Ancient Echoes

CHAPTER 25



FROM THE MOMENT Melisse stepped between the pillars, everything felt out of kilter. She tried to tell herself nothing had happened, but she couldn’t ignore the way Ted had vanished from her sight.

The university group had scrambled off the mound and huddled together fearful and awestruck. Some insisted nothing had changed for them, and that it was Ted who had somehow disappeared, not them. The argument was far from resolved when they heard a loud, eerie shriek. They ran from the mound and the pillars, but were too scared to climb back up the steep mountain they had descended. They knew how slow and difficult that would be.

They clung close to each other as they tried desperately to make their way eastward, the direction they hoped would lead back to Telichpah Flat. They felt guilty about leaving Ted, wherever he was, but were too scared to stay near those unearthly pillars. All they wanted to do was go home.

Hungry and tired, they eventually stopped. They gathered wood for a campfire. Melisse and Devlin still had their metal canteens, so they at least could boil water to kill the giardia protozoa, an intestinal parasite that lived in the area’s streams and creeks.

The moon was high when the forest erupted in a series of howls. They weren't the shrill cries of coyotes, and the group wondered if they were wolves.

“Does anyone have a gun?” Brandi asked.

When no one answered Devlin said, “I think the only one who did was fired.”

Rempart tried not to think about stories he had heard of strange creatures found out here. “Any wild beasts are much more afraid of you than you are of them,” he announced, hoping to quell fears by platitudes.

“How does he know?” Brandi loudly whispered to Rachel.

“Everyone, get some sleep,” Rempart ordered. “We have a long day tomorrow.”

The students glanced at each other, every one of them too nervous and fearful to move until Melisse said, “He's right.”

o0o

As the sun began to rise, Melisse awoke.

Her mind kept telling her that what she saw was impossible, yet offered no logical answer.

She unclipped a tracking device from the inside of her cargo pants pocket. The green light wasn’t blinking. It looked dead. The tracking device kept tabs on where she was, so that, if the situation grew dangerous, she could be rescued. She suspected the electro-magnetic transmission that had stopped her watch had shorted the device.

The others still slept. She crept to the shelter of some trees. In another of the many pockets of her cargo pants she carried a phone. Dire emergencies only, she’d been told. This qualified.

The state-of-the-art phone looked like a Blackberry, but the water-tight lead-titanium alloy case shielded it from everything short of a nuclear blast. It uplinked to a constellation of 66 low-earth orbiting satellites that blanketed the globe. Its high capacity Iridium battery used a solar charger to avoid any downtime.

It was as dead as the tracking device.

“What are you doing?” She jumped and spun around to see Vince approach. “I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he said. “What’s that? A phone?”

She put the phone back in its case and shoved it in her pocket while saying, “Phones don’t work out here.” He might be a weakling, but he knew electronics. A high tech sat phone would cause questions she didn’t want to answer.

She hurried back to the camp where others were stirring. Hunger had caused them to wake early.

“Shouldn’t we go back to the pillars to see if we can find Ted?” Brandi asked. “First Brian, now Ted! I’m scared!”

“Ted probably couldn’t climb up the mound,” Devlin said. “I doubt we’ll find him.”

“I don’t get it.” Brandi began to sob. “I don’t understand where we are! What’s happening to us?”

The others started walking, leaving her behind. They had the same questions, and no answers.

She waited a while, but no one returned, no one offered comfort. Finally, she dried her eyes and set off after them.

As she walked, she noticed a strange, musky smell similar to that near the pillars. She began to move a bit faster. Her breathing quickened; her pulse pounded. The others were a lot farther ahead than she realized. She tried to jog toward them, but her legs were weak and tired, and before long a stitch caused her side to ache. She stopped, hand to waist, and bent forward in pain. She heard a noise in the brush up ahead.

“No,” she whispered, dropping to her knees. “Help me, somebody.”

It was Melisse. She realized Brandi had fallen behind and went back to help. She was just about to take Brandi’s arm when she smelled the foul odor. Leaves rustled; a twig snapped.

She put her hand at the back of her waist under her jacket and sweater and gripped a Beretta M9 semiautomatic pistol. It was warm against her skin, the familiar handle oddly comforting in this peculiar environment.

“Come on,” she ordered Brandi. “Move it!”

“It’s here,” Brandi whispered.

A flash of movement. Melisse spun left, toward the brush, gun in hand.

A low growl rumbled. A strange beast, well over a hundred-fifty pounds and shaped like an enormous brown weasel stood with its long snout in the air as if trying to analyze their scent. Then it rose up on its back legs, as tall as Melisse, its eyes yellow and malevolent, its claws long and glittering as if made of gold.

She had never seen, never heard of, anything like it. Trying hard to quell her shaking hand, she raised her gun. The beast’s growls grew louder, fiercer, as if it knew what a gun could do. The lips curled and a snake-like forked tongue lashed out at them. Shocked, Melisse nearly dropped the Beretta. In a surge of pure muscle, the monster leaped.

Two hands on the gun, Melisse fired, hitting its shoulder. The beast seemed to pivot in mid-air, and her second shot missed it altogether. It ran for the cover of the brush.

She fired once more.

She heard the crackle of dead twigs behind her this time. She spun around, gun poised.

“Stop! Don’t shoot!” Devlin shouted.

She lowered the handgun as the group cautiously moved forward.

“Where did you get that firearm?” Rempart demanded.

“What were you shooting at?” Devlin asked, seeing the ashen pallor of her face.

“It was a…a mountain lion,” she whispered, placing the gun in the holster at her back. She couldn’t possibly have seen what she thought, and Brandi was too hysterical to contradict her. “It came at us.”

Rempart’s mind spun back to tales he’d heard as he had researched coming to this area. He didn’t want to think about them. “Why didn't you tell me you had a gun?”

Melisse glared furiously at him. “What difference would my gun have made to you? At least I had one, or Brandi and I would be dead!”

“Perhaps I should be the one to hold it,” Rempart suggested, thinking about the mountain lion and Melisse’s reaction. She wasn’t a woman to scare easily.

Her voice turned deadly. “Only if you can take it away from me.”

Rempart backed away. “Let’s get away from here.”

“Yes,” Melisse murmured. “It isn’t dead. It might return.”

Brandi’s world spun, but she couldn’t take her mind off the creature. It was no mountain lion. It was the most frightening thing she had ever seen. She moved forward, shock and terror blocking out everything beyond the need to get away. But then she saw that everyone had stopped. Run, her mind cried. Why didn’t they keep going? Why were they waiting?

Melisse, too, stopped suddenly. It took another moment for Brandi to fully process what had happened. They stood at the edge of a cliff, the descent too sheer and steep to climb down. There was nowhere to go but back, where monsters waited.