She sat bolt upright and looked around, trying to find the source of the cry, so she could run the other way. There was movement in the darkness, something moving toward the scream, and for a moment the beast in her belly began to stir again… but no, she was wrong.
Wrong about the absolute darkness… There was a faint green glow, almost close enough to touch.
Wrong about the lumbering shape crashing toward her… It wasn’t a shape at all, but her protector, the man who called himself Bishop.
Wrong about the scream… It was not inhuman at all, but was erupting from the compact form of the man she knew as Knight.
Knight sat hunched over a chemlight. He had removed his bandages and his exposed, raw, oozing flesh glistened in the green light. He had one hand held up to his injured eye, tugging at the metal protruding from it. His scream reached a climax as the shrapnel came free, releasing a gush of ocular fluid, thick with clotted blood. Then his howl changed to something that was almost like laughter.
Bishop reached Knight a moment later, kneeling in front of him and gripping his shoulders. “Damn, Knight. What the hell did you do that for?”
Knight bared his teeth in a fierce grin, but Felice saw that he was shivering. “Damn thing was trying to work its way into my brain. I had to get it out. Felt like my head was going to explode.”
Felice quickly found the med kit and knelt beside Knight. “What’s done is done,” she said, holding the glow stick close to survey the wound. She couldn’t tell if he’d made the injury worse by pulling the splinter out or if it had actually relieved some of the pressure, but one thing was evident: his eye was ruined beyond hope of repair. She tried to act clinically detached as she rinsed the area with saline solution. “But from now on, keep your grubby hands away from it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is he okay?” Bishop asked, speaking to Felice as if Knight wasn’t even there.
She placed the back of her hand against Knight’s forehead. “He might be feverish. I can’t tell. It’s so damn hot here all the time.”
“I’m good,” Knight said, sounding almost manic. “Fully mission capable. Drink water, and get back in the fight, am I right?”
Felice turned so that only Bishop could hear her. “Is he always like that?”
Bishop’s head shake was almost imperceptible in the darkness.
Before either of them could say more, an eerie hum reverberated through the woods. It reminded Felice of crowd noise — hundreds, even thousands of people all talking at the same time, their voices blending together into a strange hum. It lasted a couple seconds, stopped, and then was repeated, growing louder and more intense, until it seemed to be coming from everywhere.
“What is that?” Felice asked. “Is that a tank?”
Bishop shook his head as he searched the darkness for the noise’s source. “I don’t know what that is. Get him bandaged up. We might—”
He abruptly brought the M240 to his shoulder, ready to fire. Felice had seen it, too, a hint of movement in the night, the kind of thing that triggered primal fears.
Something lurked in the darkness, just out of sight.
She didn’t see it so much as sense it, disturbing the air with its presence. With a focused effort, she turned her back on the jungle and resumed tending to Knight’s wounds.
The machine gun let loose with a roar that made Felice yelp. The burst lasted only a second or two. The muzzle flash, almost blinding in its intensity, somehow failed to give any illumination. Bishop continued to scan the darkness, jerking the gun back and forth, but did not fire again. For several seconds, all she could hear was a faint ringing in her ears, the lingering auditory assault of the weapon’s rapid-fire report, but then the humming sound returned.
“Hurry,” he urged. “We can’t stay here.”
Felice wrapped a length of Coban around Knight’s head to hold a large gauze pad in place over his eye, and then hastily packed the med-kit and everything else into the rucksack.
“I’ll get that,” Bishop said, but she hefted it onto her shoulder, and then helped Knight to his feet.
“You’re going to have your hands full keeping us alive,” she replied.
He just nodded.
“What’s out there?” she continued. “The rebels?”
“Might be an animal. Or a pack of them. I don’t know.”
She mentally ran down the list of animals that she knew roamed the Congo. “Lions, tigers and bears, oh my,” she whispered to herself. That wasn’t quite right. More like lions, leopards, gorillas and warthogs. Oh my. Yet, none of those, nor any of the other dozens of dangerous animals she could name, felt like a good fit for the thing — or things — moving in the darkness.
Felice kept a hand on Knight’s uninjured right arm. She wasn’t sure if she was doing this in case he stumbled and needed help staying on his feet, or because she felt safer being in constant contact with another person. It was probably a little of both. She would have put her other hand on Bishop’s arm, but he had already moved ahead, and she struggled just to keep up with him. At times, it was so dark that she couldn’t see him — or anything else — at all, and had to simply follow the sound of his footsteps.
The strange droning noise came back from time to time, but if it was the call of a predatory animal, it did not announce an impending attack. After a while, Felice realized that she could see a little better. Dawn was breaking.
What little sleep she had gotten did nothing to refresh her and as they trudged on, fatigue affixed itself to her muscles like barnacles on a ship’s hull. The terror she had awakened to had become a fog of misery, and when Bishop called a sudden halt, it was all she could do to not simply drop to the ground in a fetal curl.
“What is it?” Knight asked. He sounded breathless, as if just asking the question had exhausted him.
“There’s a road here,” Bishop said. “Dirt track. Overgrown and probably not used very often, but it’s there.”
Felice peered ahead, but couldn’t distinguish any difference in the forest’s density. Nevertheless, she felt the fog of hopelessness lift a little.
“Risky,” Knight observed.
“Why?” she asked. A road was something definite, something they could follow without fear of wandering in circles. A road would lead, eventually, to some kind of human habitation, perhaps to a village, where they could make contact with the outside world and get some help.
“They’ve got vehicles,” Bishop explained. “They’ll be using the roads to look for us. But I don’t think we have a choice. We can’t just wander aimlessly around in the woods. We’ll skirt along the edge of the road and see where it takes us.”
The trek — Felice was starting to think of it as a ‘death march’—resumed, and she soon saw a thin ribbon of twilight overhead and off to the left. Before long, it brightened enough to reveal the trunks of the trees through which they were passing. Further off to the left, a clearing with parallel strips of dirt was packed by the repeated passage of four-wheel drive vehicles.
Bishop stopped abruptly, raising one closed fist. Knight froze in place, and Felice followed his example, even though her curiosity was burning. After more than a minute during which Bishop remained statue still, he turned slowly and whispered. “Do you smell that?”
Felice sniffed the air. There was a hint of wood smoke wafting through the jungle.
“Stay here. I’ll check it out.” Without waiting for their assent, Bishop moved off, following his nose.