“Bats?” Chaz narrowed his eyes and peered up.
“Squirrels,” Dwayne said.
They were red squirrels with long thin tails and white bellies. They glided from tree to tree on wing membranes stretched between their fore and hind legs. Without a sound, they soared across the open areas of sky between trees. They vanished into the thick boughs of pine.
“Has to be hundreds of ’em,” Renzi said. “Big fuckers,” Chaz said.
As quickly as they appeared, all the squirrels were gone. A snapping of foliage and a low grunting noise came through the trees from below. Something big was moving around in the deep, deep woods.
Fingers slid from trigger guards. Safeties snapped off. Guns up and trained toward the sounds from below. The unseen source of the noise snuffled somewhere close. It made a final bleating noise and then could be heard moving away. The sounds of its passage fading as it moved away down the slope to their left.
The men stayed still until the cawing of the unseen birds returned.
“Any idea what that was?” Chaz said. He lowered his weapon.
“The doc said that most of the animals here will be bigger versions of ones we know,” Dwayne said.
“My boy has picture books of prehistoric mammals,” Renzi said. “Wolves the size of bears. Bears the size of elephants.”
“Yeah, and real elephants,” Dwayne said. “Doc said there could be elephants.”
“What size are they in your boy’s book, Ricky?” Chaz said.
“I dunno. Fucking huge.” Renzi shrugged. Jimbo dropped to hands and knees again.
He ran fingers over the bed of brown needles that carpeted the ground. The ferns were thinning out.
“They came this way,” Jimbo said. “How long ago?” Dwayne said.
“Six hours or more,” Jimbo said. “But the trail’s gonna be hard to follow over these needles.”
Renzi spat again.
“Six hours or more?” Renzi said. “Even amateurs could be ten miles or more away from here by now. They could be anywhere.”
“I’d say, given the odds, the doc got us pretty damned close,” Chaz said.
“Look, the text said they had to hide,” Dwayne said. “We make our way downhill and look for likely hiding spots. They didn’t have time enough between their arrival and the text transmission to get very far from here.”
They found a likely hiding spot twenty minutes down the slope, a collection of rocks and deadfall forming a natural half-circle which would offer some concealment. They found the broken wreckage of a wave transmitter much like the one Dwayne carried. It lay next to a headless human torso wearing a Batman t-shirt.
“No animal did this,” Jimbo said. He squatted by the corpse. “Predators eat from the ass-end in. They don’t bite parts off and take ’em away. Not a lot of blood around. They took the head first and did the rest when he was dead.”
Dwayne crouched by him. Chaz and Renzi took positions just up the hill and scanned the trees all around for movement and sound.
Bugs had been at the torso. Giant, horned beetles. Ants the length of a thumb. Flies were gathered in a cloud over a sticky pool of black blood that collected where the head should be. There was blood spray on the rocks. The neck ended in a raw wound with the white ends of vertebrae showing in a mess. The arms were gone at the shoulder. The legs at the hips. “Something chopped off his extremities,”
Jimbo said. “A blade of some kind. Not very sharp. But sharp enough.”
“Not just one really huge critter taking big bites?” Dwayne said.
“No animal is this systematic,” Jimbo said, shaking his head. “Anything that big would have dragged him away whole. Anything smaller would have torn his guts free. The torso’s still intact. And you can see where a blade hit the thigh bone that’s left here. There are angular chips out of it that a blade would make. Teeth make scrapes and splinters. It took about six chops to get through there.”
“So the doc’s research is off.” Dwayne stood up.
“Yeah,” Jimbo said. “There’s people in these woods.”
“Why’d they leave part of him?”
“Damned if I know.” Jimbo shrugged.
“What was his name?” Chaz said.
“Phillip something,” Dwayne said.
From the remains of Phillip Something, Jimbo could easily follow the trail. It looked to him like a dozen or more people with bare feet. There were long gouges in the ground that meant they were dragging two more figures. The captives were ambulatory but unwilling traveling companions. Caroline and Kemp.
“They alive, or did whoever took him drag away dead weight?” Chaz said. They were humping downhill in a tight diamond shape formation, six paces apart from each other. Defensive positions.
“Could be alive,” Jimbo said. “Looks like whoever’s dragging them is having a hard time of it here and there. You can see gouges in the dirt where needles have been kicked away. They’re not going easy.”
Jimbo crouched and studied the ground. “What else?” Dwayne said.
“Circular holes an inch or more across poked in the dirt either side of the trail. The captors were carrying spears or some other kind of poles. They used them to support their weight.”
“Sun’s goin’ down, Dwayne,” Renzi said. He was walking drag—watching their six o’clock. “We just gonna run right up on ’em?”
Dwayne held a hand up and hissed. All stopped. Guns up and eyes moving.
“Smell that?” he said.
“A wood fire,” Chad said. “Real faint. Far off.”
“A cook fire,” Renzi said.
They broke into a trot through the trees.
A half-mile along, the terrain leveled out a bit as the slope of the hill decreased to twenty degrees. The smell of wood smoke was stronger now, and they abandoned any kind of tracking and moved directly toward the source. It was getting dark in a hurry. The sun was sinking. Pools of deep shadow formed between the trees. They crossed a broad, well-used trail that ran across the slope laterally and wound down toward the water. The surface was trodden flat by many feet over a long time.
The new trail brought
