“The audio is a shit, damn… Can you understand what he’s saying?”, asks Stu to Jennings.
“Not entirely. From what I see they wanted to shoot a footage to ask for a ransom, but something is not convincing me. The dog’s barking covers their voices. I think these are merely a band of jackals. Look at the face of that one, he is barely twenty years old. These assholes have put their hands on the survivor and want to gain something, but they don’t even know what they are doing. They’re improvising.”
After about five minutes, the man ends his speech and steps away from the other robber and the kneeling hostage. He stops at the edge of the view of the camera.
“Oh, that’s good”, says the old man. “That bitches’ raving was a real pain in my ass. Now go! Fuck that bitch you call mother, unless she is sandwiched in a camels’ gang-bang!”. His words vanish into a heavy cough, before he spits to the robbers. At that gesture, the man behind him raises his rifle gun, hitting the elder’s skull with its butt. The noise of the hit sounds too high. The old man looses consciousness, falling heavily to ground.
A heated debate fires up between the raiders, arguing loudly and pointing to the man lying motionless on the ground. One of the bandits stoops to check him on its neck, then he turns back to the others, raising even more the tone of his voice.
“What are they saying?”
“I believe the hostage is dead. That idiot has beaten him too hard, he must have broken through his skull. Now they’re arguing about what to do next.”
The three robbers in the footage seem to disagree. One of them, the one with the face covered by the black cloth, speaks with a hoarse guttural voice that covers those of the others. He makes eloquent gestures with his AK-47, pointing at the hostage and the camera. The others seem to give up, as if frightened, and they haste to obey him, although unwillingly.
“That son of a bitch is their leader”, murmurs Jennings tight-lipped.
One of the robbers leaves the group, walking towards the camera, while another moves to the left of the screen. The video stops here.
“Is that all?”, asks Jennings.
In response Stu moves through the tablet’s file-explorer, selecting the next movie, the last one. After the playback starts, the scene seen before seems to repeat. The man who was reading the paper now wields an assault rifle, he has his head down, and he’s singing a monotonous litany.
The group’s leader, who hit the hostage earlier, is in the center of the camera view, with the old man on his knees before him. He is holding up his head by his hair, but this time the old man doesn’t react. His eyes are closed and he seems stiff and white as a corpse. The man behind him, pulls a long knife from a liner hanging on his chest, then he bends placing one knee on the old man’s back, raising his head by pulling it back by his hair. With his left hand he quickly moves the blade, rapidly severing the man’s throat.
“Damn sons of bitches!”, bursts Stu, while the man dressed in black works fast, trying to completely sever the man’s neck.
“These idiots are cutting the throat to a corpse. It must have been a while since the first recording was shot, the light is different and… look well, there is very little blood. If he was alive, with blood pressure and heart beat running with fear, you would see a real fountain and a lake of blood.”
The two men watch the video with the hostage victim starting to shake like having a seizure. Trickles of blood come from the corners of his mouth and from his nostrils, and start to drip…
Upward.
“What the hell…”, murmurs Jennings, as something starts to happen and the scene, already too grotesque, begins to turn into a real nightmare.
The man’s hand that’s holding the knife slows down. The blade sinks in the neck of the dead man, as embroiled in the blood which, as by its own life, starts flowing upward, along the limb of the robber. At first this one gives no sign of being aware of what is happening. Then… as soon as he realizes that something is wrong he tries tugging to pull his hand free, without any result.
The man looks up towards the companion to his right, who is looking at the scene with a weird fac e. Long reddish tendrils, as thin as a finger, sprout from the bald head of the man who survived the plane crash. These stretch quickly, snaking upwards and forming rudimentary thorny limbs.
The robbe r shouts and tries to push away the body of the unfortunate prisoner with his right hand, frantically struggling to ward off the monstrous appendages. These, regardless of his efforts and his shouts, dig deep into his chest, while others manage to reach his neck and pierce his face through the fabric that’s wrapping it.
The man on t he left of the screen lets out a scream and then, shouting something in Arabic, he points his assault rifle at his friend, whose head is soon hidden by the mass of tentacles that keep popping up from the skull of what, just a few moments earlier, had the appearance a normal old man. This one is now unrecognizable, his face distorted as if it’s melting, while his mouth unnaturally wide open emits a wailing on different tones that reach the marines who stare at the scene on the screen. The eyes of the hostage victim move independently of each other, aiming at the same time at the man at the side of the screen and at the camera up front. The tiny speaker of the tablet emits a hissing sound, like that of a multitude of rattlesnakes.
Chaos breaks loose.
The robber armed with a rifle shoots at the creature. Other voice-overs shout something unintelligible. The blows of multiple rifles echo in the speaker. Suddenly the old man’s body stands up and other tentacular appendages protrude from his belly, almost as if his guts had taken an independent life and had turned into a brood of snakes writhing on themselves. With a thud, a mass of bloody flesh is thrown at the man that’s firing at the creature with his gun, hitting him on his thigh and firmly sticking on the limb.
The teeming being spits splashes of a whitish liquid that covers the face of the robber with a gelatinous coating. His shouts fade out in a gurgling gasp. His leg is yanked, knocking him down on his side. A burst of shots hits one of the jeeps, destroying the front window and one of the spotlights. The bullets open a row of holes in the side panel, till one of them hits the fuel tank, and the car explodes: the jeep jumps upward, falling back on one side, at the edge of the camera’s view.
New tentacles and other splashes of mucilaginous material are thrown swiftly towards the camera from the abomination in the center of the screen. More screams follow. Then the scene tilts. The two marines stare petrified at the third robber dragged by one foot toward the seething mass, from w hich misdeed and deformed limbs emerge, while on the surface dozens of eyes come to life and just as quickly get reab sorbed.
The man shouts and kicks, trying to break free. In the excitement the camera’s tripod is pushed aside by a tentacle, and the creature ends up out of range. The cries of despair of other men, accompanied by many guttural sounds, go on for about thirty long seconds.
Long tentacles dart in the air like a whip. The last man, crying desperately, is suddenly silenced.
Finally, the angry barking of the dog turns into yelps of pain.
The footage goes on in an unnatural strange stillness, the soldiers can hear just gurgles and liquid sounds, like wet rags that flap and glide in a hallway.