CHAPTER 16
Richard Kaufman glanced around the confines of the small hospital room. The walls were covered in a muted green. A pair of ancient beds, complete with rusting iron frames and tall IV stands, sat opposite and parallel each other, while a wilting, forgotten plant spread its thin arms in a corner near the window.
He waited there as a nurse helped the room’s sole patient return from a trip to the communal rest room. The man entered, struggling with a crutch under each arm.
Stooped but still over six feet tall, the man was broad-shouldered, thin and bony, appearing almost emaciated. A ragged nest of tangled dark hair sat on his head, while dark circles hung from his eyes and his skin looked a sickly color. He reminded Kaufman of a house that had caught fire but remained standing: hollowed out, discolored and lifeless.
A look of surprise appeared on his face as he studied Kaufman. “You’re not a doctor,” he guessed.
“I would have thought you’d seen enough of doctors.” Kaufman replied.
The man nodded slowly, then hobbled to a new position with a smile covering his ragged face. “Yeah, I have,” he said. “Which means you must be Helios.”
“That’s right,” Kaufman replied, sarcastically. “I’m the Greek god of the sun, and I spend my time visiting patients in small hospital rooms.” He stood. “The real question is who you are and how you came to know about Helios, considering that you can’t remember your own name.”
The man tried to smile, but it seemed to cause him pain and he quickly gave up. “Give me a second. I’ll explain.”
He crossed the room, struggling with the crutches in the narrow space. He reached one of the beds and leaned the crutches against the wall. When they started to slide, he grabbed them and slammed them back into place. Anger and bitterness, Kaufman thought. Here was a man who hated his current predicament. Then again, who wouldn’t?
The patient looked up at Kaufman, his legs sticking out beyond the hem of the gown; one leg was white, the other a dark tan color.
Noticing Kaufman’s gaze, the man explained. “They took it off,” he said. “Didn’t even ask me. Just took it off and gave me this one to replace it.” He glanced down at the dark prosthetic. “I guess there aren’t too many light- skinned Caucasians in these parts, so the legs all look like this, and in the end, they just give you what fits.”
“You were going to explain some things,” Kaufman said. “Let’s start with Helios.”
“Right,” the man replied. “But first I have something you might want to see.” With great effort he retrieved a small backpack from beside the bed, rummaged through it and then tossed something to Kaufman.
Kaufman studied it: a hexagonal crystal resembling those the NRI had been examining; the erstwhile Martin’s crystals. The meeting’s importance grew.
“Interested in talking?” the patient asked.
Kaufman closed the door. “Who are you?”
“I’m Jack Dixon,” the man replied.
Kaufman had seen photos of the NRI’s team, including Dixon, and he now recognized the man, a shell of his former self, perhaps fifty pounds lighter, not including the leg.
“The NRI is looking for you,” Kaufman noted. “Not interested in getting in touch with them, for some reason?”
“Not particularly,” Dixon said. “Not if I can do better.”
“What makes you think I can help you with that?” Kaufman asked.
“Because a two-faced son of a bitch stole something from me,” Dixon said. “Stole what we were fucking dying for out there.” The burst of anger seemed to come from nowhere. “My guess is he did it for you.”
As Dixon paused to calm himself, Kaufman considered what he’d said. Futrex had two moles within the NRI. Out of prudence, he’d tried to split them up, and as luck had taken its course, one had ended up on the current field team while the other had joined Dixon on the first effort.
When the NRI had stopped receiving reports from Dixon’s field team, Kaufman had taken it as a good sign, thinking his man had made some type of move. From Dixon’s comment, it was apparent that he’d done so, only something had gone wrong. There had been no radio call requesting extraction, no communication of any kind, and for several weeks no sign of either Kaufman’s mole or the NRI team.
“You caught him,” Kaufman guessed.
“No,” Dixon said bluntly. “But something else did. The natives skewered that son of a bitch and then let some animal feed on him. When I found him he was missing half his body, but he still had his pack. He had that crystal and some other items. He also had a piece of paper tucked into his ID packet with a list of frequencies on it, and the word ‘Helios’ circled a few times.”
Dixon paused to scratch carefully at one of the sores on his face. “The thing is, no one in my unit touched the radio except me. And Helios … not our code word. Sounded more like a buyer or a corporation. Some big shot waiting for delivery. Maybe a Greek god among men.” He nodded toward Kaufman. “So what do you think, big shot? You still want to buy?”
Kaufman listened to the man’s words, their abrasive quality seemed false, a forced effort as the man’s voice wavered ever so slightly. Kaufman wondered what he was hiding.
“Maybe,” Kaufman said. “First I need to know a few things, beginning with what happened out there.”
Dixon went quiet for a moment. He gazed at the floor before looking back at Kaufman. “I took eight men out into the jungle,” he said finally. “And I left all eight of them behind, dead,” he said. “Most of them ripped to shreds by some animal we never saw.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We were the rover party, our job was to cover a lot of ground, talk to the locals and categorize what we found. Sinkholes, caves, anything that might have once been a stone structure. For the first three months we didn’t find anything that wasn’t just shit. But then we hired on these two native guides, and after jerking us around for a week, they got all liquored up and told us about this place no one was supposed to go. To go there was death, they said, but for enough whiskey and the promise of a couple of rifles, they told us how to find it. And so we did. A big- ass temple, just sitting there out in the middle of nowhere. We cracked it open and I found that crystal in there, along with some metallic-looking stones, the kind that set off a Geiger counter, if you get my drift. And just then everything started going straight to hell.”
“In what way?” Kaufman asked.
“The first night we heard sounds in the forest. Weird little scuffling noises and bird calls. The next day we found some poor bastard covered in dried-up mud and all slashed and cut. Looked like they tried to burn him but it only caught on his arm and his neck and part of his head. You should have seen his face, frozen in agony. He might have been alive when they burned him, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean some poor bastard?” Kaufman asked, concerned.
“Not one of us,” Dixon replied. “Don’t know who he was. But the next night we heard these screeching calls, like a carrion bird, only a hundred times louder. And then one of my men disappeared. Went out to take a piss and never came back. We looked for him, but we never found him.” Dixon shrugged, as if he was still baffled by the disappearance. “No sign of struggle or anything. Then we started hearing the natives, a different tribe from the guys who led us there. I think they called them Chollokwan or something. They started hounding us at night.
“We planned to break out the next day, but by dawn two more of my men were gone. I found a trail this time. Me and a guy named McCrea followed it, while the others held tight.” He looked up at Kaufman. “You don’t want to know what we found.”
“Dead?”
“Torn apart,” he said unevenly, “and stuck up in the trees.”
Kaufman listened, concerned with the man’s state of mind. Dixon’s voice had begun wavering, changing pitch and cadence.
“That was it,” Dixon said. “Time to fucking go. Only your little friend had already made that decision and by the time we got back to that clearing he’d bugged out with the last of my people. So we got on his trail and hauled ass until we caught up to him. Seems we interrupted something making a meal out of him, and then … well, then it came after us.”
