Carpathian 23 - Dark Storm

blood was so dark. Curly
     hair lay on the ground, strands and tufts across fronds of fern, matted and muddy
     red. She saw fingers and part of a hand. Strips of clothing covered in blood. There
     wasn’t a place in a five-foot radius that wasn’t soaked red. It was impossible to
     tell what lay in that dark dense foliage.
    She was aware of the sudden silence in the rain forest. No sound at all. No drone
     of insects. No gunfire. No shouting. The buzzing in her head was gone, to be replaced
     by her silent screams of protest. The world around her receded and then sharply focused,
     only to recede again.
    “Riley,” Gary spoke in her ear, his voice calm and firm. “You have to come with me
     now. Looking at her isn’t going to help.”
    His hands urged her frozen body to move, to take steps, but she had no control, the
     shaking, the anger, the grief welling up like a volcano, from deep beneath the shivering
     ground, straight through her body, until her heart wanted to stop beating and her
     lungs refused to work.
    She tried to tell Gary she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t draw in air. The scent of blood
     was too heavy, permeating the entire area. He simply lifted her off her feet and began
     to stride away. She caught a glimpse of Capa, the porter, lying in his own pool of
     blood, the machete a few inches from his hand. His body was intact, although all life
     had run out of him onto the ground.
    A sob escaped and she gripped Gary’s arm hard, her only reality in a world gone mad.
     Annabel murdered in such a savage way was unthinkable. Her mind just refused to process,
     but her body was wholly aware and reacting with shutting down. She wasn’t certain
     she could have stood on her own if her life depended on it. Gary allowed her to sink
     into the carpet of vegetation, a short distance away from the site of her mother’s
     murder.
    She was aware of her traveling companions on some level, actors in a play. Their slow
     reactions. Turning heads. Mouths open with shock. The bodies of dead monkeys were
     scattered like litter across the ground, adding to the macabre scene. Everything around
     her blurred, and it took a moment to realize her eyes were swimming with tears.
    The monkeys that hadn’t suddenly taken to the trees appeared as confused as she felt,
     wandering in circles, as if they’d lost all direction. On the edge of her vision,
     she saw the three guides picking themselves off the ground, all disheveled and streaked
     with blood from the attacks of the woolly monkeys. The three brothers ignored the
     scattered primates and looked uneasily toward the rain forest and the two bodies that
     lay just out of their sight. They whispered to one another in low, hushed voices,
     before making up their minds to see what had transpired.
    Jubal moved out into the open to face them, his clothes torn from the vicious, concentrated
     attack, showing evidence he’d tried to get back to Annabel and was stopped just as
     Riley had been. The three guides hesitated, but continued slowly forward, craning
     their necks, hands gripping weapons.
    Dr. Henry Patton picked himself up gingerly from the ground and hurried over to help
     one of his students, Marty Shepherd, up. The man appeared to be in tears, almost hysterical,
     slapping at Patton and fighting when Todd Dillon rushed over to aid him as well. Marty
     was pulled to his feet, but instantly sank back to the ground with the other two men
     bending solicitously over him.
    Riley rocked herself back and forth, trying to take in that her mother had been murdered
     just feet from her. She looked down at the rich dirt, thick from hundreds—thousands—of
     years of vegetation, of death and rebirth. Above her head, the sky darkened subtly.
     She glanced up as she dropped her hands and buried them deep in the layers of black
     dirt. Clouds swirled ominously overhead, forming towers rising high. The wind stirred
     her hair, even there, under the stillness of the canopy, while the branches of the
     trees emerging from the canopy whipped back and forth in a frenzy of activity.
    She took a breath and let it out. A long keening moan escaped from her throat. At
     the sound, the remaining monkeys took to the trees, the mourning notes following them
     through the rain forest. Instead of moving up the mountain, the troop of woolly monkeys
     moved away from their natural home high up in the cloud forest.
    Don Weston and Mack Shelton stumbled back into sight. Both had run when