breath loud in his ears, bare feet shuffling down the dark path, Motumbo staggered through the dark jungle. His side, red and sticky with blood, pulsed with pain at each step, but he didn’t stop. Instead he kept scanning around, nose flared to scent possible prey, red-rimmed, watery eyes staring wide into the darkness.
Time held no meaning for him anymore—he couldn’t say whether it had been twenty minutes or two hours since he had broken free of his captors. Now all that was left in his mind was the relentless desire to move, to hunt.
Normally the Congolese jungle held no fear for him, even at night. Although there were creatures in the dense forest that should be avoided, such as the stealthy leopards, the territorial gorillas and the wide variety of poisonous snakes, spiders and insects inhabiting the lush underbrush, Motumbo knew them all and how to avoid them. Growing up in the isolated northern region, the twenty-year-old had been fortunate to avoid the violence that had swept much of his country for the past decade. But he hadn’t been so lucky avoiding the silver ghosts haunting the deep tropical forest.
They had appeared about six months ago, mysterious, gleaming beings appearing seemingly out of nowhere to snatch whomever they could find: men, women and children. Appeals to local law enforcement had been ineffective; the men who had tried to find the elusive beings had either come back empty-handed—or disappeared, as well. The populations of the scattered villages in the area, still on edge from the violence of the simmering civil war that had been slowly cooling for the past few years, didn’t enter the jungle unless they absolutely had to. But they had to eat.
That was how Motumbo had been captured one day, hunting in the jungle against his father’s wishes. The ghosts had appeared like magic around him, one of them tossing a small canister at his feet that had spewed a noxious yellow gas. One whiff had made him pass out in seconds.
When he’d awakened, he had been in a place unlike anywhere he had ever seen before. Bare, bright rooms with hard, white walls. Strange currents of cool air came from square holes in the ceiling. And he’d been surrounded by quiet, pale men and women, all dressed in long, white coats with paper masks over their faces, their dark brown or bright blue eyes measuring and cold.
And the screaming. From the moment he woke to the night he was able to escape, Motumbo always heard someone screaming. Sometimes it was a man, the voice hoarse and low, sometimes a woman, the shrill shrieks lancing through his head. But it was constant, unrelenting, endless.
The men and women poked and prodded him, weighed him, made him do physical tests that he didn’t understand. Failure to comply was met with shocking force, administered by large men with devices that shot strange darts with wires attached to their handles that made Motumbo’s entire body feel as if it was on fire. He’d only needed to experience that once and afterward he had complied with their demands as quickly as possible.
In some respects, it wasn’t so bad. He was dressed and well-fed. He was even allowed to watch television for an hour each day, but sometimes the programs gave him headaches. The tests weren’t hard—at least, not in the beginning. Then one day he had been given an injection of a thick, black liquid and brought into a room with another person, a woman. Motumbo had just stared at her for a moment, as she had looked back at him. Then he had felt a strange sort of pressure in his head, as though his skull was about to split open if he didn’t do something right now, and a funny kind of warmness in his arms and legs, and the only thought in his mind was to—
No! He banished the rising memory before that terrible nightmare replayed behind his eyes again. Instead he concentrated on how he had escaped, catching a scientist by surprise when he had come in to check on the teen’s progress after the latest round of injections of the black stuff that made his limbs pulse with a warm, drowsy fire. The man hadn’t even had time to shout before Motumbo had leaped on him, bearing him to the ground and smashing his skull until it leaked blood. He had taken the man’s lab coat, identification and mask, and headed out a maintenance door he’d noticed was often left unguarded. Outside, he’d thought he was free, but had encountered another guard, who’d seen through his flimsy disguise. Motumbo hadn’t hesitated then, either. He had grabbed the man and battered his face until he had slumped to the ground. It was only afterward that he realized the guard had stabbed him in the side. He’d left the strange place, running at first, trying to put as much distance between himself and it.
The wound in his side throbbed now, but Motumbo’s pace never slowed. One hand pressed to his right side, the other held out to block low branches or to fend off a predator, he kept moving forward. Occasionally he glanced around the unfamiliar terrain, having no idea where he was or which direction his village might be. But always, always there was the insistence demand to hunt, to find...
A rustle in the trees to his right made the teenager freeze, cocking his head to pinpoint the source of the noise. He turned in time to see a blur of fur and fangs leap straight at his face The mouth of the leopard was opened wide to sink into his cheeks while the jungle cat’s front claws reached out to pierce his arms or shoulders and the rear claws raked across his abdomen to disembowel him. All of that would normally happen in the next half second as the jungle predator efficiently killed him.
But the moment Motumbo’s vision locked on to the leaping predator, time seemed to slow. The pupils of his eyes dilated even farther, taking in every detail of the large cat, from the snarl on its face to the scrap of rotting meat wedged near its upper left canine to its left paw extended a few inches ahead of the right one to hook into him first. The soaring cat turned sluggish, floating through the air instead of flying at him in the blink of an eye.
Along with the time slowdown, Motumbo was immediately filled with an insensate, killing, red rage.
Reaching out with his right hand, he gripped the left paw, heedless of the extended claws, and grabbed the right paw with his left hand. As soon as his fingers closed on both limbs, he wrenched them sideways, as far apart as he could with all of his strength, which now seemed limitless.
The crack and tear of snapping bones and ripping flesh sounded in the night. The leopard’s ferocious expression turned to agony as its forelegs were almost ripped off its body. Using the momentum of the cat’s leap, Motumbo whirled and threw the sixty-kilogram animal ten meters away. The crippled animal landed against a moss-covered tree with a sickening thud. Unable to rise, it let out a shocked yowl, as if unable to comprehend how it had gone from supreme hunter to mortally wounded in two heartbeats.
As soon as the overwhelming urge to kill had come over him, it abated, and Motumbo regained control of himself as though coming out of a daydream. He hadn’t suffered a scratch from the beast’s attempted attack, but his head felt thick and sluggish, and his muscles burned from the effort to protect himself.
A low mewling came from the base of the tree where the leopard had landed, and Motumbo walked over to it, seeing the animal writhing in pain, its front legs twisted and useless, its back legs limp and unmoving. Broke its back when it hit the tree, he thought. Careful to avoid the sharp teeth, he grabbed it behind the scruff and, with an amazing burst of strength, snapped its neck.
As he did so, bright lights popped on all around the small clearing. Motumbo looked up to see the three of the silver ghosts appear at the far end. The red rage fell over his vision again and he sprang at them, fingers outstretched to tear them apart, if he could only get his hands on one...
A loud hiss of compressed air sounded from his left and Motumbo felt the bite of the darts again, followed by searing agony that locked his limbs and sent him crashing to the ground, his face twisted in pain, a choked cry forcing its way from between his gritted teeth.
The silver ghosts looked at him from behind the strange masks they wore, and one of them held a small vial of something under his nose that made him dizzy and sleepy.
His
