Black Rain

Susan watched in horror, backing away as the animal stood above the lifeless body. Strangely, it did not damage him further. It just stood there, eyeing him, its jaws opening and closing, its bony exterior glistening in the dim light. It sniffed the dead man. In the space behind its neck, a row of short, bristly hairs waved back and forth, swaying and parting like reeds in the wind. A gurgling noise resonated from deep within its throat and its segmented tail rose up above its head like a scorpion’s stinger. As the tail shot forward, the animal’s head tilted back and it released a hideous, inhuman cry.

It would be more than thirty minutes before any help arrived. The leader of Kaufman’s mercenaries brought six of his men, half the remaining force. They’d come ready to fight, but encountered nothing that would force them to do so. The only man they found was far beyond help.

One of the soldiers bent close to the body. The smell of sulfur was intense; the acid was still eating away at him. A trail of blood led to the pool next to them.

He picked up the man’s discarded shirt and threw it in. The water foamed up and the shirt quickly sprouted holes. “The water. It’s acid.”

Another soldier suggested a possibility. “Perhaps the girl pushed him.”

“Then what happened to the rest of them?” someone else asked.

Their leader looked around, aiming his flashlight into the corners of the cave. He spotted Lang’s camcorder and two more great swaths of blood. There was no acid smell at these sites, but there were marks in the blood, two-pronged tracks that led away from each site.

As the soldiers examined them, a piercing call echoed from the depths of the cave. The soldiers froze. It was a haunting sound.

Guns raised in all directions, the leader made a quick decision. “We’re going.”

“What about the others?” one man asked, remembering that there were still two soldiers unaccounted for. “And the girl.”

The leader motioned to the swaths of blood. “You won’t find them,” he replied, “not alive anyway.” He turned around and began heading for the exit.

————

Kaufman waited on the roof of the temple for his mercenaries to return. As the minutes ticked by, the tension grew. Devers approached him in the silence.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

“Now is not the time,” Kaufman warned him.

“When the hell is the time?” Devers asked. “You said I’d be out of here as soon as you took the camp. First flight out, you said. Well, your helicopter is gone but I’m still here.”

“Plans have changed slightly,” Kaufman said. “The natives might come back and I’ll need you for that.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to be here if they come back,” Devers said, more loudly than he should have.

Kaufman stood up, glaring at Devers, but it was not enough to stop the complaints.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” Devers insisted. “No one was supposed to get hurt.”

The temptation to have one of his men beat a lesson of humility into Devers coursed through Kaufman’s veins, but he decided it would be more important to straighten Devers out himself, rather than give the man something else to sulk about.

Kaufman glared at him. “You are embroiled in a web of self-deception, Mr. Devers. You have no rights here. I own you. Not just because of the money I paid you but because you’re now an accomplice to multiple homicides. What did you think was going to happen when two groups of armed men went after the same thing?”

Devers was silent. The first silence Kaufman had heard out of him since the day they’d met, since the day Devers and another member of the NRI, a man who had died with the first team, had volunteered to funnel information to Kaufman on various NRI initiatives, culminating in a project Devers had been asked to interpret for: the Brazil project. Even then, it was not until Kaufman had hacked the NRI’s files that he’d realized the importance of what they were looking for.

“This was more than I expected to do,” Devers said. “It was just supposed to be information.”

Kaufman understood his thinking; it was always the same. As if a little traitorous behavior was somehow less offensive than a lot. “In for a penny,” he explained, “in for a pound.”

Devers stared at him.

“Now get out of my sight until I need you again.”

Devers skulked away just as the mercenaries began to emerge from the temple. “Where’s Lang?” Kaufman asked as they reached him. “Where are the others?”

“They were killed,” the group’s leader told him. “Attacked. The animal you were told about is real. It’s down in the cave. I heard it.”

Kaufman had made the soldiers aware of Dixon’s ranting out of prudence, but he’d been more worried about the natives than anything else. “Are you sure?”

“Tracks in their blood,” the mercenary told him. “Two claws.”

Just as Dixon had described. “Dixon saw them in the forest,” Kaufman said. “Not the temple.”

“Then there must be more of them,” the head mercenary said, holding up his weapon. “We should get ready.”