BENEATH - A Novel (51 page)

"King, I just got word that your two week jaunt has been approved," Deep Blue said. "That means you're all getting some R&R. Enjoy it while it lasts."

"Where you off to?" Queen asked.

"
Peru
," King said. "An old friend needs my help."

"You going to see action?" Rook asked. "Should we come with?"

The four of them looked at King at once. He couldn't see their eyes through the small slits in their goggles, but he could tell they all wanted in...if there was action to be had.

"Thanks, but no," King said. "Should be a walk in the park."

"Bogies twenty miles out and closing," Deep Blue said. "ETA, five minutes."

 
"But now it's time to run," King said.

The group broke into a sprint towards the forested coastline where a still classified UH-100S stealth Blackhawk transport helicopter, piloted by some boys from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment , also known as the "Nightstalkers", stood ready to speed them away.

King took one last look over his shoulder. He'd counted seventy-five men and women in the camp. The explosives he'd planted had killed the majority of them. Two more had fallen to his knife. And yet, the number of dead on his hands this day was a drop in the bloody bucket filled during his last ten years as a Delta operator. For the briefest of moments he grew weary of the death and violence.

Then he remembered who these people were, what they had done and what they would do if they weren't stopped. He had witnessed the horrors of war, the blood and havoc. Fellow soldiers had died in his arms on several occasions, some riddled with shrapnel, others missing limbs or simply sprayed down by bullets. War and its tragedy were familiar to him. But they paled in comparison to the horrors wreaked by terrorists. To kill a soldier in battle was something he could justify, something he could live with, but to slaughter innocents, to willfully infect the world's population with fear was madness that served the needs of a few radicals.

In his line of work, civilian casualties were sometimes unavoidable, but he abhorred the news of innocents caught in the crossfire. It stood against everything he fought for. That the organizations he fought against served to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible, that they cheered and celebrated the deaths of innocents, infuriated him.
 
He'd seen the remains of men, women and children blown to pieces by suicide bombers who targeted cafés, markets and schools. He could identify the glazed look in the eyes of a man willing to take his own life in order to spread fear and spark wars. He recognized the heart of his enemy as evil.

So he waged his war against terrorism as a Delta operator, never hesitating to pull the trigger if it meant saving innocents. It was gruesome work, but necessary. Noble even. As King forged across the ice he looked back one last time at the ruined island. Another terror network brought to its knees. With seventy-four potential suicide bombers inside the complex and the average number of deaths caused by each suicide attack at ninety-five, he'd just saved roughly seven thousand innocent lives.

"Checkmate," he whispered.

###

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Prologue

The
Annamite
Mountains
–
Vietnam

1995

Three months had gone by since Dr. Anthony Weston began his search for the elusive creatures, and now that he'd found them, they were going to kill him.

A cascade of sweat followed a path of crisscrossing wrinkles down his forehead and dripped into his wide eyes. The salty, dirty sweat stung and brought forth a welling of tears, blurring his vision. He couldn't see the creatures clearly, nor the ground on which he ran, but he could hear them all around, calling out to each other.

The sheer volume of their booming hoots and hollers filled him with a kind of primeval dread that quickened his pace and made his heart pound painfully in his chest. He feared a heart attack for a moment, but the crunch of dry leaves all around signaled that his life was fleeting, heart problem or not.

Weston rounded a bend on the overgrown path that wound its way through the jungle and eventually up into the mountains. He picked up speed as the trail straightened out. If not for the assistance of the steep grade and gravity, the beasts would most assuredly have already overtaken him, but as it was, Weston found himself running much more quickly than on level ground. Even still, the task of outrunning the savage tribe was taking a grim toll on his body. With each labored breath, his ruddy brown beard and mustache, which had grown long and ungainly during his months in the bush, was sucked in and pushed out of his mouth. His light blue eyes sparkled with wetness and his hands, which held off approaching tree limbs and bushes, shook violently, smearing the blood drawn from his fresh wounds.

Brush exploded to his right as one of the creatures toppled through it. They were tumbling and tripping as they barreled clumsily in pursuit, focused more on their quarry than their surroundings. They were single minded hunters. He knew this from watching them take down yellow pigs and the antelope-like saola—even that fine creature's keen horns couldn't fight off the savages when they were hungry.

And they were hungry now.

Weston first knew something was wrong when, that morning, the creatures began sniffing vigorously at the air. He'd been watching them from a distance, higher up on the mountain for an entire week. He'd observed them hunting, grooming, sleeping and playing. But it hadn't been enough. Seeing through binoculars and hearing only distant calls could not quench his thirst for discovery. So the previous night, he'd worked his way carefully, silently, down the mountainside until he was a mere fifty yards above with a clear view of the glade and mountain cave that served as their home. After carefully concealing himself with brush and debris, he waited eagerly for daybreak.

As the morning sun burned off the previous night's fog the group emerged from their cave, stretching and yawning. Typically, grooming would come next, but a new smell had caught their nose—Weston. As a cool breeze tickled the back of his neck, he realized the winds were rolling down the mountainside from above, and being so close, the odor of his unbathed body was fresh in the air.

He'd only just begun debating what he should do next when the group started jumping up and down, slapping the earth. A moment later, each and every one of them, forty-three in all, charged up the mountain. Their brown hair stood on end, bouncing madly as they ascended. For a moment, he sat still, stunned by the display, but as the creatures made eye contact with him and began their wild hoots, he too began to climb. Upon reaching the top, he wasted no time looking back to see how close they were. He knew them to be excellent climbers. They were no doubt already nipping at his heels.

And now, not two minutes after reaching the mountain's peak and beginning his frantic descent down the other side, they were on top of him.

Weston lost his footing for a moment and screamed. He was surprised by the volume and high pitch of his voice. It sounded as inhuman as the unclassified creatures pursuing him. As he sensed the front runners of the group closing in he searched for any hope of escape. In the movies this was the point where the hero would trip and slide down a perfectly formed mud-covered waterslide and escape. But the forest was an unending assemblage of tall tree trunks, the occasional low level scrub and a detritus coated, downhill sloped forest floor. There was no where to go but down.

And then where? The river was two days out on foot and from there it was a week, at least, to the nearest pocket of civilization. And what weapons did they own that could defeat such a group as this?

None.

Hopelessness settled in and his limbs grew weary. He thought of his wife and only regretted not having been able to tell her how angry he was that she'd left. In the end, she grew to hate him and taunted his profession; said that being a cryptozoologist was a job far better suited to children or imbeciles prone to flights of fancy. He thought she'd understood him, but he'd been wrong.
 
And he would have never known if not for—

Shaking his head, Weston cleared his thoughts of his wife. She was not the image he wanted to see when he died.

With sure footing beneath him and the slope
 
growing steeper, Weston felt himself moving faster. The pain in his lungs began to subside and the sweat on his forehead evaporated before it reached his eyes. He'd never before experienced a "second wind" but recognized it, and for a moment, felt some degree of hope.

That's when he saw the flickering shadow surrounding him, as though something above were blocking out the sun that filtered to the forest floor between breaks in the canopy. He glanced up into a pair of red rimmed, deep yellow eyes. The beast shrieked at him and reached out. Its fingers found his field vest and gripped tightly. A moment later, Weston's feet left the earth and he found himself airborne, propelled through the air with stunning ease.

As the forest spun, he saw the entire group descending towards him, some charging, some taking to the trees and some rolling clumsily through the brush. What may have been a ten foot flight took Weston much further as the ground continued to drop away. Twenty-five feet later he landed, but the same grade that made his fall further, also minimized the force of his impact. He rolled and slid another fifty feet and came to rest at the foot of a tall, slender Aquilaria tree.

Having never lost consciousness, Weston knew he was lucky to be alive, but even luckier to not have sustained any broken bones. He struggled to his hands and knees, acutely aware that the wave of hair-covered flesh roaring down the mountain was almost upon him. He stood on wobbly legs and held the tree for support. It was shaking.

Weston looked up and found the same deep, red rimmed eyes staring back at him. The creature, suspended upside down on the tree, reached out and backhanded Weston's head. He fell to the ground, stunned and despairing. They had him. Escape was impossible.

He began weeping as the creature climbed down the tree with an agility he'd witnessed all week. In many ways the creatures were more suited to a life in the trees than on the ground. Once on the ground, the beast stood erect, stretching its height to a mediocre five feet. If not for their physical strength, Weston might even be able to fight his way out. But he remembered how easily he'd been thrown, as though he were but a child.

As the beast stood above him it hollered to the others, who quickly surrounded his prone body. They hooted and slapped the ground in a wild display, the likes of which he had not observed in the last week, even when they were hunting. A few stayed in the trees where they shook branches and shrieked. The one who caught him, Red Rim, stood above him and looked into his eyes. Red leaned in close and smelled him, moving slowed from his feet to his head, sniffing diligently.

Perhaps they're trying to decide if I'm edible, Weston thought. He tried to think of a way he could make himself less appealing, but that was impossible. Inside his pants, his legs were already coated in shit and his urine had leaked through the front. He smelled terrible, though he noted now, not as terrible as the creatures standing guard around him. Their scent was fecal and raw, like moldy egg salad. As Red sniffed his head and blew its breath onto his face, he could taste the decaying flesh of some previous meal that clung to its two-inch long canines. While Red sniffed his hair, Weston became aware of a gentle caress upon his chest. He glanced down, past his frazzled beard and saw two large hair-covered breasts dangling down onto his body. Red...was a female.

Then she was up and hooting again. The cacophony reached an apex and the group descended on Weston like a starved pack of hyenas, yelping and reaching for him. As his clothes were torn and yanked away from his body by tooth and claw, he began to scream and fight. It did little good and only seemed to lather the group into more of a craze. Then one was on top of him, straddling his naked waist and pinning him to the ground. The creature's face leaned in close.

Red.

She howled and then bit into the meat of his shoulder.

1

Annamite
Mountains
-
Vietnam

2009

Open sores covered Phan Giang's feet like the craters of the moon. They'd long since stopped oozing, but the dried flaking skin itched relentlessly. Yet he kept walking. Stumbling really. He'd been moving like a machine for the past three days, shuffling through the jungle like a zombie. His bloodshot eyes, half closed, stung and saw the world through a haze. His feverish, parched body was slick with moisture that clung to him yet failed to penetrate his skin. His tattered clothes, those of a peasant villager, hung from his bones in damp tatters, like meat hung to dry. Though near death, his heart soared when the jungle broke.