Black Rain

Exposed by their departure was the mangled body of a man in the same jungle fatigues as Dixon and McCrea. He lay facedown on a swath of crimson mud with a native spear broken off in his back. Chunks of flesh had been gouged from his legs, and his right arm and shoulder were gone, not cut clean but torn away, leaving only tattered strips of flesh and sinew draped over bloody spits of protruding bone.

“What the hell,” McCrea said, turning at the sight.

Dixon stared, disturbed but pragmatic. He addressed the dead man. “That’s what you get for trying to leave me behind.”

Beside him McCrea fought to hold it together. “The bastards did a number on him.”

The bastards were a native group known as the Chollokwan, a tribe that had been harassing them ever since they came west of the river. In a pair of skirmishes weeks before, Dixon and his men had gunned down a handful of the charging natives. But it seemed one lesson was not enough.

“Saved us the trouble,” Dixon said. “Now search him.”

McCrea dropped to the ground and rifled through the man’s pockets. Finding nothing, he pulled out a small device and switched it on. It began clicking slowly, accelerating into a rapid buzz as he zeroed in on the right spot.

“I told you he had them,” Dixon said.

McCrea put the Geiger counter away and dug into the man’s pack. He froze in place as a shrill cry rang out from the depths of the jungle.

Silence followed in its wake.

“It’s just another bird,” Dixon said.

“It sounds like …”

Dixon glared at McCrea. “It’s a long way off,” he growled. “Now just find the damn stones and we’ll get out of here.”

Under the weight of Dixon’s gaze, McCrea went back to work, soon plucking a greasy rag from the litter. Unfolded, it revealed a group of small stones, slightly larger than sugar cubes but twelve-sided and shimmering with a dull metallic gloss. Beside them lay a scratched, colorless crystal.

Dixon eyed the stones, the crystal and then the tortured face of his former charge. “Thief,” he said finally: a last pronouncement on the dead man, an epitaph for a traitor who would never see a proper grave.

McCrea rewrapped the bundle and Dixon took it.

“His papers too,” Dixon said.

Reluctantly, McCrea held out the man’s passport.

As Dixon took the ID packet, the shrill cry sounded in the distance once again. And this time a second call answered it, louder than the first, closer; a wailing screech that seemed to bypass the ears and pierce the brain directly.

“That’s not a goddamned bird,” McCrea said.

Dixon did not reply, but silently he agreed. They’d heard that call before, back at the temple, just before everything went to hell. He was not happy to be in its presence once again.

He shoved the stone-filled rag into a pocket and tightened his grip on the rifle, the veins on his massive forearms bulging. His eyes darted around as he strove to see through the mist and the trees and the same blocked sight lines that had hidden his own approach.

His thoughts turned to his dead former comrade. This was not good ground to be stalked upon.

Beside him, McCrea mumbled something unintelligible and then added, “We stayed too long.”

Dixon ignored him, drawing a machete from the scabbard at his hip and stepping forward, rifle in one hand, long metal blade held high in the other. He pushed through the fronds and then stopped.

On the jungle floor, beside another trail of dark, coagulating blood, he spotted a new set of tracks, long two-pronged depressions, like someone had shoved a tuning fork into the earth and then bent it forward. Try as he might, Dixon could think of nothing that left such a mark.

As he crouched to study them, he smelled a familiar odor. Pungent, almost ammonialike. And then the piercing call echoed through the forest once again, rolling over them like a wave and on into the distance.

“We need to get out of here,” McCrea said.

“Quiet,” Dixon replied as he studied the tracks.

“Man, don’t you see? It’s happening again.”

“Shut up!” Dixon ordered. He struggled to concentrate. Running would get them killed, but staying … There was something wrong with this place, a truth he hadn’t recognized until it was too late. Men were not the hunters here but the hunted.

From somewhere far ahead of him, Dixon heard movement, soft, like the flutter of owl’s wings, but at ground level. He put the rifle to his shoulder.

“Dixon,” McCrea begged.

The sound was coming toward them, faster now, racing through the forest but treading lightly.

“Dixon, please!”

Dixon rose up, preparing to fire, but the sound dodged to his left, passing him. He spun, pulling the trigger even as a dark blur exploded through the trees.

McCrea screamed. Gunfire boomed through the forest and a spray of red mist fanned out over the leaves, but there was nothing left to hit; no target, no enemy, no McCrea, just the low-lying fronds, swaying from the impact and covered in a sheen of human blood.

Dixon stared at the blood dripping from the leaves. “McCrea!” he shouted.