Staying low, she darted from the cover of the trees and made for the corner of the last tent in the row. It was, she recalled, where they kept supplies and food stores. It seemed likely that the contents of the tent were what the attackers might want most, but the situation had escalated beyond the point where the expedition could buy their safety by surrendering their stores. The attackers clearly intended to kill everyone and take whatever they pleased.
She crawled along the side of the tent and peeked around the front facing corner. She allowed herself only a quick glimpse, just long enough to take a mental snapshot of the camp, before pulling back and processing what she had just seen. It was enough to lift her out of despair.
One of the trucks was idling. She hadn’t been able to identify the driver, but there were three figures huddled in the bed of the vehicle. Two more were crouched behind the front end, taking careful shots with their rifles in the direction of the attacking force.
She had seen the enemy as well, at least a few of them, arrayed at the far end of the camp, crouching behind trees, content to pin their victims down until they lost the will or the ability to resist.
The space in between was littered with unmoving forms. People she knew. People she had lived with, worked with, shared meals with, joked with, gossiped with and sometimes fought with. Her friends. Dead.
She felt something stir in her gut — a primal creature too long subdued, with the scent of blood in its nostrils.
“No.”
The plea was a whimper, inaudible to anyone who might have been close enough to hear. I shouldn’t have come here, she thought. Shouldn’t have taken the risk. The beast — the ghost of a distant primitive creature that had become bound to her like a shadow during an expedition in Ethiopia two years earlier — responded to her rising fear. When it had first possessed her, the beast had nearly destroyed her mind, and in the resulting fugue state, had responded to external threats by destroying the minds of her attackers. She had mastered it, learned to control her emotions, but fear was like a fire that, once ignited, burned out of control. If the beast awoke, the world would burn. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to erase the image of horror from her mind.
“Felice!” The shout snapped her back into the moment, the bestial presence momentarily subdued. She opened her eyes and saw Derrick, hunkered down in the bed of the truck but waving to her, urging her to join them.
Yes. Escape. But how will they get past—
There was a deafening boom, and in the instant that followed, she saw something streak out of the forest beyond the camp entrance and strike the front end of the truck. Then a wave of darkness crashed over her.
Her awareness returned in a blaze of green and blue. She was on her back, staring up at the sky. The noise of the battle was gone. All she could hear now was a low tone, like microphone feedback. She felt strangely tranquil, and for a moment, she dared to believe that the attack had been a nightmare from which she was just now truly waking. Then she tried to breathe, and when her lungs refused to draw so much as a gasp, the terror returned with a vengeance.
Sensations bombarded her: smothering heat, something stinging her eyes like a chemical burn, pain shooting through every nerve of her body. The ringing in her ears started to diminish, replaced by the crackle and roar of a fire. Her breath finally caught, but instead of fresh air, she drew in a choking miasma of burning metal and plastic, the sulfur of gunpowder and high explosives, and ghastlier still, the odor of cooking meat.
Where the truck had been, there was only a blackened shell, dominated by flames and a pillar of dark smoke. The vehicle, however, was not the only thing burning. The tent behind which she had been hiding — or rather what remained of the flattened, shredded canopy — was also ablaze.
The darkness surged through her, not just in her gut but electrifying every fiber of her being. She told herself to run, to escape back into the woods where the killers would not find her, and where she might, just might, be able to quiet the beast before it tore through her defenses and laid waste to everything, but her body betrayed her. She could do little more than turn her head to witness the holocaust that had devoured her friends and would soon burn her as well… and when she burned, the world would burn.
A shape emerged from the smoke, a man, tall and thin almost to the point of looking emaciated. He wore no uniform — just tattered jeans and a t-shirt — but the rifle he carried marked him as one of their attackers. He pointed the weapon at her, but there was not a hint of wariness in the way he moved. The battle was over, and he was about to claim the spoils due the victor.
Felice struggled to move, willing herself to get to her feet… to run… but it didn’t happen. She lay there, unable to move, and as the man drew closer… twenty feet… ten… she knew that there would be no escape.
“Kill me,” she rasped, and in his eyes, she saw that he would, but only after he was done with her.
Suddenly, the man pitched back as if slapped by an invisible hand. A red mist settled over his unmoving form. Two more men had come into the camp behind him, and they were instantly on their guard, ducking for cover behind the flaming wreckage, shouting in confusion and alarm.
One of them went down, his head practically dissolving in a spray of crimson.
The remaining man screamed an unintelligible curse and broke from his place of concealment. He only got a few steps before the same unseen force struck out like divine vengeance and dropped him in his tracks.
Was someone still alive? One of their local guides perhaps?
There was more shouting and sporadic gunfire from the forest, but it seemed distant now, unthreatening. With the immediate threat removed, Felice felt her self-control returning, and as the beast retreated back into quiescence, she was able to move again. She rolled onto her side, away from the burning tent, and then managed to sit up.
An ominous quiet fell over the jungle; the shouts and shooting had stopped.
Suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone. A figure stepped into view, as if materializing out of the smoke. Her first thought was that he looked like one of the tree people from The Lord of the Rings — Ents, she remembered, they’re called Ents—brown and green, covered with what looked like leaves and moss, and as big as a walking tree trunk. It was camouflage, she knew. There was a man underneath it all, a man carrying an enormous machine gun. His face became clearer, peeking out from beneath a tree colored hat that was covered with leaves and twigs. His face was streaked with green and gray paint, and his eyes hid behind a pair of dark sunglasses, but she could tell by his features that he wasn’t African.
“Are you all right?”
The voice sounded faint, distant, as if a much greater space separated them, as if he was speaking from another plane of reality. He repeated the question again as he finished crossing the distance and knelt beside her.
“I don’t know,” she croaked, and she discovered that she couldn’t hear her own voice very well either.
With surprising gentleness for someone so big, the man put his hands on her shoulders and peered into her face. “I’m a friend. You’re safe now, Miss Carter.”