Jacques tested the squelch a couple of times, tossed her a transceiver and spoke into his end. His words were chopped up by the helicopter’s whooshing, but he came through clearly enough.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Jacques said, but he couldn’t really hide his grin.
Jill took another step away from the chopper, boot crunching down on a small pile of leaves. “You wanna know the truth?” she froze, turning back to her friend. “I can’t believe it either. Something’s changed in me, something seriously changed. A year ago I’d be telling you to get me the hell out of here and back to civilization. I dunno what, but—”
“Love,” he cut her off. “Love is what happened. Go find ‘dat girl, Jilly. I’ll be here. And here,” he tossed his revolver down to her, which she caught by the handle as it fell. “Can’t hurt to have more insurance.”
With a smirk and a nod, she was off into the dark unknown, chasing a panicked voice and trying to make sense of her own head.
-11-
“This is not at all going the way I expected it to go.”
-Claire
“Help!” Claire called again, her voice weakening with every passing moment. “Help me! Help!”
She woke up in the dirt with a throbbing headache and the sense that she was somewhere she really shouldn’t be. The bears – the men – whatever they were, were nowhere to be found. For the first time since she wandered away from Girl Scout camp and got herself lost for half a day in the Poconos, Claire was alone in the damn forest, and she had no idea where she was, or how she got there.
The small circle she’d been wandering around in for what seemed like eternity was getting worn down. It reminded her a bit of when she’d gone on a tour of Fort Sill as a little girl, and saw the room where Geronimo supposedly paced for so long that he wore a path in the stone floor.
Moments before, she’d heard popping sounds. Very distant ones, but they sounded a little like gunfire – or, like she imagined gunfire would sound, as she’d never actually been around a gun. Hunters, maybe, hopefully, were out... at night, shooting at something in the pitch black.
She took a puff on her inhaler, which was fast running out, and called for Cleo. Surely whoever had taken the bears wouldn’t have done anything to the dog – right? Surely that ridiculous pitbull had just run off into the woods. Right? That one had said to let the dog go. He’d said to let her go.
“Help!” she called out again, into the pitch black, not entirely sure who she expected to find her, or even if being found was a good thing. After all, whatever had snatched the bears was still out there. “Help!” she called again, as a chill coursed through her body, sending her teeth chattering and goosebumps crawling up her chest. “Someone! Anyone! Help me!”
Whatever got them left me, though. Or didn’t notice. Or didn’t care.
That last thing – that whatever took them didn’t care – was something she’d been hanging on ever since those weird soldiers said it. “Leave the girl, she doesn’t matter,” one of them had intoned in its weird, static-laden voice. “Only the bears. Only the bears. One-eight-eight-nine.”
Those numbers stuck in her head too, the strange, haunting repetition. The foreign, bizarre, unsettling order to them.
Well, that, and the fact that those weird number stations had creeped her out for as long as she could remember.
“Help!”
Her feet ached, her head throbbed. With a sigh of resignation, Claire finally took a seat and leaned back against a tree trunk. One of a million in the forest. This one seemed a little smoother than the rest.
“And thus,” she said with a great amount of drama, “the heavy sound of silence descends upon the land.” Claire was quoting a poem she read at some point, in some English literature class. She’d taken a lot of them, couldn’t quite remember which class it was, or which poem because she never cared much for either. But in this case, the words resonated deep in her angsty, college student heart. “With nary a thought,” she paused as something whispered through the darkness.
Not a voice, no, not a sound exactly, more like air simply moving around something else. “Nary a breath, silence holds, it grips, it strangles, it... Howls? And along with the howls, jingling? Cleo?”
Her heart jumped as the dog loped out of the woods, apparently having been sensible enough to go hide. With a snuffle, a snort, and a few hundred licks, she’d gotten Claire feeling better.
Just as the warm hum of semi-contentment settled in, Claire let out a pained scream before the awful sounds even reached her. Cleo, however, seemed completely unaffected. Ear-splitting, horrible, pained and agonizing all at once, the sound of a massive howl, and a whimper, and then another chorus of howls filled Claire’s ears. The deafening screams and cries filled the night, and these were... significantly worse than silence.