HUMAN ORIGINS

Part I

By Dale Glaser

Kent Nelson woke up and reflexively checked the digits on the alarm clock as if he were running the risk of missing his 9 a.m. Psychology 207 class.  The cool blue numbers read 10:51 but Kent had taken the psych final three weeks earlier and he was emerging from sleep not in his dorm but his childhood bedroom at his mother’s house.  Kent threw back the covers and greeted the day with little enthusiasm; the drizzly gray early January sky visible out the window reciprocated.

Downstairs, Kent happily found half a pot of cold coffee; his mother had brewed extra while making her own breakfast before work, and leftovers at home were significantly better than the cafeteria coffee he was accustomed to on campus.  He poured a mug and set it in the microwave to reheat, then seated himself in front of the laptop on the kitchen table and started checking the message boards he frequented.  Some of them had slowed their activity considerably over the holidays, but a couple remained as lively as ever, and after confirming that DestinationThalarion.co.uk and Bjarmaland.net hadn’t updated since the day before, Kent pointed the laptop’s browser to cryptocarta.com’s forums and scanned the newest threads.

A message entitled “Tech salvage from Shamballah?” looked promising until Kent saw that it had been started by a user called Schizoid21C, a handle Kent recognized from flame wars past and whose threads Kent now tended to avoid on principle.  Kent clicked instead on the thread title “El Dorado/El Argento” and found himself, with train wreck fascination, reading a long screed explaining, among other things, that the fabled City of Gold was actually a City of Silver, and was in fact constructed on Earth by Angels, and therefore proved the existence of God, and had additionally been situated where present-day Memphis, Tennessee stood, and the United States government was engaged in a massive cover-up conspiracy preventing excavations in downtown Memphis which would produce incontrovertible evidence of the Silver City.  The message was simultaneously everything Kent loved and loathed about cryptoarchaeology.  He scanned down the thread to see if anyone had made the requisite Elvis joke yet, saw that someone indeed had, and returned to the board index.

An older thread entitled “Dragon Bones” had been updated by its originator, Piltdown, which usually meant more photos had been uploaded to the collection of shots which alleged to capture fossils and other remains of mythological beasts.  Kent clicked on it and the laptop began the laborious process of downloading hundreds of pictures.  Kent opened a new tab to check his e-mail, half-expecting nothing new in his Inbox, but found a highlighted, unread message at the top of the list.

From: Dad
Subject: Need you here.

Kent pushed himself away from the kitchen table with a heavy sigh and rose to retrieve his coffee from the microwave.  He tried to remember where his father was these days and was fairly sure it was somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula.  Not that he needed to remember, since the e-mail would tell him which airport to go to, and which airline would be holding a ticket in his name, in addition to his ultimate destination.  That was essentially the way it had worked since Kent had been thirteen years old, his parents had gotten divorced and his visitations with his globetrotting archeologist father had become mandatory.

He took a sip of coffee and idly wondered if he had a good reason to purposefully tank this latest test of his filial piety.  He had already gone out drinking with all of his hometown high school friends.  Classes for the spring semester didn’t begin until the last week of January.  His mother had asked him not two days before if he planned on belatedly celebrating the holidays with his father.  Kent failed to find even a single, flimsy excuse to beg off, and knew in his heart that it had been a foregone conclusion all along.

When the passengers of Flight 799 emerged from the International Arrivals doors of Kuwait International Airport, Kent and the driver dispatched to pick him up had very little trouble spotting one another.  Among the middle-aged business men in somber-colored suits and darker-featured Kuwaiti nationals in traditional garb, Kent stood out starkly: tall, blond, fair, wearing a Salem University hoodie and cargo shorts.  The driver wore a standard-issue professional uniform and was otherwise physically unremarkable, but the MR. KENT NELSON sign he held was the only one in the waiting area not written in Arabic.  Kent approached the driver with a smile, and the driver reached for Kent’s bag and led him to the car.
The modern skyline of Kuwait City was soon receding in the rear window as the car carried Kent out into the unforgiving desert.  The winter days were unlikely to heat up even as high as room temperature, but the arid swells of lifeless sand were forbidding all the same.  Kent watched the desolate scenery roll by, earphones nestled in place and conveying a mixed playlist of Sigur Rós tunes.

Hours later the car arrived at the field camp, consisting of several large tents and one Quonset hut, with a small fleet of trucks and utility vehicles parked haphazardly throughout.  The driver left the engine running while he stepped out and retrieved Kent’s bag from the trunk.  Kent accepted the bag and slung it over his shoulder, reaching into a pocket for the driver’s tip, but the driver looked toward the central tent in the encampment with an expression bordering on utter revulsion and hurried back behind the wheel.  The door slammed and the car made a quick about-face before speeding toward the highway.

Kent watched the rooster tail of pale dust billowing in the car’s wake, then slowly turned toward the main tent and approached it.  He stepped inside and saw more or less exactly what he had expected: in the middle, a long makeshift table constructed from plywood and sawhorses, covered with white sheets and supporting a myriad of small artifacts meticulously arranged and labeled; around the edges, several bins holding more artifacts yet to be catalogued, crates of excavation tools, and other gear.  Two high-powered electric lanterns hung from the tops of tent poles, bathing the artifacts in an almost unreal white clarity.

Kent approached the table and looked over the objects laid out there.  Organic materials, predominantly bone chips, were arrayed to the left, while man-made objects occupied the right side.  Most of the artifacts were fragmentary, including small potsherds, some inscribed with primitive symbols, and an angular sliver of metal which might once have been part of a spear.  But Kent was drawn to what appeared to be a small fetish carving near the edge of the table.  He bent over it to observe it more closely.

The fetish had been sculpted from a deposit of green stone, probably malachite, Kent presumed.  It had clearly been completed by its maker, but while recognizable features had been chipped out of the raw stone, it had never been polished or smoothed in anyway, and was thus an ellipsoid mass of irregular mineral blisters.  Yet painstakingly detailed features had been rendered in the surface, including an asymmetrical pair of wild and predatory eyes above an oversized mouth stretched into an exaggerated grin bristling with haphazard fangs.  Kent marveled at the precision with which each needle-like tooth had been drawn in the stone, then looked again at the eyes of the fetish and jerked backwards involuntarily.  For a moment he was convinced that the proportions of the eyes had changed, that previously the left one had been larger yet it was now the right orb that bulged more dominantly.  Kent bent closer again.

“Fascinating, aren’t they?” a voice asked from the entrance flap of the tent.  Kent whirled around with his heart in his throat and found himself looking at a near-duplicate of himself, albeit decades older, with slightly thinner hair and bifocals perched on the tip of his nose.

“Hey, Dad,” Kent said

INTERLUDE

“So what do you know about this Karkull guy?” asked the driver of a battered green cargo van as it idled before the wrought-iron gates.  Wearing mud-brown coveralls and a ball cap emblazoned with the same day-glo green Vernal Landscaping logo that adorned the sides of the van, the man leaned out the window to wave a magnetized access card at the reader standing beside the driveway entrance.

“You mean besides the fact that he’s got more money than he knows what to do with?  So much that he uses a lawn service in January?” the other passenger in the van responded.  At least ten years younger than the driver, he was dressed in the same workman’s uniform, albeit a newer version devoid of grass stains and splatterings of dirt.

“Yeah, besides that,” the driver confirmed, as the gates unlocked and slowly swung open.  He dropped the van into gear and coaxed it between the brick columns anchoring the gates, up the winding driveway between half-melted mounds of dirty snow.

His new co-worker considered the question carefully.  Only recently paroled after serving nearly two years of an armed robbery sentence, Droz Tiernan needed a steady job in order to meet the terms of his probation but was unqualified for most.  The opening at Vernal Landscaping was practically a godsend, all the more so coming in the middle of winter when most gardening gigs in New England went into deep hibernation.  Droz did not want to jeopardize his position by insulting a client, and yet something in his co-worker’s voice seemed to be urging him to hold nothing back.  The fact that his co-worker was technically his boss only complicated matters further, but ultimately Droz decided to play along.  “I hear he’s like some kind of weird recluse now.  Wasn’t always, though.  He traveled the world or something for a while, and then when he came home he disappeared into his mansion and never comes out, right?”

“Man likes his privacy, that’s for sure,” Howie Briggs nodded, scratching the corners of his bushy black mustache with thumb and forefinger. Between the trying-too-hard facial hair and the completely bald head for which the ‘stache was obviously overcompensating, Howie had struck Droz immediately as a bit of a roly-poly dweeb who probably read fertilizer catalogs for fun.  But he hadn’t had a problem with the thought of hiring a convicted felon, and that raised his estimation in Droz’s eyes considerably.

“I like privacy, too,” Droz went on.  The van was now circling around the vast Karkull mansion itself, and Droz stared at the opaquely shaded windows on its upper floors.  “But the whole hermit thing, I mean, what’s the point?  Wasn’t he like studying to be some kind of doctor or something?”

“PhD in science, physics or chemistry I think,” Howie supplied.  “Not like a medical doctor.”

“Well, either way,” Droz shrugged off the correction.  “I never finished high school, and I still went out into the world, you know, tried to find my way.  What’s up with a guy who has every opportunity to make something of himself and then just hides in his room?”

“You think he’s just hiding in there?” Howie asked as the van came to a stop.

“I don’t know,” Droz admitted.  “Whatever he’s doing, it ain’t being a scientist.”

“Guess not,” Howie agreed as the two men climbed out of the van.  The bang of van doors slamming shut echoed loudly across the remote estate’s treetops.  Howie led the way toward a small shed set a hundred yards away from the mansion.

“So what’s the job here, exactly?” Droz asked as the pair cut towards the shed.  “Not mowing the lawn, obviously.”

“Checking trees, mostly,” Howie explained.  “Big nor’easters can knock down the limbs of the dead ones, so we cut back the ones that look like they might be next to go.  Clear away ones that fall on their own.  That sort of thing.”

Droz let out a low whistle, looking around at the old growth Rhode Island forest surrounding the estate.  “Man, there’s a ton of trees around here.”

“Yeah, but we don’t do all of them,” Howie clarified.  “Just the ones near the edge of the lawns, the driveway, couple of walking paths through the forest.”  The men had reached the shed, and Howie produced a small key to unlock a padlock on a chain looped through the door handles.  He grasped the lock, turned to Droz and said, “You know, what you said, about Karkull not being a scientist?  How do we know he’s not?”

Droz’s eyebrows knitted in confusion.  “He’s a damn shut-in, that’s how,” he reasoned.

“Well, yeah,” Howie nodded.  “OK, he doesn’t like go work in a lab or whatever, but he’s gotta be doing something to pass the time up in there, right?  Maybe he found some books on his world travels and he’s, whatcha call it, deciphering them.  Translating.  Or maybe,” Howie lowered his voice conspiratorially, “he does some kind of experiments up there.  The kind he doesn’t want anybody else to know about until he’s ready.”

Droz snorted, “Yeah, right.”

Howie shook his head and turned the key in the padlock.  “No, I know.  He probably just keeps a low profile because when he was roaming around the world he killed a guy.”

Droz reflexively looked up at the mansion as if a pair of murderous eyes would be staring back down at him from one of its gabled windows.  Then he laughed and punched Howie’s shoulder.  “Oh, man, you got me!  Hazing the new guy!  Hey, why not both, why not say Karkull killed some dude and has been doing freaky death-science experiments ever since?”

Howie allowed the open chain to fall from the door handles, and pulled one of shed doors open.  “Yes, why not both?” he asked with a wry smile as he pushed Droz roughly into the dark interior of the structure.  Droz stumbled while Howie remained expectantly in the open doorframe.
“What the hell…?” were the only words Droz managed to utter before he was transfixed by the pulsations emanating from the middle of the bare dirt floor.  A central, irregularly shaped portion of the cold earth had been transformed into a viscous substance that glowed from within with greenish light, brightening and dimming at random intervals.  The membranous surface bubbled and puckered in stochastic whorls, sometimes adding luminous greenish mass only to shed it a moment later.

In a sudden flux an asymmetrical elongation of the substance rose up before Droz, who rocked back and forth on his heels before it like a rodent hypnotized by a cobra.  The undulating tendril bloomed a million thorny barbs in a sickly shade of pus-yellow up and down its length, each one different from the next: some straight and needle-thin, some wide and curved, some jagged, others corkscrewed, all varying in length from a fraction of an inch to over half a foot.  The spiny yellow and green protrusion wrapped around Droz from his shoulders to his ankles in less than a heartbeat.  Droz finally screamed, only to be silenced the next moment as his body was torn to bloodied shreds, some of which fell spurting and steaming to the floor of the shed, while others simply disappeared into thin air.  The plasmic probe receded into the pool of undifferentiated glowing and gurgling matter.

Still standing in the shed’s doorway, Ian Karkull considered the results of his latest experiment, an experiment which had begun when he had created a dummy landscaping company and applied for partnership in a prison work-release program; continued when he had posed as Howie Briggs to interview and hire Andrew “Droz” Tiernan, an orphan reprobate whom no one would miss or bat an eye at the disappearance of; and concluded when he exposed Droz to the Pit of Chaos he had previously summoned and was currently holding in check with the Hands of Eris and other mystic sigils painted on the interior surfaces of the old shed.  “How very … interesting,” Karkull mused with a cold-blooded grin, as he closed the shed doors, chained their handles and locked them shut.

END INTERLUDE

Sven and Kent Nelson sat on collapsible chairs inside a smaller tent, with a folding table between them where flatbread, tabbouleh and goat cheese occupied a battered tray.  A scant film of wine clung to the sides of two glasses and an open bottle.  “So I told him we were going to have to stop using camels altogether,” Sven concluded.  “He didn’t take it very well, but this project doesn’t have unlimited funding.  I’m happy to use local labor and buy local goods, but not at the expense of the dig itself.”

“Makes sense,” Kent nodded.

Sven drained the rest of his wineglass and waved it through the air as if to banish the previous train of thought.  “But that’s all more of the same-old, same-old,” he said.  “What about you?  Classes going well?”

“Well enough.”

“Got yourself a good schedule for the spring?”

“I guess,” Kent answered.  For a moment he flashed back to his adolescent self, who could rarely be bothered to give more than a two or three word answer to anything.  He wasn’t being obstinate now, but had little to say about his coursework.

Perhaps sensing as much, Sven regarded his son across the table.  “Anyone … special back in Salem?”

Kent smiled in such a way that denial became effectively impossible.  “Maybe,” he admitted.

Sven raised an eyebrow at his son.  “Do you want to volunteer some details as to what she’s like, or do you prefer the twenty questions approach?”

“Her name’s Inza Cramer,” Kent offered, leaning to one side on the chair as he fished his smartphone out of his pocket.  While he navigated through the photos stored on the device, he continued, “She’s in anthropology, too.  I have a picture from the department holiday party in here somewhere.”

“Your year?” Sven asked.

Kent shook his head.  “Grad student.”  He handed the phone across the table.  “That’s her on the left, and my buddy Damon on the right.”

“An older woman, eh?” Sven chuckled appreciatively as he took the phone.  On the screen was a snapshot of a heavyset young man with longish brown hair and an unkempt beard, wearing a sweater with an ostentatious reindeer motif, standing beside a young woman with coppery hair and a dazzling smile.  Her red silk blouse was cut low enough to show the golden ankh symbol hanging from her necklace, glittering against her freckled breastbone.  Sven looked meaningfully back and forth between the gold pendant on the phone’s screen and his son, finally asking, “She’s not another myth-seeker, is she?”

“Not as far as I know,” Kent replied coolly, reaching for his phone.  He left unspoken the fact that Inza knew him primarily as a student in a class where she was a teaching assistant, and they had exchanged very few words beyond the most innocuous pleasantries, and the picture on his phone was owed in no small part to various social lubricants available at the holiday party as well as Damon’s peculiarly obnoxious charm.   Kent’s feelings for Inza were so far unrequited.  “There are some people in this world who wear ancient meaningful symbols just because they like the look of them, you know,” Kent huffed.

“Is my skepticism really that offensive?” Sven asked, bemused.

“Skepticism?  Is that what you’d call it?  Sounded a lot like condescending disdain from over here,” Kent retorted.

“Son …” Sven sighed.  “I didn’t fly you halfway around the world to offend you.”  A long, somewhat awkward silence followed, and then Sven resumed, “Forgive me for wondering if you are going to outgrow your obsession with prehistoric myths, or if you’re surrounding yourself with other people who cling to the same fantasies and drifting farther away.”

“It’s not an obsession, Dad,” Kent insisted.  “It’s an interest.  There are things in this world that science can’t explain.  Why does it bother you so much that I keep an open mind about what those things might mean?”

“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Sven warned with a touch of paternal sternness.  “I never said it bothered me, only that I was curious.  It’s strange … a man gets older, sees his own son become an adult, and finds himself wondering if the parent might have more to learn from the child.”
“Excuse me?” Kent asked.

“What did you think of that malachite carving in the tent?” Sven asked, sharply changing the conversation’s direction.

“Aside from being creeped out?” Kent asked.  “I didn’t recognize the style.  Did you?”

“I did not.”

“Did… does anyone?”

“No one that I’ve spoken to.  Granted, I haven’t spoken to that many colleagues just yet.  I would take some professional pride in being the one to solve this mystery.”

“Mystery?”

“Mysteries, really.  What that carving represents.  Where it came from.  Whether or not there are any more like it.  It’s possible that it’s simply an isolated, idiosyncratic piece of primitive exceptionalism.  But if there are similar artifacts, if that particular fetish imagery was repeated anywhere, it might signify more.  Possibly an entire culture that had otherwise been lost to time.”

“Hey, that’s my line,” Kent mock-objected.  He scrutinized his father’s face, then ventured another question.   “Do you really believe all that?”

“Honestly … no, not really.  I fully expect that a much more mundane explanation will come to light as we continue to dig.  If we continue to dig, I should say.  Because the fetish is unclassifiable and its discovery site falls outside the sanctioned project, there was no one here who would indulge me in satisfying my curiosity.”

“Until I got here, is that it?” Kent surmised.

Sven smiled slyly.  “It would make an interesting independent study project, wouldn’t it?”

“Are you asking me to stay on at the dig instead of going back to school?”

“Let’s take it day by day,” Sven suggested.  “Or night.  Tonight.  Right now.  Let’s go to the site.”

“Now?  Why?”

“Why not?  The day I e-mailed you, we found a buried doorway.  I wanted to open it but no one else did.  I’m not fool enough to go it alone, but I thought that the two of us…”

Sven Nelson’s pickup truck was battered gray, its original paint job abraded away to bare steel which took on an almost spectral glow in the Arabian moonlight.  He drove rapidly down the highway and barely slowed after turning off the paved surface onto the desert sand.  His eyes darted back and forth between the GPS unit affixed to the dashboard and the desolate expanse visible through the windshield, as he made minor course corrections based on the coordinates displayed on the screen.

Kent, riding shotgun, watched his father from his sidelong perspective with curiosity.  Sven seemed almost frantic to reach the dig site, which might have been attributable mainly to all the wine imbibed over dinner.  Or perhaps Kent was picking up on his father’s mannerisms in new ways, which might also have been due to the wine.  Kent was still trying to sort out the possibilities when Sven brought the truck to a sudden, skidding halt.  Excavation tools clattered loudly in the flatbed behind them.

“I … I don’t understand,” Sven squinted at the unbroken sand under the pickup’s headlights.  “The doorway should be right here.”

“Desert winds shift the sand around,” Kent pointed out, as if an archeologist of the senior Nelson’s preeminence could be unaware of such a fact.  “We’ll find it when we brush a few inches out of the way.”

Sven shook his head.  “It was raised … couldn’t have been buried in anything less than a weeklong sandstorm…”

Kent climbed out of the truck and looked around at a landscape so dark that the horizon was only visible as the distant boundary where stars arose.  Kent turned in a full circle, then halfway around again to take a longer look at a shape emerging from the sands hundreds of yards to the south.  “Hey, I think it might be over there,” he called to his father as he headed toward the squared-off elevation.  “You must have misremembered the coordinates.”

“I did no such thing,” Sven insisted as he emerged from the driver’s side door, duffel bag in hand.  “I noted the location exactly and returned to the very spot.”

“So not only is this site the key to discovering a lost civilization,” Kent summarized, “but it also moves around like something out of a fairy tale?  Geez, Dad, any chance we can work in some aliens for the trifecta?”

Sven declined to respond as the pair approached the unearthed hypogeum, and his hurried steps brought him to the stone doorway first.  Kent trailed behind him, still ruminating on his father’s uncharacteristic behavior.  Whenever they had spoken of archeology, Sven Nelson had always been adamant about the importance of respecting indigenous cultures’ rights to their own historical artifacts.  He believed that the technological advances of industrialized nations gave them no greater right to carry the physical heritage of less affluent peoples away to labs and museums at will.  He was a champion of the idea of an obligation to employ skills and tools on behalf of an ancient tribe’s descendants, not in opposition to them.  But Kent had never asked his father what would happen if he stumbled upon the treasures of a culture without heirs.  If a civilization were truly lost, then its remains belonged to no one … except whoever might discover them.  For the first time, Sven Nelson was on the brink of a discovery which he might possess entirely, and the effect on the elder archeologist was an almost manic giddiness.

Kent felt as if he were on the brink of something significant, as well, not professionally but personally: a breakthrough with his father.  Maybe the old man had finally made peace with the idea of his son having a mind of his own, a life of his own.  Maybe rather than constantly trying to shape and mold who Kent would be, Sven was now ready to get to know who he was.  As strange as it seemed, maybe a spontaneous jaunt into subterranean ruins in the dead of night would be something Kent Nelson would look back on as a turning point.

The gateway to the subterranean structure was pitched at an angle, with a single slab of basalt cradled in a frame carved with strange symbols and pictograms that had eroded nearly into total illegibility.  Sven reached into his bag, drew out a large iron prybar and immediately set to wedging it into the top seam of the doorway.  Kent caught up to his father and helped himself to a nearly identical tool in the bag, then climbed to the top of the structure and attacked the top of the slab at the opposite corner.  As the slab began to loosen, Sven worked his prybar around to the side and pushed while Kent lifted, until the door had been shifted horizontally by a couple of feet.

Kent was sweating heavily, his head swimming with a combination of lingering wine intoxication and sheer physical exertion, as he rejoined his father in front of the hypogeum’s entrance.  Sven handed him a flashlight, turned on his own, and wordlessly led the way into the underworld.  Kent grabbed the duffel bag, tossed the prybars into its unzippered opening, and followed.

The entrance corridor ran at a near 45 degree angle downward, and Kent found himself turning his feet sideways and bracing one hand against the walls as he descended; all the while, his father made no such attempt to slow himself and practically ran down the basalt shaft, flashlight beam juddering erratically.  Kent swept the circle of illumination from his own flashlight from side to side, picking out inscriptions along the top of the walls.  The symbols within the structure had been protected from the elements, but were no more recognizable to Kent than the ones aboveground had been.

As the corridor continued deeper and deeper, it widened both in height and breadth, although with increasing irregularity.  For a certain distance the wall on Kent’s left was taller, until the wall on the right abruptly overtook it.  The ceiling dipped without apparent reason.   The entire corridor followed a curve down and to the right, then zigzagged while generally trending left.  The seams where walls met floor and ceiling met walls became increasingly irregular, and the walls bent along multiple planes until the corridor’s cross-section was a warped seven-sided shape.  The symbols etched into corridor no longer formed a linear progression neatly aligned with the tops of the walls, but sprawled haphazardly in wandering waveforms that marked floors, walls and ceilings alike.  In the hearts of the channels and grooves of the symbols, bright colors reflected in a million impossible hues under the flashlight’s cast.

Kent only realized that he had completely lost track of his father when he heard the older man scream.

Steeling himself, Kent hurried down the meandering corridor, grimacing and narrow-eyed.  He made every effort to ignore the wild unpredictability of the corridor’s surfaces and markings, and although the yawing perspective and riot of decorations clamored at the edges of his vision, Kent was soon able to perceive what had no doubt been his father’s downfall: a sheer drop as the corridor suddenly emerged into the middle a massive vault.  Kent halted where the corridor terminated, dropped to one knee, and called out “Dad!”

A feeble groan echoed back from below, and Kent immediately shoved his flashlight in his pocket and the duffel bag handles up to his shoulder and began to climb down the chamber wall.  Some distant part of his brain told him it was foolhardy to do so unequipped and unaided, but his instincts screamed that reaching his father’s side was paramount.  Those instincts spurred him on even as the wall, which scant inches from his face he could not perceive in the near-total darkness, seemed to flex beneath his boot soles and fingertips, like the carapace of a gargantuan, writhing insect.  After a few seconds Kent could hear his father’s ragged breathing nearby, and lowered himself onto what was either the chamber floor or a ledge against the wall.  He felt for his father in the dark and took his hand, his heart flooding with relief as the older man squeezed his fingers in response.

“Foolish … rushed in … couldn’t help myself …” Sven Nelson lamented, each word sounding as if it cost him dearly in painful exertion.

“It’s gonna be OK, Dad,” Kent insisted.  “We’ll get you back to camp, it’s gonna be…”

A feral snarl cut off Kent’s words, a malevolent sound which rose and fell to encompass the yowl of a rabid bobcat, the bellow of an enraged Kodiak, and the cry of a wounded eagle.  Kent strained to determine where the hideous noise had originated, just before he was knocked aside by a small stampede of clawed limbs propelling a massive beast through the darkness.

Kent scrabbled at his pocket while his heart jack hammered hot in his throat.  He produced his flashlight, aiming it in the direction the creature had been moving.  The faint parabola of light fell across two figures.  The topmost was a nightmare given flesh, an incomprehensible grotesquerie with a body of shapeless organ-red meat streaked in iridescent green and blue, sprouting at least nine segmented limbs that Kent could see, none of them properly belonging to the same organism.  Its head was a blistered ellipsoid with two differently-sized eyes and a wide mouth crowded by needle-like teeth.  Those teeth shone slick with fresh, dark blood.  The lower figure was Sven Nelson, unmoving, and eviscerated.

TO BE CONTINUED…