“Yeah, uh, the fight broke out here,” Vincent whispered, indicating with a nod. “A firefight ensued. Several grenades got lobbed…we were running, got hit with arrows that had the hallucinogen, couple of us were caught in the vines…uh, then, we staggered in that direction and found an encampment after freeing our own men. More fire power got unleashed, and the abductors fled. We dropped from the effects of the drug—but the other side had already pulled back—we hit one or two, but they dragged their own to safety. But we got all the hostages that were stashed.”
“I don’t know, brother,” Jermaine said nervously. “Some of us left a lot of DNA evidence back there.”
“Ballistics won’t match up unless we go back through and act it out,” Lou said, glancing around and wiping his palms down his face. “For bigwigs that important, they’ll raze the forest looking for a trail.”
“I know, but what else can we say?” Dutch said, raking his finger through his hair.
“They didn’t kill nobody, didn’t ransom them like they could have,” Jesse said, glancing around the group, “and seriously made up for the inconvenience, if you ask me.”
“That’s the thing, dude,” Lou fussed under his breath, “nobody’s gonna ask you what you think. You’d better get this story tight and right, or all our asses are gonna spend a very long time in the brink.”
“Damned straight,” Vincent said. He looked around. “We go back to the original glen, anything we say we’re gonna do, we do. If we say we blew it up—we gotta blow it up. If we say we sprayed an area—we gotta spray the area. If…” his voice trailed off as he watched a goddess walk toward him.
Artemis sauntered over to the group and the small circle of men opened to allow her in. She touched Vincent’s face with trembling fingers and then lifted up to take his mouth. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’m a goddess…it will all work out. Men will see what they need to, the hostages will remember what they should, and you will each be honored for your courage.”
He couldn’t take his eyes off hers, wondering if this very insane woman really did have something supernatural about her. He wanted to tell her he was going to miss her, one very long afternoon with her wasn’t enough. But with his men standing there, each with the same expression on their faces as they stared at their temporary captors, he couldn’t. Contact with her after this would have vast repercussions.
Her sad gaze told him that she understood as she touched his face one last time. “Goodbye, gentle Titan…if you ever want to see me, visit my temple in Crete and call me by name…or simply go to your Olympus and find a meadow beneath the crescent moon…and whisper my name. I will come to you there.”
His ranks splintered, the men in his squad walked over to the respective nymphs trying to get their names, the method to contact them, and all pandemonium broke loose. Artemis shook her head and smiled with a quiet chuckle. Vincent raked his fingers through his locks, hoping all would be well. Then he watched sadly as Artemis began running, her long tresses sweeping her back, and her nymphs waving goodbye.
Somehow going into a tent to collect bound and gagged old men with tears running down their faces seemed completely anticlimactic. But as the squad opened the tents, they backed away in pure horror leaving the flaps flung up. Each tent was tiny, the size it appeared on the outside. What happened to the sumptuous love dens? Where were the bound and gagged hostages they’d been shown?
A buck was bound and gagged in each tent now. The animals had congealed blood on their coats exactly where the original mortal injuries had been. Glassy, dead, animal eyes stared at Vincent and his men. The poor creatures had been dead so long that rigor mortis had set in and each animal was washboard stiff.
“Oh, shit—we got played, partner,” Donovan whispered.
A cold sweat made Vincent’s t-shirt cling to him. The twitching of one deer freaked everybody out.
“What the fuck do we do now?” Jermaine yelled, beginning to walk in a circle.
Then another deer twitched, and still another, until the fragile nervous systems around Vince snapped, frayed, and popped, and guns got drawn toward the carcasses.
“No!” Vince shouted, not sure why. “Don’t screw with any more evidence. Leave it. Let’s put our heads together, we have to think through this, pick up the trail, we gotta…”
His voice trailed off as a human cough riveted everyone’s attention to one of the tents. A pudgy CEO lay naked, shivering, and bound by vines, leaves stuffed in his mouth. Terror-stricken, they watched each dead animal reanimate and then transform into a hostage. Jesse and Dutch stared at each other, voices choked.
“We weren’t drugged,” Jesse whispered.
“It happened.” Dutch wheezed, grappling at his chest as though having a heart attack, and then stumbled away and puked.
Nervous glances passed around the squad.
“Gotta still be the crap that’s in our systems,” Lou said, his voice quavering.
Vincent looked at the tents and then out into the vast wilderness, knowing. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s all it is.”
EPILOGUE
ARTEMIS KEPT HER WORD. THINGS WORKED OUT, more than he could have imagined. Since the glen, every man on the squad retired. Donovan got a boat as an unspoken and untold gesture of appreciation from the CEO he helped half carry to the rendezvous point. He headed down to the Caribbean and disappeared. Last anyone heard, Donovan regularly had three gorgeous, out-of-this world babes on his yacht.
Jermaine went back to Brooklyn, and then moved to Harlem to buy a brownstone in the up-and-coming section…the squad quietly heard tell that some appreciation dollars fell off the table. Now Jermaine is tracing his family genealogy after a nymph mentioned something about him being a dead-ringer for an ancient king. Jesse went to Wyoming, and somehow some cattle land got ceded to him, mysteriously enough, along with a hundred head of healthy beef. He’s a happy man who only takes a harmonica into the woods these days. His hunting days are over.
Dutch was traveling abroad, last anyone heard, and getting VIP treatment wherever he goes—no expense spared—all financed from a nice, quiet Swiss account. Lou moved to southern California, joined Greenpeace, and became a New Age guru. Some say that a nice investment portfolio that changed hands as a private thank you allows him to pursue his environmental platform with gusto.
Major Harcourt still knows something about the whole story wasn’t right. There were no hallucinogens found in anyone’s systems, but all insisted on such bizarre occurrences that mind control or a new, experimental substance that leaves no trace could be the culprit. He is still searching for that drug or method of group hypnosis.
That day in the glen changed each and every man—both those who were captives and those who were hostages. Vince…well…he went back on home to Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula and is using his quiet, unspoken gift from the appreciative wealthy to help build up the town and rebuild the traditions of his people…preserving, especially, the culture and the oral stories called by some legends and myths.
He spends a lot of his days contemplating the universe and the wisdom of the ancestors as he burns incense and waits for the crescent moon in a quiet glen…from where he sits he can see across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island. The equinox is their anniversary. She comes so swiftly that he doesn’t mind waiting to be hunted, knowing soon he’ll be felled by a true goddess.
He loves her, plain and simple. She finally learned his name and has visited his people, unbeknownst to them what she really is. She still thinks he’s a Titan, and cannot believe him to be a mere mortal…because she hasn’t been so adored since the times of old, and never, ever, quite so personally.