A distant screech rakes over Todd’s eardrums. He hunches over in unease.

  “What do you think that is?” Randall wonders.

  “I’m sure it’s something nasty,” Joe replies.

  “Something big as fuck, and full of teeth,” Candra chirps. She urges them onward. “Can we not dick around?”

  Sue Ann leans on Todd’s shoulder. He tries to ignore the warmth of her body, which is difficult because she’s blazing hot to the touch. The two of them together are like a game of three legged race; they amble with just as much grace as a dog missing a limb.

  “I know it’s hard to keep cycling when you’re moving, but it’ll help,” Todd tells her.

  “I can’t concentrate like this. It just hurts too much,” Sue Ann groans.

  “Control your breathing, focus on that. It’ll help with the pain.”

  “Ugh. I’m trying. I’m trying.”

  “Just listen to me. I’ll set the rhythm. You just match what I’m doing.”

  “Uh. Huh,” she pants. “Damn it. Okay. Okay.”

  Painstakingly, the crew makes its way across the empty plain and nears the first hill. As they do, a flock of tiny shapes spring out of the far trees like dandruff. They wheel into the air, a murmuration that spreads out into the valley until they spiral around a lone wandering beast. They plunge.

  Todd watches as the volant creatures pick their prey apart. They swarm like mosquitoes and pepper the back of the fat, feathered unfortunate. From the far distance, Todd can barely see it thrash, trying to shake off its attackers.

  Closer by, a feathered mink stalks a group of naked rats. Once within striking distance, it launches itself into the back of their number, assaulting a back leg with a chomp that fractures bone. The mink leaps backwards, clearly mindful of being surrounded. It backs away further the more that the rats threaten it. But the crippled rat is clearly unable to keep up with its pack. Sooner or later they will have to leave it behind.

  Everywhere around them there are little scenes like this. Conflict and predation taking place out in the open under the moon.

  Joe charts the way. He evades the larger mobs of beasts, and brings them into combat when the numbers are smaller and easier to tackle. The temperature drops further, breath clouds from out of their mouths.

  Todd drops Sue Ann unceremoniously, with only a curt apology. He falls into rank and fights alongside Randall as they tackle a speckled downy hound to the ground. The beast snaps at him, and he shoves the handle of his ixwa into its jaws. He forces it back while Randall chops savagely at its flank. Howling, it disgorges itself of his weapon and whirls around to target the larger young man, so Todd throws himself on its back, grips it around the sides, and stabs continually. As he holds on for dear life, a sudden violent electrical shock envelops Todd. His heart skips a beat. It happens again, but less intensely.

  “Move!” Randall shouts, brandishing his cutlass and unwilling to take his shot.

  The hound shakes itself, nearly sloughing Todd off. It curls to the side and its nose bumps his leg. Alarmed, he jabs all the faster. The voltage of the beast’s discharge is weakening.

  “Keep hitting it!” Todd shouts.

  “I can’t!”

  “Gah!”

  “You’re in the way!”

  Todd plunges his ixwa into the hound’s belly. “Just! Hit! It!”

  Randall clips the hound in the ear, splitting the appendage in two and scoring the back of its head to the bone.

  Todd punctures the beast like a sewing machine, working his way upwards on its body, striving for something vital. He jams the blade into a rib and gets stuck for a moment, then wrenches his weapon free. Shuddering from galvanic energy, Todd drives his spear into the flesh of the hound one last time. This time, he pierces something important. The creature slumps, then crumples. Randall raises his his sword for an executioner’s blow and claims the kill.

  Joe and Candra have already finished off their adversaries, so Todd shoves the body of the hound, rolling it so that he can extract his ixwa. He wipes his hands on the animal, then claps hands with Randall to congratulate him. Ready to leave, he goes back to collect Sue Ann. He apologizes to her again.

  The five of them move like this: stuttered forward progression followed by short, fraught fights. Todd is ever cognizant of the risk of being surrounded, and eventually Sue Ann needs to defend herself against a pair of rats. She nearly takes a slice out of Todd, but she holds her own long enough for the rest of them to clear out their own rats and save her.

  Todd collects a new series of scrapes and scratches, though he doesn’t suffer anything major. His unnatural regeneration works overtime, forming scabs and stunting bleeding faster than humanly possible. Plus, the millipede toxin has almost run its course. But exhaustion soaks him to his very bones, and cycling cosmic energy is only getting him so far.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The woods can’t come soon enough.

  The crew trudges over a second hill and looks down into the short lee between it and the next. A swarm of rats surrounds a horned pangolin, and they nip at its feet. It lays down to protect its tender underbelly; but the rats gnaw at it incessantly, their teeth wearing away at its armor plates. Todd’s morbid curiosity isn’t strong enough to overcome his revulsion. He turns away.

  “Two more hills,” Joe encourages. “Toast, how’s your skill? We need you in case those birds come back.”

  “I need a bit more,” Randall replies. “Maybe in an hour or two?”

  That’s too long. Todd rifles through his sack, pulls out his corvid marrow pill, and offers the last one to Randall.

  “Don’t use it unless you need it, but don’t save it either,” Todd requests.

  Randall’s fingers curl around the pill. “Got it,” he says.

  A canopy looms ahead of them, over the next hill. Gnarled trunks coil and spread into knotty branches. The boughs are thin, with dense clusters of coniferous needles. Sharp thorns spike through the bark of the trees, from their roots up to their upper reaches. These plants belong to a species of grim determination, of ill-tempered misanthropy. They survive and they resent.

  Todd and his friends crest the final hill. As they do, a snorting, raging horned pangolin rushes at them uphill. The beast fights gravity to surge at them, and manages a slow, exhausting lope. Todd blasts it in the leg like usual, and the five of them bum rush the creature. They take it apart in mere seconds.

  “Alright,” Joe wipes his forehead with his sleeve, “now where are those birds.”

  “They went back, I don’t see them,” Candra informs.

  Joe adjusts his leather pteruges with a sour face. “I’d rather we deal with them here than have to fight them in the forest. Toast will burn the whole thing down.”

  “Maybe they’re not hungry anymore?” Randall offers.

  “Wishful thinking,” Candra grumbles.

  “Well we can’t stand out here forever,” Todd says.

  Joe spins his sword. He limbers up. “Fine. Just stay together.”

  They pick the easiest, winding route down the hill, having long since abandoned the road. Out here, the terracotta ground starts to break up. Tessellated cracks spread through the earth, like a mudplain. The trees burst out of the ceramic, leaving shards and dust pushed aside. The cold bites at naked skin, bracing and insistent.

  The group skirts around the thorned conifers. At first, there’s ample space to navigate between them. Todd moves closer and his hand hovers over the bark. Noticeable warmth emits from within, and there’s something strange about the texture, as if the whole tree has been marked and twisted by fire. Sue Ann follows him and taps her foot impatiently.

  “It’s cool, right?”

  Sue Ann scratches the ground with the tip of her sword. “What if the trees can move? What if it tries to eat you?”

  Todd backs away slowly. “Shit. You’re right.”

  They rejoin the others.

  The woods grow thicker as they head deeper. The group takes a detour to avoid a dense copse of craggy evergreens.

  “If we want to find water, we should be heading downhill,” Sue Ann says.

  They change course to accommodate her advice.

  “Are we going to be able to find our way out again?” Todd asks.

  “That’s a good point. We might be getting turned around.”

  “We should have left a path or something.”

  “With what?”

  “We have bread stuff.”

  “That would just get eaten.”

  “Shh!” Joe silences them. “It’s too late now. We should be listening for water and for monsters.”

  The five no longer move quietly. Fallen branches and debris now litter the ground. Fertile earth is reclaiming the scorched clay. Crunch, crunch, goes their shoes.

  “I wish we had a compass,” Todd says.

  “Or a map,” Randall jokes.

  Sue Ann huffs with exertion. “I have a compass,” she says.

  Joe whips around. “Why didn’t you say so?!”

  Sue Ann shakes her head. “Because it doesn’t work. I thought it would be useful because it points to the largest source of cosmic energy. But that’s us.”

  Joe considers it. “It would warn us if something came along which had more cosmic energy though, right? Maybe we should be checking it, just in case.”

  Sue Ann’s shoulders slump. “Fine,” she agrees. “I need to pee though.”

  Candra perks up. “I could use a break too.”

  Todd raises one hand. “Yea, I’m coming close to the end as well.”

  “Shit,” Joe says. “Alright. We don’t go far. We’ll take turns.”

  Sue Ann is nearly walking on her own power. She and Candra walk out behind a far tree. The guys turn around. Privacy isn’t luxury they have much of here. The girls take care of their business and tap out. Todd heads over to take his turn.

  Hyper-vigilant and feeling vulnerable, he listens to the woods around him. Echoes of skittering noises and cracking twigs filter in towards him. For a moment, Todd thinks he sees a glint through the trees, but it vanishes just as quickly. He shivers, shakes himself off, and heads back to the others.

  “I think there’s something following us,” Todd tells them.

  “Are you sure?” Joe asks.

  “No. It’s just a feeling.”

  “Everybody sticks together from this point on. Like glue,” Joe declares.

  Huddled up, they thread the ever narrowing path between trunks. Further in, fluttering noises and deep basso cheeps traverse overhead, and they freeze long enough for the sound to pass.

  The sky overhead is nearly occluded by the forest’s crown. A thin layer of cloud is forming above, and the stars peek through where they can. The fluttering forms of flying beasts disappear.

  Randall lowers the pill from his lips.

  But their voyage is not bloodless. Eventually, they stumble upon a nest of rabidly aggressive, pink and yellow badgers. The beasts huddle up in a hollow underneath the roots of a nearby tree, and boil out of their home in a frenzy. The knee-high animals are as fast as a hare in full sprint, and Todd doesn’t have time to fire a [water spear] before they’re already scratching and clawing at the ankles of Joe and Candra.

  “Fuck!” the brunette cries. She kicks off and shakes the rampaging creature loose. It flings through the air, tearing at her calf as it goes. “You little fucker!” she shouts. It scrabbles towards her as soon as it lands. She runs ahead to meet it, plants her foot, and boots the badger full force. Meanwhile Joe tries ineffectively to stomp his foot and dislodge the beast that way.

  A third garishly colored animal bolts out of the hollow, and this time Todd brings his hand up in time. His skill beams out and punches a hole in its skin, which balloons out as it rips free from the fat and muscle underneath. The beast skids to a stop and rolls backwards. Todd springs on it while it’s down and stabs it in the chest.

  Bleeding and angry, Joe holds a badger by the scruff of its neck. He’s wrung it dead with his bare hands. Candra waits for her own opponent to drag itself back to her before she stomps on its back and breaks its spine.

  “God, that stings,” Joe winces. His hand hovers over his torn up lower leg.

  Candra looks herself over. “I swear, if this scars, I’m going to be so pissed,” she spits.

  With renewed caution, the five travel on. Ever moving down-slope through denser timberland, they keep their ears and eyes peeled, searching for danger, and for signs of life-giving water.