Falling Prey

by M. C. Norris

  Nate was not a particularly religious man. He supposed that he believed in some sort of a higher power, some seat for the human soul that flew off like a locust when at last the flesh failed. His logistical dilemma was that human souls weren’t even supposed to exist for eons. God hadn’t created them yet. So, in the scope of Judeo-Christian philosophy, would an afterlife have awaited Dawn when she showed up on her Creator’s doorstep millions of years before Christ, millions of years before that god had even dreamt of humankind? How would that play out? If you exist before your species was created, then once again, you had a time paradox. Nate’s eyes flicked open. Moon shadows bobbed on the rotten floorboards of a vehicle that was not unlike them in the sense that it somehow existed many millennia prior to being invented. If things could exist apart from time, in one form or another, then that suggested that all things, all matter, all energy, had no beginning and no end, eliminating the need for a suddenly irrelevant creator. Was God the ultimate paradox?

  No, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that. Not here, when he needed a god on his side more than ever, when he had to believe in some sort of organization behind this screen of entropy. Where in time were they? These things, these shaggy howling beasts, they resembled nothing he’d ever learned about in school. The only enormous creatures ever known to inhabit the earth were the dinosaurs, and the creatures that inhabited this jungle did not in any way resemble those pebble-skinned, cold-blooded, reptiles lumbering around in science books—unless those books were all very wrong.

  Nate’s eyes brightened. What if everything they thought they’d ever known about the prehistoric world was inaccurately imagined? What if the dinosaurs were reeking shaggy things that howled up to double-moons? Nate glanced up at the two celestial bodies. They were hovering so closely tonight that he was sure they were going touch. He imagined them bouncing lightly off of one another with a cartoonish sound effect, and a little poof of stardust.

  Sandy glanced at him, but she didn’t ask him what he was thinking about. He was glad. He didn’t feel much like talking right now. Certainly, he didn’t want to describe his silly daydream of colliding moons, or his fear that their loved ones might’ve arrived at Heaven’s pearly gates only to find a posted sign that read, “Coming Soon.”

  “Listen,” Sandy whispered, curling her fingers around his own, squeezing his hand tightly.

  “I hear it, too,” Peanut said, stiffening in his seat.

  “What?” Nate asked. He couldn’t imagine what the two of them were hearing. He strained his ears beyond the rusted walls of their sanctuary, through the insulating layers of vegetation, the chirring barrier of sound produced by the nightly choir of insects. “Is it a howler?”

  Sandy shook her head. She and Peanut gazed at each other from across either side of Nate, and they began to smile, as if they were sharing some private joke. Just as he was about to become irritated with them, he finally heard it. God, he heard it, and when he recognized the sound, he experienced a jolt of the wildest emotions surging through his mind.

  Pirouetting notes piped eerily through the night, spinning, spinning, like a leaf falling from the jungle canopy, drenching the forest in an almost clerical ambiance that imagined a dervish of spectral entities, twirling spirits of the dead, until the Baroque intro was annihilated by drumsticks hammering at the sultry night air, and the gritty roar of a psychedelic guitar. The discordant, throbbing music champed along to mostly unintelligible, throaty vocals of a singer who drawled over the acid metal in a manner that suggested he was bombed clean out of his mind. “In a gadda da vida, honey, don’t you know that I’m lovin’ you? In a gadda da vida, baby, don’t you know that I’ll always be true?”

  The relief they shared was something euphoric, something mostly crazed. Here was the equivalent of a trumpeting bugle, the thunder of a thousand hooves. It was the sound of the cavalry charging to the rescue of a few surrounded soldiers who’d been holding a desperate spot of ground against terrible odds. Where before the well of hope had run dry, there sprung suddenly a fountain of promise.

  Two sounds, juxtaposed, thrown together into a bed where they were made to writhe together for two whole sides of the same record album. Here, in the literal Garden of Eden, blared the pinnacle of rock and roll decadence two-hundred-million years before that anthem would ever be written. It was weightless yet heavy, sanctimoniously obscene. The product of a forced union between angel and demon was something delicate, yet armored, bristling with spikes. It was the Iron Butterfly.

  “Let’s go find it,” Peanut said, nodding his head to the beat.

  “Oh my God, let’s go find it right now!” Sandy shouted, her eyes glimmering with madness.

  “Okay,” Nate replied, resisting a fit of hysterical laughter that threatened to come cachinnating up from his core. “Let’s go find it right now!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  28-D

  It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t supposed to have happened like this. Their long road together had only just begun. Hart crooned over the crippled body of the shackled man. He crawled along beside his best and only friend, who’d lived so feral and free just minutes ago, and could now barely drag his useless legs behind him through the weeds. The spear had severed his spine, and the worms couldn’t fix it. The injury was hurting him something awful. Hart could tell by his weak hoots, the sheen of sweat on his skin, the tendrils of drool whipping from his lower lip. The overlapped outline of his halved spinal column surged grotesquely beneath his skin with every hitch forward.

  How could that promise for a shared eternity in their jungle paradise have been such a blatant lie? The worms had never mentioned that there were some things that couldn’t be fixed. They’d failed to warn them that there were risks, and that their charmed lives could come to an abrupt end. They’d been cheated. The worms had been cruel enough to show Hart just a glimpse of that happiness he’d forever been denied, opening that window just a crack to the world he’d forever watched passing him by, just enough to let him smell the sweet summer breeze, before slamming it right back down over his fingertips.

  Hart threw back his head in a mournful wail. Lifting his trembling hands, he searched every scar on his face for some glyph of hope, some remembered story of a hard hit taken when he’d managed to find a way to get back up again, but something was wrong. He couldn’t remember any of the stories behind his scars. He couldn’t recall anything. How had he gotten here, clear out here in the middle of this jungle? Was he born here? Had he lived in this forest his entire life? Only this groveling thing in the weeds evidenced that there had ever been another creature like him, but this creature appeared to be dying. What had happened to him? Was he the one who’d injured this man?

  Gritting his teeth, Hart clenched a fist, and he bashed it repeatedly against the side of his own skull. There was something wrong with his brain. He felt like he should’ve been able to remember all of these things, as if they’d happened just moments ago, but his mind was failing to record memories.

  It was worms. The worms were eating his brain. He could feel them in there squirming against his skull, devouring memories, digesting thoughts, projecting their own dreams on the old screen of the decrepit theater that was his mind. How long before they’d completely hollowed him out into a mindless husk that just plodded around? Maybe he’d reached that point already.

  Hart dropped to his knees, and gently rolled the shackled man onto his back, exposing some gruesome wounds to his chest and abdomen. The man cried out, but Hart did his best to calm him. He stroked his bald head, and gazed down into his blood-drop eyes. There were worms squirming around behind his eyes. Hart could see them, and he understood that this man was suffering in much the same way, losing a battle to the same invaders. The man’s chest was heaving. Covered in mud, blood and leaves, he whimpered with every exhale, mouthing some word that he just couldn’t seem to produce.

  A wrecked bicycle, Hart remembered, red as the blood that trickled from his knee. Hart closed his ey
es and clung hard to that memory, the very last that remained in his mind. It wasn’t just a bicycle. That bike was his father, and he’d killed him. It was the worst agony he’d ever felt, before or since. Every bone was shattered in a briefly imagined connection to a man personified in a boy’s bicycle.

  “Don’t take it,” Hart whispered, his lip trembling. He could feel them burrowing in, targeting his last memory as if to them it was something sweet as candy. “Please, not that one! Leave it alone!” That memory was the root of every scar that had followed, the foundation of the monster he’d become. It was the last time he’d cried, the first time he’d experienced pain, and it had driven him on a lifelong mission to experience more. Hart required pain because he felt that he deserved it. He deserved to hurt, because he’d always needed something for which he was too proud to ask.

  “Help,” Hart whispered, shuddering all over, as worms chewed into his final scrap of memory, devouring his foundation, his red bicycle, and his father. “Help!” he bellowed, his mouth stretching into a grimace. “Somebody help me!”

  Ironic, that he’d finally reached a point where he was no longer too proud to beg for what he needed, and he was losing the ability to speak, and to remember what it was that he’d even been crying out for.

  Hart lowered his fingers to the shackled man’s wound, and he dabbed them gently in the blood. Lifting his arm to the height of his chest, he brought his fingers in to rest on his sternum. In a matter of minutes, he wouldn’t remember what he needed, but he could always leave a note.

  H.

  E.

  L.

  He wrote the first three letters of a word in the center of his own chest, before his fingertips ran out of paint, and his mind lost purchase on what exactly it was that he was writing. Hart dropped his chin, and he stared down at what he’d done. Although he couldn’t recall why he’d painted those letters, he was convinced of some deeper meaning, some purpose that a better part of him had once intended. He’d leave it there.

  Thrusting his arms beneath the unconscious man on the ground, Hart lifted him, cradling him like an oversized infant swaddled in chains, and he rose to his feet. The jungle beckoned. He lurched forward with a single step. Loops of chain swayed and jingled. There was no real plan. He was just a vehicle, and something else was driving. It turned him, this governing presence. It rotated him on his heel, peering out through his dead eyes, as it listened to the sounds of the night through his dead ears. They were one, but Hart’s percentage of the whole was miniscule. The presence seemed to have an interest in the sound of distant music. Hart recognized the song. At least, that miniscule part of him did.

  His feet rose and fell with a mechanical rhythm. So did the footsteps of the other things, all around him. The creatures of the night still loved to follow him. They found him interesting, in the sense that he probably looked and smelled like prey to their predatory senses, but some old instinct in the back of their reptilian brains knew better than to eat one of his kind. Something was off, and they knew it, but they would still follow him. A horde of scavengers would always follow, because that nightmarish cast of creatures intuited that wherever Hart went, he’d leave a trail of death behind him.

  ###

  23-E

  Sandy’s eyes widened as her fingers parted the veil of leaves. Before her loomed a wall of towering posts, bound together with rough cordage, and hacked into points. The wall’s footing was a perilous slope of riprap, millions of heaped stones that not only served to anchor the base of the posts, but as another layer of defense on this hilltop fortress. The wall was a simple obstacle, but its design prevented great leaps or ramming charges by the behemoths of this world. She couldn’t imagine how long it would’ve taken to collect so many stones, and to haul them to the top of what appeared to be an extinct volcano, one rock a time. Between the wall’s posts jutted thinner spikes, spaced about an arm’s reach apart, and positioned at forty-five degree vertices to the wall’s base. Swaying bridges spanned a number of guard towers that peered over the wall at regular intervals. In the darkness, it was difficult to determine just how large of a fortress this spiked wall contained, but she couldn’t see an end to the progression of pointed posts in either direction.

  The music was deafening. She wasn’t much of a fan of psychedelic rock, but as they’d climbed up the slopes of this hill, the song struck her as being one of the most beautiful she’d ever heard. It was like a siren seducing them ever deeper into the dangers of the night.

  To remain safely huddled inside of their vehicle until dawn’s break would have been the conservative choice, but the grinding beat of Iron Butterfly triggered a spontaneous impulse in all three of them to find the source of that music before the longest rock and roll song that was ever recorded was allowed to come to an end. There was someone else behind that wall. It wasn’t passengers from their plane. It wasn’t some savage tribe of cannibals, as described by John the hijacker, nor was it a nomadic band of troglodytes. Obviously, they’d been here a while, and they were brilliant. They’d managed to harness the power of electricity. They’d managed to make a stand in this violent world, and most exciting of all, they had no qualms about announcing their presence for everyone to hear.

  “Wait a sec,” Nate said, grabbing Peanut’s shoulder as he took the first step out into the clearing. “We probably shouldn’t go charging straight out into the open.”

  “Why?”

  “I just—think maybe we should wait a while.”

  “But, they’re from our time,” Peanut said. “Iron Butterfly is ours. Maybe they hit the exact same time warp as us. They might even be from Baltimore!”

  “Come on. No other plane out of Baltimore has ever vanished into thin air like that. We don’t have any idea who’s behind that wall. It could be a trap.”

  Peanut shook his head. “I don’t think so. They’re advertising. It’s their way of letting us know that they’re strong, friendly, and that they can defend themselves.”

  Sandy looked at Nate, and then back to the looming wall. She hoped that Peanut was right. In fact, she’d never hoped for anything so hard in her life. Whoever was up there blasting the night with their music seemed to be expressing a pretty clear interest in attracting visitors, and there was no telling how many others before them had already been beckoned to this same hilltop. She still wanted to believe that he was alive and well, and maybe that he was here. She couldn’t help but feel hopeful when this was the best chance she’d ever had of reuniting with Ray since the crash. All people were drawn to the sound of music. If they played music every night, and if her husband was anywhere alive in this world, Sandy believed that he would be here. If not tonight, then eventually.

  The song ended. Unseen speakers gave a static pop, and the eerie sounds of the forest resumed their place on the usual concert stage. Insects rasped in the leaves. Somewhere in the distance, a howler unleashed its terrible cry. It seemed to go on forever, before chuffing out into stillness.

  “I’m with Peanut,” Sandy said. “I want to go.”

  “I’m not against either of you,” Nate replied. “I’m not saying we don’t go in. I’m just saying that we ought to, you know, spy on them for a while.”

  “I can’t. I cannot do it. I’m done.” Sandy shook her head. “I’m through creeping around out here in the bushes. I’d rather die in there in the next five minutes than spend another hour out here in this jungle.”

  “I need to find Tara,” Peanut said. “If she’s not already in there, then maybe there’s somebody who can help me find her.”

  Sandy nodded furiously, her eyes moistening with tears. “Yes. That’s what I’m thinking. My husband could be in there right now, waiting for me.”

  “Alright, alright, but just—let me do the talking, alright?” Nate poked a finger at Peanut’s chest.

  “Whatever you say, Dad,” Peanut said, rolling his eyes.

  “Okay,” Sandy replied.

  Nate took a deep breath, exhaled, and then p
arted the last boughs that concealed them. “Okay, gang. Let’s do this.”

  Hand in hand, their cobbled family of perfect strangers stepped forth together from the jungle, and into the fort’s earthen yard. They’d only emerged for about five seconds before a shrill whistle peeled from one of the guard towers. Sandy felt her throat tighten. Her heart began to pound, as a second and third whistle keened from adjacent towers. It was not a pleasant sound. Whatever instruments were being blown were tuned to a note most disturbing to the human ear. It felt like her ear drums were being lanced with a quivering needle.

  The trundling resonance of rolling cogs preceded an outpouring of defenders. Bearing spears, hatchets, and what looked disconcertingly like modern rifles, a platoon of naked and painted warriors rushed across the yard, all piping their terrible whistles. Nate had been right in his hesitation to approach this place. It was she and Peanut who were being delusional.

  “Stop it. Put that damned thing down.” Nate seized Peanut’s spear as the kid assumed a defensive stance. He grappled with the boy for control of the weapon. At last, he overpowered him, yanked it from Peanut’s hand, and threw it into the shadows.

  “You told me I was making my own decisions!”

  “You’re not making mine for me. You want to get us all killed?”

  Sandy imitated Nate, lifting her hands slowly over her head. At first stubborn, and unwilling to submit, Peanut finally obeyed when the defenders drew close enough that they were able to see their faces. Whistling warriors closed in all around them. Eyes bulging, cheeks puffing on slender reed flutes, they pointed all manner of weapons in their faces. Their various skin tones suggested a tribe of mixed races, with hairstyles that were as unique as the painted designs on their bodies. Some wore dreadlocks. Others plaited their long hair into braids, while others shaved their heads right down to the skin.