Welcome to the Jungle

Welcome back to Geekcentricity. There have been a lot of changes here since my last post.  I’ll be introducing them to you over the next few days.  First, I want to inaugurate the new site with a bit of fiction.  The following piece is for the Maschine Zeit Blog Carnival.  Please check out the game in .pdf form over at Drive-Thru RPG.  You won’t be disappointed.

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Posted by SL Clemins

Photo Copyright Associated Press

Photo Copyright Associate Press

That’s who we’re supposed to be, right?  Clemins?  To protect us.  I suppose it doesn’t matter though.  As soon as they see this post, and I’m sure they will, they’ll know.  They’ll know that I was there.  That I took the photos.  What they might do to me scares me far less than what I’ve already seen.  The photos.  You may have seen them on the internet.  I’d have just as soon burned all of them, along with any reminders that we were ever in that gods-forsaken rainforest.

We were paid to go deep into the Amazon, along the border of Brazil and Peru.  Officially, we were there to study the recovery of the rainforest since the Cataclysm.  One of the stations fell a few hundred miles north of the little shithole Peruvian airport we were flying out of.  The forest burned for months.  Whole tribes, tribes who’d never even been exposed to the flu, were wiped out.  But the forest was coming back.  The burn was being brought back under her protective green canopy.

There were twelve of us.  Botanists, anthropologists, geologists, I’ve never seen so many “-ists” in one place.  I was just a photographer.  There were a couple of us there to record the native flora and fauna and provide a photographic record of the recovery.  Maybe a record that the Cataclysm wasn’t all that bad, I don’t know.  Our sponsor was some guy named John Burbank.  I’ve never heard of him before he hired me.  He was the thirteenth member of our team.

As we flew low over a rise in the forest, we got our first view of the old burn.  There’d been nothing but trees below us for close to two hours.  When we crested that rise, it was new growth, at least compared to what we’d been seeing.  I’m not sure why the fires stopped where they did, but it was like they hit a wall.  Maybe they just burned themselves out.  Maybe it hit the rainy season.  Who knows?  But the trees were coming back.  Sure, a hundred years seems like a long time, but in the life of a forest, that’s nothing.

There weren’t supposed to be any tribes here.  This Burbank character told us that the last three expeditions he’d hired hadn’t seen any people.  I wasn’t sure if I believed him then and I damn sure don’t now, but that’s what he’d said.  No people.  But when we buzzed in low like giant metal hornets out of some old monster flick, there they were.  Their entire bodies were painted.  They looked up at us as we buzzed the tops of the trees.  One of them pointed.  They were shouting, at least they’re lips were moving.  We couldn’t hear shit over the rotors.  A couple of them had spears.  I flinched at that.  I was actually scared then that a little wooden spear could bring down a chopper.  I couldn’t help it.  They were standing near a line of huts that grew up out of the forest like the fossilized spine of a long dead beast.  I remember thinking it odd that the huts were in a line like that, not in a circle or clustered together.

About six kilometers past the huts, Burbank spotted a bare, rocky outcropping rising out of the trees.  He had the pilots bring the helicopters in close, one at a time, and we climbed down and offloaded our gear.  The choppers would head back to the airport in Pucallpa and return for us in 48 hours.    Four members of our little expedition set up a base camp near the landing zone, while the rest of us, eight plus Burbank, put together our kits and started the hike back to the huts.  Back towards the painted guys with pointy sticks.

It was a four hour hike through some rough terrain.  We reached the line of huts just before sunset.  Burbank initiated contact with the natives, who predictably didn’t speak any language that any of us knew, but Burbank somehow calmed them down enough to not look so ready to run us through with their spears.  While Burbank dealt with the natives, we started walking around, exploring.  I remember watching one of the geologists pull out a machine that was supposed to detect radiation.  The little needles on the thing went crazy.  We wandered around taking notes and snapping pictures for a while before I saw it.

I didn’t even mean to look inside the big hut.  I mean, I just wasn’t that curious.  I figured there’d be some sleeping pallets or something in there, but there wasn’t.  I was taking pictures of some giant flowers near the back of the largest hut and I just looked away from the camera to wipe my forehead when a glint of metal inside the hut caught the rays of the setting sun.  When I saw it, I heard it.  I heard her.

I realized pretty quickly that what we were looking at were the remains of the station that had landed here during the Cataclysm.  It was pretty well broken up, but these natives had built huts over each of the pieces.  And that was when we became reacquainted with the whereabouts of Mr. John Burbank.  In the forty minutes or so we’d been distracted, wandering around recording the scenery, the natives had tied up John Burbank.  They were in the hut there with him.  He was lying on his back, tied down on a piece of that station.  The painted men started to chant in rhythm with her voice.  She was urging them on, their voices rising to a crescendo with hers.  The men danced around the strange metal altar and the chanting reached a fever pitch when she appeared.  She stepped right out of the metal and bent over Burbank.  She was an angel.  A goddess.  And she was demanding sacrifice.

I started running when the sharp metal wing ran down Burbank’s sternum and the blood welled up from the surgical incision.  We got separated.  Out of the eight of us, nine if you count Burbank, three of us made it back to the landing site before the helicopters came back.  I don’t know how long I ran alone in the dark forest, but I eventually found two others.  We forced ourselves to slow down.  We were lost and didn’t want to run into any painted men with pointy sticks who might sacrifice us to their beautiful, terrible goddess.

We found the landing site about four hours after the sun came up.  The camp was a wreck.  They had obviously found it before we did.  The three of us never saw any of the rest of them again.  We hid among the roots of the trees not far from the landing site for the rest of that day and the next night.  We waited for the helicopters and, when they came, we ran to them and climbed aboard.  One of the other guys, the botanist I think, got the pilot to take off.  I passed out from exhaustion and sheer terror soon after we took off, so I don’t remember much of the flight back to Pucallpa.  I remember the tequila after we landed, though.

I know this is true because I was there.  Pieces of the stations can hold the souls of the dead.  And sometimes they can be hungry.