The Chimera Secret

42

Ethan stared out into the forest, unable to process the fact that this animal had so comprehensively outwitted them. He was attempting to formulate some kind of response when Klein jogged back into the camp.

‘Simmons’s body’s gone,’ he said, and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Ripped right out of the trees.’

Kurt Agry turned to the soldier. ‘It’s gone?’

‘That thing was twenty feet up in the air,’ Lopez uttered.

Kurt Agry turned and looked down at Duran Wilkes, who was still on his knees and staring into the forest where the creature had presumably run off with Mary.

‘Duran,’ Kurt said, and crouched down on one knee alongside the old man. ‘Can you track it?’

Duran stared blankly into the wilderness, muttering to himself behind eyes glazed with emotions that Ethan didn’t like to see. He imagined that he might have borne that same, wild-eyed disbelief for months after Joanna had vanished without trace from Gaza City.

‘Duran,’ Kurt repeated more urgently, grabbing the old man’s shoulder. ‘Do you want to find Mary alive?’

Duran looked at the sergeant and nodded, the wild look in his eye vanishing in a blink to anger.

‘Can you track it?’ Kurt asked.

Duran looked into the forest and his paralysis vanished. ‘Damn right,’ he hissed, and reached down to grab his rifle.

Agry stood up and looked at them all. ‘We’re not running anymore,’ he said. ‘We’re going after this thing. Anybody have a problem with that?’

Ethan watched as everybody shook their heads. He looked back to where the dead elk lay somewhere in the distance, then at Duran Wilkes, and then out to where Mary had been dragged away into the forest.

‘Yeah,’ he said finally, ‘I do.’

‘What?’ Kurt snapped, grimacing at him. ‘You want to go home instead? I thought you were a goddamned marine?’

‘What’s on your mind?’ Lopez asked.

Ethan gestured back to where they had hung the soldier’s body as bait.

‘We set a trap for this thing,’ he said. ‘It then deceives us to distract us away from Duran and his group, steals Simmons’s body, and then takes Mary away. Doesn’t anybody else think that’s a deliberate plan of action on its part?’

‘I don’t care if this thing reads War and Peace every night and plays fucking chess,’ Kurt snapped back. ‘Only way we’re getting out of here is if it goes down, and it’s going down.’

‘That’s what you said yesterday,’ Lopez pointed out.

Kurt gestured at Duran. ‘He’ll take us to it, and we’ll kill it.’

‘And that’s my problem,’ Ethan said. ‘I don’t think it’s doing any of this randomly. I think it wants us to follow it.’

Kurt stared at him for a long moment. Ethan noticed that Duran now turned his head and looked straight at him.

‘You think?’ the old man snapped.

‘I can’t figure out any other reason for why this is all happening,’ Ethan replied. ‘It stopped us from getting back out of the valley, but let us travel north. It took Willis, then hurt him so that we’d hear it, to keep us following. Now, it’s outwitted us and taken one of our number again, giving us a reason to keep following it. It killed that elk as bait and tore off the antlers so that we wouldn’t identify what we were looking at until it was too late.’

Duran clenched his rifle tightly as he shook his head. ‘That’s not what happened to my wife. It just took her and disappeared.’

‘Different circumstances,’ Ethan said. ‘If we start following it instead of trying to kill it, we might be able to figure out why it’s doing what it’s doing.’

Kurt Agry turned away from them in disgust. ‘This is bullshit. You really think the ape’s gone all Einstein on us?’

Duran Wilkes got up from his knees and hefted his rifle onto his shoulder.

‘We’ve done things your way twice now, Kurt,’ he said, ‘and both times it has cost lives. Now my Mary is gone. You’re not my priority right now: she is. I’m going to follow this thing and find out where it leads me.’

Duran looked at Ethan and nodded once before he turned on his heel and walked away between the broken and trampled ferns. Ethan looked at Lopez, who shrugged.

‘I’m in, if you want to go for it?’

Ethan nodded and picked up his bergen. ‘What we’re here for.’

‘What you were here for,’ Kurt Agry corrected him, ‘was to find Cletus MacCarthy’s body, and he was killed miles from here in Fox Creek.’

‘That’s right,’ Ethan agreed, ‘and we haven’t found him yet. This creature just strolled out of here with at least two bodies in its grasp and didn’t seem to find it that hard, so my guess is that wherever it takes them is where we’ll find Cletus and the answers we need. You got any better ideas, how about sharing them?’

Kurt’s features creased with indignation.

‘You need to get yourselves out of this,’ he uttered.

‘Out of what, exactly?’ Lopez snapped.

Kurt looked at her for a moment. ‘Out of this forest.’

‘We will,’ Ethan replied, and turned to follow Duran. ‘Right when we’ve done what we came here to do.’