by John Jakes
His waterlogged clothing and boots weighed him down, made him clumsy as he thrashed along, but at least it gave him a little protection from the stinging nettles, ripping thorns, and whip-like branches that made his mad dash a painful trail of fear and frustration. It was like one of those nightmares where you run and run, but you just go slower and slower, and whatever it is rushing up behind you gets closer and closer…
There could be no doubt now that he’d blundered into something, though exactly what was a mystery. Growing closer with every battered stride he took, he could hear the sounds of frantic flight, soft muttered gasps of exhaustion, the hammering beat of panicked flesh against unyielding earth.
The ever-rising tumult was right on his heels when, without any warning, he clawed his way through a heaving screen of sticker vines, stumbled over a noose of thick brown roots, and lurched wildly into a broad, barren expanse studded with rocks big and sharp enough to snap his legs like toothpicks.
The ruckus at his rear abruptly soared to a crescendo as he scrabbled to turn, to get himself set for whatever was coming after him. The nearly impenetrable screen of sticker vines began to shake, as if something big was trying to fight its way through.
With visions of hideous, man-eating alien beasts dancing in his skull, Davidson frantically looked for something—anything—with which to defend himself, but there was nothing, not even a branch he could use as a club. Only stones. He stooped, grabbed one hefty chunk, and raised it, just as the vines finally parted and a…
Man!
…smashed through the barrier and skidded to a halt in shock, staring openmouthed at Davidson.
The stranger had long, stringy gray hair and a face tanned nearly brown by the sun, seamed with lines of age so deep and harsh they looked like freshly healed knife scars. Overlaying this was an intricate layer of tattoos, twisting, convoluted patterns that made no sense to Davidson. But this creature who carried a leather sack of odd-looking fruits as he gaped at Davidson, eyes bulging, was human. Definitely a human male, fifty, maybe sixty years old.
And that’s impossible, Davidson thought. So who you gonna believe? The impossible, or your lying eyes?
Davidson set himself and raised the stone in one hand, ready to club or throw. If this guy was a hallucination, no harm done. But if he wasn’t, if he was, maybe, a cannibal looking for something different for lunch, well then, a nice hunk of rock might come in real handy.
For a long, breathless moment the two men stared at each other. Then Davidson caught the barest flicker of movement in his peripheral vision and tried to turn, but too late.
Something struck his wrist a stunning blow. The rock flew from his numbed fingers. He stared at the savage, barbarian woman who faced him, her long blond ringlets as matted and disheveled as any Terran aborigine, her sharp teeth bared in a warning snarl. And if he hadn’t been quite so scared witless, he might have also appreciated her fine, muscular legs extending from beneath an enticingly scanty dress that also exposed mounds of nicely tanned breasts.
“Father, they’re coming,” the woman said.
The native man grunted, pushed forward, shoved Davidson out of his path, and loped quickly out into the stony wasteland. The woman gave Davidson one last warning glare, then wheeled and followed rapidly after the man.
Davidson gaped at the rapidly departing pair, but before he could figure out what—if anything—to do next, more of these strange, primitive humans came pouring out of the forest. Many also carried sacks overflowing with bright-colored fruit, and most of the males bore tattoos similar to those of the first older man. They rushed past Davidson as if he didn’t exist, loping after their leader and his daughter with barely a glance in Davidson’s direction, as if they had something far more pressing on their minds than a weird-looking human with no facial tattoos and a stunned expression on his face.
Before Davidson could fully catch his breath, let alone his composure, the entire ragged mob had vanished in the distance. He found himself alone again, but his solitude was no relief. It possessed definitely ominous overtones, the main one being…
What the hell are they running from?
There had been quite a few of those folks, and some of them had looked pretty tough. Not all the toughies were guys, either. It hadn’t looked as if there was a single shrinking violet in the whole crew. Yet they were moving out like the hounds of hell were baying at their heels.
He slowly turned and gazed at the jungle. No hounds baying, hellish or otherwise. But as he leaned slightly forward, squinting at the shadows as if to force them to give up their secrets, he heard a definitely undoglike sound: he’d heard it before, and thought it had sounded vaguely familiar.
Now it came again, louder and clearer: the soft clash of bells, but again, oddly muffled, as if the full tone of the ringing was muted by contact with something else.
As the sounds grew closer and louder, Davidson began to see something moving in the dim green shadows deeper in the jungle. Something big. Lots of big somethings. Whipping through the trees as fast as squirrels—and now all the birds had gone stone silent.
A man with an out-of-control imagination might think these dark shadow things coming so fast were ghosts. Davidson doubted that the humans he’d seen were running from ghosts. They looked as if it would take more than a few phantoms to spook them.
But he still had no idea where he was, not even what planet he was on. Did ghosts announce their presence in this place by ringing muffled chimes?
He looked down at himself, at the cuts and scrapes and bruises, at the stinking, ragged, sleeve-ripped, mud-streaked regulation white pants and shut he’d been wearing under his flight suit, and decided he was in no condition for a street fight with a bunch of alien specters playing some extraterrestrial version of “Jingle Bells.”
At least the mob that had just gone past was demonstrably human. He had no idea what was coining toward him from the jungle now. It made his decision fairly easy.
He turned and ran as fast as he could across the rocky barrens until he reached the other side and vanished into the jungle. That woman might have slugged the rock out of his hand, but nobody had actually tried to hurt him. He wasn’t sure he could say the same thing about what they were running from. Then it hit him: what they’d been running from was now what he was running from, too.
For Davidson, the next several moments were a whirling, chaotic jumble. He was at the absolute dregs-end of his strength, yet somehow he found a way to push himself further. Gasping, his chest heaving, he staggered on through the underbrush, too exhausted even to shield his face any longer, simply absorbing the flailing punishment from every passing branch and thorn, as if his skin had been anesthetized.
The forest here was not quite as dense as the one he’d passed through back on the other side of the stony field. In places he would break out into relatively clear patches where he could see a fair expanse toward his front. Once or twice he caught glimpses of the humans he was trailing, a flash of color, even heard high, thin cries of terror echoing in the distance. And now, behind him, the bells were growing louder again, although when he risked an occasional quick look back over his shoulder, he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, not even the frightening black shadows ghosting through the thick canopy overhead that had scared him so much before.
He turned, redoubled his efforts, and though a red haze was growing at the edge of his vision and his heart was a continuous racing triphammer in his chest, he saw he was gaining on the humans up ahead. He could see several of the laggards clearly. He would have yelled at them to wait for him, but there was no room in his scorched lungs for air to make a cry. There was nothing he could do but keep staggering along and hope he could catch up before whatever was lurking behind caught up with him…
He’d reached another one of those relatively open patches where his forward view was almost unimpeded. He could see several of the strange humans, could even see the expressions on their distant faces when huge black sha
pes suddenly slipped down from the trees above them and fell on them like small dark clouds: clouds lavishly equipped with fangs and claws.
He was still too far distant—and the light under the trees too gloomy—for him to make out exactly what sort of beasts were dropping from above onto the shoulders and backs of the humans, clubbing them and dragging them down.
He could hear the panicked cries, the roars of anger and fear, the pleading and wailing. And he could hear other cries, almost familiar—but reminiscent of what? As he stared at the melee up ahead, he almost had it—but then the notion vanished as a body—a human body—came flying out of the woods on his right side, tumbled across his field of vision like a broken rag doll, and vanished into the thick brush at his left.
What the hell’s strong enough to throw a full-grown human around like a kid’s toy?
He decided not to wait to find out. In this case discretion, or at least flight, would be the better part of valor. The big question, though, was where to run? Forward seemed like as good an idea as any. A sudden rattling of the nearby shrubbery gave him a good start.
As he pounded along, the tumult grew all around him, shouts and cries of anger, panic, pain, and mixed in with these, a chorus of strange, grunting whines and the nearly continuous jingle of muffled bells. Out of the corners of his eyes he saw weird things: barbarically dressed humans fleeing lumbering, indistinct shapes, bloody wounds gaping; flashes of fur, some dark, some gold, some even red; a hurried glimpse of— armor? Something big wearing a metal breastplate like a Roman centurion?
Could that be? And if so, what the hell could it be?
Up ahead the foliage was clearing out, the underbrush thinning, and he was able to pick up speed. With a final burst he approached the forest eaves and saw a sun-drenched horizon beyond long, rolling terrain that culminated in a rise of low, round-topped hills. He spotted the tattooed man he’d first seen, still carrying his bag of fruit, gesturing to his remaining people with his free arm. He seemed to be trying to herd them toward the safety of the hills.
Davidson reached deep down inside himself and found a last surge of strength. He was rapidly closing the gap that would take him out of the jungle entirely when a blood-curdling growl sounded from somewhere above him. He looked up just in time to see a huge black shape hurtle down from the leaf-shrouded upper branches of a nearby tree, to land a few feet in front of him.
A gorilla.
It was a damned gorilla. Davidson skidded to a halt before he ran full tilt into the beast. This gorilla spread his unnaturally long arms wide, opened his mouth in a yawning growl, and showed Davidson a maw full of yellowed fangs.
Which was bad enough. What was worse was that the gorilla wasn’t just some overhyped refugee from this planet’s equivalent of a zoo. Across his massive barrel chest the animal wore an armored metal breastplate, finely worked with strange shapes and carvings. His head was protected beneath a full metal helmet that looked as big as a cooking pot. The beast also carried a sword in a scabbard at his waist, and wore a suit of dark, massive armor that protected his huge flanks.
Now this snarling, lunatic apparition began to advance, sweeping its grappling-hook arms back and forth like a professional sumo wrestler.
“Jesus!” Davidson blurted.
The ape didn’t say anything, just bellowed louder and kept on coming. Davidson scrambled backward, looking for something he could use as a weapon. This monster outweighed him by at least four hundred pounds, and had teeth a lot longer and sharper than his own.
Unfortunately, there were no handy rocks anywhere in sight. Davidson bumped against some shrubbery, then grabbed a branch, held it like a spear, and turned back to face the advancing ape. It wasn’t a very impressive spear, though, and so Davidson was amazed when the gorilla immediately stopped— almost as if puzzled—and glared at the makeshift weapon, then at Davidson himself.
Davidson had just enough time to think, That’s one surprised-looking monkey, before the gorilla’s perplexed expression vanished, to be replaced by a mask of utter ferocity. Moving much faster than anything so big had any right to, the gorilla’s arms flashed out. He plucked the pathetic spear from Davidson’s grip and snapped it like a toothpick.
The next thing Davidson knew, a pair of huge hands latched on to him like grappling hooks and he found himself rising into the air so fast he thought he’d left his stomach behind on the ground. He had a momentary whirling instant when he was looking down at the top of the ape’s helmet, before he was spun away like a Frisbee.
He crashed back to earth with a bone-twisting, skin-scraping thud that knocked all the air out of him and left him momentarily stunned. When he was able to focus again he looked up, expecting to see the alien King Kong coming at him to finish the job, but the giant animal, evidently having satisfied himself that Davidson was no longer a threat, had turned his attention toward the rest of the fleeing humans.
Davidson huddled on the ground, trying to look as insignificant and harmless as possible, as he watched the rest of the amazing scene unfold. Out of the jungle poured more monkeys, all of them wearing the odd, archaic armor, but they didn’t behave like any apes Davidson had ever seen.
They wheeled and moved in sharp battle formations, as smoothly practiced as the best human soldiers Davidson had known in his own training days. The big ape raised one massive arm, obviously a signal of some sort. High-pitched, brassy horns blared as the apes advanced, following their leader’s direction.
On the head gorilla’s back rode a heavy pack. The ape reached into it and took out a tangle of what looked like ropes and rocks. At first Davidson couldn’t figure out what it was. But when the gorilla unsnarled it and began to whirl it around his head as he advanced toward the fleeing humans, Davidson recognized it: a primitive but terribly effective weapon that humans called a bolo, made of three connected ropes with weights on the end to give it the necessary heft.
The ape bounded through the brush, still whirling the ropes over his head, hard on the trail of the nearest stragglers. With a grunt of triumph he loosed the bolo. It whirred through the air toward its prey with a flat, vicious, whizzing sound. The hapless man had no warning. He heard the whine of the ropes at the very last instant and turned his head, enough for Davidson to see the panic in his eyes. Then the bolo snapped around his legs and brought him crashing down.
Almost before the man hit the ground, two more gorillas raced forward with long wooden poles. They fell on the man, clubbed him viciously into submission, then trussed him to the poles with no more dignity or concern than if he were a goat bound for the cook fire.
Davidson gaped, stunned. Animals don’t hunt humans…
But these animals did. As if gorillas with bolos and poles for prey transport weren’t bad enough, now a new threat appeared: wheeling out of the jungle in perfect order came the source of all those muffled jingle bells he’d heard. This fresh horror didn’t even remotely look like Santa, though. It was a tightly disciplined squadron of gorillas, each one holding the edge of a huge rope net. The jingling sounds came from hundreds of tiny metal bells affixed to the net’s strands.
The apes leaped forward, manipulating their net with a precision and grace that couldn’t have been more perfect if their separate bodies had been controlled by a single brain. As they moved, they shook the net rhythmically, like human hunters driving scattered game toward a hidden stand of shooters. And that was how the humans reacted: no more than terrified animals, lurching and staggering away from the nets and the bells, succumbing to mindless panic, totally heedless of where they were being herded—or even that they were being herded.
Davidson staggered to his feet, sickened and horrified by what he was seeing. He still couldn’t quite get his mind around it. These were monkeys, damn it! Animals, things you went to the zoo to see, beasts you tossed bananas at. Monkeys you laughed at.
Nothing to laugh at here.
His vision was getting hazy around the edges again, too much energy wasted, too many sh
ocks to his system. The human mind can take only so much before it starts to shut itself down. He fought it, bit down hard on his lip, and the bolt of pain pushed the mists back for a moment. The instant of clearheadedness was enough to charge up his instinct for self-preservation and get him running again, but his normal military reflexes were battered into near-uselessness; without realizing it, he ran in exactly the wrong direction. But by the time he noticed his mistake there were gorillas advancing from the rear on either side of him, and in between them, shaking and jingling madly, was a tightly woven net.
But providence—or sheer, dumb luck—saved him once again. Just as the net was about to close over him, he stumbled forward into a shallow ditch. He hugged the ground as the bottom edge of the snare swept harmlessly above him, then continued on. Evidently the apes wouldn’t stop to snatch a single human prey, when there were so many left to catch. It gave him a chilling moment of insight into how insignificant these animals thought humans were. Not even worth stopping to catch a few strays.
He scrambled out of the center of the melee by following the ditch until he was beyond the worst of it. As soon as he was up and out, he looked for a safer route through the jungle, but just as he started to move out, he found his path blocked by a stocky human running as fast as he could—which wasn’t all that fast, because the man was carrying a terrified young girl, maybe five or six years old, in his brawny arms.
The man wasn’t paying attention either to Davidson or to the pair of slavering gorillas rapidly coming up on him from the rear. Before Davidson could shout a warning, the gorillas caught up with the man and the girl. One of the apes reached out and plucked the shrieking girl from his grasp as easily as a man picking a daisy. The other smashed him in the back and sent him tumbling. Before the man could right himself, more apes swarmed him, and he disappeared under a scrum of heaving, snarling fur.
Davidson kept moving, but now the whole area was a confused tumult of apes and humans running in every which direction, screaming, roaring, lunging, and darting. To his numb and exhausted mind, there didn’t seem to be any way out, at least nothing he could see. The whole area had become a maelstrom of ferocious apes and panicked humans. But it wasn’t in him just to give up, not while he was still conscious and breathing.