Trophy Grove Page 16

  Chapter 12 – Plastic Faces

  The grove unveils its next surprise several hours further into its depths. Our only companions remain the pair of hulking Spartan sentries that flank us for protection as the grove continues to unfold a path for us to follow. Even Teddy must now have to accept our expedition’s failure, to have lost so much so quickly. Even Teddy must accept that the grove has mocked him, taking even his beautiful Marlena away while forcing that old hunter to recognize how all his weapons were powerless against the shadow that stalks us. The Spartans continue to spin their cannons, and the weapons quickly click as there is no longer the ammunition to send roaring from their barrels. We crouch behind those robots as Teddy clutches his laser rifle and I clutch my camera, the both of us waiting for whatever else decides to leap from the grove.

  “Hold your fire!” A voice suddenly shouts. “We’re as human as you are!”

  “Then you best walk out really slowly from that jungle!” Teddy shouts back.

  Two men dressed in the lightweight armor of League space rangers step backwards into the light glowing above our path, a strange manner of walking on a planet that brims with more oddity than even I’m used to experiencing. One ranger stands slim and tall, while the other is a wide wall of a man measuring a good foot shorter than his companion. Each of the men wears an identical, plastic face on the back of his trooper helmet. The plastic faces are eyeless, lacking any kind of feature or color. Yet something in their expression still sends a shiver up my spine, as if those false visages somehow appraise my character as well as any of the living, breathing faces of flesh I’ve thus far encountered upon Tybalt.

  “Tell your Spartans to stop twirling their cannons,” the taller man shouts. “There might still be a round jammed in one of those gun barrels, and I don’t want to take in the back should it decide to wiggle its way out of the weapon.”

  “Sure,” Teddy snarls, “right after you turn around and show me your faces.”

  “You’re a fool for not knowing what you’re asking of us,” the shorter man growls.

  “Maybe so, Mitch,” the taller ranger responds, “but we’ll only have to expose our faces for a moment. Just long enough to let that fool know we’re human.”

  “A second might be all it takes, Danno.”

  The slim man slowly turns to face us through a dark visor that hides his features. I notice that his hands tremble slightly as they push the helmet off of his head to reveal a pale face of blue eyes and short blonde hair. The man’s eyes dart about the grove that rises like a wall only a few inches beyond either side of our path.

  “Come on, Mitch,” urges the ranger. “I took the risk. Now it’s time for you to do the same.”

  Mitch hurries around, and his hands rip off his helmet to show a face of dark skin and dark eyes, shadowed by beard stubble. The men could hardly look any different from one another. I doubt I would’ve given the observation any thought if not for the identical, white masks on the back of their helmets.

  Mitch’s dark eyes do not scan the jungle. They instead remain locked upon Teddy’s. “Well, old man? Have you seen enough?”

  Teddy grunts. “Better. But why are you wearing those masks?”

  Danno shakes his head. “Not until you command your Spartans to stand down, and not before I squeeze my face back into this helmet.”

  “Lower your guns, Spartans.”

  The sentries’ cannons hum to a stop, and the weapons’ barrels no longer click. Both of the rangers hurriedly squeeze their heads back into their visors, and each twists his body so that those plastic, white masks fixed onto the rear of their helmets again face the grove. Mitch drops a pack from his shoulder before removing a pair of additional helmets, each with another identical, plastic face. He tosses one to both Teddy and me.

  “Don’t just stare at them. Hurry and put them on,” urges Danno.

  “Why?” I stammer.

  Mitch glares at me. “This isn’t the place for explanation. Trust us. We’ve survived this grove longer than most.”

  I don’t argue any further, and I’m squinting through the dark visor to watch Teddy squeeze his beard into his helmet. My helmet dims the grove’s light, and my view doesn’t improve as my breath begins to fog the visor. The helmet feels a size or two too small, pushing against my nose and squeezing against my ears. My breath quickens. I feel the sweat rise to my forehead, and moisture trickles into the corner of my eyes. But I can’t rub at my eyebrows to clear the sweat my anxiety keeps generating because that visor keeps getting in the way.

  “Just take a breath,” Danno tells me. “Just concentrate on slowing your breathing before you start hyperventilating or get sick. You wouldn’t be the first person to struggle with such sensations the first time you squeeze into a ranger’s helmet.”

  Mitch nods. “Listen to him. You can’t afford to remove that helmet out here in the grove. Danno, you’d better get his plastic face pointed at the jungle.”

  Danno slowly turns me, but it still feels like vertigo’s about to overtake me within the helmet.

  “Why are you spinning our backs to the grove?” Teddy asks. “How are we supposed to see whatever jumps out at us? My Spartans’ sensors don’t work in the middle of all this jungle, and now that you’ve put this visor over my eyes, I’m afraid we’re not going to have any warning when some creatures jumps out at us.”

  Mitch chuckles. “Did you have any warning before, old man?”

  “We had enough,” Teddy replies.

  “And what good did that do you?” Danno asks. “You probably had time to raise your weapon. I’m guessing your Spartans’ weapons were clicking empty because they’d already unloaded everything they had against the shadow. What good did it do you? I doubt even those Spartans did much to dissuade the shadow from taking whatever, or whoever, it was looking for.”

  “It took my daughter,” Teddy’s voice cracks.

  Mitch scoffs. “Who in the hell brings a child here?”

  “Is she dead?” The words erupt from Teddy as a shout, telling me it takes all the strength remaining to that hold hunter to shove them from his throat. “Will I find her?”

  Danno shrugs. “Only if the grove decides to let you. Only if the grove’s in a merciful mood.”

  “So I have a chance? There’s still a chance the grove will give her back to me?”

  Mitch sighs. “The grove returns nothing.”

  “What was that shadow?” I’d rather ask questions about a terrible monster than learn another thing more about Marlena’s probable fate. “Our Spartans gave it all they had. You didn’t hear the robots roaring their guns?”

  “We could’ve been less than ten feet away from you in this grove and we still wouldn’t have heard a thing,” Danno answers. “We’ve spent too much time out here as it is. Trust us. We know of better shelter.”

  “I have to find my girl,” Teddy’s voice falters.

  Mitch’s helmet nods. “You have to believe me when I tell you the shelter is the only place where you have any chance of seeing her.”

  “Will the grove let you get back?” I ask. “The only direction we’ve been following is whatever one the grove shows us.”

  “The grove will let us,” Danno replies. “Please, we have to talk on the move. It’s too dangerous to slow down on account of too many questions.”

  I must concentrate to keep from stumbling as we continue deeper into the grove. Mitch and Danno have positioned us so that the white, plastic faces on the back of our helmets face the grove ahead of us, forcing us to walk in reverse and trust that our surprise comrades aren’t in fact pushing us towards some pitfall filled with demise. I’ve never been a very athletic man. I’ve never owned coordination, and what little grace I might’ve been born with has long ago evaporated in too many all-night parties with deep space pirates and private adventure girls. I’ve tossed too many hallucinatory powders into my eyes, and I’ve sipped from too many zombie cocktails. Thus, I trip several times into Danno, who faces me as
he walks forward in a much more agile, reverse gait. I’m about to go mad. I’m about to tear that visor away from my face and simply toss the helmet into the glowing grove just as Mitch finally gives us some explanation behind our masks and our walk.

  “The masks come from a box of mudder face templates we found back at our science station,” Mitch begins.

  “Are you part of the contingent the League sent to find Dr. Amberson,” Teddy asks.

  Mitch laughs. “Yeah, we found her alright, found her right after the grove took most of us, before we found all those plastic, mudder face templates stored in the station. You need to understand what the grove wants most.”

  “What is that?” I hate to ask.

  “Faces.” Danno doesn’t break his stride as he answers. “The grove collects faces.”

  “You’re not talking much sense,” speaks Teddy.

  Mitch chuckles again. “Listen, old man. You have to hear a little of how it went down out here to understand why we’re walking backwards with these dark visors dimming our view while we glue mudder masks onto the back of our helmets. The grove took the mudders first, which makes sense, seeing how the obliterators first sent all the mudders to chop down that glowing grove with little more than hand axes. But the mudders failed to satisfy the grove’s curiosity for very long. The grove quickly tired of taking the mudders.”

  “So the obliterators didn’t lose all the mudders that they claim?” I ask.

  Danno answers. “The obliterators lost plenty of clones. Only, the grove didn’t kill most of them. The obliterators committed the mudder butchery on their own. The mudders were terrified when they remerged from the jungle, ranting about monsters made of shadows, capable of taking all kinds of strange forms lurking in the glowing grove. The obliterators feared the panic such mudders might spread almost as much as they feared the grove, and so the obliterators just swallowed the cost and put a bolt through the brain of any mudder coming back from the grove before the clone could spread a rumor about whatever might’ve been waiting within that glowing wall of jungle.”

  Mitch and Danno suddenly stop. They slowly adjust their bodies, insuring that the plastic, mudder masks on the rear of their helmets squarely face the grove directly ahead of them. I can’t see Danno’s face, though it’s no more than an arm’s length in front of my own. The dark visor veils any of the emotion, or fear, that might be crossing his features as all of us stand as still as possible, listening to whatever sound the grove betrays. I wonder if Danno is as frightened as I am. We must look like an easy meal to whatever monster shuffles through the foliage – four men, all dumbly presenting eyeless masks to whatever danger approaches.

  Mitch somehow notices that the danger passes and nods, and we return to our reverse strides.

  Mitch continues to relate what he knows of that shadow I still sense nearby. “The grove’s become tired of all the mudders, but the grove hasn’t lost any of its appetite when it comes to us humans. Mudders can walk back out of the grove once they’ve entered. Men and women cannot.”

  “Why is that?” I swallow.

  “It’s because we all have different faces,” Mitch answers. “All of our faces offer a unique trophy. You have to realize that the shadow and the grove are the same. The shadow is only one of the forms the grove takes in order to hunt. That shadow doesn’t want to collect the same face over and over again. The shadow wants each face it collects to be different than any it found before. That’s why the grove lets all the mudders go while it devours every man or woman that steps into its confines. The mudders have nothing new to offer it.”

  Danno smirks. “Sound crazy enough for you?”

  I must admit that Mitch’s tale fails to shock me. Once more, I think back to that room on Teddy’s star yacht adorned with the mounted horns and the stuffed heads of so many alien creatures Mr. Jackson killed during his prior safaris. Teddy doesn’t mount the same alien head over and again on his walls. Doing so would be a poor showing for Teddy’s collection. The prize hunter wants to fill his trophy chest with one different head after another. The prize hunter must always move on to new game after asserting his dominance by killing another.

  “Are you suggesting the plastic masks serve as some kind of camouflage?” Teddy asks.

  “That’s the idea,” Mitch answers. “Too bad Danno and I didn’t come up with the idea until the grove took everyone else out of our platoon. We’re hoping that the shadow sees the mudder masks and thinks its just looking on more of the same clone faces. Hopefully, the black visors shield our true faces from the shadow’s attention. Hopefully, the shadow doesn’t think there’s anything worth grabbing on the front of our skulls.”

  “Is it working?” I ask.

  Mitch shrugs. “We’ve survived longer than anyone else who’s entered the grove.”

  “That’s not true,” Danno counters. “Dr. Amberson’s been in the grove longer than either of us.”

  Mitch snorts. “And you think the grove hasn’t taken her?”

  Teddy stops. “The obliterators sent us to drag Dr. Amberson back out of the grove.”

  Mitch laughs loudly. “They sent you just like they sent us. You must be one mean, old dog. Did the obliterators show you their lightshow? Did they tell you it was just as well to kill the woman?”

  “They did.” Teddy replies.

  “Then you’re going to love us,” Mitch continues, “because we’re going to take you straight to her. But I’ll save you from the suspense. There’s not anything that can be done to remove that woman from this grove.”

  “Why is that?” Teddy asks.

  “I’d like to try to tell you,” speaks Mitch, “but I don’t have the words for it.”

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