Sandpaper Kiss by Angel Wedge

Author:Angel Wedge [Wedge, Angel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction
Publisher: Another Word
Published: 2015-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15 — Pursuit

On the run in the jungle, I didn’t know who I could trust. I wondered if the rapport I’d built up with Amba in a single afternoon’s conversation nearly a week earlier would be enough to enlist his help. It was possible that he understood me as a seeker after knowledge, and he could be sympathetic. But I wouldn’t have been willing to stake my life on that, even if I’d known how to find his tribe’s camp. For now, I would most likely have to avoid anyone I saw. The tribesmen had some loyalty to Faulkner, the city natives were employed by the Lucretia Falls facility, and the American and UN soldiers probably had some kind of orders. I didn’t know how everything would play out now that Faulkner was gone; would the tribesmen follow Barishkov or Corliss? Were the UN soldiers actually following Barishkov’s orders, or would they throw him to the wolves if there was any chance of a scandal that wouldn’t tarnish their own countries’ reputations? There was no way to know.

But compared to staying out here in the jungle, maybe it would be better to make a report to someone, sooner or later. After three days of walking, I didn’t know how far off the highway I was, and I was starting to think I might have no chance at all of getting these pictures back to the office without some form of help.

This sound of someone moving through the undergrowth, still too distant for me to see them clearly, only raised questions in my mind. Before I knew if it was safe to approach them, I’d need to both find out which group they belonged to, and make a wild guess about whether that group was currently going to be sympathetic to my goals. I was frozen with indecision for a moment, and then I caught a glimmer of reflected light. A faint shimmer of pink in the darkness; the monster’s eyes.

Monster. I caught the word right after it crossed my mind. I’d thought I was above that, but it seems that when I was in a tough situation I couldn’t even trust my own thoughts. I’d resolved before I ever came here that I would just think of all the experimental subjects as animals, no matter how grotesque they might look. Paul would have called them ‘enhanced lifeforms’, many of the more extreme churches called them ‘monsters’ or even ‘demons’, and the moderates on both sides preferred ‘specimens’ or ‘creatures’. I figured that the word that entered your mind when you didn’t have time to think said a lot about your personality, and I was instantly disappointed with my own response.

I wanted to see them as they really were, tortured animals to be pitied. But the first thing the jungle strips away, like any threat of imminent death, is your illusions. Seeing those eyes glowing in the darkness opened a door to some terror that has been too long ingrained into our racial memory to be easily purged from the hindbrain.

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