Finally, Brian leaned back away from the table and nervously rubbed his brow. “Kristen,” he began, “you know that we’re in a constant spiritual war, right? That our true enemies are not of flesh and blood…”
She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “Is this about the radio?”
A pause. “I think so.” And then his mouth fell shut again, still reluctant to put words to his thoughts. Sighing, he stood to his feet. “There’s something else I think you should see.”
Now Kristen was starting to panic. She had never seen Brian and Tabitha so uneasy before. “What?”
Brian led her out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Standing off to the side of the doorway, he invited her into his bedroom by motioning her past him.
Thoroughly confused, Kristen timidly stepped forward, eyes sweeping back and forth trying to discern whatever had rattled her hosts. But she didn’t detect anything strange. She turned back to face them, shrugging. “I don’t…”
Then Brian pointed a finger up to the ceiling, above the bed.
When she lifted her eyes to where he’d pointed, a cold chill swept through her body. “What is it?” she whispered while stepping back and away from it.
The entire section of ceiling above the bed was covered in writing, though made up of characters she didn’t recognize. Dark, hard strokes against the white ceiling paint had formed a grid of alien symbols.
“I don’t know,” Brian said. “But it wasn’t there when we went to bed last night.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand what… You think I have something to do with this?” Tears began dripping down her cheeks.
Brian sighed, his face sympathetic and pitiful. “I saw something like this in your bathroom.”
Kristen studied him while letting the magnitude of his words sink in.
“I didn’t want to tell you, because I didn’t want you to be worried or scared,” he explained.
“That’s why you wanted me to stay here with you.”
He nodded, and Tabitha put an arm around his waist, leaning against him.
Kristen forced herself to look back up at the ceiling. “What does it say?” She hadn’t meant to whisper, but her throat seemed to be closing.
“I don’t know. I think it’s Sumerian. I have someone coming to translate it later today.”
“Sumerian? As in the inventors of writing?”
But Brian could only shrug, helpless. “I have to get over to the building.” He never called it “church” because the church was supposed to define a body of people and not a physical location. Referring to the church as a mere building, as far as he was concerned, always led to a host of false priorities. It was something he had to explain to John not that long ago. “You can come if you’d like, or Tabitha can stay here with you. Whatever you need to do.”
But she wasn’t hearing him. “Why would this be happening? I don’t understand. Why now?”
Brian bit his bottom lip and exchanged a quick glance with his wife. “I think it may have to do with John.”
THIRTEEN
Sunrise. 23rd day of May. Bermuda, Harrington Sound area
Paul was following closely on Jackson’s heels, demanding to know just how, exactly, he’d learned of the lost vessels. The rest of them listened while simply trying to compute the obvious meaning the collection suggested.
“I knew about it,” Jackson snapped, “because Ronald talked about it in his book.”
“Wait,” Chris spoke up. “You and Ronald knew about this place?”
“In theory.”
Jackson was walking cautiously through the forest’s undergrowth, weapon held firmly against his shoulder. They were backtracking, looking for signs of Nick, while wary of anything with six toes that might be hiding in the woods around them. The sound they’d heard coming from within the forest while at the wall was still very fresh in their minds, giant footprints and a seven-foot sword only compounding their alarm.
“And you just didn’t think it was worth mentioning, is that it?” Hunter demanded, almost shouting he was so angry.
“If I told you, you wouldn’t have believed me.”
“Yeah, or maybe we wouldn’t have come.”
“For a chance to save Henry, you’d have come,” Jackson retaliated.
Trying ever so hard to push the six huge piggies from his mind, John took Ronald’s book out of his backpack as he asked, “How did you know Henry was here?”
But before Jackson could refuse to answer, Chadwick blurted out, “How did you get us here?”
To that, Jackson turned and pointed at John. “Him.”
“Him what?” Chadwick persisted.
“He’s got the same blood as Henry. I knew he’d open the door.”
“What are you talking about?”
Before anything else could be said, however, a faint cloud of smoke came floating across their path, climbing whimsically through the evergreens.
They stood still, studying the shapeless tendrils dancing toward them, until Paul pointed to their left.
“Over there.” And he followed after the serpent-like trail, it’s floating body leading them to a patch of glowing embers.
Squatting to the wet ground, they all fell silent, the wind stroking the fire’s remains some twenty yards ahead of them. Slowly, they began moving forward, their weapons sweeping back and forth and searching for movement.
Upon reaching the fire and completing a reconnaissance sweep of the area, Paul announced, “It’s clear.” And he let the MP5 drop idle to his side.
“That’s Church Bay in Harrington Sound,” Hunter said, pointing to a break in the trees.
Jackson was kicking at the ashes around the fire, quenching the glowing remains of what smelled like a recent steak dinner — or breakfast. And then Chadwick’s voice hollered a loud expletive that rebounded off the trees and brought everyone running toward him.
“What is it?” yelled Chris, coming up beside him.
But Chadwick was standing motionless, his eyes wide and focused on something down on the ground in front of him. Whatever it was, it had him covering his mouth with one hand and pointing shakily with the other.
Paul stepped forward, disdain rippling through the muscles in his neck. “What the—”
Piled before them was a heap of gore, broken bones and torn flesh protruding from tattered and blood-soaked clothes.
Paul reluctantly poked it with his boot, hoping that spreading it out would help identify what it was. It looked like washed-up carnage left over from a shark attack. When he nudged the pile, intestines came spilling out through the sleeve of a shirt. “Looks like it was attacked by a wood chipper.”
But Hunter was the only one to appreciate the most horrible aspect of Chadwick’s discovery. “Those are Nick’s clothes.”
Chadwick puked all over the ground behind him.
“No,” Jackson whispered. “No, no, no…” And he began looking around for something.
A mist covered Chris’ eyes as he came to understand the situation, emotionally if not yet rationally. “What’re you looking for?”
“The head.”
It was true, there was no head present within the mess.
“Look.” Paul was pulling a long bone out of the clothes, tendons, muscles, and strings of flesh tearing away from it in the process. He tossed it to Jackson.
Chadwick threw up some more.
Examining what was obviously a femur bone, Jackson suddenly swore, dropping it to the ground.
“You knew about that, too, didn’t you?” Paul growled at him.
But Jackson just turned his head toward Hunter. “Are you sure they’re the same?” He pointed at the clothes.
Hunter bent over the gruesome pile of remains and carefully pulled out a black, blood-soaked bush hat. Setting it aside, he put his hands back in the butchered mess and retrieved a piece of camouflage. “His hat and his pants.” He let them fall back to the ground.
That’s when John bent over and picked up the femur b
one, examining it for himself. As he studied it, a sense of horror wrapped itself around his body and began squeezing so hard that he suddenly couldn’t breathe. He dropped the bone, took a step back.
“What?” Chris wiped a tear from his face.
“Teeth marks.”
Chris’ mind reeled, his head moving back and forth between the fire and the human remains. “No,” he protested.
“You saying something ate him?” Hunter yelled. “Cooked him over a fire?” He was losing it.
Lightning tore through the sky, and a blast of thunder shook the ground beneath their feet just half a second later. They all looked up in time to see the floodgates finally open, the timing of which seemed appropriately fitting.
But then a great rushing wind exploded from the trees around them, the air filling with a hideous, high-pitched whistle.
“What is that?” Hunter called out, frantically aiming the MP5 up into the trees. But the rain was falling too hard, building liquid walls they couldn’t see through.
And then things were flying into them, grabbing at their clothes.
John covered his face, swiping blindly at the air around him. At first he thought they were bats, but the demonic laughter seemed to suggest otherwise.
Both Paul and Chris opened fire on the skies above them, their anguished screams echoing along with the blasts.
“Stop shooting!” Jackson was shouting.
But still they kept channeling their pain into an attack on the unknown, at what had taken Nick from them.
When they did stop, their chests heaving from exhaustion, they could hear that the awful screaming had stopped, the forest now eerily silent beneath the downpour.
“They were just birds!” Jackson hollered at them, throwing half of one in their direction. “They’re cahows!” He cursed loudly. “We need to get out of here! Now!”
“If that’s Nick,” Chris said, the barrel of the weapon sizzling under the cold rain, “then we need to bury him.” Emotion pinched his words.
Jackson’s jaw tightened. “Then do it fast.”
Paul kicked one of the dead birds and reached into his pocket to replace the spent clip.
Jackson, however, had turned his attention to the surrounding trees the waterfalls were attempting to conceal. He was standing completely still, hardly breathing. “They’re nocturnal, used to thrive here before the settlers ate them into near extinction,” he whispered, his mind spinning. And then he turned away from whatever he was listening for and snapped impatiently at the others. “Let’s go! You wanna bury him, then do it!”
John, Chris, and Hunter dropped to their knees and started digging frantically through the mud. Chadwick simply collapsed against a tree, his eyes closed, his breathing labored. The rain was mixing his vomit with the river of blood now flowing from Nick’s remaining anatomy, and he tried not to look at it. “That was the noise we heard yesterday at the wall,” he managed to say.
“Shearwater,” Jackson said. “Another bird. Must’ve been up in the trees with them. Sounded to the Spanish like, diselo, diselo — which is ‘tell them’ in English. They thought they were being laughed at by witches, believed that devils haunted the islands.” His voice now seemed strangely detached from their situation and Nick’s death.
Chadwick opened his eyes. “Bermuda was haunted?”
Jackson slowly began removing the MP5 from back off his shoulder. “Used to be called Devil Islands — the sailor’s most feared and avoided place… The shearwater, though, were gone by 1985.”
Hunter looked up from their muddy hole and shouted through the rain. “You do realize that Nick is dead, don’t you, Jack?”
But Jackson was in a world all of his own. “There should only be a few cedars left, too. An insect pest destroyed most of them back in the 40s.”
Not able to take any more commentary on the supposed impossibilities of their surroundings, Paul stepped toward him and grabbed him by the jacket. “Nick’s dead! You tricked him into coming here and now he’s dead!”
But Jackson shook his head. “We came to save Henry.”
“And now Nick is dead!”
“It was a risk…”
In a flash of anger, Paul whipped out the pistol he had tucked in the back of his pants and thrust it up into Jackson’s mouth, pushing him back against a palmetto. “You’re gonna tell us everything right now, or I swear I’ll put your brain all over this tree.”
At that, the faraway look in Jackson’s eyes seemed to disappear, comprehension returning beneath a squinted expression of intolerance. He saw immediately that Paul had his trigger finger resting on the outside of the trigger guard, and he quickly grabbed Paul’s gun hand, twisting his wrist while, with his long reach, grabbing his throat with his other hand.
Paul countered by letting go of the pistol and throwing himself backward, grabbing Jackson’s wrist with both his hands while twisting his own body toward the ground. The move took Jackson by surprise and he lost his footing, lurching forward and landing on his back with Paul on top of him. Paul struggled to his knees in the mud, throwing a ferocious blow at Jackson’s face, but Jackson turned away from it, the attack simply glancing off a cheek bone.
“What did you do?” Paul screamed, taking another attempt at his face.
By now, Hunter was pulling him away from Jackson, dragging his flailing body through the gathering puddles.
“Knock it off!” yelled Hunter.
Jackson got to his feet. “Touch me again, and I’ll kill you.” He threw the pistol back at Paul.
Paul tried to get to his feet again and lunge one more time, but Hunter held him tight, wrestling him back to the ground. “Stop, Paul!”
John and Chris did their best to ignore the confrontation as they carefully lowered what was left of Nick into the shallow hole.
“Should we say something?” Chris asked.
Hunter turned away from Paul, who seemed to be getting a handle on himself, and looked at John. “Shouldn’t you pray or something?”
“He’s your friend,” he responded. “You want to say something, go ahead.” John didn’t have anything to say on behalf of Nick and didn’t think that praying for a dead person did any good anyway.
“We don’t have time for this,” Jackson said. “We need to go, now.”
But it was too late.
Chadwick was the first to see it. He struggled to stand up, leaning against the tree for support while his hands fumbled clumsily with the gun. He fired a round into the ground at his feet.
Everyone spun toward the blast and saw Chadwick standing there shaking, his eyes fixated on something above him, through the rain and up in the trees. But whatever it was, the thick sheets of water prevented them from seeing it. And then a dark shadow appeared behind the moving veil.
Paul quickly got to his feet and joined the others in backing away from the towering presence now poking its head through the falling rain.
John felt his heart stop as the manifestation now towering above him married his nightmares to his past.
Six toes. Seven-foot sword… It was the answer to the equation everyone knew but couldn’t bring themselves to actually believe. Now they had no choice.
The giant stood over fifteen feet tall, its head ridiculously close to the forest’s dripping canopy. Mountains of muscles traversed its body. It was holding an enormous sword in one hand, the six fingers on the other opening and closing in seeming anticipation of some head popping.
It wore nothing but strange markings that wrapped every inch of its flesh, and a rope that traveled over its shoulder and across its massive, scarred chest. Hanging from the rope, like some kind of ornament, was Nick’s head.
The retired SEAL’s mouth hung open in a twisted scream, but his tongue was no longer present to articulate whatever pain he’d experienced before leaving earth. Or wherever this place was. The severed neck was still dripping blood down the monster’s body.
Eyes frozen open in shock, the six men stared upward at the mang
led face as it bounced off the giant’s chest with each of its steps.
Finally, its dark eyes fell on them and registered their presence beneath it. Lifting its head up to the sky and opening its mouth — revealing sets of teeth stacked row upon row — it let out a hellish roar that shook the ground. Leaving the demonic howl to echo throughout the forest, the giant’s soulless eyes then settled back on the intruders. Stepping forward, it raised the sword high into the air, its razor-sharp blade sending cedar branches dropping to the forest floor around it.
The movement jolted the six men from their terror-induced stupor, and they simultaneously lifted their weapons. They opened fire with agony-stricken battle cries of their own, John (the only one without a weapon) watching the giant’s body recoil from the holes punching through it. The rain turned to red mist until, a moment later, the giant finally fell backward. It landed hard, shaking the ground and disappearing beneath an explosion of mud.
It was still, unmoving.
A second of stunned silence passed with nobody moving. Nobody breathing. Hands shaking, gun barrels steaming.
The giant moved.
“Run!” Jackson hollered, and he turned to take off through the trees, bursting through waves of blinding water.
They ran with such fear-fueled adrenaline that it took nearly ten minutes before exhaustion hit home, and they finally allowed themselves a glance over their shoulders. They had expected to see Nick’s terrible face swinging after them, but there was only the blank forest and the rain. They stopped, their lungs burning.
But then Jackson pressed a finger to his lips. “Shhh.” He squinted into the trees ahead of them.
And then a person appeared from behind a tree just ten yards away.
And then another.
Within seconds, they found themselves surrounded by men dressed in all manner of clothing and carrying old M1 carbines, AK-47s, M-16s, double-barrel shotguns, and hunting rifles.
“Follow them,” a man ordered as he stepped forward. He was wearing dirty bellbottoms and a coat made from some kind of animal skin. He spoke with a British accent while pointing to a group of men falling out of rank and forming a line away from their position. Meeting curious eyes with Jackson, he said, “We’ll take care of the giant.” And he raised a rifle, signaling the rest of the men to follow him.
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