After the Amam were gone, they tried to eat. Daniel broke open one of the MREs in Sam’s pack, sharing out the content, but the wretched screams continued and no one had much of an appetite. He flinched when he heard a man shrieking in the distance, trying hard not to imagine that it was Jack or Teal’c.
“How often does this happen?” he asked Hunter, as much to distract himself as anything else.
Hunter sat hunkered with his wife, the child still sleeping in the hide they’d created beneath their shack. “A hunt?” He shrugged. “Depends. Sometimes they hunt the same place every night for a month. Other times weeks go by without a sniff o’them. Hunting’s just for sport, though. When they want to harvest, they use the Snatchers.” He glanced at his wife, who pressed her face into his shoulder with a shudder, and drew her closer. “That’s how they got me.”
“You mean the beams of light?” Daniel said, wiggling his fingers to illustrate a transporter beam.
Hunter nodded. “We call ’em Snatcher beams.”
“I can see why. That’s how they got us too.” He glanced over at Sam who sat guarding the entrance, as if her weapon and the scrap of canvas could keep out the Amam. He supposed it made her feel like she was doing something while they waited. “Hunter?” he said, in a voice loud enough for Sam to hear. “Have you ever heard of an Amam healing someone who was dying?”
Sam glanced over at him, gave a slight warning shake of her head.
“No,” Hunter said. “Why would they? We ain’t nothin’ but livestock to them.” He scratched a hand over the stubble on his jaw. “There are the Feeders, though,” he added, “people who slave for the Snatchers. Heard it said they get fed.” He made a clawing gesture with his hand. “Instead of taking life, they’re given more.”
“Really?” He resisted the urge to touch the place on his chest where the Amam had healed him. “I wonder what kind of affect that has on them?”
“They say their bodies live forever, but they ain’t got no soul left inside.” Hunter grimaced. “Makes me sick just thinking about it.”
“Yeah, it’s certainly… a disturbing thought,” Daniel said, meeting Sam’s alarmed look with one of reassurance. He wasn’t going to admit to anything. “So, um, you’ve never met anyone it’s happened to?”
“If I ever met one of the Feeders I’d kill him, not talk to him.”
“Right,” Daniel said, ignoring the ‘shut-the-hell-up’ looks Sam was throwing in his direction.
“Probably just camp-tales anyway,” Hunter added. “Can’t believe most of what people say around here.”
“But Dix is real?” Sam said from the doorway, changing the subject. “And the resistance?”
“Yup,” Hunter said. “They’re real, for dead sure.”
“I wonder,” Daniel mused, unwilling to be distracted, “why they’d do that — the Amam, I mean. Why would they heal people?”
Hunter shrugged. “Who knows? They’re monsters. Why do they do anything?”
But Daniel didn’t believe in monsters and whatever these Amam were, they were intelligent and rational creatures. That meant they could be explained. He rubbed a hand absently over his chest, where the Amam had touched him. Unlike Sam, he felt no lingering pain. A life for a life, the Amam had said, which meant they had the capacity for moral thought. For altruism, perhaps. They might look like monsters, they might act like monsters most of the time, but that was too easy a way to dismiss them — and, perhaps, to underestimate them.
“It’s getting light,” Sam said, opening the canvas a crack with the tip of her gun.
In the distance someone started screaming again — it sounded like a child.
She grimaced, moving into a low crouch as she opened the gap wider. He saw her recoil a little, and in a grim voice she said, “There are bodies out there.”
Hunter nodded. “There always are.”
“Do they only hunt at night?” Daniel said.
“Yes, mostly. They see better in the shadows. You saw how dim their ship was — I think they see differently to us.”
“Photosensitivity,” Sam said, still watching the creeping dawn. “It explains the shape of their pupils.”
“I wonder —” But Daniel’s question was cut short by the distant but familiar rat-tat-tat of an MP5.
Sam was on her feet in an instant and out the door, Daniel only a couple of steps behind her. Weapon raised, she was scanning the area, but the sporadic gunfire was at least half a mile away.