by Hugo Navikov
Popcorn, who had finally caught his breath from trying to run a hundred yards, put his hand on Brett’s shoulder and said solemnly to Lathrop, “And he won’t be alone.”
Brett closed his eyes. He literally couldn’t have created a less-threatening person than Orville Blum, but he appreciated the sentiment. “Thank you, Popcorn. That’s … very helpful.”
“You bet, big guy,” Popcorn said. “If you need me, I just need to do my inhaler before I get too much more excitement.”
Lathrop said, “I’m duly chastened. Now, Mister Russell—”
YEARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH
An unholy roar blasted them from outside the four wasp-body walls of their tiny fort, making everyone sitting inside slam themselves flat against a wasp or double over into a defensive position. Then a furry pentadactyl paw the size of a car tire and the color of street slush swooped in and grabbed Natasha the Organization operative, swiping her out of the encampment and out of sight.
Lathrop moved to rise, but Brett held him down and yell-whispered, “No! You don’t know how many there are! Stay down, for God’s sake!”
“She is vital!”
“How?” Brett said, but then shook the thought out of his head and said, “We can’t risk losing anybody else. I don’t know what the hell that paw belongs to, but it has to be huge. It’s way too dangerous to even stick your head out—”
“Crane!” Lathrop shouted in what was definitely not a whisper, “You and your men get your asses over the side and get her back! She is vital!”
Brett turned and looked at Crane, who was frozen between wanting to obey orders from his employer and really not wanting to get his head taken off by whatever hairy monster just ran off with a woman he didn’t really talk to even once. Crane looked at his men, each of whom looked back with absolutely no hint of volunteering for the suicide mission of going after Natasha.
“You cowardly bastards! You’ll be lucky if I pay a single one of you!”
Each commando—including Crane—had a submachine gun across his lap. At Lathrop’s angry words, the muzzles all subtly, but unmistakably, were shifted to point right at him.
“I’m being hyperbolic, of course,” Lathrop said lightly, but quickly regained his serious tone: “But we need her back! She is—”
“Vital?” Brett snarked, but quickly regained his serious tone: “No one except me and you is irreplaceable on this expedition, pal.”
All through the sight of seeing Brett wrestling a crocodile and an anaconda, almost going down with a ship being attacked by a sea monster, and running from ginormous wasps and megapedes, Lathrop had never seemed more than a bit ruffled. But the way he now spoke showed that the Russian woman probably not named Natasha was probably a lot more vital than Brett believed even ten seconds earlier. Lathrop said in an almost-panicked voice, “No! Mister Russell, you don’t understand—Natasha is the reason we’re here.”
“Wait—her name really is Natasha?”
“What? No, her name is none of your business. But that woman had better still be alive and you all had better go retrieve her or there is no expedition.”
“Lathrop, there is no expedition if we’re all dead! I’m sorry, but there’s no way in hell any of us should risk our own lives to rescue any one member of the—”
RRRRREAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH
The new roar was followed by the appearance of another hairy hand, which also reached over the top of the wasp’s bodies—and grabbed Ellie. This time, however, the thing attached to the giant paw didn’t remain low to the ground, which it and its compatriot must have done in order to sneak up on the makeshift fort.
It stood now, Ellie screaming from within its clutches like Fay Wray. Her scream came from at least thirty feet up, and the top of the thing’s head was at least ten feet higher than that. It swept its great hairy leg over the top of the encampment and started walking away.
To the south. Every remaining person within the wasp fort put their head over the top and watched the impossibly tall and impossibly ugly orange ape-monster walk in the opposite direction from the one they wanted to go. In the distance ahead of this one strode the one that snatched Natasha. Its fist was still closed like the others’ fingers were closed around the screaming Ellie White, so maybe the vital woman was still alive as well.
After a moment, every head turned to Brett, whose face still registered only shock. A few seconds went by before he came to his senses and shouted, “We have to go after them!”
If Lathrop had anything to say about the sudden change in his expedition leader’s attitude toward rescuing any group members abducted by monsters, he kept it to himself. Brett could see the amusement on the commandos’ faces, and he supposed he deserved a little ribbing, if not outright derision; he could take it, if it meant they would go along with getting Ellie back.
“What were those things that stole TMI host Ellie White?” Ravi asked Brett, with Stefan was on the job holding the camera at him.
“Guys, not right now—”
“Ellie would want us to be doing this, Mister Russell,” Stefan said.
And he was right. She was an amazing woman, and it’s just what she would want. Brett thought with an inward smile that what she’d probably really want right then was for him to stop screwing around with Sam and Dean over her and come to her rescue already. But he had a second to say, “Ithaqua, the Wind-Walker. You might know it as the Wendigo.”
“What? For real?”
“For real. Now get that camera out of my face, okay? I gotta go save your boss.”
Ravi said defensively, “She’s not my boss. I’m her boss.”
“Well, great job, boss—you put your employee in danger. If she gets hurt or killed, guess what? When we get back to the surface, OSHA’s gonna come for your ass.”
“I mean, I—”
“But don’t worry about that, because I will already have killed you with my bare hands,” Brett said.
Then he felt a hand on his shoulder again. “And he won’t be alo—”
“Shut up, Popcorn.”
~~~
There was no more argument; they were going after the Ithaqua, which had to be the most cryptid of any Brett had hunted so far. It was practically mythical, not to one culture but to all, even though it was usually known as the Wendigo outside of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Of course, Brett didn’t know if this was what the ancient legends were referring to—Wendigos ate human flesh and stripped away souls and all of that, but Lovecraft’s version simply stalked off with its victims later to drop them from a great height. Brett enjoyed the senseless evil of Lovecraft’s monsters, and this was surely the purest pointlessly nasty creature in any of his work. Ithaqua didn’t do anything to its victims except kill them by letting them fall from hundreds of feet (Lovecraft’s Wendigo was impossibly tall; the thing they just saw must have stretched the outer limits of the cube-square rule limiting the size of terrestrial creatures and was probably one-tenth the height of Ithaqua.)
As if he could read Brett’s mind—something that kind of surprised Brett, since he didn’t feel confident the man could read at all—Crane asked point blank, “What the hell are those things?”
Brett didn’t get a chance to answer him, as Ravi rushed to share his own cryptid expertise with the group as they gathered themselves and their things to go after the monsters, Natasha, and Ellie: “They’re wendigos, Commander. The word comes from the Algonquin word wiindigoo, of course. They’re described in myths shared by everyone from the Ojibwe to the Naskapi as cannibalistic monsters or manifestations of an evil spirit, or both. They have aspects of humanity, but aren’t human, obviously, despite their walking upright and possession of hands with four fingers and an opposable thumb, so I suppose the term ‘cannibalistic’ isn’t strictly accurate. They also are known to be shapeshifters, but that might not be completely accurate.”
“That might not?” Popcorn echoed incredulously. “The whole thing is impossible.”
Brett smirked. “This coming from a man who fought the world’s largest dinosaur predator and now just watched a forty-foot ape-man kidnap two people.”
“Well, perhaps not impossible. But darn it, it’s still all pretty unbelievable.” He paused, looking over the four paramilitary mercenaries, the crocodile wrestler, and the operative of a murderous global cabal, and added, “Please excuse my language.”
Ravi went on: “There is a similar overtly mythical creature called the Wechuge, which is detailed through the oral tradition of the Athabaska from the Northwest Pacific. In any case, these creatures may seem humanlike in another aspect separate from their appearance: I’m thinking that perhaps they cook their food. That would explain why they took off with the agent and our show’s host.”
And the only person I’ve ever loved except my murdered wife and son. “Whatever it is, we have to travel south now, away from the mountains that are the most likely place for Merco to hide out. We need to get our people back. Apparently, Natasha is vital, and I can tell you Ellie is a lot more than that.” He took a deep breath. “Let’s go get them back. No monsters are going to steal our women and get away with it!”
They all shared a much-needed laugh and rose together to strike back—
“God in Heaven!” Stefan shouted, almost dropping the camera as something new came into the frame. Several things. And they looked hungry.
“What in hell are those?” Lathrop spouted. “Jackals? Hyenas?”
“Not unless jackals and hyenas have six legs,” Brett said, but they did look a lot like the scavengers. But these were long, and an extra pair of legs supported them in the middle. Their mouths and the fangs within them were huge and dripping with drool no doubt triggered by a sudden big meal laid out right in front of them. He looked around them and counted off the creatures. “Six of them. There’s nine of us. Any suggestions?”
“Stay here until they go away,” Popcorn said flatly.
“That’s not gonna save anybody.”
Popcorn didn’t have to say the words, since his sentiment was right there on his face: I’m okay with that. It was not, perhaps, his finest hour. But he made up for it: “Then let’s go, right? Let’s get away from them and save our women!” He paused. “Not to be sexist. But they are both women, technically speaking.”
“Wow, okay, Popcorn is on board,” Brett said with a look at the rest of them that was both a shaming and a dare. “Commandos, each of you take one side and just shoot any damn thing that doesn’t look friendly.”
“You don’t order my men around, Russell.”
Brett put his palms up in a “no offense” gesture. “Sorry.”
Crane nodded at the apology and addressed his men: “Let’s do what he said.”
“Good work, Commander.” Brett watched the jackal-things slowly circling the fort but not coming any nearer. “Now, we need to get out of here and … and, um …”
His words trailed off as he saw one of the animals sniff at the edge of the wasp carcass that was outside the four making up their encampment, because it recoiled and backed away. Considering that all of the creatures’ legs and flanks were thick with horizontal lines of scar tissue, no doubt from a lifetime of rubbing up against the leaves of acid-plants, the jackal-things didn’t shy away from anything easily.
The plants wouldn’t touch the wasp bodies, either. He didn’t know what it was about the steel-gray super-insects that repelled things down there, but he knew a possible advantage when he saw one. “Guys, those things out there won’t get near these wasps. They want us really bad, but they want to avoid the wasp bodies even more.”
“Superior,” Lathrop said. “Now we may starve to death inside our little fort in peace.”
“Nice attitude. People, listen to what I’m saying: maybe there’s something with the wasps we can use, something to keep the jackal-things away from us long enough that we can get to wherever the wendigos are taking Ellie. And Natasha.”
“We can’t shoot ’em?” Flattop asked, looking genuinely crestfallen.
“No, you can—” Brett started to say, but POP! POP! POP! POP! POP! the commandos dropped every one of them in less than three seconds. “Okay, then! Good shootin’, fellas!”
“I believe I understand where you’re going with this, Mister Russell,” Popcorn said. “We need to carve out these wasp corpses and travel within them as we go after the wendigos, right? It looks like each could fit two to three people within it. We could slice one open, pull out the ichor and spiracles and glands and guts and such, then carve some arm and leg holes, maybe take off the face in front so we can see … it could work! I mean, we’re all wearing boots and long dungarees, so any really low plants that brush up against us won’t get through, not for a long time, anyway.”
“That’s so disgusting, it might just work,” Ravi said, and everyone shared a laugh. After a moment, he added, “No, but I really do think that will work.”
Brett nodded and said to Lathrop, “You’re just gonna have to throw that suit out when you get back, all the bug goo that’ll be on it.”
“Alas, yes. It’s especially sad, since it cost more than you make in a year.”
“I don’t know, crocodile wrestling in a tiny rainforest village pays pretty well,” he said, and laughed. “But yeah, that suit costing you so much is what makes it getting ruined so awesome.”
~~~
They managed to drag the outside wasp carcass next to the walled-off area, making damned sure that the huge stinger didn’t touch anyone. It wouldn’t do to split it open and pour out its guts inside their one relatively safe place, and it definitely wouldn’t do to make it through all of this crap just to get stung to death by a dead wasp.
No more jackal-things had come close, but Leavitt the commando reported that he could see several circling at about a one-hundred-yard perimeter, looking toward them the whole time. The hope was that whatever it was about the wasps that pushed all the various killer things away—even the wendigo didn’t actually touch them—would hold at least as long as it took them to get to the southern reach, maybe even the northern mountains.
It was hard to judge distance in this alien environment, but the mountains looked to be a two hours’ walk away; the wendigos were still much closer, but each step they took was like five human steps. Unless the giants stopped soon, they would quickly be farther from them than the mountains. And Brett had to get Ellie back.
Not just back to the group. He needed to get Ellie back. He would get the information, she and her crew would get the money, and they could be together. The Organization would have to give up on him now that he would have the goods on them, for fear that he might have set up a public airing of the information should something unexpected happen to him.
He knew he could get her back. But first, he had to literally get her back.
Crane used his machete to cut a seam down the middle of the bottom of the wasp’s thorax, then let the thing fall onto its side and let its innards spill out onto the ground. Brett was curious as to whether any of the plants on the edge of their little clearing would like what was inside of one of the mega-wasps, even though they didn’t care for their outer shell.
But it was like they had poured lye on the ground instead of the wasp’s guts: the moment they touched any of the plant stems, the plants curled up, dried out, and turned black.
On the “Do acid-plants like wasp ichor?” question, then, Brett marked this down as a “no.”
“That is some effective evolutionary adaptation,” Popcorn said—then puked hard as the stench hit him. He wasn’t the only one, either; in fact, the only people who didn’t throw up were Brett, Lathrop, and Crane. And even they gagged.
“I just want to say that I am having such a pleasant adventure,” Ravi said, wiping his mouth on his shirtsleeve.
“If you like that smell now,” Brett said, “you’ll love it when our heads are inside.”
More puking.
Brett laughed, but he was pretty sure
he’d be hurling like everybody else as soon as he had to breathe that in. However, he learned in the rich aromatic environment of tropical rainforests from Africa to South America that it takes only about five minutes to get so used to a smell that you don’t even notice it any longer. One had to avoid getting away from and re-encountering the odor in question, but the constant up-close exposure each of them would have inside the carcass looking out should keep them from becoming completely dehydrated from vomiting. Brett had yet to see a water source down there, and the bottles of water in the commandos’ bags wouldn’t last very long.
As they worked to cut the cartilage and whatever the hell else kept the giant wasps in the shape of giant wasps, Brett realized that he had absolutely no sense of how long they had been in this weird world within the world. They hadn’t stopped since they got there, first with the plants and then the wasps and the megapedes and the wendigo and now the six-legged jackals that, Brett noticed as he let some of the others spell him on the carving out the giant bug and stared out at the area around them, had made the radius of their circle much smaller in just a few minutes. Wasn’t the smell bothering them, or could they have gotten used to it as well?
Had they been there for two hours, or eight? Or even ten? There had been an enormous amount of trudging through the sizzling acid-plants, and fighting the various creatures had taken much longer in reality than it seemed to in Brett’s mental reconstructions. There was no sun and no clouds. His watch, like anything electronic, didn’t seem to work down under the island. Maybe it was a good thing they weren’t dragging that high-end arsenal that depended on computers and electronic components even to start up, let alone aim or fire.