Chapter Text
The whipping of wet and warm air roused her mid free fall. In time to witness the endless sea of deciduous treetops approaching underneath like the risen tide of incomprehension.
Something was snug across her middle. Unfamiliar straps overlaying the blood-smeared padded winter jacket and bitten-up matching cargo pants, flapping violently like campfire flames in a gale. Straps to whatever the rigid object on her back was. A dial on the chest began beeping with building intensity, but no matter how hard she slapped it didn’t stop. When it hit an apex, a parachute from behind deployed and snapped her upright. The dizzying descent snagged the chute over cracking tree branches until it yanked her to an abrupt stop with a grunt, splintered wood chunks raining. Hands dashed for a release and too conveniently found it, untangling and dropping several meters onto soft jungle flooring.
With a few heaving gasps, she willed her lungs to expand as if breathing air for the first time after falling through frozen ice. No relief after escaping the plunge, amplifying confusion wreathed in exotic scenery. Slumped on the ground, feeling her hands shaking and cold sweating, she groaned softly at herself while forcing into an upright sit. Mind fought to dial the terror back down to a controlled simmer, staring up into the mess she fell through as stray leaves still sprinkled. The fear-to-anger pipeline had no target to pursue yet, no task to narrow focus and distract, and letting it overflow would only announce her weakness. Hell if she’d let anyone’s first impression of her be weakness.
She made a sharp exhale with her palm shoved behind the breath, as if it helped expel the bad energy, then muttered, “Well. That was something.”
Bummer of an end to a long and already calamitous night. One of the worst treks in recent memory, and there were ample competitors for that honor. Oddly not in first place was the first time some guy began shooting towards her campfire in the dark, more middle of no where than home. Fucker wouldn’t stop, had no reason to be shooting out that way at that time, and she could hear the bullets hitting branches around her head. So she hunted him down and jumped him, choking him out with a spare sports bra and her knee for a backpack. What a fortunate moron to be cut loose after toying with her bad nature that way.
In first place for worst trek ever was her first time bumping into a bull moose.
Now usurped by whatever the fuck happened. At least the soggy ground, even in an unfamiliar place, even in an unknown biome far from all she knew, staved off some distress. Eyes scanned the surroundings, calmer now but quickly overrun with the urge to get moving. It was entirely possible that whoever ordered this toss out an airplane was waiting on arrival, and she wanted to find them and express her feelings. Real thorough like. See if, perhaps, they had anything to do with the midnight shooter. Or whoever else received her ire. A list of candidates might be lengthy.
Before anything else random could happen, a necessary inventory, to see what she had to work with: One mid-sized gardening knife, a hori-hori, with a serrated edge, plus a Bowie knife, both rapidly accessible from homemade leather sheathes on her belt. Plus in her soft canvas lumbar pack was an empty field med kit (shit), the horse pill of a multivitamin she forgot to take earlier, a homemade fire starting kit, two meters of frayed cordage, an empty and folded up cloth water bag (SHIT), and a near-empty bottle of water purification tablets.
And each forearm was steeped in a mixture of her own and a grey wolf’s blood. Unconcealable under multiple layers of taut bandage burning with memory from the bites presently disacknowledged.
Kieran Lee yanked her winter gear off and let the set fall to the ground, able to breathe easier in a long-sleeve tee rolled up the arms. There were more layers to shed but she didn’t know if nights here would be chilly, thinking ahead to the likelihood of being stranded for some time. Fuck. What ridiculous chances for a recluse. Half the point of the lifestyle was to avoid ridiculous situations. Who’d want to abduct her ass anyway? If they had done proper research, they’d have simply put a bullet in her brain before bothering.
Outer layer of socks half off, she heard several interesting thumps nearby, and swiftly laced her work boots back up to noiselessly search their origins. Peering through one of many lush fern cloaks and tall grass patches, she could see others up ahead who similarly plummeted from the sky in parachutes. Odder a situation still. Either they all had beef with someone, or there was some other reason for this selection. War? Ransom? Powerful grudges?
Four were already gathering together to make sense of it all. Their discussion was mostly careful - oddly boastful - introductions and speculation. Some woman named Tara dressed in a pencil skirt who extolled the virtues of working with vulnerable peoples. Some guy named Uri dressed in all black tactical gear who told Tara to ‘shut the fuck up’. No clue among them of where this place was or what happened. A few more joined the ranks, becoming a proper gaggle of physiques and age groups, skewing male and skewing cantankerous. All decided to journey ahead together. Kieran followed for a while, debating the make of their collective, maintaining a generous distance.
The way she saw it, bodies clumping together could never guarantee safety. It would draw attention, thus drawing trouble. From noise, from visuals, from heat, from other peoples’ dumb fucking impulses, stupid beliefs, lack of consideration, and careless failures. All it took was one person to get the rest killed, and often one good-natured idiot to try saving them, and killing themselves or more in the process. It wasn’t that she disliked having a sense of community, she only despised sharing it with those deemed unworthy. By default everyone was unworthy.
The woosh of a mass humming electronically darted high overhead. It disappeared as quickly as it came. Then another glance of it appeared far ahead, above the group as it contoured over a verdant hill. Confirmed that it was a drone, moderately swept wings and a sleek and segmented design. A feeling of outrage bubbled within, not unlike being peeped on through the bathroom window. The feeling of being scouted after, stalked, like prey. Never pleasant being on the receiving end.
Trapping was as much a part of hunting as scouting was: It ended up being no surprise to Kieran when the first booby trap appeared. The angle of her new overlook provided a chopped view of the group, all of them at the deep valley of a far hill. Not unlike gladiators being watched by Romans, expected to fight to their deaths, and the combatants were woefully outclassed by tricky sport. Over the course of fleeting moments, she found gruesome sight of two people falling into the sharp bottom of an oversized trapping pit. Only one was lucky and died near instantly, a spike emerging out the base of their neck in a gory mess. The other survived the fall, immobilized, their screams lingering in excess. Originally they were eleven members strong, now cut down to nine.
Then eight, when Uri panicked and ran into a net trap that twisted and shrank itself up until nothing but chunks of cubed meat remained. Gruesome as it was, a flicker of morbid humor gave a single huff of an unsmiling laugh. Didn’t take him long to break.
It made her wonder who the game’s editor was, what all this gratuitous bloodshed was supposed to be for, her upper lip curling in disgust. Didn’t seem like good sportsmanship at all, overkill at least and batshit crazy at best. A little voice inside, the one that occasionally reflected her long-ago therapist, said, ‘This should all feel batshit crazy to you’. To which her consciousness responded by mentally palming towards the comfortable, generous distance she maintained. Satisfied to have avoided intermingling. Adapting before her brain could catch up and register a proper emotion.
All her deepest instincts drove her forward with a single word illuminated in mind: Survive. Survive no matter what.
It had been at least a few hours and the sun’s position hadn’t changed. Vexing, raised her hackles when she realized it. Seeking out a clearer view of the sky clarified why, beyond any shadow of a doubt. Scooping all breath out of her, somewhere between horror, entrancement, and natural wonder, like the first prehistoric human to ever see aurorae.
I should have brought the fucking 12 gauge.
A massive planet hogged the sky. Tremendous, titanic, looming, with a metallic moon behind in tow. In the farthest parts of the horizon, other foreign planets and moons. An embering and cloudy orange atmosphere cradled it all. The sight utterly cleaved her optimism, made her feel like she was sweating inside her skin and spiraling lost through unknown cosmos. She wanted to scream numerous multi-lingual expletives, throw up stomach acid, but self-announcing and trail-dumping were not good tenets of survival.
This alien jungle was enough of a sensory hell without inviting even more bad luck. The sheer amount of concealable lookouts overwhelmed. The breezy wind drowned ears in the overlapped swishing of grassy ferns and many varieties of waxy leaves, growing throughout the ground all the way up completely unknown types of trees. All beyond her botanical proficiencies. Even the grass looked a little weird, smelled a little weird. But of all things out of place were the lack of animal sounds. In a jungle, her lay knowledge level expected many birds, primates, shit like that. Their complete absence was not natural, making this area feel pruned with intent. Much like an arena.
That was the feeling she could not shake ever since the drop-in. The inkling of a presence supervising the space. Of something exhaling, observing, and foliage shifting a little stronger than winds could undertake.
Visual scans around revealed no cameras, no artificial scenery, no wires, no microphones, no transmitters, no trace of anything but nature and those traps back there. Tactile scans were about the same. Feeling her way across whatever trees she deemed suspicious, cutting open abnormal-appearing vines to make sure they were purely organic, even digging for buried sensors. Lack of results didn’t make her feel better, but with thorough efforts ticking the task off her list, she moved on to the next concern.
Food would need addressing soon. She was used to going long periods of time without meals, still needing to finish work, and today was clearly going to be one of those days. But there was no game that she heard or smelled so far, no scat, no chewed leaves, no marks on the bark or in the land. Would have thought edible root plants were around based on some promising leaf shapes and proximity to the ground, but nothing dug up so far. No sign of berries or fruits or nuts, just flowering plants whose vibrant colors screamed ‘don’t touch, obviously poisonous.’
This place really does make no fucking sense. There’s obvious biodiversity wanting to spring out but it gets hacked back. Too many different tree species, too much variation to lack food for other things. Life here should be packed asshole to bellybutton …
… The fuck is ‘at?
Sounded like running. Rapid footfalls, maybe approaching. Weird barking, not like any canids she knew of. Maybe there would be game to hunt after all. At first she thought it was a migration or small stampede of local wildlife, finally breathing some fleshbound life into the scenery, but the sounds were becoming clearer. The rhythm steady with purpose.
Heading this way.
She bolted in the opposite direction, bounding over wild floor.
When the noises came too close for comfort, she high-tailed it up something resembling a girthy rubber tree as fast as musterable, stopping a comfortable 7 or 8 meters up not ten seconds later. The deep callouses on her hands and the developed musculature of her body made easy grips. Soon under her barreled the noisy culprits. Quadrupeds, big and wolf-sized (ugh), but with ultra dense muscle mass. Scaly and glossy skin with spiked appendages sprouting like fingers from its back, both to the front and to the rear. Eager to meet her.
A hunch wondered: Were these things trying to make her move back towards the group? Because that was the direction she needed to escape towards. Too many things were too convenient at once.
Well, fuck that.
Visually she scouted for an exit in the opposite direction. No pushing on a mountain to force it to bend towards a pebble. She’d rather hold lit dynamite than to ever willfully mingle with strangers. Rather place her nether regions into the jaws of a crocodile. Years of lonely heartache, violently decimated trust, and excess years of self isolation could do that to a person.