Then there was the PTSD. The nightmares of violence and death that tortured her mind every night were so vivid and horrifying that she would, more often than not, do her utmost to avoid falling asleep. She could handle combat and shooting well enough; instinct seemed to take over when action was required – and this surprised her just as much as it did the beastwalkers. It was when she was alone, when everything was quiet, that it was worst. She would break into cold sweats, and waves of debilitating panic would crash against her mind like the ocean pawing relentlessly at the dark shore. When it got really bad, she would start to hyperventilate, and would begin to lose touch with reality, slipping into a hallucinatory state. Back in California, Lightning Bird had helped to soothe her troubled mind on such occasions … but now Chloe really was on her own, and there was no magic to help ease the terror. Njinga and William did what they could to help, but often Chloe couldn’t do anything but ride out these attacks.
At this moment, however, her mind was clear and her reflexes were sharp. She was ready to do whatever needed to be done.
Drawing in a deep breath as she prepared to shoot, she focused on the target ahead, and as she did, the two-dimensional figure began to morph, the black outline both sinking into and popping out of the paper at once to create a three dimensional being: a man, dressed in the SWAT-style gear in which Huntsmen troops were commonly attired. And before him, kneeling on the ground, her wrists handcuffed behind her back, her broken spectacles lying shattered on the floor, and tears and blood, intermingled, streaming down her cheeks as she begged for her life, was the ghostly figure of Paola.
The Huntsman paid no heed to her plaintive cries. He pressed the muzzle of his M-16 rifle against her forehead and squeezed the trigger.
Gunshot after gunshot rang out in rapid succession, but there was no empty trigger click at the end of it when the pistol clip was empty; Chloe had long since learned to count every shot. When she lowered her smoking pistol, the Huntsman soldier, riddled with blood-oozing bullet wounds, looked up at her with a leering grin.
‘You’re next,’ he rasped, chortling mockingly before melting into the air and drifting into the trees like a foul fog.
Growling a wordless snarl at the fading apparition, Chloe slammed the warm pistol into its holster on her hip, and then turned around and began making her way back to the camp, dabbing at her perpetually sweating forehead with a handkerchief as she walked. She stuffed the damp cloth into a side pocket of her camouflage-pattern military trousers, and then, bucking to an old habit that had not yet been overcome, put her hand up to her head to run her fingers through a thickness of hair that was no longer there. Gone was the neon hair she had proudly sported before; her skull was covered now with hair in its natural dark chestnut hue, buzzed all over in a number two cut.
Little serpents of sweat slithered down her bare arms and glistened in salty beads on her shoulders, and the black tank top she wore clung to her torso with its warm dampness. This forest was quite different to the North American one they had spent time in near Graeagle. Looking around and keenly taking in details of her surroundings, Chloe noted, as she always did, small minutiae that others may have overlooked; the twist of a tree trunk here, the shape of a rock recalling a crouched rabbit there, or seeing a portal to another world through a rare gap between intermeshed plants competing for restricted streams of sunlight.
This Asian jungle, she mused, was an interesting paradox in action, at once welcoming yet simultaneously alien and threatening. Far hotter, more foliage-crowded and sweaty than the Northern Californian forest, the oppressiveness of the humidity here was something that she was still not used to, despite having been in Cambodia for three weeks now.
She rounded the final bend in the trail that led to their camp and saw Zakaria squatting next to a camping kettle boiling on a gas stove, while William was heaping spoonfuls of instant coffee into mugs on the flat rock that served as their table, and Njinga was stripping and cleaning an AK-47 at the edge of the clearing.
Chloe paused, hovering at the final curve of the trail, observing the three of them. It was apparent that each was still grieving the loss of Paola, as was she. She was intimately familiar with every striation, outcrop and gash on the cliff-faces of the chasm that was sorrow and grief; she had been there – was still there, languishing in its dark depths, where the rays of the passing sun never quite reached.
In the first days after Paola’s death, Chloe had been a tangled mess of grief and rage, and for a week or two afterwards had regarded the beastwalkers’ expressions of grief as fake, as put-on and ingenuine. Paola had her had been friends since elementary school, while these imposters had known her for all of a few weeks. What right did they have to grieve – or, worse, to pretend to grieve? Once the initial pain of her friend’s loss, like a third degree chemical burn, had grown less fierce and immediate, however, Chloe had begun to look at the beastwalkers’ grief in a different manner, and
