“Are you saying there’s a kickback coming?”
He said it teasingly, but Jill didn’t find it funny at all. She shivered.
“Are you cold?” He put his arm around her.
She stood up abruptly and brushed off her pants. “Why don’t we get back to the main artery? All this sunlight is deceptive. We have to make ourselves rest, Nate. We can’t afford to get overexhausted.”
“Right.” He slowly got to his feet. The excitement on his face dimmed, responding to the reappearance of “strategic Jill.” She felt a perverse relief.
That was what happened when she let down her guard and allowed herself to touch him, as she had while they were walking. It made him think he had the right to have his hands all over her all the time. Talk about dangerous. Someone had to retain control here.
“You sure you’re all right?” Nate asked.
“I’m great,” she said briskly. “Couldn’t be better. After all, you said it yourself, Nate: we’re in Paradise.”
17.3. Sixty-Forty Denton Wyle
Denton Wyle was lost in Paradise and he was in big, big, big trouble. His back was up against the rough, scratched-up bark of one of the bloody trees at the mouth of the horseshoe gorge, his hands were tied behind him, and his mouth was gagged. There were four Sapphians with him in a similar predicament. Their captors had mounted them there early this morning and had taken off again without so much as a thank-you or a parting gift of Valium.
Denton wished very much that he had some good drugs or that he’d fought harder with his captors and been knocked unconscious. Unconsciousness from a head injury would be great about now. But… no. He was completely awake and fully conscious and apparently was going to be for every long, stinking minute of this.
He worked against his bonds. The tree was fat and his arms were forced around the back—back there where they could do nothing to shield his nice soft belly and throat. The vine around his wrists was supertight, and he couldn’t even try to rub the vine against the bark, because he couldn’t move that way. His feet were untied, but there was nothing in front of him to kick and bracing them against the trunk and trying to push himself off only killed his arms. He still tried, crying with frustration and pain, until he could try no more.
The skalkits, whatever they were, still did not come. After giving up on escape, Denton had plenty of time to relish his fear, for the terror to have its way with him. You would think that you couldn’t sustain that level of fear for very long, but yeah, you could. It didn’t help that all he had to look at was the other Sapphians. They were visual echoes of his own doom. Their eyes rolled and streamed and their thin bodies trembled. He thought one of the females had wet herself. He wondered briefly what they’d done to be sent here, but he couldn’t spare much head room for them because he was too consumed with his own tragic loss.
Except that across from him was a young female who had been one of his morning visitors, an unusually shy, skittish type. She pleaded at him with huge brown eyes. As if he could do a freaking thing. As if it weren’t her stupid society’s fault in the first place.
He could have made his peace with all that free time, but all he could think about was how bad it was going to be, how much it was going to hurt, how terrified he was, how he hated this, how unfair it all was, how he would give everything to be far away, how he couldn’t believe this could really be happening to him, Denton Wyle. He cried for himself, great bunny tears. It was so unfair for a nice, white, twenty-first-century guy like him to be treated like this. It just was not right. And the worst thing was, he wouldn’t even get a decent funeral in LA with all his friends to mourn him. No one would ever know what had become of him; that was the worst part.
No, screw that. The worst part was going to be the pain.
And just when he was convinced it was never going to happen, it did. He heard them coming through the trees.
Denton thought he’d already been as scared as humanly possible. He’d been wrong. The sound in the trees caused his body to shoot sharp, cold stabs of panicked blood through his veins. His veins ached with the force of it, like getting a tetanus shot. He would have screamed except that he had no breath: his entire respiratory system had gone on strike.
What was coming through the trees was large. And eager, too; you could tell. The things, the skalkits, were crunching through the brush at an amazing speed. Whatever they were, they had to be enormous to slice through the jungle like that. Denton could hear things cracking and breaking that sounded like tree trunks, not just branches. Those things were freaking bulldozers.
Louder and louder.
He still hadn’t breathed, and he could feel his eyes bulging out of their sockets as they stared at the brush. His vision was going red. His entire body strained against his bonds in a completely automatic flight reaction, and he hadn’t even seen them yet.
Then two of the things entered the clearing.
His first thought as he saw the skalkits was: Holy freaking cow. They looked every bit as bad as his most paranoid conjurations. His last shred of hope that this would all turn out to be less of a big deal than it seemed choked and died.
The skalkits were slightly bigger than hippos or rhinos. Their skin was gray and leathery, hairless and wrinkled. Their massive limbs were muscled and they moved fast. They had large heads with beady little eyes and huge mouths of sharp, protruding teeth. Two lower mandibles curved upward, resembling tusks, and the rest of the teeth were chaotically arrayed. Their front limbs ended in three massively clawed toes.
Some button marked PREDATOR in the deepest recesses of his reptilian brain was being pushed, hard. Denton finally found his breath and screamed behind the gag. He screamed like a woman. He screamed like a little girl.
The skalkits stopped at the edge of the clearing, sniffing the air. One of them raised up on its hind legs, its front claws held a few feet off the ground, nostrils huffing, tongue darting out as if tasting their scent.
There was no doubt that that thing was looking right at him—at him, Denton Wyle. There was something in its eyes, something about as murderous as Denton had ever imagined an animal could look. It was like the look of his old dog, Lucky, when Denton would hold her favorite ball in the air in the backyard and move it around teasingly before throwing it. The skalkit was looking at him with the same intensity with which Lucky looked at that ball. No, like Lucky would have looked at that ball had Lucky been a ravenous man-eater instead of an easygoing canine and if the ball had been a blood-engorged hunk of meat. Or a bunny perhaps.
Denton fought his bonds like a wild man. And now that he thought about it, screaming wasn’t such a great idea—it was drawing their attention to him—but that didn’t mean he could stop. What was coming out of his mouth was completely beyond his control and sounded like one long, “Waaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
The other skalkit, the one that was not staring at him, approached one of the male Sapphians. Its body was crouched low, almost in a stalking maneuver, but its stealth was a mockery in this case, since its prey not only could see it but also was completely immobile. The skalkit’s eyes glittered with anticipation. It seemed to Denton to widen its mouth, to be grinning at its victim.
It stopped close to the male, sniffing him. The Sapphian struggled, looking pathetically vulnerable. The skalkit made a single easy swipe with a foreclaw and opened a nice long scratch across the male’s chest. It wasn’t deep, but it was the first blood of the day and the skalkits got very excited about it. The one that had been focused on Denton earlier was now riveted by the blood and let loose a piece of drool that could have filled a bathtub.