I charge straight into the tangled plants. Branches snag my clothes, scratch my skin. The pain is distant, a faraway thing. I crash through a thick bush. I see glimpses of Bello’s white shirt as she’s pulled deeper and deeper into the wooded darkness alongside the thicket wall. I rush after her. My foot catches on a vine-covered log and I tumble forward. As I go down, I see her face clearly, see what is covering her mouth:
A hand, long and bone-thin and gnarled, wrinkled pitch-black skin. A black arm is wrapped around her waist.
I land face-first, kicking up a cloud of dead leaves. I scramble to my feet. I see another flash of her shirt as she again vanishes behind dense branches. I snatch up my spear and I’m moving. Something has my friend…not someone, something.
(Kill your enemy, and you are forever free.)
I yell for Bishop again, then I point the spear tip forward and I charge in. That thing that is hurting my friend: I will cut it to pieces.
I will kill it.
From the left, something slams into me, sends me stumbling—I bounce off a tree trunk and tumble down in a flurry of sticks and dried leaves. The world spins. I taste blood in my mouth.
“Don’t damage her!”
A new voice, a voice that promises murder, a voice I’ve never heard before and have also heard a hundred thousand times. The voice of a woman, of a Grownup. Something about that voice whips hard against the brain-mud suffocating my past—for a moment I can almost remember, then that moment is gone.
Where is my spear? I don’t see it. My hands whip across the leafy ground once, twice, but I don’t feel it.
Weaponless, I jump to my feet, turn to face this new threat.
I see a nightmare.
Two nightmares, a few short steps away. They are people but not people. Deeply wrinkled, coal-black skin covers spindly arms and legs. They have big red eyes, round and shiny, but no mouth—leathery flesh-folds dangle where a mouth should be. One is almost my height. The other is taller than me, with a jagged, dark-blue scar zigzagging down its chest.
There is something wrong about them, something that makes me want to turn and run, that makes me want to tear out my own eyes so I don’t have to look at them, jab sticks in my ears so I don’t have to hear them.
Bello isn’t here…more of these things must have dragged her away.
The smaller one points at me. “Take her,” she says in that voice I know but do not know. “Quickly, take her!”
The scarred one reaches for me. My hands ball into fists. I am afraid, yes, so afraid, but also enraged. It has to be them, the ones that put us down here, the ones that murdered those little children, the ones that let Yong and Latu die.
It grabs my left wrist and pulls me toward the thicket wall. I stumble, then plant my feet and yank back hard, jerking the monster around suddenly as if it didn’t expect me to resist at all. I kick at its shin: where my foot hits, I feel something break.
The monster lets go of my arm, hops on one leg to keep its balance. The other leg is bent in at a funny angle below the knee.
“You bitch,” it says. A man’s voice, growling and hateful. “You always were a bitch, Savage.”
If it has lips, those lips are hidden by the disgusting folds of skin hanging where a mouth should be.
It raises a trembling arm. There is something metallic ringing its forearm below the elbow, like a thick bracelet, and jutting from that bracelet is a metal rod that ends behind its bone-thin hand. Spindly fingers clench into a fist: the rod’s metal tip is pointed right at my face. On the bracelet, a white jewel begins to glow.
The smaller monster grabs the scarred one’s wrist, shoves the arm down.
“Don’t shoot her,” she says. “Just take her!”
Shoot her? That bracelet is a weapon?
Something heavy rips through the underbrush to my right, and suddenly Bishop is there, standing between me and the wrinkled monsters. Fresh scratches crisscross his bare arms and shoulders. A snarl twists his face into a mask that frightens me even more than these disgusting creatures.
He’s holding my spear.
Bishop roars and lunges forward: the blade drives deep into the scarred monster’s chest.
Everything stops.
Bishop’s rage-face melts away, replaced by that confused look I saw when we first met. He’s still holding the spear shaft in both hands.
Part of me sees the smaller monster scurrying off, vanishing into the trees, but I can’t look away from what Bishop has done.
The scarred monster stares at the metal buried dead-center in its chest.
“No,” it says. “No…I gave up everything.”
Bishop makes a noise that is more a whimper of fear than a battle cry. He realizes what he’s done, and it horrifies him. He yanks back, pulling the blade free. Thick, grayish-red liquid covers the metal. Bishop shakes his head slightly, automatically, as if he doesn’t want to believe this is happening.
The creature drops to its knees. It sags to its right side. It doesn’t move.
Bishop grabs my upper arm.
“Come on, Em! There could be more of those things!”
I try to wrench free, but Bishop is too powerful. All my strength barely moves him.
“They took Bello,” I say. “We can’t leave, we have to find her!”