'I said quiet,' Harbinger admonished. The team settled down. Charlie team materialized out of the mist a few minutes later, moving like ghosts. Franks looked like Swamp Thing, coated in mud and moss. He made a few rapid hand signals and his team disappeared into the trees.
'Okay,' he grunted as he knelt in the mud amongst my team.
'Y'all sit tight. I'm going over there.' Harbinger pointed out a small clump of land, almost tall enough to be dry. 'I'll be right back. Franks, you'd best keep your men under control.'
'Don't worry,' the quiet man stated. Harbinger nodded and moved quickly away, sloshing through the mud, stepping on roots and semisolid land whenever possible.
'How's your stomach?' Franks asked as he studied the terrain.
'Sore. How're your nuts?' I whispered back.
'Fine.' He shifted his gun in his big hands. 'I killed the last guy who tried to kick me like that.'
'Hey, asshole, if we're comparing notes, I think you've hit me a lot more times than I've hit you.'
'Will you two shut up?' Julie hissed.
Harbinger had reached the island. He hung his tommy gun in the branches of a tree, set down his revolver and grenades, and finally stabbed his bowie knife into the trunk, leaving it there vibrating slightly. He left his weapons behind and walked slowly up the mud hill. At the summit he sat down cross-legged, back toward us, and waited.
'Probably a stupid question at this point…' Trip whispered. 'But what's a Wendigo exactly?'
'A shaman who was cursed for committing an unforgivable act, usually something cannibalistic. Doomed to walk the Earth forever, guardians of the land and its original inhabitants,' Julie answered softly. 'It's a horrible fate.'
The swamp grew still. The rain stopped. The constant croaking and chittering of amphibians and insects abruptly died. The tiny bit of light that we had been getting through the canopy went away, leaving us in near darkness. A shiver ran down my spine. It felt almost sterile and impossibly lifeless.
An eerie illumination slowly rose from the other side of the hill, highlighting Harbinger as he sat perfectly still. Something moved in the unnatural light. Something huge. Impossibly tall, but startlingly lean. All we could see was a silhouette of billowing skins, ten feet tall, with antlers like a deer rising from the center of its elongated head. An alien figure out of nightmares. It was not of this world.
The thing stopped before Harbinger. Our team leader did not move. I realized I was holding my breath.
The antlered being was motionless. Its long limbs folded tight against its body, giving us no clue as to its unnatural structure. I could not see the Wendigo's facial features, and for that I was thankful. If they were conversing we could not tell. Other shapes moved on the island, giant hulking things, bristling with hair and mud, just outside of the circle of pale light. A horrible smell drifted across the water. I gagged involuntarily.
After a few minutes of silence the Wendigo turned and drifted off of the island. The hairy beasts ambled away, disappearing into the swamp. The gray light died. The rain began to pelt us again. Gradually the light returned to its natural levels and frogs began to croak. The swamp returned to normal, or at least as normal as a place like Natchy Bottom could be.
'That was the Wendigo,' Julie told us. 'The other things were skunk-apes. Swamp Sasquatches. It protects them, keeps them away from our world. They are why I didn't want your people'-she nodded at Franks-'to just come in here and blow the whole place up.'
'Just big monkeys,' the Fed grunted.
Julie started to reply, but then bit her tongue. Arguing with Franks would be like beating your head against a block of granite.
'Uh-oh,' I said, 'that don't look good.' Once the mysterious being had gone, Harbinger leapt to his feet and slid down the hill, grabbed his weapons, and came leaping across the water, splashing toward us as fast as he could.
'It's a trap!' he shouted in our direction.
'Alpha, Bravo. Go hot,' Franks ordered.
Harbinger skidded into us, breathing heavy. He looked like he had seen a ghost. I suppose in a way he had.
'The Cursed One ain't here. The vampires ain't here. But they summoned something else. Something is waiting for us. It was a trick.' He turned to Franks. 'We need immediate extraction and air cover.'
The silent Fed did not argue. 'Delta, this is Charlie. We need immediate evac. Over.'
Nothing.
Franks repeated his request. Still no response. A regular man would have looked concerned at being stuck near the crossroads of all badness, in the middle of an ambush set by creatures of unspeakable evil. He shrugged, apparently unperturbed.
'The signal isn't getting out,' Julie said. 'How could it be a trap? My dad told us…' She trailed off. 'Oh no.'
'He told us what Susan wanted him to,' Harbinger snapped. He kicked a tree stump. 'Damn it! I should have thought of that. We have to get out of here.'
'Alpha, Bravo. Come in,' Franks said. 'Nothing.' He stood up and pointed at some of his men. He made several rapid hand signals and pumped his fist in the air. They nodded, leapt to their feet, and sloshed in the direction of the other teams. 'We fall back to the extraction zone.'
'Can you call in air cover with flares?' Sam asked.
'Already done,' he answered as something boomed from the direction of Charlie team. A few seconds later, red flares erupted high above us and slowly drifted toward the thick canopy of trees.
'I just hope they see them in the bad visibility,' Milo said, looking up at the rain and the roiling clouds.
From the distance came a sound like the blowing of a horn, a deep rumbling that we all felt in the pits of our stomachs. The low note continued for several seconds and then trailed off. Another horn blew to our south, and then another to the east.
'Earl, what did they summon?' I asked. All I knew was that if they had been brought here by Lord Machado, they were not going to be friendly.
'I don't know.' His face was streaked with mud and his eyes narrowed dangerously. 'But the Wendigo said to get out. He said it's beyond his power. So it's bad. Real bad. I told him to get his people out of here. So if you see something that ain't human, shoot it.'
More horns sounded. Now they were all around us. Several rang out between us and the way that we had come from. 'Sounds like they're not going to let us retreat.' Julie snapped her M14 to her shoulder and scanned through the scope. The MHI staff began to fan out, weapons at the ready, looking for defensive positions.
Deprived of his radio, Franks started to bellow orders to his men. 'Dig in. Claymores. Hit them when they come for us. At my signal push through to the south.' That was our end of the diamond. 'Your men up to being the tip of the spear?' he asked Harbinger.
'Of course,' our team leader answered with far more confidence than I felt. Ed's swords flashed silver in the low light as he pulled them smoothly from their sheaths. The blades were short and thick and wickedly sharp. He cracked his neck and vertebrae. The rest of us were armed with a variety of firearms, plus each person was packing along some form of heavier ordnance: RPGs, grenade launchers, and Milo had some sort of homemade lightweight flamethrower. It hummed ominously when he switched it on, heavily pressurized with napalm.
'Find cover,' Harbinger ordered. 'We don't know what they are, so hit them with everything.' The squad complied. To our left, Charlie team dug down. To our right was Alpha. Bravo was behind us. Franks moved amongst his men, giving orders. Pointing out problems. Assigning areas of responsibility. Offering reassurance while the rumble of unnatural horns sounded in the distance. He may have been a violent bloodthirsty scumbag, but he was a good leader.
'Get lower, Trip,' Harbinger suggested as he paced amongst us. 'Holly, you have a clear area behind you, so you can use the RPG if we need it. Lee, don't hug right against that tree, it limits your mobility. Step back a bit and you still have cover.' We had a great leader as well. 'Looking good, Hunters. It ain't gonna be nothing we can't handle.'
'I hate the part when you don't know what the bad guys are,' Sam said quietly as he pressed his bulk behind a mound of tree roots. The low rumbling horns stopped. The rain slapped against the water.
'Harb Anger,' Skippy grunted. The orc swiveled his head from side to side as he sniffed the air. 'They
