PREVIOUS CHAPTER
As we delved into the forest, it became increasingly obvious that Dr. Alvarez operated as a sort of parachute slowing the expedition’s forward momentum. She insisted on stopping every fifteen yards in order to pluck up samples of vegetation or animal dung with a pair of steel pincers that hung at her hip.
“Honestly, Doc,” said Li on the second day, “I understand that you came out here intending to do some serious science, and as far as I’m concerned: hey, more power to you. But if we keep on at our current ratio of science to walking, we’re never going to get anywhere.”
“Yes, of course,” said Dr. Alvarez, prodding curiously with the tip of her pincers at a bulging yellow plant bulb. “It’s all so fascinating, you know?”
“I’d be careful with that,” I said, pointing at the bulb. “You’re not going to like the smell that comes out if you pop it.”
Dr. Alvarez gave me a wide-eyed look of impending guilt, her steel pincers frozen mid-prod.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Don’t even think about it.”
“But you can’t just say something like that and expect me to leave it alone,” said Dr. Alvarez. “Now I have to pop it. You know that. It’s basic human nature.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Li, “at least let us get to the other side of the clearing first.”
Something big rustled toward us from the direction of a thick patch of razorgrass.
“Up!” hissed Li, and the three of us readied our grapple guns.
I aimed and fired in one fluid motion. Hook secured, I zipped upward, a few milliseconds behind Li. Then Dr. Alvarez’s bolt, fired a bit late and well off the mark, careened against the trunk of the tree beneath the branch we’d aimed for and sailed into emptiness. As it flew, trailing its impossibly thin cord, the missed hook generated a thick, horrible silence.
“She missed,” I said, hanging upside-down with my feet braced against the branch. Before Li could respond, I dove into space, cord whizzing out of my grapple gun as I rappelled down toward the doctor, who stood, dumbstruck, facing the quick-rippling wall of razorgrass--
Out into the open stampeded a towering avian creature, dubbed “Megadodo” by the rangers, a round, blunt-beaked, dim-eyed, fat-bodied bird with splayed pebbly talons and tufts of down jutting every which way. Confronted by Dr. Alvarez, with another human plummeting from the sky above and a third not far behind, the Megadodo squawked and fled, its stubby wings flapping.
“Oh my God,” said Dr. Alvarez, a palm pressed against her cheek.
“Jesus, Doc,” said Li, detaching from her line and dropping to the ground with the thoughtless grace of a gymnast, “what’s your fucking problem? I thought you knew your way around a grapple gun?”
“I do, I just—”
“You should be dead. Actually, I’m mad that you aren’t dead. Because that is the saddest, most mind-blowingly imbecilic first-week-rookie fuck-up I have ever seen!”
“I’m sorry, Li, I just—”
“I can’t believe it! I knew this was going to happen. Tetris, did I not say that this was going to happen?”
I didn’t respond, just retracted my grapple gun’s line, although I could feel the features of my face settling into a grim concrete stare. Thank God it had been a Megadodo. Thank God it hadn’t been a snake, or a spider, or a scorpion. Watching another decent person get impaled by a scorpion stinger seemed like the kind of thing that would finally push me right over the edge into prescription-strength insanity.
“Ninety-nine point nine percent of things that produce that kind of noise in razorgrass are Class One human-eating badass motherfucking forest things you DO NOT WANT TO FUCK WITH,” said Li, very conspicuously not shouting. “You are the luckiest person I have ever met, Doc, you know that? You miss your fucking grapple and don’t even run, just stand there like a cow in a slaughterhouse, slack-jawed, mooing, and the thing that comes out of the bushes is a motherfucking MEGADODO?”
Dr. Alvarez, to her credit, met Li’s gaze.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I do know how to use the grapple gun. It must have been nerves. I haven’t missed a shot like that in months.”
“We’re turning around and going back,” said Li. “I thought I could watch you die, Doc. I really did. But when I saw you miss that grapple, it felt like a thirty-wheeler hit me full in the chest.”
“Please,” said Dr. Alvarez, “don’t be like that. We can still do it. I’ll be careful, okay? I won’t rush it next time. I won’t mess it up.”
I squatted down and traced a footprint left by the Megadodo. When I lifted my head to watch the argument, a third person had appeared in the clearing. It was Junior, his legs crossed as he leaned against a tree trunk, grinning at me through the gap between Li and Dr. Alvarez. The scorpion was nowhere to be seen, although the hole it had left in Junior’s chest remained, blackened and crawling with flies.
I gritted my teeth and stared back at him, right in his shiny, featureless eyes, willing him to disappear.
He kept smiling.
“You’re not real,” I said under my breath. “You’re a hallucination. Go.”
If anything, Junior’s smile broadened. His arms were crossed, obscuring the top edge of his chest wound. One of his fingers idly tapped against his opposite forearm.
I closed my eyes and counted to five. When I opened them, instead of vanishing, Junior strolled toward me. He walked right between Dr. Alvarez and Li, hands sunk into the pockets of his jeans.
“Not real?” he said, smile morphing slowly to a foul-tempered sneer. “Why don’t you listen, Tetris? Why don’t you listen why don’t you listen WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN LISTEN LISTEN–”
“Go!” I shouted, his words bouncing around inside my skull, leaving divots and welts and sharp, keening pain. With a sarcastic tilt of his head, Junior vanished.
I felt the ground where he’d stood for footprints, my temples pounding. Li and Dr. Alvarez had stopped their argument to stare at me.
“Excuse me?” said Li.
“Go on. With the mission, I mean,” I said, standing and dusting my hands on my pants. “Doc fucked up. It was a wake-up call, sure. But she’ll be more careful from now on.”
I ran a hand through my hair. Dr. Alvarez beamed at me in a way that would normally have left my entire body tingling. At the moment all I could muster in return was an upward contortion of my lips.
In a show of gratitude, Dr. Alvarez didn’t ask to stop even once the rest of the afternoon, and most of the next morning, although I caught her staring wistfully at just about every discarded arthropod exoskeleton, cluster of flowers, and pile of excrement we passed.
The next few days passed quickly. Though the forest screeched and trilled around us, its inhabitants left us alone. Part of this was due to Li’s grim, silent concentration as she led the way, SCAR at the ready. At the slightest rustle of undergrowth, she would raise a hand to stop us, and we’d stand listening, holding our breath, until Li decided it was safe to proceed.
At night, I was tortured by nightmares. I lost track of the ways I saw Dr. Alvarez, Zip and Li murdered in these dreams: disemboweled by claws, swallowed whole, set aflame by fire ants. Mercifully, I never cried out or attempted to wriggle out of my sleeping bag. I merely woke, again and again, repeating clear and quiet words of reassurance to myself as sweat pooled in the inlets of the bag’s acrylic interior.
On the fifth day we came across an antlion pit and paused to drink out of our canteens.
“Don’t go close to that,” said Li, pointing at the pit. It was longer than it was wide, a dirt-sloped trench, the bottom out of sight unless you approached the edge.
“What’s in there?” asked Dr. Alvarez.
“A nasty Winnebago-sized bug with totally wacko pincers,” I said, miming pincers with the thumb and index finger of my left hand.
“Ah,” said Dr. Alvarez, “Myrmeleon Maximus larva. Colloquially referred to as an antlion.”
“Yup,” I said.
“I wish I could get a look,” she said.
“You don’t want to go anywhere near that pit,” I advised.
The forest moves at several speeds. At the low end, there’s the imperceptible rate at which the trees grow, elbowing one another out of the way as they scramble for the greatest possible concentration of sunlight. Then the speed with which creeper vines extend, measurable on a daily if not hourly basis. The gradual creep that a tarantula employs as it pads on hairy legs towards unsuspecting prey.
But because the forest is an inherently violent place, these periods of slow, careful movement are always followed by explosive bursts of speed. The tree, after many years, its root network rigid and destabilized, creaks and tumbles to a crashing demise. The creeper vine, triggered by contact, snaps reflexively inward, undoing all its weeks of careful growth in an instant. The tarantula, close enough to nearly taste its prey, strikes so fast and suddenly that it appears to teleport.
So too with the forest as a whole. Periods of near-silence and stillness can end at any time, and the violence of the explosion that follows often seems more intense the longer the silence that preceded it.
Li saw the iguana first. It crept towards us over a fallen branch, spines standing up along its back, reddened eyes narrowed. In its mouth, which hung open a few degrees as it tasted the air, small triangular teeth bristled. The whole creature was twenty feet long, much of its length in its whip-like tail.
Dr. Alvarez and I only noticed the iguana when Li opened fire. It bulled past us, the tail slicing the air behind and knocking Dr. Alvarez off her feet. The iguana closed the distance before Li could react. A swing of its heavy triangular head — it didn’t dare open its mouth and try to bite her under the hail of bullets — sent her flying with a rib-cracking thump. The SCAR, knocked out of her hands, skittered to a stop near the antlion pit. I fumbled with my holster, tugging the pistol out as I ran.
Li hit a tree trunk and tumbled down. Across the clearing, I pulled my pistol’s trigger as fast as I could, flinging rounds into the side of the creature’s scaly head. It turned to face me and I pivoted right, sliding into a patch of tangled weeds. Then the iguana was on me, tearing at the vegetation as I tried to wriggle deeper, feeling the hot greedy breath wash over me--
Then the familiar sound of the SCAR and the sensation of bullets whistling by through the weeds. I cowered, making myself as small as possible, and the iguana’s breath vanished. I scrambled back up and saw it lumber across the clearing toward Dr. Alvarez, who lowered the SCAR she’d picked up and turned to run — my heart sank as I saw her approach the antlion pit, the existence of which she must have forgotten in the heat of the moment — I had an unshakable feeling that Dr. Alvarez was about to die in spectacularly gruesome fashion, and I couldn’t pull my eyes away--
My breath sucked through my teeth as Dr. Alvarez took a running leap and vaulted the antlion pit, simply soared across the gap, scrabbling a bit at the far edge but making it up and out nonetheless, a nearly unbelievable act of athleticism and nerve, and then, as the iguana pursued, the antlion’s titanic pincers erupted out of the pit like a sick insectoid jack-in-the-box, closing around the iguana’s midsection and dragging it, writhing, down into the pit.
As I struggled out of the weeds and Li rushed to Dr. Alvarez’s side, taking the SCAR back and helping the doctor to her feet, a swarm of pillbugs came bouncing and rolling like giant gray-plated cannonballs out of the undergrowth on the far side of the antlion pit. They bolted across the clearing, around and over the iguana as it spasmed and snapped its jaws and bled from its wounds in tall wet spurts, and I had to dive out of the way to avoid being flattened. But before I even picked myself up again, I realized things were about to get worse, because pillbugs never ran like that unless something was chasing them, and sure enough after the pillbugs came a huge, towering, horrifically gigantic praying mantis, enormous serrated forearms folded up near its thorax, the thorax itself like a thick electric-green rocket booster.
The mantis was less interested in us than the battered iguana, which had begun to emit clipped, guttural shrieks, one of its front legs hanging loose, dangling by a translucent strand of connective tissue, the remorseless antlion’s pincers closing and opening and closing again. The mantis struck, latching onto the iguana with its razor-blade arms, and a tugging match ensued. Li and Dr. Alvarez took advantage of the distraction to grapple-gun to a tree branch far above.
I stood watching the mantis and the antlion fight over the iguana. With a terrific slippery tearing sound, the mantis ripped the top half of the iguana clean off, guts and blood fountaining out the severed stump while the head’s eyes bulged, the shrieks cut short. The iguana’s intact forearm continued to windmill, slapping hopelessly against the mantis, which dragged the iguana’s head-and-upper-torso a few feet away and began to tear off thick strips of flesh.
Frozen by the gore, it took me longer than it should have to notice a second praying mantis, this one stalking carefully towards me, feelers quivering above its head. I grapple-gunned at once and zipped upward, but the mantis followed, wings flaring out as it scampered up the tree trunk after me. I undid the grapple as fast as I could to prepare for another jump. When I fired I knew it was too late, the mantis was too close, and I took a chance and leapt off into the air, praying that my hook would latch in time. Dropping like a stone, I watched the hook close around a branch across the clearing, and slammed the button to cut the slack, transforming my downward momentum into a wild swing forward. I whistled over razorgrass and, at the absolute lowest point in the parabola of my swing, past the iguana-devouring mantis, which lifted its head to watch me pass, bloody quivering meat dangling out of its dainty mouth.
I retracted the line and rose, swinging back toward the mantises but ascending rapidly. As I passed overhead the ground erupted and a creature of truly titanic size, summoned by the chaos, emerged. It was shaped like a Komodo dragon but covered in thick, matted black hair, and it had two ravenous, toothy mouths, stacked on top of each other, as if God had designed the thing with one mouth and then slapped another one on its chin just for the hell of it. The antlion, which from this angle was visible in all its beady-eyed larval grandeur, took its half of the iguana and wriggled down into its burrow. The mantis with the other half ripped off one last scaly chunk and fled, leaving a heap of bloody iguana leftovers, which the hairy monster snarfed down at once. As its lower mouth chewed, the monstrous creature whipped around, tracking the mantis as it retreated up a tree — my tree, as it happened. With a roar, the two-mouthed beast set off in pursuit.
I stood on the branch of a tree I’d thought was safe, once again aiming the grapple gun and preparing for an emergency leap, when the mantis skittered up and then past me, trailing a shower of iguana bits. Before I could fire, the hairy creature was on me, its shoulder knocking me vertically as it rushed by. The grapple gun flew from my hand and I tumbled down the length of the creature, managing to grab hold of the thick tangled hair just short of its back haunch. Stunned, I clung to the creature’s side, wrapping my arms in the hair to keep from falling off because I could think of no alternative.
The creature smelled like wet dog times a million. My pack bounced crazily, threatening to tear me off and send me tumbling through open space a hundred feet to the forest floor below. I squinted upward, past countless tons of raging animal muscle, and saw the canopy approaching fast, the mantis skittering at full speed a few meters ahead. Then leaves and branches were whipping by and I had to hide my face, pressing it against the side of the creature as I held for dear life to its thick and tattered fur. Either it hadn’t noticed me holding on or it didn’t care, and either way I didn’t see a whole lot of options besides sticking it out and hoping we wound up on the ground long enough for me to dismount.
With a crash and a sudden shift of momentum that nearly flung me skyward, we crested the top of the tree. I yanked my head back for a look and was blinded by the sun, hot and huge against a motionless blue sky. In the distance, the mantis we’d pursued buzzed through the air, its wings a blur as it passed above the wind-rustled green canopy. The creature I rode unleashed a roar from both mouths. It clung, teetering, to the top of the tree. I heard an odd clicking sound and turned to see a flat tick bigger than me making its way over through the matted landscape of fur. The tick’s eyes were dull and expressionless, but its slavering mouthparts betrayed its intentions.
I pulled out my pistol and shot the approaching tick four times in the head.
With a roar, the hairy beast reared up on its perch and contorted itself to try and get a look at me. I struggled to hold on and lost my grip on the pistol. Somehow, impossibly, the tick continued to creep toward me, its ruined face hanging loose but its legs moving all the same. I tried to climb laterally away, toward the underside of the creature, but then an enormous hawk came screaming out of the sky and sank its talons into the hairy flesh mere inches from my face--
Each of its talons buried deep as a railroad spike, the hawk flapped its wings, gouging at the beast’s small round eyes with the wicked tip of its beak. As the beast writhed and tumbled, both mouths snapping wildly, I lost my hold. Jettisoned away from the melee, I plummeted through thick leaves, bouncing to a bone-jarring halt against a wall of sharp twigs. Covered in gashes, including one on my neck that I prayed had missed my carotid, I woozily surveyed the place where I’d landed.
It was a bird’s nest, complete with eggshell fragments and a disarray of discarded feathers.
Suddenly I understood why the hawk had picked a fight with such a gigantic creature. From the other side of the nest came three fledgling hawks, whose roundness and curious mannerisms would normally have provoked a smile and an “awww” from me, except that in this case they were large enough to regard me as an afternoon snack.
“No,” I said, as the three fledglings hopped closer. “No, guys, trust me, don’t even think about it.”
My grapple gun and pistol both gone, I settled for drawing one of my climbing picks, leaving my left arm free as I circled the nest.
“Don’t you do it,” I warned the foremost fledgling.
“SKREE!”
As I climbed up onto the lip of the nest, brandishing my climbing pick, the fledgling in front worked up the nerve to charge. Sensing a way out, I dodged just slightly right and lunged onto the fledgling’s back as it passed. We tumbled out of the nest, ripping through leaves and branches, and then suddenly into open space, my arms wrapped around the fledgling’s neck. Down we plummeted, the rushing air intensifying into a roar. The forest floor loomed closer.
“COME ON,” I screamed. “FLY!”
Screeching, the fledgling flapped its wings, and our descent slowed. No matter how it tried, the bird couldn’t gain altitude with me on board, but it managed at least to flatten our trajectory somewhat, so that when we hit the ground we rolled and tumbled instead of splattering.
Still, the speed at which we made impact was bone-crunching. Through the undergrowth I flew, glancing off rocks and roots, until I came to a rest against a massive tree trunk.
The last thing I saw before blacking out was Li descending toward me like an angel on her grapple-gun’s line, the look on her face like someone who’d just witnessed a miracle and couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t all one big and elaborate trick.
NEXT CHAPTER
As we delved into the forest, it became increasingly obvious that Dr. Alvarez operated as a sort of parachute slowing the expedition’s forward momentum. She insisted on stopping every fifteen yards in order to pluck up samples of vegetation or animal dung with a pair of steel pincers that hung at her hip.
“Honestly, Doc,” said Li on the second day, “I understand that you came out here intending to do some serious science, and as far as I’m concerned: hey, more power to you. But if we keep on at our current ratio of science to walking, we’re never going to get anywhere.”
“Yes, of course,” said Dr. Alvarez, prodding curiously with the tip of her pincers at a bulging yellow plant bulb. “It’s all so fascinating, you know?”
“I’d be careful with that,” I said, pointing at the bulb. “You’re not going to like the smell that comes out if you pop it.”
Dr. Alvarez gave me a wide-eyed look of impending guilt, her steel pincers frozen mid-prod.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Don’t even think about it.”
“But you can’t just say something like that and expect me to leave it alone,” said Dr. Alvarez. “Now I have to pop it. You know that. It’s basic human nature.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Li, “at least let us get to the other side of the clearing first.”
Something big rustled toward us from the direction of a thick patch of razorgrass.
“Up!” hissed Li, and the three of us readied our grapple guns.
I aimed and fired in one fluid motion. Hook secured, I zipped upward, a few milliseconds behind Li. Then Dr. Alvarez’s bolt, fired a bit late and well off the mark, careened against the trunk of the tree beneath the branch we’d aimed for and sailed into emptiness. As it flew, trailing its impossibly thin cord, the missed hook generated a thick, horrible silence.
“She missed,” I said, hanging upside-down with my feet braced against the branch. Before Li could respond, I dove into space, cord whizzing out of my grapple gun as I rappelled down toward the doctor, who stood, dumbstruck, facing the quick-rippling wall of razorgrass--
Out into the open stampeded a towering avian creature, dubbed “Megadodo” by the rangers, a round, blunt-beaked, dim-eyed, fat-bodied bird with splayed pebbly talons and tufts of down jutting every which way. Confronted by Dr. Alvarez, with another human plummeting from the sky above and a third not far behind, the Megadodo squawked and fled, its stubby wings flapping.
“Oh my God,” said Dr. Alvarez, a palm pressed against her cheek.
“Jesus, Doc,” said Li, detaching from her line and dropping to the ground with the thoughtless grace of a gymnast, “what’s your fucking problem? I thought you knew your way around a grapple gun?”
“I do, I just—”
“You should be dead. Actually, I’m mad that you aren’t dead. Because that is the saddest, most mind-blowingly imbecilic first-week-rookie fuck-up I have ever seen!”
“I’m sorry, Li, I just—”
“I can’t believe it! I knew this was going to happen. Tetris, did I not say that this was going to happen?”
I didn’t respond, just retracted my grapple gun’s line, although I could feel the features of my face settling into a grim concrete stare. Thank God it had been a Megadodo. Thank God it hadn’t been a snake, or a spider, or a scorpion. Watching another decent person get impaled by a scorpion stinger seemed like the kind of thing that would finally push me right over the edge into prescription-strength insanity.
“Ninety-nine point nine percent of things that produce that kind of noise in razorgrass are Class One human-eating badass motherfucking forest things you DO NOT WANT TO FUCK WITH,” said Li, very conspicuously not shouting. “You are the luckiest person I have ever met, Doc, you know that? You miss your fucking grapple and don’t even run, just stand there like a cow in a slaughterhouse, slack-jawed, mooing, and the thing that comes out of the bushes is a motherfucking MEGADODO?”
Dr. Alvarez, to her credit, met Li’s gaze.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I do know how to use the grapple gun. It must have been nerves. I haven’t missed a shot like that in months.”
“We’re turning around and going back,” said Li. “I thought I could watch you die, Doc. I really did. But when I saw you miss that grapple, it felt like a thirty-wheeler hit me full in the chest.”
“Please,” said Dr. Alvarez, “don’t be like that. We can still do it. I’ll be careful, okay? I won’t rush it next time. I won’t mess it up.”
I squatted down and traced a footprint left by the Megadodo. When I lifted my head to watch the argument, a third person had appeared in the clearing. It was Junior, his legs crossed as he leaned against a tree trunk, grinning at me through the gap between Li and Dr. Alvarez. The scorpion was nowhere to be seen, although the hole it had left in Junior’s chest remained, blackened and crawling with flies.
I gritted my teeth and stared back at him, right in his shiny, featureless eyes, willing him to disappear.
He kept smiling.
“You’re not real,” I said under my breath. “You’re a hallucination. Go.”
If anything, Junior’s smile broadened. His arms were crossed, obscuring the top edge of his chest wound. One of his fingers idly tapped against his opposite forearm.
I closed my eyes and counted to five. When I opened them, instead of vanishing, Junior strolled toward me. He walked right between Dr. Alvarez and Li, hands sunk into the pockets of his jeans.
“Not real?” he said, smile morphing slowly to a foul-tempered sneer. “Why don’t you listen, Tetris? Why don’t you listen why don’t you listen WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN LISTEN LISTEN–”
“Go!” I shouted, his words bouncing around inside my skull, leaving divots and welts and sharp, keening pain. With a sarcastic tilt of his head, Junior vanished.
I felt the ground where he’d stood for footprints, my temples pounding. Li and Dr. Alvarez had stopped their argument to stare at me.
“Excuse me?” said Li.
“Go on. With the mission, I mean,” I said, standing and dusting my hands on my pants. “Doc fucked up. It was a wake-up call, sure. But she’ll be more careful from now on.”
I ran a hand through my hair. Dr. Alvarez beamed at me in a way that would normally have left my entire body tingling. At the moment all I could muster in return was an upward contortion of my lips.
In a show of gratitude, Dr. Alvarez didn’t ask to stop even once the rest of the afternoon, and most of the next morning, although I caught her staring wistfully at just about every discarded arthropod exoskeleton, cluster of flowers, and pile of excrement we passed.
The next few days passed quickly. Though the forest screeched and trilled around us, its inhabitants left us alone. Part of this was due to Li’s grim, silent concentration as she led the way, SCAR at the ready. At the slightest rustle of undergrowth, she would raise a hand to stop us, and we’d stand listening, holding our breath, until Li decided it was safe to proceed.
At night, I was tortured by nightmares. I lost track of the ways I saw Dr. Alvarez, Zip and Li murdered in these dreams: disemboweled by claws, swallowed whole, set aflame by fire ants. Mercifully, I never cried out or attempted to wriggle out of my sleeping bag. I merely woke, again and again, repeating clear and quiet words of reassurance to myself as sweat pooled in the inlets of the bag’s acrylic interior.
On the fifth day we came across an antlion pit and paused to drink out of our canteens.
“Don’t go close to that,” said Li, pointing at the pit. It was longer than it was wide, a dirt-sloped trench, the bottom out of sight unless you approached the edge.
“What’s in there?” asked Dr. Alvarez.
“A nasty Winnebago-sized bug with totally wacko pincers,” I said, miming pincers with the thumb and index finger of my left hand.
“Ah,” said Dr. Alvarez, “Myrmeleon Maximus larva. Colloquially referred to as an antlion.”
“Yup,” I said.
“I wish I could get a look,” she said.
“You don’t want to go anywhere near that pit,” I advised.
The forest moves at several speeds. At the low end, there’s the imperceptible rate at which the trees grow, elbowing one another out of the way as they scramble for the greatest possible concentration of sunlight. Then the speed with which creeper vines extend, measurable on a daily if not hourly basis. The gradual creep that a tarantula employs as it pads on hairy legs towards unsuspecting prey.
But because the forest is an inherently violent place, these periods of slow, careful movement are always followed by explosive bursts of speed. The tree, after many years, its root network rigid and destabilized, creaks and tumbles to a crashing demise. The creeper vine, triggered by contact, snaps reflexively inward, undoing all its weeks of careful growth in an instant. The tarantula, close enough to nearly taste its prey, strikes so fast and suddenly that it appears to teleport.
So too with the forest as a whole. Periods of near-silence and stillness can end at any time, and the violence of the explosion that follows often seems more intense the longer the silence that preceded it.
Li saw the iguana first. It crept towards us over a fallen branch, spines standing up along its back, reddened eyes narrowed. In its mouth, which hung open a few degrees as it tasted the air, small triangular teeth bristled. The whole creature was twenty feet long, much of its length in its whip-like tail.
Dr. Alvarez and I only noticed the iguana when Li opened fire. It bulled past us, the tail slicing the air behind and knocking Dr. Alvarez off her feet. The iguana closed the distance before Li could react. A swing of its heavy triangular head — it didn’t dare open its mouth and try to bite her under the hail of bullets — sent her flying with a rib-cracking thump. The SCAR, knocked out of her hands, skittered to a stop near the antlion pit. I fumbled with my holster, tugging the pistol out as I ran.
Li hit a tree trunk and tumbled down. Across the clearing, I pulled my pistol’s trigger as fast as I could, flinging rounds into the side of the creature’s scaly head. It turned to face me and I pivoted right, sliding into a patch of tangled weeds. Then the iguana was on me, tearing at the vegetation as I tried to wriggle deeper, feeling the hot greedy breath wash over me--
Then the familiar sound of the SCAR and the sensation of bullets whistling by through the weeds. I cowered, making myself as small as possible, and the iguana’s breath vanished. I scrambled back up and saw it lumber across the clearing toward Dr. Alvarez, who lowered the SCAR she’d picked up and turned to run — my heart sank as I saw her approach the antlion pit, the existence of which she must have forgotten in the heat of the moment — I had an unshakable feeling that Dr. Alvarez was about to die in spectacularly gruesome fashion, and I couldn’t pull my eyes away--
My breath sucked through my teeth as Dr. Alvarez took a running leap and vaulted the antlion pit, simply soared across the gap, scrabbling a bit at the far edge but making it up and out nonetheless, a nearly unbelievable act of athleticism and nerve, and then, as the iguana pursued, the antlion’s titanic pincers erupted out of the pit like a sick insectoid jack-in-the-box, closing around the iguana’s midsection and dragging it, writhing, down into the pit.
As I struggled out of the weeds and Li rushed to Dr. Alvarez’s side, taking the SCAR back and helping the doctor to her feet, a swarm of pillbugs came bouncing and rolling like giant gray-plated cannonballs out of the undergrowth on the far side of the antlion pit. They bolted across the clearing, around and over the iguana as it spasmed and snapped its jaws and bled from its wounds in tall wet spurts, and I had to dive out of the way to avoid being flattened. But before I even picked myself up again, I realized things were about to get worse, because pillbugs never ran like that unless something was chasing them, and sure enough after the pillbugs came a huge, towering, horrifically gigantic praying mantis, enormous serrated forearms folded up near its thorax, the thorax itself like a thick electric-green rocket booster.
The mantis was less interested in us than the battered iguana, which had begun to emit clipped, guttural shrieks, one of its front legs hanging loose, dangling by a translucent strand of connective tissue, the remorseless antlion’s pincers closing and opening and closing again. The mantis struck, latching onto the iguana with its razor-blade arms, and a tugging match ensued. Li and Dr. Alvarez took advantage of the distraction to grapple-gun to a tree branch far above.
I stood watching the mantis and the antlion fight over the iguana. With a terrific slippery tearing sound, the mantis ripped the top half of the iguana clean off, guts and blood fountaining out the severed stump while the head’s eyes bulged, the shrieks cut short. The iguana’s intact forearm continued to windmill, slapping hopelessly against the mantis, which dragged the iguana’s head-and-upper-torso a few feet away and began to tear off thick strips of flesh.
Frozen by the gore, it took me longer than it should have to notice a second praying mantis, this one stalking carefully towards me, feelers quivering above its head. I grapple-gunned at once and zipped upward, but the mantis followed, wings flaring out as it scampered up the tree trunk after me. I undid the grapple as fast as I could to prepare for another jump. When I fired I knew it was too late, the mantis was too close, and I took a chance and leapt off into the air, praying that my hook would latch in time. Dropping like a stone, I watched the hook close around a branch across the clearing, and slammed the button to cut the slack, transforming my downward momentum into a wild swing forward. I whistled over razorgrass and, at the absolute lowest point in the parabola of my swing, past the iguana-devouring mantis, which lifted its head to watch me pass, bloody quivering meat dangling out of its dainty mouth.
I retracted the line and rose, swinging back toward the mantises but ascending rapidly. As I passed overhead the ground erupted and a creature of truly titanic size, summoned by the chaos, emerged. It was shaped like a Komodo dragon but covered in thick, matted black hair, and it had two ravenous, toothy mouths, stacked on top of each other, as if God had designed the thing with one mouth and then slapped another one on its chin just for the hell of it. The antlion, which from this angle was visible in all its beady-eyed larval grandeur, took its half of the iguana and wriggled down into its burrow. The mantis with the other half ripped off one last scaly chunk and fled, leaving a heap of bloody iguana leftovers, which the hairy monster snarfed down at once. As its lower mouth chewed, the monstrous creature whipped around, tracking the mantis as it retreated up a tree — my tree, as it happened. With a roar, the two-mouthed beast set off in pursuit.
I stood on the branch of a tree I’d thought was safe, once again aiming the grapple gun and preparing for an emergency leap, when the mantis skittered up and then past me, trailing a shower of iguana bits. Before I could fire, the hairy creature was on me, its shoulder knocking me vertically as it rushed by. The grapple gun flew from my hand and I tumbled down the length of the creature, managing to grab hold of the thick tangled hair just short of its back haunch. Stunned, I clung to the creature’s side, wrapping my arms in the hair to keep from falling off because I could think of no alternative.
The creature smelled like wet dog times a million. My pack bounced crazily, threatening to tear me off and send me tumbling through open space a hundred feet to the forest floor below. I squinted upward, past countless tons of raging animal muscle, and saw the canopy approaching fast, the mantis skittering at full speed a few meters ahead. Then leaves and branches were whipping by and I had to hide my face, pressing it against the side of the creature as I held for dear life to its thick and tattered fur. Either it hadn’t noticed me holding on or it didn’t care, and either way I didn’t see a whole lot of options besides sticking it out and hoping we wound up on the ground long enough for me to dismount.
With a crash and a sudden shift of momentum that nearly flung me skyward, we crested the top of the tree. I yanked my head back for a look and was blinded by the sun, hot and huge against a motionless blue sky. In the distance, the mantis we’d pursued buzzed through the air, its wings a blur as it passed above the wind-rustled green canopy. The creature I rode unleashed a roar from both mouths. It clung, teetering, to the top of the tree. I heard an odd clicking sound and turned to see a flat tick bigger than me making its way over through the matted landscape of fur. The tick’s eyes were dull and expressionless, but its slavering mouthparts betrayed its intentions.
I pulled out my pistol and shot the approaching tick four times in the head.
With a roar, the hairy beast reared up on its perch and contorted itself to try and get a look at me. I struggled to hold on and lost my grip on the pistol. Somehow, impossibly, the tick continued to creep toward me, its ruined face hanging loose but its legs moving all the same. I tried to climb laterally away, toward the underside of the creature, but then an enormous hawk came screaming out of the sky and sank its talons into the hairy flesh mere inches from my face--
Each of its talons buried deep as a railroad spike, the hawk flapped its wings, gouging at the beast’s small round eyes with the wicked tip of its beak. As the beast writhed and tumbled, both mouths snapping wildly, I lost my hold. Jettisoned away from the melee, I plummeted through thick leaves, bouncing to a bone-jarring halt against a wall of sharp twigs. Covered in gashes, including one on my neck that I prayed had missed my carotid, I woozily surveyed the place where I’d landed.
It was a bird’s nest, complete with eggshell fragments and a disarray of discarded feathers.
Suddenly I understood why the hawk had picked a fight with such a gigantic creature. From the other side of the nest came three fledgling hawks, whose roundness and curious mannerisms would normally have provoked a smile and an “awww” from me, except that in this case they were large enough to regard me as an afternoon snack.
“No,” I said, as the three fledglings hopped closer. “No, guys, trust me, don’t even think about it.”
My grapple gun and pistol both gone, I settled for drawing one of my climbing picks, leaving my left arm free as I circled the nest.
“Don’t you do it,” I warned the foremost fledgling.
“SKREE!”
As I climbed up onto the lip of the nest, brandishing my climbing pick, the fledgling in front worked up the nerve to charge. Sensing a way out, I dodged just slightly right and lunged onto the fledgling’s back as it passed. We tumbled out of the nest, ripping through leaves and branches, and then suddenly into open space, my arms wrapped around the fledgling’s neck. Down we plummeted, the rushing air intensifying into a roar. The forest floor loomed closer.
“COME ON,” I screamed. “FLY!”
Screeching, the fledgling flapped its wings, and our descent slowed. No matter how it tried, the bird couldn’t gain altitude with me on board, but it managed at least to flatten our trajectory somewhat, so that when we hit the ground we rolled and tumbled instead of splattering.
Still, the speed at which we made impact was bone-crunching. Through the undergrowth I flew, glancing off rocks and roots, until I came to a rest against a massive tree trunk.
The last thing I saw before blacking out was Li descending toward me like an angel on her grapple-gun’s line, the look on her face like someone who’d just witnessed a miracle and couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t all one big and elaborate trick.
NEXT CHAPTER