More gunshots rang out and more demons fell. Something moved through the camp, a bulky shadow jerking violently. It looked… It looked like a man swinging a hammer—a viking berserker brought up from Valhalla. The man took down demons left and right, like he was fighting infants. Kamiyo could barely believe his eyes. A soldier appeared out of the tree line, popping off shots as he moved towards the campfire. Where had these people come from? A soldier and a viking.
Within minutes, the demons had all been dealt with. The threat was over.
The dust settled. People crept out of their hiding places. Jackie ran to meet their saviours while everyone else stood agog. The whole crisis played out in scant minutes, but they hadn’t come through it unscathed. Carrie-Anne, a woman he’d not even got to say hello to, leaned up against a tree, clutching a gushing neck wound. Nearby, a child lay face-down, motionless.
Somebody cried out behind Kamiyo. Distant. He turned towards the lake and saw someone flailing in the water. They waved their arms madly and yelled for help.
The lake was glowing.
In the chaos, nobody else noticed the drowning man, or the amber glow pulsing beneath the water. Kamiyo needed to figure out what was happening, but he would have to do so later—after he helped the drowning man. He raced towards the lake, praying the pulsing glow beneath the water wasn’t a leviathan waiting to devour him or an alien craft about to take off. Both were crazy notions, but once so had been demons invading the earth.
Dashing into the water, Kamiyo pinwheeled his arms to keep his balance. The drowning man was ten-metres out, too far to wade to, and he tried to remember the last time he’d swum, deciding it was childhood. He threw himself forwards into a breast stroke and hoped it all came back to him. The water was oddly warm, and the glow beneath the surface hurt his eyes when he tried to look at it. So he focused on the flailing stranger in front of him. How had they got out here? Had they taken to the lake to escape the demons? It made sense on an instinctual level—like how people threw themselves from burning buildings four floors up.
The stranger continued panicking, unaware Kamiyo was trying to save him. If the man didn’t calm down, he’d grab ahold of Kamiyo and drag him under.
Kamiyo concentrated on his breathing, frightened he’d be too tired to make it back to shore, or fight off the stranger if they struggled. He turned into a side paddle and called out. “Hey! Hey, I’m coming to get you. Try to stay calm, okay?”
The stranger spotted Kamiyo, and his eyes flashed like torch beams. Then his mouth opened wide—too wide—and from within came the most awful of sounds. An inhuman screech.
Kamiyo realised he’d swum into a trap—a demon trick. The stranger reached out and grabbed him by the shoulders, pushing him beneath the lake, trying to drown him. The world went dark. Sounds swirled together in an aural blur. Kamiyo fought back, kicking and thrashing until he got his head back above water. Disorientated, he tried to keep an eye on his attacker, but when he looked now all he saw was a man—a drowning, desperate man.
“Help me!” the stranger cried. “Please, help me!”
Kamiyo was seeing things, stress and fear messing with his mind. Reality was a strange beast, and one to be wary of these days, but there was, without a doubt, an ordinary man drowning in front of him. Kamiyo kicked his legs and reached out with both hands, grabbing the exhausted stranger and pulling him towards the shore. He hoped he had enough stamina left to get them there.
14
DR KAMIYO
By the time Kamiyo got to shore, the drowning stranger had lost consciousness. Kamiyo’s training kicked in and he began chest compressions at once. Within ten beats, the young man coughed up a lungful of lake water and breathed on his own. Thank God! Or whoever the Hell is in charge up there.
The next threat was hypothermia. Kamiyo touched the back of his patient’s neck and found it chilly, so he peeled off the young man’s t-shirt and rubbed at his body brusquely with both hands. After a while, he spotted Jackie and called for her help. “I need to go check on anybody else who might be injured,” he told her. “I dragged this young man out of the lake. He’s stable, but he’s cold.”
Jackie studied the half-naked young man uneasily. When Kamiyo asked what was the matter, she told him. “I’ve never seen this man before. What is he doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
“I have a bad feeling, doctor. We’ve been hidden in this forest for months without seeing a soul. Now we’ve got strangers coming out of our ears. First you, now him—in addition to our two action heroes over there.”
Kamiyo looked towards the campfire, locating the soldier and the unknown man who’d intervened during the attack. The man with the hammer was large in a burly, beer-gut kind of way—all strength and no stamina. The soldier—who was not a man but a woman—carried herself like a cobra, coiled and ready to strike. Whoever they were, the people here owed them a debt—including Kamiyo. That demon had been about to eat his face when the soldier had taken its head off.
Kamiyo put a hand on Jackie’s shoulder. “It’s been a crazy evening, but it isn’t over yet. Can you get this young man indoors for me, please?”
She nodded. “I’ll go get some help carrying him. You go check on everybody else.”
Kamiyo scrambled off the ground and hurried over to the campfire. Most of the survivors gathered there, no doubt feeling safer in the light of its flames. Beyond the fire lay several inert shadows, featureless mounds representing bodies. How many of them were human and how many were demon? He dared not
