her knife tighter and tighter and tighter.

  The disemboweled body of Samuel Smith swayed gently in the wind from where it hung from the elm. The purple and swollen white intestines dripped down, catching on his foot. His lungs were pulled half out, the ribs cracked at horrid angles in the bright sunlight. She had read a story once, about a method of execution performed by the Vikings. The blood eagle. It was performed by cutting the skin of the victim by the spine, breaking the ribs so they resembled bloodstained wings, and pulling the lungs out through the wounds in the victim’s back. If they suffered in silence, the executed man would be granted access to Valhalla. Samuel had not been able to scream at all, she saw, as his own tongue had been removed and then used as a gag to stifle his screams.

  Chapter Five

  When was the first time you realized you would die one day? Ben’s words played through in her head.

  Samuel’s dead eyes held nothing. They were misted over, foggy. It was life that kept them clear, and now he was like an abandoned car, smashed, broken.

  They had to go. The green eyes were in the trees somewhere, watching. They did this on purpose. They wanted to send a message. Go! Her brain screamed at her. She had to get out, run. She was a tracker, a pursuer. The pursuit was over. Survival was all that mattered now.

  They scrambled through the tree, hauling their gear down in a rush, carelessly tearing the fabric of their hammocks clean of their rigging. Lux packed Julie’s things and Hal scooped up Samuel’s research. Julie came round, but there was no time to provide comfort to her. She had been close to Smith, and his death would hit her hardest of all, though later. Now they must go.

  Lux was afraid now, truly afraid for her life. Not the fear of facing down a wild creature, but the fear that the mouse knows in the split second that the wings of the owl blot out the moon. The sound of footsteps encroached on the camp. Lux didn’t know how to think anymore. She just stood, her pack strapped to her and her knife in her left hand, pistol now free of its holster for the second time in these woods. The male that had led the last encounter came towards them. His gait was slightly ataxic and labored. He came unarmed, but for the claws tipping his fingers.

  Lux looked into his eyes and knew she was going to die. It wasn’t the first time in her life that she had made eye contact with what she thought was her death. He stopped, not twenty feet from her.

  There was no threat in his poise, unlike the last time. He made several rumbling words like a storm coming in, but there was no understanding it. No language that she could know. Lux felt dizzy. This wasn’t real. None of this was real. She had contracted a fever the first few days in the woods. The bugs were killers. They had shared a crazy disease with her, that was all.

  Ben’s warm arm brushed hers, offering support. Hal was there too, standing just in front of Julie. Lux felt like crying again. There was a monster standing there, a monster that in no uncertain terms was not real. They stood behind her anyway. The creature spoke again, his voice sounding vaguely assertive, but she couldn’t be certain. His hand waved, the claws glinting in the light. Kill it, she thought, and her pistol rose to point at the creature’s chest. From this distance it would be impossible to miss.

  But she didn’t. Her trigger finger could not close. She thought back to the firing range, a lifetime ago. How could she fire seven shots in seven seconds? It would take her an hour now to fire just one.

  The creature reached behind him and all three of them bristled like angry porcupines.

  He was preparing to kill them all. He could pull anything out from behind his back. Anything. Very carefully, the male stooped, his arm lowering deliberately to the ground. From the strong seat of his large hand, a grubby form appeared. Wearing only a filthy pair of bloomers, a girl no older than three looked up at them. Her body was dirty but not harmed. Her hair was wild and two mud beads hung in the wispy tips. In very deliberate and prolonged syllables, he said, “Kah Bay.”

  “Abbey!” the toddler chirruped.

  The body of Samuel Smith hung from the tree. The girl did not look at it once, her wide eyes on Lux. She felt like the contrast was too much to handle and wobbled. Ben’s hand was clamped into her shoulder, strong fingers digging into her flesh. Hal bent down to meet the girl’s eyes.

  “Hi Abbey,” Hal said. “My name is Hal.”

  The girl smiled at him, her little baby teeth shining.

  “Is that the little girl missing from Belle?” Lux asked to no one in particular.

  “Yes,” Hal said. “Hey Abbey, do you want to come over here and we’ll take you home?”

  Abbey looked back up to the monster male’s face. There was a kind element on it, soft and gentle. Lux dismissed it. He was a monster, and that was all. Not just a wild beast, a ritual killer of men. But try as she might to dismiss it, the kindness was there.

  The male nodded to her and pushed her very gently towards Hal. She wobbled over to him, her little legs trundling ambitiously across the dirt. Lux could hardly breathe.

  “The bears found me,” the girl said. “But I miss my mommy.”

  “Your mommy misses you, too,” Hal said, picking her up and swinging her onto his shoulders.

  “Did she say t
hat to you?” the girl said.

  “Yup. She told me that I better come back with her Abbey or else!”

  The male turned, his furry back broad in the dappled sunlight at once huge and perfectly camouflaged.

  “Bye!” Abbey hollered, waving a chubby fist. She seemed entirely unfazed by what should have been a terrifying ordeal.

  The male turned around, and Lux was sure that there was surprise on his terrible face. He mimicked the wave hesitantly, unsure of the motion. It came out jerky and ill practiced. Then he was gone. The glow of green eyes was gone. They were gone, all of them. The trees could breathe again; Lux could breathe again.

  Lux turned to look at Ben and Hal.

  “I don’t understand,” she confessed.

  “Neither do I. They kill one of us and look after a defenseless child? What does that mean?” Ben said.

  Lux was glad Hal was there. She certainly didn’t know what to do with a baby or a little kid. She saw the child looking reproachfully at her from her position atop Hal’s shoulders and realized she still had her pistol drawn.

  “My mommy says guns are bad.”

  “Yes, Abbey,” Hal said, “guns are bad. Why don’t you put that away, Lux? I don’t think we need it anymore.”

  Lux nodded, and holstered her useless weapon.

  Hal, as it turned out, loved kids. More importantly, he knew how to handle them and Abbey appeared totally at ease. Lux had never thought about kids of her own; after all, that would at least require a relationship of at least one night to occur, but watching Abbey convinced her that she absolutely did not need any. Not yet, at least. The little girl did not stop chattering. By midday, it had slowed to a sleepy drawl, her cloudy Texan accent weighing down her little words, half of which Lux was sure weren’t even real. Julie stumbled along on the other side, still in shock. Her face was pale, drained of something more than blood. Her eyes were wide and did not blink as many times as Lux felt they should.

  That night, Lux helped Julie set up her hammock.

  “We’ll be back in Belle before you know it,” she said, trying to be reassuring. “Just a little longer, alright?”