He pushed down his metal mask and snapped his teeth at the dewy air around him. Stryker ran his fingers through his short strands and shook out the water.
He jumped down to the next landing; the resulting impact snapped the wood. He wasn’t meant to bounce around in trees–he was a creature of quiet, camouflage, and surprise.
But times change, situations change, even hisbodyhad to adapt to accommodate those changes.
Nothing could keep him from his own personal Hell, not even the beautiful scientist up above.My hostage.In a sick way, the thought made his beast excited. It made his head jerk and his fangs descend to bite at the tree.
Stryker placed the band back over his mouth, annoyed with his impulses. If it were up to him, he would be a machine and nothing more.
But then the plates in his groin would shift when Norah’s smell filled his nostrils; it reminded him how wonderful it could be to be a man, too.
He looked down on the flowing death-trap of water. The constant rain created flash floods between the swamps and the edge of the nearest body of water. He had seen one on the way down to the surface, it had to have spilled over at this point, gushing its froth through a jungle that didn’t want it. The weather raped everything around him.
If he wasn’t careful, it would ravage them too.
Stryker lifted his gun and morphed his body, letting his lower limbs meld together, and spun his way down the tree, each turn had him aiming his gun at any nearby coilers, taking them out. Each twist chaffed a new design upon the trunk.
When he’d come within several yards of the rising tides, he shut off the compartment that enabled him to hear.
He waited.
He watched.
It wasn’t long before the ghostly tendrils of long fingers reached up from the water like long white worms, each digit swayed with shredded flesh hanging like Spanish moss at their ends.
Stryker scanned them as they rose from the depths, stretching, reaching, slithering toward him.
They were humanoid, human shaped, but longer, and far less dense. Their heat signatures remained unmoving below the currents regardless of what he saw.
Not possible.He lowered himself down until he was just out of their grasp. The scent of rotting flesh, beyond the stage of putrefaction, and the skin on the hands fell away from the bones underneath in a wrinkled, greenish mass.
He saw their mouths open but didn’t hear them.
Several wet heads with sprouts of hair popped up next. It was stringy and weak, floating out into the currents.
Stryker lifted his gun and aimed.
Several very human faces stared up at him. Stretched out lips filled with rainfall and blunted teeth snapped at him as he got closer. He moved down to get a closer look.
They had no throats, no tongues, merely an empty mottled hole terminating in blackness.
He captured pictures of them with his eyes, to look at and study later.
Three precise headshots had the ghouls sink within the mire. Stryker didn’t know how long he hung on the tree, his lower half holding him up as he waited for the water-laden corpses to reappear. The strange, invisible heat signatures were still there, unchanging with the current and he had a notion that…
The dead don’t release heat.
One couldn’t kill what was already dead.
He thrust out his rifle and scooped up some of the gore that his shots had created and brought it close to his face.
Smells dead.But as he analyzed it, it heated up until it glowed red and had its own heat signature. Stryker dabbed it into his eye and scanned the anomaly.
Microbes.Alien and strange, it expanded as the rain water fell across it. He flicked the carnage off his gun and watched it float away.
When it was out of sight he broke his eyes away from the waters and looked back up the gigantic tree, searching for Norah, knowing he wouldn’t be able to see her.
He headed back toward their camp. If Stryker had learned one thing as he maneuvered up the pillar, it was that the shriekers needed the water. It took every fiber–muscular and optical–of his being not to dive back down and hunt them.
