Trophy Grove Read online

  Chapter 11 – Shadow Monster

  An alarm shrills from the Spartan at our hunting party’s vanguard, and its dual assault cannons spin in preparation for a firefight as its torso swivels around so that its weapons face the rear of our line.

  “I regret to inform you, Mr. Jackson, but the Spartan at the back of the party no longer appears on my sensor sweeps,” the robot’s voice still seems to originate from the white skull spray-painted on its decorative faceplate. “Nor am I recognizing the presence of any clones.”

  The second Spartan follows the lead of its mechanical brother and levels its spinning cannons upon the grove. I gasp to see that the grove has collapsed and seemingly swallowed the rear portion of our expedition. The mudders, and all our supplies, are gone. There’s no trace of the third Spartan as I swivel my eyes around my surroundings. I tense, and I get ready to leap face-first upon the ground, because those Spartans are ready to unleash hell over my head the moment any enemy blinks into their awareness. But nothing stirs, and the grove remains silent.

  “Spartan, initiate a sonar ping,” commands Teddy. “Locate the position of our missing Spartan.”

  I hold my breath as the robots’ halo of sensors spin to find any trace of our missing robot and mudders. The grove’s only sound is the hum of the spinning assault cannons.

  “We cannot locate the third Spartan,” the robot answers after a very long minute.

  “How far can you see through the grove?” Marlena asks.

  “Our sonar pings fail to return to us, and so we cannot calculate distance.”

  Marlena sighs. “The grove soaks up everything.”

  “At least the grove didn’t swallow us,” Teddy remains positive.

  “How do you know?” I quip. “Maybe our mudders are dancing at this very moment to celebrate their sudden freedom.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” and Teddy straightens his shoulders, refusing to show the grove any indication that his resolve falters. “The way forward remains clear, and we have nothing capable of making a dent in the grove behind us. Our best option remains going forward. Spartan, keep your weapons at the ready.”

  The grove hasn’t revealed any additional baubles for several hours, and the intensity of its pulsating light has diminished. I no longer feel like a guest the grove is working to impress. The jungle has evidently decided we’ve seen enough of its alien zoology, and it continues to shape our progress with the path it unfolds before our feet.

  My breath turns to vapor in the chill air, for the temperature within the grove has fallen as the grove dims. I doubt Tybalt’s climate has much any kind of effect upon this depth of the jungle. All the vines and ropes of jungle seem to knot together into tight walls that contain whatever environment pleases the grove. Every condition – including temperature, humidity and illumination – seems tailored to a sophisticated intelligence’s whim, and I doubt if even Teddy remains confident that any of our hunt’s terms or conditions remain in our control. None of us speak as we continue, with the spinning of our Spartans’ whirling cannons humming over our heads.

  Teddy suddenly drops to a knee, and his laser rifle tracks something within the grove.

  Marlena carefully bends to whisper into her father’s ear. “What is it?”

  “There’s something rustling between all that orange foliage,” Teddy hisses. “I saw a moving shadow.”

  My heart pounds. In the short time since I witnessed a shadow lurking within that sleeping chamber I shared with mudders, I’ve convinced myself that what I looked upon was merely dream. No matter that the things I’ve already seen in the grove prove that jungle too strange for my understanding, I have convinced myself that the feline shaped from darkness that caressed Marlena’s sleeping face in the mudder camp was a creature far beyond possibility. Regardless how the grove revealed one alien creature after another, each one stranger than the one revealed before, I’ve assured myself that the shadow creature I suspect ripped away a bounty hunter’s face couldn’t be real.

  But Teddy’s mention of a shadow moving within the grove shatters the fragile lie I’ve tricked myself into believing.

  Teddy’s long laser rifle sweeps the jungle just beyond our path. “Are you picking up any signature at all on your scans Spartan?”

  The sentry’s cannons follow the sights of Teddy’s rifle. “Negative. I see nothing beyond the path.”

  “Careful,” Marlena urges her father. “The Spartans are on a hair trigger.”

  “That’s just where I want them.”

  I summon as much courage into my voice as I can to command Teddy’s Spartan. “Calibrate your sensors to focus on light fluctuations. Track the darkest shapes.”

  Both sentries immediately swivel their torsos to center their spinning cannons on the opposite side of our path. Whatever shadow moved within the grove diverted our attention in one direction before creeping upon us from another. Pieces of dark collect together into a cloud. That mass of black would’ve been upon us had our Sentries not turned to alert us of our jeopardy.

  The Spartans unleash the fury of their assault cannons into the advancing cloud of darkness. The robotic sentries’ weapons fire at an incredible rate, and though only every seventh round unleashed from their cannons is that of a glowing tracer, the velocity of their projectiles blur into a beam of burning, red light. The cloud of shadows ripples as the rounds rip patches of black away from the larger mass of dark. Every shred of shadow swirls a second before fighting its way through the Spartan’s onslaught to reunite with its cloud of shadow. The Spartans’ weapons halt the shadow’s advance, but the robots fail to push the shadow back into the grove. My ears ring for the thunderous roar of the Spartans’ cannons, which now steam as the robots’ internal cooling mechanisms struggle to prevent the whirling barrels from overheating. I know the Spartans will soon deplete their supply of ammunition. I know that the Spartans cannot forever continue their onslaught.

  “The cloud’s changing shape!” Marlena shouts over the din of weapons.

  Teddy’s discipline lapses, and he discharges a laser beam from his rifle, which the dark cloud absorbs just its shadows morph into an animal’s shape.

  “How can that be?” Teddy snarls.

  “How does it know?” Marlena asks.

  The cloud of shadow accepts the form of the beasts that have fed humankind’s nightmares for millenniums. The tusked snarl of the razor boar, that manic grin of the animal responsible for the slaughter on Delphi Prime that inspired the Law of Extermination, hungrily leers at us. The boar’s shape falls back into a formless cloud, and the shadow reshapes itself into another nightmare monster. The spiked appendages of the twelve-legged, giant spiders that still terrorize the miners of Chrysalis Station stretch out from the mist and claw towards us before the Spartans’ bullets rip those legs back into the shadow’s core.

  The first faces of teeth and fang the shadow assumes are those humankind has thus far discovered waiting in the stars, but those shades soon shift into more ancient predators of man and woman. The nostrils of the great jungle tiger sniff at our scent as that great, shadow cat’s power poises to leap. That cloud of shadow swirls, and a pack of wolf heads howl against our sentries’ fury. The shadow shifts, and the mandibles of a giant scorpion click towards our faces as its barbed tail flails over our heads. I wink, and the cloud expands despite the hail of gunfire into the head of great hooded cobra that unfurls to shroud the grove’s light.

  “It’s reading our fear!” I shout. “It knows our monsters!”

  Marlena retreats a step. “Zane’s right! The shadow’s taking the shape of anything that scares us!”

  Screeching dragons, drooling werewolves, shuffling corpses and bellowing minotaur’s threaten us. That creature of darkness will find no shortage of monsters to emulate in the warehouses of our fear. We believed we turned all those terrible creatures harmless by killing them in the hunt and mounting their heads upon the walls. But within the grove, that shadow reclaims all the terror those a
nimals possessed before our wit and weapons neutralized their power, and then turns that ancient fright back upon us. Within the grove, that monster of shadow steals the trophies mankind holds as proof of his dominance.

  The shadow crashes over us the moment the Spartans’ weapons turn quiet. Darkness chokes me, and it stings me like a swarm of buzzing hornets. Cold hands squeeze my arms, and I feel chilling fingers trace my face’s shape. And then, as suddenly as the shadow fell upon us, the darkness vanishes so that our eyes wince in even the soft light of the pulsating grove.

  Teddy cries at my side. “Marlena! Where are you!”

  Marlena is gone. I know that monster of shadow has taken her, because I witnessed how Marlena’s face attracted the darkness. The obliterators’ canister healed that woman’s face, and by doing so returned so much of the original beauty that the monster of shadow couldn’t resist taking Marlena’s features as its prize. My stomach turns sick.

  Teddy screams at his Spartans. “Conduct a full scan! Find her! Find my girl!”

  I can’t look towards Teddy as the robotic sentries rotate their halos of delicate sensors. Watching the despair contort that father’s features would make Teddy’s face as terrible as any taken by the shadow monster. Teddy Jackson has jumped beyond so many stars to reach Tybalt to experience a new safari, and he has found the monster that denies humankind a new Eden. But Teddy has failed. He’s been defeated in a way he likely never anticipated. He has lost his daughter.

  “We fail to find signals of any kind, Mr. Jackson.”

  Teddy Jackson crumbles upon the ground. Suddenly, I realize I’ve agreed to follow an old man on the kind of adventure once reserved for the young. I see that Teddy Jackson is no longer the man I read about in all those journals detailing his expeditions. I doubt Teddy Jackson was ever really such a hero. Desperation erases all the bravado from Teddy’s face, leaving only the terror. Should luck, or mercy, ever rescue me from this grove, I swear I’ll make all of Harold Higgins’ subscribers read the truth behind Earth’s famous interplanetary hunter, even if I have to force each page down every balking throat.

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