Pred novel–deleted scene
It’s to that point of deletin’ some final stuff, reshufflin’ and reconfigurin’. Here’s a casualty. I always loved the burning deer stampede in Beautiful Mutants by Deborah Levy, but the stampede in the Pred novel ultimately just didn’t make any sense. I like the little otter-like critter, though. Might airlift him out.
Jeff
“Do you hear that?” Sukhon said, stopping. She was breathing hard, sweating like a fat American in a Bangkok massage parlor, and already remembering why she liked the sea so much.
“Hear what?” Virote asked, motioning to the men to stop chopping away with their machetes. The point of clearing a path was to make it easier to get out later.
“Like a rumbling?”
The odd thing about the sound was that it seemed to have a thousand parts to it. A kind of choreographed avalanche.
Virote frowned. “I hear it now. It’s coming from over there.” He pointed to the southeast. “Should we go toward it, stay here, continue forward, or…?”
It took her only a moment to decide. She hated this slow, incremental progress through the jungle-forest. She hated the buzzing insects and the strange calls from stranger animals. And she’d smashed the last walkie talkie on the beach for fear the demon could track her using it, although the lights in the sky had left her with no real confidence in being able to evade the demon if it wanted to find her.
A sudden urgency came over her.
“Toward it. Quickly!”
Virote barked the order and they abandoned their self-made trail for the claustrophobic, wretched jungle, Sukhon in the lead. She could sense a vibration in the ground that was almost like the constantly shifting motion of a ship’s deck at sea. It made it easier to tell where the sound came from, easier to know when they had gotten close. Still, it was slow-going. Too many stickery bushes and patches of mud or lashing branches, trees too close together, almost like a wall. They would all be bleeding from dozens of scratches by the end of this, and she could hear more than a couple of the men cursing, the glint and jingle of their shouldered AK-47s.
After about ten minutes, though, they stood at the edge of a canal of dark water, looking past it to an old wire fence, and past that a break in the jungle in the form of an embankment and a raised road above that.
Now it was Sukhon’s turn to curse. A road! Almost parallel to the pathetic path they’d been carving out so slowly.
But her attention quickly turned to what traveled the road. At first it struck her as a herd of deer, but resolved into a much odder assortment of animals. Not just deer and antelope but flanking them jackals and rabbits, foxes and smaller creatures. A heaving, bleating, snarling, biting mass of animals that formed a long torrent of tan, black, white, brown skin passing in front of them. There was a smell like mildewed carpet, and this close the rumbling vibration triggered the word stampede in Sukhon’s mind.
A stampede of animals so scared none of them cared prey followed predator followed prey. What was happening in the south of the island?
“Is there a fire somewhere?” Virote asked as, slowly, the mass of animals began to fade, become a dribble, and then just a few stragglers loping along. An otter-like creature loping awkward along, looking over its shoulder every few seconds, but soldiering on.
“No,” Sukhon said, shaking her head. “Just a demon. But now we have a road on which to travel.”
“Let me guess,” Virote said. “We’re going in the direction they came from.”
Sukhon didn’t reply, just started walking toward the road. After a moment of hesitation, she could hear them all behind her, following.