5
My brother tried to warn those who command him about the monster. My brother had remembered our grandfather’s words. Those in charge did not believe him, did not want to listen to our grandfather’s warnings. But my brother did not speak of a matter of belief. He spoke of truth. Truth may or may not be believed, but that does not alter truth. Truth is. Speakers of truth understand that. They also understand that truth always wins, but sometimes with the winning comes death.
The sun was low in the pale blue sky, just an orange ball above the western hills, but the day’s heat still covered everything like a thick blanket on a warm night. Private Nathaniel Clowes held his M-16 in ready position across his chest as he crouched near the front of the tank. Sweat dripped off his forehead and he could feel it soaking his undershirt. It would be a relief when the cool of the night finally arrived.
He wiped his face with the back of his hand, his knuckles scraping against the cap he had worn backward since he got out of boot camp. It was his signature, his way of being different in this place where conformity was prized. A number of commanders had tried to get him to wear a regulation hat, but he never did. All of the commanders learned, quickly, not to make the cap an issue. It was one of the few things that Clowes felt strongly about.
Right now the cap felt like a talisman. Something was making him uneasy here, something he couldn’t quite put a finger on.
Neither could his partner, Corporal Ryan. At least that was what Ryan had said as they approached the tank. But their voices had dropped to whispers, and finally they had stopped speaking altogether. Ryan was beside the tank now, holding his own M-16 muzzle upward as he inspected the scrub-covered sand and the small stand of trees. Clowes glanced at him. Ryan shrugged, meaning he had found nothing.
Yet.
Ryan was a tall, thin kid who had joined up right out of high school. He had reddish-brown hair, chopped short, and brown eyes that seemed always to have a touch of humor in them. He could pull practical jokes with the best of them. Clowes knew that all too well, since he had been the butt of a number of them.
But Ryan didn’t seem to be in a joking mood now. He had his head tilted back slightly, as if he were trying to identify something by smell. If anyone could do that, Ryan could. He was from the woods of Oregon, and had been raised to hunt. Clowes had been raised in West Texas, and knew a bit about hunting himself. In fact, it was while telling hunting stories that the two men had become friends. They were planning to take their next two leaves together as part of a bet: Ryan said hunting was better in Oregon. Clowes claimed it was better in Texas. They would go to Oregon first, Texas second. And when those two leaves were over, Clowes knew he would have fifty dollars of Ryan’s money. Nothing—especially not a spotted-owl-filled rain forest—beat West Texas.
The wind shifted slightly, and Clowes winced. Something smelled wrong, but he’d caught only a sense of it, not a full-fledged sniff. He held his gun tighter. He and Ryan were alone, though. Clowes had an intuition about that, and it rarely failed him.
He didn’t know how he’d tell the sarge that they couldn’t locate Dietl. Sarge didn’t like anything untidy. Clowes was willing to give this search an extra effort just to avoid the sarge’s wrath.
Not that they had finished examining the area. They hadn’t even been to the other side of the tank yet.
This whole assignment had Clowes nervous. The sarge had pulled him aside—him, not Ryan—and warned him to take all precautions. Then the sarge had gotten just a hair too close to him, and whispered that he believed Private Dietl had been killed out here and that he wanted them to investigate. Real “hush-hush" for the moment. He didn’t tell Clowes what might have killed Dietl. And when asked, the sarge had simply said, “Go look and you tell me.”
Clowes had asked Ryan if the sarge had told him the same thing. Ryan merely looked at him with that cold humorless gaze that he reserved for moments when someone asked him something stupid.
“If the sarge said it was hush-hush,” Ryan had said, “then it’s hush-hush.”
The only thing Clowes could conclude was that the sarge didn’t care if they worked together. He just wanted them to find whatever they could.
Whatever that meant.
“Anything?” Clowes asked softly.
“Nothing,” Ryan said.
But neither of them had moved from their positions. This tank had been manned nearly twenty-four hours a day since Clowes had been in camp. Having it now sit unmanned like this seemed almost unnatural, and unnerving.
The sun clipped the top of the nearby mesa and the evening breeze kicked harder, swirling dust and hot air. The smell that had been teasing Clowes became a full-blown odor: the stench of rot and decay that brought Sarge’s warning completely to mind. The smell instantly twisted Clowes’s stomach, forcing him to swallow.
“You smell that?” Ryan asked, moving slowly around in front of the tank. He still held his M-16 upright, as if he had a flag hanging off it. Clowes wished Ryan would hold the damn thing properly. Something was wrong here, and it would be better if they both were prepared.
“Yeah, I smell that.” Clowes stood, but stayed in his position. “What the hell is it?”
“Blood,” Ryan said, pointing the barrel of his gun at the front of the tank. “And lots of it.”
Blood. Clowes felt his unease grow stronger. And that sixth sense of his was kicking up. There was something nearby. Something watching them. He glanced over his shoulder, but saw nothing except more scrub and sand.
Slowly, he walked forward, stopping beside Ryan. The stench was stronger here. It made Clowes’s eyes water. He wiped them with his dirty left thumb, keeping a solid grip on his weapon with his right.
“See?” Ryan asked.
The fading sunlight bounced off the front of the tank, and Clowes had to squint in order to see. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. Then he realized his eyes weren’t the problem. What he was seeing as a shadow on the tank’s front wasn’t shadow at all. It was blood. Black, dried blood, covering most of the tank. Hundreds of flies were swarming in a thick puddle on the tank’s top.
“Shit,” Clowes whispered.
“If he bled that much,” Ryan said, his voice trembling just a little, “where could he have gone?”
Clowes took a step forward. Think of it as if the blood were not human. Think of it like he would if he were hunting.
He peered at the area around the blood. A trail moved off toward the trees, a trail of spattered blood. This wasn’t the trail left by something wounded running away to a place of safety. This was a trail made by something else, carrying away the wounded. Nothing could bleed like that and move on its own.
“Here.” Clowes used his own gun to point at the trail.
Ryan stepped beside him, his voice naturally low. “You think maybe Nakai killed him?”
Clowes looked at his partner. Ryan’s brown eyes still had that flat look, “Is that what the sarge told you?”
“The sarge told me to decide for myself.” Apparently Ryan didn’t think the information was worth hiding anymore.
“Then do that,” Clowes said. “Me, I don’t have enough information. I want to find a body first, then wonder how he was killed.”
“You don’t think this blood’s Dietl’s?” Ryan asked.
“I don’t think anything right now,” Clowes said. “Let’s just go.”
He realized, after he spoke, that Ryan had probably been asking questions as a way to stall, not wanting to follow a trail like that to look for the body of a man who had shared more than one beer with them.
Ryan took a deep breath, and went to the right of the blood trail. Clowes went to the left. They moved slowly, constantly scanning everything ahead and behind. Clowes had that strange sense of being watched, but he saw nothing. There weren’t even scavengers in the trees. No vultures, no insects, nothing except the flies on the tank, far behind them.
The shadows of the mesa had completely swallowed them by the
time they reached the edge of the trees thirty paces away. The blood trail stopped abruptly. Clowes stopped too, beside the last tree, and sighed. How could a trail just end? Could this thing get any stranger?
Then he heard a faint buzzing. He raised his head. “Oh my God,” Clowes said. “There he is.”
Almost directly above hung Private Dietl’s body. Or at least, it was someone’s body. In the shadows it took Clowes a few seconds to understand exactly what he was looking at. The body was hanging from a rope tied around its feet. Every inch of skin had been peeled off, leaving muscles and intestines showing, now a reddish brown from the dried blood. The heart and lungs had been removed, and only the jawbone was left on the head. Something had removed the skull completely.
Clowes took a step back, almost tripping over a bush. His stomach wanted to pour out of his chest, and every muscle in his body was telling him to turn and run. Only his army training kept him from doing just that.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Ryan said softly as he too backed away from the grisly sight.
Hundreds of flies swarmed over the corpse, moving in and out of the chest cavity as if it were a hive. Clowes had skinned and hung his share of deer over the years. But he had no idea that a human could be skinned and hung too. There was one sick bastard running around out there, that much was for sure.
One sick, strong bastard. It had taken some work to kill Dietl like that, and even more to string him up from that tree.
Ryan choked, then coughed, but managed not to lose his dinner. Clowes moved over beside him, keeping his back to the body. “You all right?”
Ryan took a deep breath of the hot, evening air, then nodded.
Clowes did the same, ignoring the smell as best he could. And that damned feeling that they were not alone. It had to be a psychological reaction to the body. The trees were too far apart, and the scrub too small for anyone to hide here. A person could be seen a long distance off.
“Oh, man,” Ryan said. “What are we going to do?”
“Report back to the sarge,” Clowes said. “They got to get a team out here before there’s nothing left of this body.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, standing up straight and cradling his rifle in his arms. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Suddenly behind Ryan came a sound like a knife snapping open. The snick was accompanied by a cold, almost metallic sound that seemed to come out of thin air.
Ryan started to turn, but then the air shimmered and something huge and very sharp stabbed him in the back, lifting him off the ground like he was a child’s toy. He didn’t even have time to scream.
Hot blood splattered over Clowes, covering him. He instinctively dove backward and away, rolling in the dirt. He came up into a crouch, his rifle ready.
Ryan’s body seemed to hang by itself in the air, held up by an unseen hand. He was clearly dead.
Clowes opened up, firing on full automatic, spraying Ryan with bullets, hoping to hit whatever was behind him. Ryan’s body moved in a strange dance, limbs jerking as the bullets hit them.
The air shimmered behind Ryan, not once, but twice, as Clowes’s shots went through him. Clowes guessed that the shimmer meant the shots had hit their mark.
If there was something behind Ryan, it had to be getting pissed. And if Clowes were getting pissed, he would—
He saw the shimmer and had a half second to react. He dove to the right, rolling as a blue bolt of energy scored the ground where he had been an instant before.
Again he came up firing, spraying the air with a stream of bullets.
“Show yourself, you chickenshit!” he shouted.
Ryan’s body dropped to the ground. This time Clowes dove left, and was glad he did. Another blue streak had come out the thin air, exploding into the dirt where he had been.
This time he came up from his tumble running, heading for the nearest rocks. He needed some cover and he needed it quick.
He heard the crackling of the shot before he felt it tear through his back and explode out his chest. The force of the impact sent him flying forward. He tried to put his hands out to block his fall, but his arms didn’t work anymore.
And in the seconds before his head smashed into the desert rock, he realized that he and Ryan were part of a hunt, but not the kind of hunt they had planned for their leave.
Clowes had never been prey before.
And he finally, in the last moment of his life, understood why prey usually lost.
6
My people are hunters. We have never been the hunted, except in the tale of the monster, told to us by our ancestors. Only the monster slayer, Nayenezgani, is a greater hunter than the monster. My brother is Nayenezgani, yet those who think they know all keep him from the monster. They have never heard the story of the monster slayer. Death awaits those who do not learn.
As it was most nights in the summer, the barracks had become an oven, heated by the blazing sun for fourteen hours. The breeze wasn’t strong enough to bring in the cooler air of twilight. The open windows were taunting, promising more than they could give. By morning, though, the barracks would be freezing, the chilly desert night air making the place so cold that many of the guys waited until it was cool enough for blankets before falling asleep.
But no one was thinking of sleep yet. The mess had just finished serving dinner, and the evening hours stretched ahead, the only free time many of the soldiers would have all day. Most of them used it to write letters, read, or play cards. Others lined up at the phones inside the mess, hoping to talk to wives or girlfriends or family. And a few looked for trouble, but didn’t find it. The base camp was too far out for that.
Corporal Nakai sat on his bunk, ignoring the heat, ignoring those who came and went around him. His thoughts were buried in the events of the morning. He went over every detail of Dietl’s death, looking for anything that he could have done different. Maybe when he caught the odd smell, he should have insisted that they both crawl inside the tank. Maybe, if he could have kept Dietl from acting aggressively, it would have saved him.
But saved him from what? Whatever had killed Dietl could seem invisible in plain sight. It seemed to fire from out of nowhere. And its weapons were highly advanced.
The sound of gunfire echoed across the evening desert, bringing Nakai out of his thoughts. His grandfather’s words rang through his mind.
Evil does not just go away. It must be defeated.
Nakai stood and headed toward the closest window. Private Kroft, wearing only his pants and T-shirt, leaned out another window, smoking, and staring out at the desert. His hairy arms bulged with muscle, and his neck was thick like a football player’s. He took a long drag off the cigarette, clearly savoring the taste and the fact that it was against the rules. Nakai lived in the army, under more rules than he could remember. Breaking some of the small ones always felt good to him too. But the no-smoking rule was one that he liked. He hated the stench of tobacco. It dulled the senses, made the subtle scents disappear.
Right now Nakai didn’t want any scents to disappear.
“You hear those shots?” Kroft asked as Nakai stopped at the window and looked off in the direction of the tank. In the fading light there wasn’t much to see.
“Yeah,” Nakai said.
More shots cut through the night air, then abruptly ceased. The quiet that followed seemed profound. Nakai strained to hear something else, anything else. But all he heard was Kroft inhaling, and a faint conversation behind him. The desert was silent.
Nakai didn’t much like the silence. It meant something had ended. Remembering what had happened that morning, he doubted the silence was a good one. He just hoped the sarge had taken his advice and sent a dozen men out to investigate. If he sent only two or three, they were most certainly dead by now.
Nakai stepped back from the window. The air stank of cigarette smoke. His irritation flared. If he had been with Kroft this morning, neither of them would be alive now.
“Kroft,” Nakai
snapped, “get your head back in here and ditch that butt before the sarge comes by.”
Kroft took a long, last drag off the cigarette, ground it out on the window ledge, and flicked the butt into the dirt.
Nakai sat down on his bunk, trying, without success, to keep the thoughts of this morning out of his mind. Those shots just now bothered him more than he wanted to admit.
“Hey, Nakai,” Kroft said, turning from the window. His eyes glittered. Nakai recognized the look. Kroft was angry that Nakai had ordered him around. “Where the hell is Dietl? Is he still out there?”
Yeah. He was still out there. Nakai could still see that arc of energy appear in the empty sky and slice through Dietl’s body. Dietl’s eyes hadn’t even widened with shock or surprise. He had died instantly.
And Nakai had left him in the desert with that thing.
He’d had no choice.
From two bunks down, Corporal Danken stood. Out of the corner of his eye Nakai watched him come. Danken was built like Kroft, with more muscle than brain. The two spent their off time together in the weight room. Nakai imagined that in school, both of them had been bullies. They hadn’t changed much since.
Danken had black hair and fair skin pitted by dozens of acne scars. He was a good soldier, except for one fairly major problem: he hated all blacks and Native Americans. To him, anyone with dark skin was the enemy, tolerated only because of the rules.
“Yeah, where is Dietl?” Danken stopped next to Nakai’s bunk.
Nakai ignored him. The sarge had ordered him to say nothing about Dietl. Nakai planned to follow that order, more for Dietl’s sake than the sarge’s.
Kroft pushed off the window ledge and stood. He reached for his cigarettes, then seemed to think the better of it. Or maybe he was trying, in a not-so-subtle way, to let Nakai know why the mood had shifted.
Kroft came up beside Danken. Now there were two muscle-bound idiots towering over Nakai. He suppressed a sigh. This was just what he didn’t need. Not that it mattered. Even if he did say what happened to Dietl, no one would believe him. And even if they did believe him, that wouldn’t stop them from looming over him. He had criticized Kroft, and Danken wouldn’t stand for that. Danken used any excuse he could to turn on Nakai.
Predator - Big Game Page 3