“In what way?” Kaufman asked.
“The first night we heard sounds in the forest. Weird little scuffling noises and bird calls. The next day we found some poor bastard covered in dried-up mud and all slashed and cut. Looked like they tried to burn him but it only caught on his arm and his neck and part of his head. You should have seen his face, frozen in agony. He might have been alive when they burned him, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean some poor bastard?” Kaufman asked, concerned.
“Not one of us,” Dixon replied. “Don’t know who he was. But the next night we heard these screeching calls, like a carrion bird, only a hundred times louder. And then one of my men disappeared. Went out to take a piss and never came back. We looked for him, but we never found him.” Dixon shrugged, as if he was still baffled by the disappearance. “No sign of struggle or anything. Then we started hearing the natives, a different tribe from the guys who led us there. I think they called them Chollokwan or something. They started hounding us at night.
“We planned to break out the next day, but by dawn two more of my men were gone. I found a trail this time. Me and a guy named McCrea followed it, while the others held tight.” He looked up at Kaufman. “You don’t want to know what we found.”
“Dead?”
“Torn apart,” he said unevenly, “and stuck up in the trees.”
Kaufman listened, concerned with the man’s state of mind. Dixon’s voice had begun wavering, changing pitch and cadence.
“That was it,” Dixon said. “Time to fucking go. Only your little friend had already made that decision and by the time we got back to that clearing he’d bugged out with the last of my people. So we got on his trail and hauled ass until we caught up to him. Seems we interrupted something making a meal out of him, and then … well, then it came after us.”
Kaufman had heard from the doctors that this patient was unstable. They’d warned him not to ask too many questions, but he needed more information.
“What the hell are you talking about? What came after you?”
Dixon looked out the window, the light filtering through the leaves seemed to calm him. It was a strange sight, a man of Dixon’s background and reputation, gulping at a lump in his throat, trying to fight off what seemed like waves of fear.
“I don’t know what it was,” he said finally, turning back to Kaufman. “We heard those calls in the mist and I stepped forward to take the point. There was something moving out there. I couldn’t see it, but I heard it, sensed it. I moved forward to take a shot, but it went for McCrea. It moved so fast. Like a barracuda in the water, or that spider that jumps out of its hole to get you. Bang!” He slammed his hand against the wall. “Now you’re dead.
“I took off running, but one of them caught me. I blasted the damn thing dead center. But it didn’t fall, it just changed direction a bit, snapped my leg and left me there for the natives to finish off.”
“And yet you’re still alive.”
“I couldn’t tell you why,” he said. “A squall line came through a little while later and I crawled out of there in the downpour. Maybe they couldn’t follow my trail. Maybe they figured I was as good as dead, why not let me suffer.”
“Interesting story,” Kaufman said, leaning back. “Sounds a little strange, don’t you think?”
“I didn’t say it made sense.”
Kaufman shook his head. He decided to be direct. Either the patient would crack or he might be jolted back into reality. “What really happened to you out there, Mr. Dixon?”
“I told you.”
“You’ve told me gibberish. Animals and natives killed eight armed men? Ex — Green Berets like yourself?”
“It’s the truth,” Dixon said.
“Is it?” Kaufman asked. “The doctors don’t think so. They think you cut your own leg. That the gash was so clean it was done with a blade.”
Dixon shook his head. Looking at the ground he mumbled, “It was one of them.”
“Them what?”
“I don’t know!” he shouted. “I don’t know what they were. Why the hell does it matter? Why the hell do you care?”
The man was bordering on a nervous breakdown. If he went over the edge he might never return. “Maybe you don’t know,” Kaufman offered. “I’ve seen your toxicology report — your body’s chemical levels were so far off you were hallucinating when they brought you in. Your temperature was one hundred and six degrees, high enough to cause brain damage. You had a massive infection where your leg had become septic and you’d lost a lot of blood.”
Dixon looked away.
“You screamed at the doctors,” Kaufman added. “Do you remember that? Do you remember calling the nurses demons, threatening to kill them if they put you under?”
Dixon shrank back slightly. “I didn’t … I didn’t want to sleep.”
“Terrors,” Kaufman guessed.
Dixon turned slowly toward Kaufman and when he spoke this time, his eyes were flat, unblinking, his voice gravelly and low. “My men,” he said. “I see them when I sleep. Their faces, their bodies.”
Kaufman paused. Whatever had happened, Dixon seemed to believe it. And for certain the NRI had taken preparations against the possibility of a native attack. Perhaps he could turn Dixon’s fear to his advantage. “Then maybe you want revenge?”
Dixon looked up at Kaufman. “What?”
“Take me back there,” Kaufman said. “I’ll bring an army with us. And we’ll wipe those natives from the face of the earth.”
Dixon blinked a few times but remained silent. “I’m not going back,” he said finally.
“If you want a big check, you will,” Kaufman said.
“No. I’m not going back,” Dixon repeated, sounding more like a man admitting to a newly discovered reality than one making a conscious decision.
“You’ll be safe. I promise you. We’ll all be well protected.”
Dixon started to laugh, but it was a sad laugh, a nod to the irony of life. He looked Kaufman in the eye and shook his head: the shipwreck survivor, unwilling to reenter the sea.
“I hope you understand what you’re throwing away,” Kaufman said.
The emotion drained from Dixon’s face and when he spoke again his voice had dropped. “Most people are born afraid,” he said. “But some of us only learn how to fear along the way. I spent half my life spitting on the weak and gutless. But now … it’s worse for me than it is for any of them, because I remember what it was like to be different, I remember a time when I didn’t know what it was like to be afraid.”
He choked back the lump in his throat once again. “I don’t eat much and I never sleep. And sometimes, even when I’m wide awake, I hear those things calling to one another, stalking us.” He shook his head emphatically. “I’ll sell you what I have, the crystals and the rest of the artifacts. But it don’t matter how much money you got. It ain’t enough to get me back out there.”
Frustrated, Kaufman glared at the man. “Then you can give me the location,” Kaufman said. “The spot on the map. That might be good enough for a partial payment.”
Dixon hesitated for a moment and then turned his gaze to the floor and Kaufman began to realize the truth. “You don’t know,” he said. “Do you?”