“I hope you’re right, Lieutenant, but my friend, who’s an expert on such things, doesn’t think so.”
“What else could it be?”
“That is a very good question.” And the priests of the Restoration might have the answer.
“Well?” Mailos said. “Can you do anything for him or not?”
Avery returned his attention to Xarris, who was now frothing at the mouth, his eyes jerking crazily in his skull. He trembled only a little now, subsiding every moment. Soon he would be completely still, except for his eyes.
“There’s nothing in my training that enables me to deal with this,” Avery said honestly, “although we do at least have gloves and protective suits we can use to touch him with, and plastic to wrap him in. If this is some local ailment, perhaps the villagers of Sevu can be of assistance. If nothing else, they’ll have poultices, herbs, fresh water, a place for him to rest. At best they might even be able to treat the illness, if we can call it that.”
“Well, they do owe us,” the lieutenant mused. “But I sent a runner ahead to appraise the approach to Sevu. Bad news: the villagers haven’t maintained the road from the main road to the village. We’d have to go by foot.”
Avery motioned to the wrecked vehicles. “We can’t go forward by automobile until these are moved, anyway.”
“Fine. You and your people come with me. I’ll detach a group of soldiers to go with us to the village while the rest stay here and clear the path.”
He strode off, giving orders, and Avery turned to the others to see them looking nonplussed.
“I don’t like this, bones,” Hildra said.
“Do you have a better plan?”
She bit her lip.
“Do you think ...?” Janx started, then gathered himself. Some terrible notion seemed to have occurred to him
“Yes?” said Layanna.
“Shit, you think this is why those Nisaar attacked the caravan? To, you know, burn out the disease?”
Avery looked at him, startled, but could not answer.
* * *
Lt. Mailos gave Avery some time to wrap the maggot-riddled soldier, Private Tulos Xarris, in a protective cocoon of plastic and rubber, and had several men cart him around the stopped vehicles and down the road; others carried the armor the group would need. Walking with the soldiers, Avery fished for any necessary medical information, such as congenital and contracted diseases, and discovered from them that Xarris had grown up on a pig farm. His father had died early of a heart attack and his mother turned to drink, beating her three sons regularly and forcing them to work at grueling labor from sun up to sun down till eventually Xarris had enough and ran away from home for the bright lights of the big city. Although the soldiers wouldn’t come right out and say it, Avery received the distinct impression that Xarris had had to earn money in the oldest way possible once he got there, servicing men in back alleys and rest rooms until one day he came of age and was able to join the military. Now, less than a year later, just when his life was really beginning, this. Avery could only hope the people of Sevu had more answers than he did.
Mailos stopped, gesturing at the jungle. “Hard to see, but this is the trail. Or what’s left of it.”
“Fuck this, man,” a soldier said, but when Mailos narrowed his eyes at her, she looked ashamed.
“If that was you,” Mailos said, flicking his gaze to Xarris, who still twitched every now and then, “you’d want us to make every effort to save your sorry ass, wouldn’t you? Well, this is our best shot, and we’re taking it. Any objections?”
“Single file through the jungle,” grunted another soldier. “And with those Nisaar pissed at us. A good place for an ambush, Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. Place a scout ahead of us and a trailer behind. No one will take us unawares.”
Some still grumbling, they began donning the strange armor used for trekking through the jungle.
“Godsdamned uncomfortable,” Janx said, struggling into his. He had to stuff himself inside like an overlarge, naked lobster trying to inhabit the shell of a smaller specimen.
“It’ll save your ass in the Drip,” a nearby soldier told him.
Janx mumbled something under his breath and snapped a piece into place.
Avery had to agree with Janx. The armor may have fit Avery better than it did the whaler, but it pinched and stifled regardless. Breathing into the helmet, tasting his own breath with every inhalation, he was reminded of the environment suits worn on the Atomic Sea, but at least those were of fabric, not metal.
Once ready, the group trooped through a narrow corridor in the jungle, alien plants crowding them on all sides. The stench of ammonia and exotic poisons filled Avery’s nose more than before, burning his eyes and sinuses; the armor was not airtight and the respirators were only for emergencies. Only about half of the vegetation seemed to have been contaminated by the infection spreading from the local waterways, if that’s what had done it, but the infected trees and vines and undergrowth blended so thoroughly with the green, healthy plants that the alien presence was omnipresent, and Avery began to feel a panicky feeling, made worse by the armor. Strange noises sounded through the jungle, hoots and chitters, ticks and warbles.
Some of the trees moved. Some grasped. Some swayed in winds that weren’t there. Some had become translucent and glistened eerily; Avery could see the vegetation on the other side of them through their glassy substances.
Many animals hid from the party of men, but others showed no fear, idly watching the humans from tree limbs and holes in the ground. Avery saw a massive, poisonous lion-fish creature jutting from a tree, saw a mutated, scale-covered batkin hanging upside down from another knotty limb that was almost invisible. Once he heard a great crashing, rending noise off to his left, and all the soldiers jerked to a halt and stared in that direction. They’d taken turns carrying Xarris, but now the ones who bore him set him down and took hold of their weapons, aiming toward the noise. For a long time they all just stood there, staring, but at last the crashing and thrashing moved off, and they took deep breaths and resumed their march.
The vegetation constantly dripped, and Avery heard plinking on his armor all the time, and the accompanying steam of acid or venom, so much so that it seemed to him as if a constant steady rain fell. Plink plink plink. Plink plink plink. It almost grew to be reassuring ... until it wasn’t.
Two hours into the march, one of the men screamed. He’d been walking under a certain branch, and a fluid that had dripped on him was more potent than the others. Smoke rose from the contact of the droplets. As Avery rushed over, the man was ripping at his armor, trying to get it off. Avery helped, then gasped when he saw the damage the droplets had done. Not only had the acid eaten through the metal of his armor, it had also taken a good chunk out of the man’s shoulder. Thankfully the armor had taken most of the damage and the substance had only blackened his skin and eaten out a small circle. After the application of a salve from Avery’s medical kit, the soldier was able to press on, though he would be scarred for the rest of his life, assuming he survived the jungle to live it.
The band kept a very close watch on what trees they walked under from that point on. They reached the village before night fell, and Avery felt a great sense of relief that they wouldn’t have to travel through the jungle after dark. Gods knew what terrors night would unleash. A wide swath of burned ground created a perimeter around the village, and a cry went up from the wall as soon as the party entered the clearing. Avery felt his back hunch to be so exposed and wondered what he and the rest looked like to the natives: black-armored, strangely-weaponed, almost alien figures appearing out of the jungle.
“Are we safe?” he asked, as the shouts of villagers echoed in his ears.
Mailos started to answer, then seemed to realize he didn’t know. Before anyone else could speak, the village gate swung open and a group of natives spilled out. Two carried rifles and covered the rest, armed with spears and knives, as they approached Avery’s party. The leader—short and broad, with a circle of red feathers (almost certainly trophies taken from slain Nisaar) on a string around his neck—jabbered at them in some language Avery didn’t know, and Lt. Mailos responded in kind, having to pause here and there, obviously not fluent. The conversation continued haltingly, and there was much animation among the gathered villagers at something Mailos said.
Avery marveled at the appearance of the villagers. All were infected, of course, as they lived deep in this alien hell, but what was most striking about them was that they had acquired mutations derived from the flora and fauna of the area. Instead of the usual fish-men and the like, Avery saw a man with spotted leopard-fur, another hunched over and using his knuckles to propel himself, and another with the bristly hair of a boar. Others did show more traditional mutations—fish scales along one arm, a partial carapace, protruding eyes, the vanishing of a nose—but Avery suspected this was more because the local fauna was just as strange as the environment would indicate.
The leader, who had dark fur on his chest and one arm that might have been derived from a sloth, and short tusks sticking up from his lower jaw that were probably boar-ish, called out toward the village, and a woman who must be a shaman of sorts materialized. Tall, bone-thin and covered in intricate tattoos (all of them glowing in the shadow of the wall, hinting at the presence of the ghost flower), the ancient crone emerged shaking a rattle and mumbling some benediction or curse. One of her legs was bent backward and cloven-hoofed, causing her to walk with a springy limp.
She approached Xarris, who had been stretched out on the ground, and poked and prodded him, leaping back every time one of the maggots popped from his skin but not seeming surprised at their appearance. Indeed, a strange smile lit her face and she chattered excitedly with the man who led them. Not so excited, but suitably awed, he said something back to her, then spoke to another man, who ran into the village. Moments later a group of women emerged with a stretcher made of reeds and fronds; each covered in glowing tattoos, but none as much as the head woman, the women wore thick gloves made of some local fabric. They carefully, even expertly, moved Xarris onto the stretcher, then picked him up and started to carry him inside the walls of the village.
“Wait,” Avery said. “Where are you taking him? I’m his doctor.”
Mailos shot him a sour look but translated, and when the crone responded, he told Avery, “She says they’re taking the Chosen Man—put capital letters there; they’re serious about this—to a healing place.”
“I don’t understand,” Avery said. “Are there others like this?”
Mailos spoke with the crone, who answered impatiently, then led her women and their patient inside.
“She’s says there’s more,” Mailos told Avery.
“How many?”
“She didn’t say.”
“So it is some local ailment,” Layanna said. “Good. Then they’ll know how to deal with it, and perhaps they can show us how to treat it in case any of the rest of us become infested.”
