“Lay eggs?” said Ellen.
“Lay eggs in the soft sand! The world needs a hero, and now they have one—Platypus-Man!”
The women were laughing so hard now that they were having a tough time staying on the trail. Micah and Ebenezer bemusedly watched them.
“What about Tree-Sloth-Man?” Ebenezer ventured. “One day a radioactive sloth fell out of its tree and bit mild-mannered podiatrist Peter Porkchop and—”
“That’s stupid,” Minerva snapped acidly. “Why don’t you shut up? Nobody asked you.”
“This is what happens when you hire professional mercenaries to take you on a hiking junket,” Eb said to Ellen in a mild tone. “They are uncouth. They make things uncomfortable.”
Minerva said, “Go piss up a rope.”
“Example A,” Eb went on pleasantly. “Vulgar, yes? Barbaric, you might even say.”
From that point on, they hiked in silence. The land was dry—the crumbly, baked-earth aridness that would make firefighters pray for rain. Ebenezer aimed his rifle and obliterated a tumorlike toadstool growing on the trunk of a saw palmetto at two hundred yards. The crack of the gun pushed every other sound away, ushering in a thudding stillness.
“Simply checking the aim,” he said, reloading the rifle. “Every gun shoots a little different, as you know.”
Ebenezer and Micah were now breathing hard. The women fared better. Minerva’s strides carried her over gnarled roots and fallen logs. Ellen moved with preternatural grace. The men plodded behind them. A fungoid smell rose from the earth, which was spongy beneath a carpet of browned pine needles.
Minerva said, “What is that?”
She was looking at a hackberry tree. Something had been carved in its trunk. A symbol, a rune. It had been gouged deep into the wood.
Micah ran his fingers over the marking. The bark had not grown back; the pale heartwood was smooth as scar tissue. He had seen things like this in Korea. The enemy would score them on trees or rocks as warnings to passing soldiers. Sometimes an army translator had been able to decipher them and gain Micah’s unit a crucial advantage; other times not.
“A trail marker?” said Ellen. “Maybe someone hung their bear bag in the tree.”
“There’s one over here, too,” said Eb.
They discovered seven of these markings hacked into the surrounding trees. There might have been others farther back, only they hadn’t noticed. The markings were all roughly the same: a cross with a shorter line underneath the horizontal beam. It looked somewhat like a telephone pole. But what struck home was the intensity with which they had been laid into the wood: crude thudding chops that had torn out chunks of wood.
“It was some boys with their daddy’s axe,” ventured Eb. “Or a crazy fool who wanted to remember which tree he buried his jar of pennies under.”
There being no more logical explanation, they silently accepted Ebenezer’s reasoning. But the markings lingered in their minds. The violence with which those marks had been laid.
The path gradually rose. They wended over the foothills into the deeper passes. The land plateaued but never dipped. The trees thickened until the woods became impenetrable in some spots.
A deerfly settled on the nape of Ebenezer’s neck. It bit him and flew away before Eb could slap the bugger. Cocksucking bugs! he thought. Cocksucking trees! Cocksucking dirt! Ebenezer hated everything about the wilderness. Rather inconveniently, he had forgotten this fact. He was not built for this. His was a delicate constitution. As a boy, he’d been forever coming down with the sniffles. His humors were perpetually in arrears, as his grandmother used to say. His iron was probably low. He should shoot something that hopped or skulked through this godforsaken purgatory, put it out of its misery, and eat it raw. That would surely jack the life back into him.
But there was nothing to draw a bead on. He became aware of this quite suddenly. Where before there had been the industry of animals ferreting through the brush and birds wheeling in blue sky, now there was almost nothing. An odd serenity. Just the sound of their boots and Ebenezer’s own breath whistling in his ears.
We’re trapped with the Monster from Green Hell.
Ebenezer flinched visibly. Where had that thought come from? Then it dawned. Monster from Green Hell was a B-movie he had watched, along with The Brain From Planet Arous, at a creature-feature matinee many years ago. In… where had it been? Barstow, Illinois? Bar Harbor, Maine? He’d been on a job. He watched both films at a second-run movie house where the popcorn was stale and the floors sticky. The movie’s plot involved a rocket ship of mutant bees that crash-landed in an African jungle. The queen bee found sanctuary in a dormant volcano. Her progeny set about killing the local tribesmen. Then a delegation of blow-dried American scientists arrived. They tossed grenades into the volcano and triggered an eruption that incinerated the vile bugs. Fin.
The film was forgettable dreck—except there had been this one shot. Only a few frames of stock footage the cinematographer had jammed in to establish the setting. A panoramic view of the jungle. A riot of creeping vegetation and trees that had witnessed generations wither and die under the wide sweep of their limbs. A place where things never stopped growing, implacably and endlessly and insidiously so, pushing up through the ground and twining around whatever was closest to them, strangling it. A lunatic vista of inhospitable, brooding, vengeful green.
“Yet his soul was mad,” Ebenezer whispered. “Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”
Joseph Conrad. As a boy Ebenezer had been forced to study that malarial old moper. Those lines from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness had leapt into his head unbidden. But Eb wasn’t in a jungle, was he? He was in a forest… and yet. The green was of a different shade. But it was everywhere.
“Did you say something?” Ellen asked him.
“Nothing of importance, my dear.”
THEY CRESTED the back of a ridge. The sun hung above the treetops.
“We’ve put eight or nine miles under us,” Minerva said. “We should find a place to camp for the night.”
They made their way across the ridge, scanning for a sheltered spot. The daylight was guttering, and they still had to pitch their tents and gather firewood. Minerva saw the Englishman staggering toward her, cursing. She did not want him to collapse—he might fall down the steep slope and break his loathsome neck, robbing her of the opportunity to slit it later on and dance a happy jig in his fountaining blood like a child skipping around an opened fire hydrant. She was half considering retreating to help him, when her thoughts were derailed by something that sat high up in a tree.
She stopped short. Ellen, who had been following tight on her heels, slammed into her back.
“What’s the—?”
Minerva heard Ellen’s breath escape in a whinny. She must have seen it, too. When Micah and Eb caught up, they also saw it.
It was seventy feet up, near the top of a ponderosa pine that had shed most of its needles. Dangling at the end of a branch. It wasn’t that big. It could have been many things. Twilight prevented accurate identification.
It seemed to have been skinned, whatever it was. It glimmered wetly. If it was a body, it could only be that of a small woodland animal. A rabbit, a kit fox. It hung from the branch on a thin strip of something-or-other like a Christmas ornament suspended on a line of filament. What predator would do that? Steal the skin of its prey and hang the body way up there?