Jack shook his head. He might not be from this planet, but he was just as human as its ragged inhabitants. “That’s bullshit.”
The thing merely stared, clearly not understanding the epithet.
“If these people are so worthless, then why stay? Why fight the Goa’uld for them?”
Crazy gave a snort. “Small, worthless gods to rule a small, worthless race. The parasites are nothing — like iratus larvae, easy to crush.”
“From what I’ve seen, those parasites aren’t going down without a fight.” Defending the prowess of the Goa’uld? Well, that was something new.
God’s honest truth, though, he’d rather go up against the snakeheads than these freaky bastards any day of the week and twice on Sundays. With the Goa’uld, you knew what you were getting. Devious and nasty though they were, they wore their villainy on their elaborately embroidered sleeves.
This creature, however, was cold, callous in the very truest sense of the word. For a thing to be evil, it had to want to be evil. But the Amam were something else entirely. Right now though, he just couldn’t figure out what. “The question still stands,” he said. “Who are you people?”
“We are Amam,” said the creature. “We are Devourers and Snatchers. We are the Soul Burners and the Blood Eaters. We are Wraith. We survive. We feed. We are.”
“And you’ll destroy a species just to survive?”
“We are.”
Crazy scuttled back to crouch in his corner and resume his aimless scratching at the floor. As it moved, the light caught the object that had clattered to the floor and Jack felt a beat of what was almost hope. His Beretta lay just a few yards from the open doorway.
This truly is too easy, he thought, and prepared to make his move.
From within, the camp seemed even more ragged and sprawling than it had when Daniel had looked down on it from the mountainside. Shacks made of nothing but scraps of fabric or wood leaned drunkenly together, a mishmash of shapes and sizes, and everything the uniform drab of dust and dirt. Between the shacks ran muddy, rutted tracks and here and there lay piles of refuse. The stench was appalling.
But poverty and misery aside, Daniel was struck by the huge ethnic mix he saw in the population. On most worlds they visited the people were pretty homogeneous — like Aedan’s people — having been taken from just one location on Earth, sometimes from a single village. But here, there were faces of all different races and with no apparent distinction drawn between them. It was an ethnic fusion few places on Earth had achieved. Perhaps, he thought, faced with the inhumanity of the Amam, racial differences had ceased to have any meaning here? If you were looking for silver linings, he supposed that might be one.
Nevertheless, the camp was no nirvana. In fact it was the sort of place you’d expect to see on the evening news, with a camera crew and a scrolling plea to donate money to the emergency appeal. Except no one was coming to help these people, not unless Daniel could get home and somehow rouse the humanitarian instinct of the Appropriations Committee.
That, in itself, was a dismal prospect.
It took a couple of hours to reach Hunter’s home, not least because he was stopped every few minutes by people astonished to see him alive, returned as if from the dead. Some embraced him, while others peered out cautiously from inside their raggedy shacks, but most simply touched two fingers to the center of their forehead in salute.
“I was snatched from the Shacks,” Hunter explained as they navigated the labyrinthine alleyways. “People who get snatched don’t usually come back again.”
“But you did,” Daniel said with a smile. “You came back.”
Hunter touched the mark on his forehead. “By the grace of Hecate, I did.”
Daniel didn’t comment on that, it wasn’t really the time to debate theology and in truth his mind was too distracted anyway. His thoughts were with his friends back on the Amam ship rather than with Hunter, and as the hours passed and his radio remained stubbornly silent he felt a cold weight of fear settle in the pit of his stomach. It had been too long, something must have gone wrong.
“Perhaps this was a mistake,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at the Amam ship. Far away though it now was, its looming presence still dominated the camp.
Hunter glanced at him. “What do you mean?”
“I should have gone with them,” he said. “I should be with them.”
“Sam called it right,” Hunter said, although he sounded distracted now, his attention darting ahead. “You’ll do ‘em more good finding help and talking to Dix.”
“That’s easy for Sam to say,” Daniel grumbled. “She’s not the one out here waiting.”