All the hairs on Ghost’s back stood up in a stiff row. The hairs on the back of my neck did the same thing. Ghost growled at the handprint and took a slow, fearful step backward.
I looked from the print to Bunny and then to Top, and then we all slowly turned and looked at the thick wall of shadow-filled forest.
“Fuck me,” whispered Bunny.
“Don’t touch that shit,” warned Top.
I almost laughed. “There is not one chance in ten trillion that I was going to do that.”
We backed away and then climbed out of the boat. We all wanted to talk about that print, maybe we needed to. We didn’t. Instead we moved off down the beach and then edged back toward the trees. The jungle seemed a lot less inviting now than before. Instead of seeming to offer cover it had a feeling of occupation to it, a vague presence that was impossible to define. Could have been my imagination running hot after seeing that print on the boat. Just as easily could have been my rational mind wondering why in the wide blue fuck I was on this island and in this line of work. I used to be a cop in Baltimore. Not once in all those years on the force did I encounter a four-fingered monster handprint. It’s not the sort of thing you tend to encounter, even in Baltimore. Made me long for a boring life of being shot at by gangbangers and cartel pistoleros.
I was on the island right now, though, and tough as they were, my men looked to me for guidance, for leadership, for the kind of stoic toughness that makes great copy in speeches about Special Operations. So I kept my poker face in place and shifted to take point. Top yielded that position without argument.
Inside the wall of the forest the ground was a soft mixture of sand and soil, with many palm fronds knocked loose by the crash. As we moved, we began to smell the stink of burned foliage and torn earth. There is a distinctive smell to land that has been torn by cataclysm, be it a bomb, an earthquake, or a plane crash. The richer soil is ripped up and exposed to the air, releasing microparticles of nutrients and rotting plant matter, and infused with it are the smells conjured by great heat. Of silica sand fused into glass and wood burned to charcoal.
We did not find a single human footprint. Nothing to indicate what had happened to the sailors from the boat we’d found. No prints, no shell casings to indicate a fight. Nothing, and that was very spooky.
I stopped the team because Ghost suddenly crouched low and bared his teeth. Thirty feet in front of us was a thick tangle of vines draped between a stand of pines and an ancient overgrown aloe plant. I couldn’t see anything, but Ghost did. His titanium fangs gleamed with reflected sunlight, making it look as if he had bitten down on raw fire. His eyes were fixed, unblinking as he stared at a spot just behind the stiff, serrated aloe leaves.
I felt it then.
That strange, unnerving sensation of being watched. Not suspecting that you are. Knowing it. I snugged my rifle stock into my shoulder and aimed at the aloe plant. At what was behind it.
It’s such a strange feeling, and your conscious evolved mind wars with the instincts of the lizard brain as to whether to believe it or not. Good soldiers don’t ignore those kinds of feelings. I may fail at a lot of important things in my life, but I am a good soldier.
We shifted around and found cover, each of us kneeling, aiming, waiting, straining with our senses to justify what we knew was there. The jungle was unnaturally still and even the soft slosh of the waves on the sand was muted. The breeze died as if the world held its breath, silencing the whisk of palm leaves and the creak of tree trunks. It was a silence so complete that you become unnaturally aware of your own shallow breathing, certain that it is far too loud, that it can be heard all the way across the forest floor, that it draws the ear, the eye, and the aim of whatever weapon is seeking you from the shadows.
There was no good play here. If we fired, we could hit someone hiding in fear, and that could be a sailor from the navy or Coast Guard, or one of the scientists from the nature research team. Or maybe we’d be firing at a bunch of plants and trees and accomplish nothing more than revealing our location and our numbers. Or we could hit one of them. Whatever they were.
I signaled my guys and sent Top cutting left in a wide circle, indicating that Bunny should go right down to the sand and circle around behind the trees. I’d wait for them to get into position and then go up the pipe. They moved off, though I could see from their expressions that they didn’t like the plan for the same reasons I didn’t like it. But there was no better way to play this.
Cold sweat trickled down my back between my shoulder blades and zigzagged over the knobs of my spine. Ghost was still crouched low, still caught in that animal zone where fear and anger are the same thing. I could relate.
Top and Bunny reached their points and gave me nods.
I moved first, went in with my own zigzag, cutting left and right to make use of natural cover and spoil aim. Ghost was right at my side because I did not want him to rush into a blind spot like that without my eyes on him.
“Cowboy!”
I heard Top yell out my combat call sign, but it came one-half second too late. The whole front of the forest seemed to move, to pulse outward toward me as if it were a door someone was kicking open. The huge aloe plant crashed into me before I could even think about stopping. There was no time to evade, no time to brace. There was only time to feel it.
It was hard.
It hurt.
It was like a tidal wave of plant matter and it struck me with enough force to knock all the light out of the world.
-4-
I was nowhere.
It was the strangest feeling.
I had a body and I was aware of it. Breath wheezing in and out of my bruised chest. The gunfire rattle of my terrified heartbeat. The pain of shocked and abused skin. The ache of muscles.
But there was something missing.
There was no downward pull. It’s something you never take notice of day to day. The pull of gravity. You feel lead-footed when you’re tired, but otherwise it’s normal to be tied to the earth, to be pulled into standing, sitting, falling, lying down.
Not now.
There was no actual sensation of gravity, not in any specific direction.
I’ve never been in space, but I’ve been in a reduced-gravity aircraft. A vomit comet, they call them. They’re fixed-wing aircraft that provide a brief near weightless environment for astronaut training. Hollywood uses them for making movies about space travel.
It was like that.
But not like that.
In reduced-gravity aircraft you feel your skin become rubbery, your hair and clothing tend to float on you. I could feel my clothes hanging normally on me, as if gravity applied to that but not to me. Which made no sense at all.
It was absolutely pitch black. So dark I had to blink to make sure my eyes were even open.
No sound. I was neither hot nor cold. No sensation of air passing my skin, no wind. Nothing like that.
A smell, though, and a taste to go with it. Metallic, like copper. And a bit of ozone, like after a lightning strike.
“Hey!” I yelled, and my voice was strangely distant, the way it sounds when you’re in a wide-open place and there’s no wall to bounce or trap your noise.
Yelling did not help, but it gave me something to do. I could hear my own voice, so I kept yelling. It was a long, long time before I heard another sound. I think it was a long time because time itself had no meaning for me.