I'm amazed they're allowed to roam free. They look like a horrible cross between a tiger, a jackal, and an alligator. The tiger is definitely there in the body, with fuzzy looking orange fur with white stripes. But the size of it definitely resembles more of a Labrador than an adult tiger. And the jackal is there in the tail, bushy and wispy and inarticulate–it almost looks like it's composed of ostrich feathers.
One of them brushes up against my knee like an overgrown cat passing by. If it were a cat it'd be brushing up against my ankles and weaving between my feet. I go stock still and glance at Dennis nervously, silently wondering if this means I can acknowledge that they're there. He just reached out a hand and the other one pushes its forehead into his palm.
From this angle I see the alligator resemblance perfectly. It's all in the mouth. A short snout with retracted jowls and gums that I wish would slink back out and hide the gruesome fangs that shine wetly in the fluorescent light. They're angled out slightly, away from their faces. I wonder how they manage to cuddle up to people without scraping those teeth on skin and drawing blood.
The first one, still pressing itself hard into my knee, pushes its own forehead into my clammy hand that I'm too nervous to retract from my lap. And its barbed wire mouth is just centimeters from my groin. So I reach my hand out to spare my posterity and its head follows. I'm grateful at first when it moves away, and I'm almost comforted as it moves around in a motion that almost forces me to pet it. But as it slinks away and lifts its tail up to finish off the last stroke of its self-guided petting, my ring catches in the wiry fur of its tail. And it stops, just shy of letting it's fur tug free, to let out a low patient growl.
The other beast has left Dennis’ radius and moved over to me. I can't tell if it's calm or enraged. It doesn't growl. It moves its head to my other hand like the first one did. But when I offer it, still nervous, it doesn't press its forehead into my palm. It calmly opens its mouth and gently holds my fingers between its teeth. And when I try to retract my hand I realize it's too late, it's not going anywhere. As soon as it feels the pull it slightly increases the pressure like my digits are a rope and it's asking to play tug of war. But it doesn't crunch down, doesn't bite, doesn't draw blood. It waits. And with a strange sense of horror I realize it's waiting for me to free myself from its partner’s tail.
I don't let my fingers on either hand out of my line of sight and I can feel the pain of going cross-eyed as I slowly use my thumb and index finger on my right hand to carefully wiggle the metal band loose from their neighbor digit. It feels like minutes. It's probably 10 seconds. But the ring comes free. If it went much longer my fingers might have swelled in panic and I'd be missing a few from my other hand.
The growl ends abruptly. The ring hangs limp and the fur of the creature’s bushy tail and my fingers are released from the other’s mouth. And I watch in stunned silence as the second creature carefully puts its mouth over the ring and wiggles it free from its partner’s fur. I can't see a single loose hair as the liberated ring drops to the tile floor from it's gnarly jaws.
And then they walk out of the door I'd come in from earlier, leaving just as quietly as they'd arrived.
I wait until they're gone to retrieve my ring, but I think better of slotting it back on my finger. It met regulation by being a brushed matte gray color that didn't particularly reflect light, so I was allowed to wear it. But I drop it into a breast pocket and press my hand there to reassure myself. The racing my heart beneath the circular impression of the ring does the opposite of reassure me.
“What are they?” I ask Dennis. I don't look to him, but he knows I'm asking him.
“Smart enough to be trained, dumb enough to stay trained.” He answers with a dark chuckle. “Barely.”
“I can tell they're trained.” I say with a groan at the badly timed attempt at a joke. “But what are they?”
Dennis lets out a deflated sigh and says “Classified.”
I feel like that’s going to be the answer to a lot of questions in the future. And I'm going to have a lot of questions. I know most of them won't get answered beyond ‘classified.’
“You'll grow to like ‘em, though. Ziggy and Charlie, by the way. They've got names. At least unofficially, but they'll answer to them. But they won't run off when the feeling sets in out there. That was the problem we had when we started, we brought dogs along to stay alert and keep any critters away. But the second they felt the ick on any of the sites out on the river, the dogs’d paddle off into the muck quiet as ghosts and never come back. That's what happened when we tried German Shepherds, it's what happened when we tried Huskies, and it's what happened when we tried Labradors. Stiles asked if we could try Pyrenees or mastiffs, but we didn't have the budget. But no one wants to be out there without some kind of warning, so we were able to requisition Ziggy and Charlie.”
“So. They'll stay?”
“Like you're a sheep and they're a Collie.”
“You sound like you know about dogs. I didn't realize… Do you just watch the dog shows religiously after the parade every Thanksgiving or something?” I’m trying to offset the question with a laugh, but I'm just shaking slightly instead of making any noise when I try to laugh.
“Classified.”
“Oh.”
“You can't requisition resources you don't know about.” Dennis says quietly with a wink.
I'm filled with a whole new sense of dread. He’s all but saying he made monsters. I know he wrote his dissertation on embryonic stem cell manipulation in cows. But the thought hadn't occurred to me that he’d do any sort of genetic modification to anything other than cows. Of course he’d made monsters. But at least they were obedient ones.
“But, like I said, they'll stay.” Dennis says, trying to revive our conversation from the cold awkward silence I left it in. “More than that; if a gator tries to crawl up on you and pull you by the feet into the water for a death roll, Ziggy’ll catch the bastard before it gets your ankles and chew through its hide.”
“You know, somehow that does make me feel better.” I try to play my fear off with a laugh again and actually manage some sound.
“Trust me, Harve, you'll learn to love ‘em.”
- - -
We’re all loaded up in a long jeep. It holds two in the front—Curtis drives and Stiles is in the passenger—two in the middle with space for a bag or two between them—I don't know the names of the soldiers there but they look as nervous as I do—and then a back row where I sit next to James. There’s a spacious open trunk too, with a few flat boxes on the bottom and kennel crates on top. Ziggy is in the left one, Charlie is in the right. I learn that Charlie is the one that had my hand in its jaws and spared me. Dennis is explaining to me right now and I'm barely listening. He’s buckled into a fold-down seat in the trunk and I have to twist around 180 degrees against the pull of my own seat belt to make eye contact.
“Hold on, ladies!” Stiles calls out from the front seat. “We’re about to hit–”
We hit it before he can finish. The jeep rocks around uneven ground like a fair ride. I'm pretty sure Stiles about bit his tongue off mid sentence. I don't ask ‘about to hit what?’ like an idiot in a movie learning they'd hit a point of no return. I'm pretty confident what it is that’s still making the massive speed bumps under the reinforced tires. They're stumps. Or they used to be. This was in the field report from the briefing. Tree stumps carved low to the ground to look like faces rising from the earth. I catch one out of the corner of my eye through the window as we bump airborne for a second. It's enough to draw my full attention from the trunk.
They look like mesoamerican stone carvings. Olmec heads come to mind quickly, but are soon replaced by the memory of a dig site in Peru. Flat, rounded, carvings of wide faces with prominent teeth. They almost look more like carvings of gorillas, but the only gorillas within a thousand miles of here are probably in a zoo. Miami, maybe? I don't remember if there's a zoo in Miami. This feels like another planet, not southern Florida.
I can feel myself willfully sinking into a distraction. But I wish I could get a better look at these stump carvings. All I can see is that they're well preserved, apart from where other jeeps have clearly come and gone. It's probably the salt water. The trees were probably cypress, judging by the size and shape and visible roots, but I can't see any actual cypress trees growing on either side of the shallow valley we’re driving through. And besides, cypress don't grow in saltwater marshes. All I can see in the woodland around us are low growing southern oak, palms, saw palmettos, and the occasional crushed mangrove underneath them. The tidal wave knocked over most anything that wasn't a mangrove and those all crushed the mangroves that survived. Still, there’s enough clusters of upright trees to show that they could support each other. We’re far enough inland that the damage is minor, but closer to the river system that won't be the case. And the slowing of the car's lets me know that the river is closer than I thought.
“Right, we’re about a minute out from Styx. Deep breaths. Don't let it sink in.” Stiles announces from the front seat.
I look back to Dennis, but he’s wearing a grimace that tells me not even he will try to laugh it off. He’s whispering to the beasts in their crates. I can't tell if he’s soothing them or preparing them. James is taking slow deep breaths next to me while he twirls a chain around his fingers with a little black cross hanging from it. I put my hand over my breast pocket and feel for the ring that's still there. I feel the round shape and press down until I can feel my heartbeat beneath it. And I copy Jame’s breathing, slowly reaching a detached calm and a low heart rate.
I feel like I'm regulating pretty well when Stiles announces in the most serious tone I've heard him take, “we’re off the map.”
A second after he starts talking I feel it for the first time. A feeling of dread palpable as fog washes over me. I can see the difference on everyone's faces. They all look gray and tired and I can only imagine I do too. But the breathing helps. I'm only panicking for two breaths before I can reassure myself that this is fine. I'm with everyone else. Stiles, Curtis, and the two soldiers in the row in front of us are armed. We’ve all been issued a pistol (not that the rest of us plan on using them). Ziggy and Charlie are in the back. We’re safe. But none of those things actually make me feel safe. What makes me feel safe enough to keep going is knowing that we won't be here long.
We lurch to a stop just after we all manage to catch our breath. Everyone is still half trying to steady their breathing as we step out and begin to unload gear silently. Silence feels natural here. There’s hardly any ambient noise. No wind, no animals. Only the river down past the side of the cliff. Stiles is the only one to talk.
“Murph, you go down with Andy first. There’s more holes in the ACV. Bring all the patches and the methyl.”
The two enlisted just nod and heft a toolbox from the rack on top of the jeep. I watch them disappear down the hastily constructed staircase that leads to the docks. I try not to listen for them once I lose sight, but I feel like I have to just in case. It looks like everyone else is. When I'm mostly done pulling my bag off the top of the jeep and double checking that I actually patched everything I need I hear an air compressor whine to life. It's the most uncomfortable sound I've ever heard, because I know that everything out here knows we’ve arrived now.
“Don't worry about the noise, Harve.” Dennis reassures me. He has a hand on the back of each of his creature's heads. “Most of the stuff out here doesn't hear things. The leeches are all blind and deaf, they go mostly by touch.”
I don't miss the connotation of ‘most of the things.’ At least one thing can hear us, I'm sure.
“Most of the Seminole that used to live around here navigated by canoe. We figure that it probably helped them move around quiet on the river. They're probably the ones who left those stumps too, like a tide marker.”
I want to correct him. He’s a biomedical researcher. He doesn't know anything about anthropology, archeology, indigenous cultures, or who lived where and when. He is right about the Seminole people living in the Everglades, probably only because it was in the briefing. But this hardly feels like the Everglades anymore. It's too cloudy, it's too humid, and it's too cold. Not to mention we have no confirmation of this river system in any map of the Everglades.
I can feel my clothes getting damp from the fog that seems more physically present now than ethereally depressing.
I don't correct him about the canoes. I don’t even tell him that what he just said makes no sense. That them moving quietly wouldn’t matter if nothing here could hear. Besides, no one would have canoed here. Not when the river is so attached to the tide. If you left a canoe here overnight you wouldn't find it in the morning. The only reason the hover boats stayed was, presumably, because they were anchored on a long tether to a semi-permanent dock.
“We’ve got about four hours till it starts getting dark and the tide starts shifting. We want to be out of here before that even gets close to happening.” Stiles announces.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
His voice is quieter than it was in the car, I notice.
I left my pack onto my shoulders and follow Dennis and the creatures to the stairs.
The whole area at the top of the cliff is paved. Modern concrete, hand laid. There's no way they would have been able to get a cement truck out here. They would have had to mix it on site and wait for it to set. The fact that the stairs are prefabricated metal segments bolted together on-site and held in place to a combination of concrete anchors and metal bands fastened to standing trees reminds me that whoever built this dock area didn't want to stay for long.
The stairs are surprisingly sturdy, even with the hints of swamp slime hanging from the grated metal frame. The floating dock is not sturdy. As soon as I transition from the stairs to the dock I feel the world sink slightly below my feet. James has a similar surprised look on his face as he steps down. Everyone else appears used to the feeling. But they've all been here before.
The dock isn't too big. It's a wooden platform floating on metal buoys with chains anchoring it to the cliff. It's designed to float up when the tide comes in. It has a lot of vertical flexibility. It has to be able to go up and down at least 15 feet. Currently it's half depressed into the muddy bank of the river. The hover boats are half on the bank off to the side as well. The one more in the water has a fresh patch on the air cushion and Murph and Andy are already mostly loaded onto it. There are four other large patches on the cushion that I notice as I continue to look. They all look fresh.
The stink of ethanol reminds me of the other thing they carried down. A container of denatured alcohol. It's floating in the river out past the boats now, getting carried out by the molasses current along with something long and black and shiny half floating near it. Nothing in the river seems to be moving, but it still pulls things along with it. The can, the long black thing, branches, a small spill of gasoline shining like an opal path on the black water.
“Gear in the boat on the right, personnel on the boat to the left.” Stiles all but whispers.
We all pack on. Curtis and Dennis board the boat with the gear. Charlie goes with them. Everyone else loads into the boat with Ziggy. The two creatures are unnaturally calm, even when the fans power up and cause more noise than the compressor earlier. It makes me think back to the bumps in the road, neither of them made a noise then either.
The boat ride is long. Longer than I'd like it to be, at least. It's loud too. I'm not sure if it's louder than a motor boat would be, but a rotor in the water could get jammed easily. They had started with boats that had in-water rotors, according to the briefing. But the murk of the river had so much gunk in it that they had barely made it ten feet before it got tangled in moss and roots and weeds. The hover-boats, on the other hand, glided more or less safely across the top of everything. We didn't move too fast, though. There were plenty of sharp turns and obstacles.
I couldn't help but see the long black masses sluggishly slithering through the water. The leeches, as the briefing had called them, weren't big threats. But at four to five feet long and about a foot wide you didn't want to bump into them. They could put a hole in the cushion of the boat and they could put a hole in you too. Best not to bump into them. Best not to kill them too, since that could attract alligators.
But I didn't see a single trace of an alligator the whole time. It made me think that “alligator” was code for something else.
After what was probably thirty minutes, but what felt like hours, I saw something that distracted me entirely. A large skeletal rib cage, bigger than the jeep, protruded from the mire in a clearing to the right of the boats. We slowed as soon as I saw it and for a moment thought it would be our destination.
“Whale.” James answered my unspoken question. “Blue whale. We took samples last time we were out here. I did the tests myself. Came in with the wave is my best guess.”
The extreme lack of flesh and the integrity of the bones made me doubt James’ estimate. The wave had been two months ago. It would take a lot longer than that for a blue whale carcass to decompose. Especially in a damp habitat like this. It would take more than two months for coyotes or other scavengers to eat as well, and they'd have done more damage to the bones. I tried to put it out of mind, but it was right there in my field of view and I couldn't not look at it.
The boats turned away to the left. That was what tore my eyes away.
We were approaching a small mound that rose out of the river. It was probably 100 feet in diameter and almost perfectly round. It looked like it was made out of concrete, though it had browned extremely with age. The river had bowed around it and made a large clearing in the mire. There was even a small rippling trace of a current around the sides of it.
This was why I was here.
The fans went off and we drifted cleanly onto the barren stone bank of the mound. Stiles and Curtis leapt off the boats carrying ropes to anchor us down. They were both very careful not to touch the water. Murph and Andy jumped off next and helped the first two pull the boats all the way over the bank and tied them down; each rope was pulled around a stone pillar at the base of the mound and latched with a sturdy carabiner. The rest of us stepped off once we were tied down.
The mound itself was impressive. I wasn't sure what to take in first. The gentle slope of the banks, probably crafted through erosion. The steeper climb to the main platform, a large stage with three walls at its back in a trapezoidal formation and two sets of carved stairs that mirrored each other on the inner sides of the far walls. There was a balcony up on the, probably, seven foot high incline from the stairs that lined the upper back wall. The stage itself was the lower floor, below the balcony. There was a seal carved into the wall below the balcony. That would be first.
“James, take some chalk and outline all the obvious markings.” I held out a large stick of red chalk for James to take and walked absently towards the seal once he’d grabbed it.
The military folks–Stiles, Murphy, Andy, and Curtis–all positioned themselves around the stage. They had guns at the ready now, but I didn't pay them much mind.
If I wasn't here under military contract I would have thought I was being pranked. The seal was not native, not any native design that I had seen before. It wasn't Seminole, it didn't match any Creek peoples craft. It didn't even look mesoamerican like the head stumps had. If it looked like anything, it looked like it was from an early Qin dynasty dig in northern China. But they hadn't used concrete there, they had used terracotta. But the seal, a sort of fat snake with a horse-looking head, reminded me of the designs that the affluent Qin people decorated shrines with.
Other carvings lined the back wall and the sides of the stairs. None of them particularly telling. I was reaching for my camera instinctively when I looked back to Dennis. He was watching me more closely than his beasts, while his beasts seemed to roam equidistant among all of us.
“I know I was cleared for pictures, but will a flash set them off?” I meant Ziggy and Charlie. But I also meant anything else that might be in the area.
“The flash is fine.” Dennis nodded dreamily. His expression seemed more vacant than it had been earlier, but answering the question seemed to sober him up a little. “We’ve taken plenty of pictures out here, film works better than digital. The flash has never been the cause of a problem.”
Without further questions I wind back the lever on my camera and start to take pictures. Carvings, mostly with James’ red outlines, several of the stairs, and then up on the balcony of the stonework there.
“Stiles, there’s a leech up here.” Andy calls from the other stairs. Her voice is cold and quiet but it carries in the clearing in a way I can tell she hates.
I walk over to the other side of the balcony to look, Dennis is right behind me, while Stiles goes up the stairs behind Andy.
“Looks like it got stranded when the tide went down. Probably dead.”
I wind the camera and take a picture. It’s skinnier than I thought it would be. And shorter. It probably shrank out of the water.
“You'll need to cut that one out of your reel when we get back to base.” Dennis whispers. “Classified. Besides, I have plenty.”
I don't want to ask if he means pictures or specimens.
“Let's get behind it and roll it down with a stick just in case.” Stiles says. It is less of an order and more of a question aimed at Dennis. Clearly he is the expert, but he just shrugs. “Let's try not to pop it.”
Dennis lets out a low whistle and Ziggy, who has gotten close to the leech, backs off. I turn back to the carving along the back wall of the balcony and don't see the leech again.
“Harvey, there’s another carving here.” James announces. “It's laid out asymmetrical and it's covered in mud.”
It hasn't fully registered that most of the mound should have been covered in mud. If the tide went high enough for a leech to be stranded on the balcony, the whole thing should have been muddy and covered in muck. But it’s too clean for that.
“How high does the tide get here?” I ask Dennis.
“We don't go past the heads after dark. So I don't know. I'd wager the whole place goes under.”
I look to James, but he isn’t exactly a tidal expert either.
“Trowel.” I order.
Jams quickly produces one from my bag, which he is carrying now. I'd put it down in the middle of the theater, but he'd brought it up to the balcony.
The muck is still wet, but so is everything. It’s mostly clay, with some swamp muck and old soggy weeds sticking out. What is strange was that it still looks packed on. And I was probably imagining it, but I could swear there’s a faint impression of a human hand on it. I try to preserve the outer layer by scraping from the bottom like I’m separating laminate from wood, but the mud crumbles off.
Below the mud is the rest of the carving James had only seen the upper traces of. The cut is smooth and worn and rounded like the rest. It seems improbable for it being made from concrete, but it was probably set in a mold and then placed rather than actually carved. The actual carving was probably wooden, and had been transferred. It depicts a single man with what looks like horns. While the man is carved in relief, the horns are protruding from the surface slightly. And as I brush away the last traces of the mud I can see that, unlike the rest of the carvings, this one has color. The man is painted white with a brown garment over most of their body, they have short black hair, they hold a black spear, and the horns are a deep brown.
“Hah, hey, Andy, this one looks like you.” Murphy had wandered over and is standing behind me while I take pictures.
Once he says it, I can’t not see the resemblance. Her military fatigues have darkened from an army-green camouflage to a murky brown from the humidity, her short cropped hair is the same sort of black and shape and her rifle certainly could have been construed as a spear. But the horns, six of them, long and wavy like an antelopes, don’t fit for obvious reasons. But it could also be any of the enlisted soldiers from the base with short black hair. There were plenty.
After another half hour I look up from my pictures. “Are there any I missed, James?”
“No. But I marked out a section of stone at the center of the balcony, it's set weird. We should look.”
I follow James over to the center of the balcony. He’s marked off a trapezoidal segment of concrete set at the base of the back wall. The wall is only about four or five feet high on the balcony and I can just barely see over it. I'd seen the back on an initial walk-around, and we weren't missing anything there. So whatever this is, if it is anything, is probably a small cache of some kind. The rest of the concrete structure of the mound is more or less contiguous which is strange in its own right, but it feels even stranger for there to be this one trapezoidal slab set in the middle of a platform.
I push the trowel into the mud at the trapezoid's edge and push it in with little resistance. It is likely that the fit has loosened over time as the water and mud pushed around the structure. I pry the wide end up with minimal effort and James carefully grips the edge with his fingertips while I pull out the trowel and grab onto it as well. The slab isn’t hinged but tilts up easily enough thanks to its shape. Beneath it is an empty, narrow chute that descends into darkness after what looks like fifteen feet. It descends at a slight angle, just slight enough that it doesn’t connect with the edge of the structure’s outer wall. The opening is about three feet wide and one and a half feet tall and it looks curious.
“Lieutenant Stiles, we’ve found some sort of chute.” I call out as loud as I dare. “It looks like it goes down about as deep as the mound, maybe deeper.”
Charlie wanders over first, his horrible jaws now about eye level. Stiles is close behind. But before he can answer, the world seems to shift.
The cold dull dread I held felt when we entered the area spontaneously deepens into panic. It is as though looking into the chute has made me feel a deep and urgent sense of mortality deep in my gut that I can’t explain. And it seems like everyone else feels it too.
Stiles only has time to glance at the chute before his head jerks up at alert from the sensation and he makes a sharp pivot with his rifle raised to the swamp around us. James lets go of the slab and I follow suit, letting it close quietly on its own. A quick glance around reveals that we are short a person.
James and Stiles are close by, as is Charlie. Murphy is by the carving and looking as though he is half asleep. Dennis is by where the leech had been, and he looks as though he's been frozen solid. When I stand up and look over the balcony next to Stiles I can see Curtis in the middle of the stage, pistol held out to the swamp with Ziggy at his side. Corporal Andy Keller, I’d had plenty of time to read the patches on her uniform on the boat, is gone. A slight ripple in the black strap molasses water off to the side of the boats tells me what has happened.
My fingers grip the stone banister of the half wall that guards the balcony and they stick there. I can’t move. My eyes are locked on the water. I can see the whale fall in the distance, nothing but bones, and wonder how long a human can last stranded out here. They had to call this river Styx for a reason. Up until now I haven't let myself think it was for any reason other than how dark and foreboding it looks.
Something else moves in the water. If Andy has gone in, she has sunk like she has filled her boots with gravel. Whatever this is, it is much bigger. It looks like an octopus without a mantle, maybe more like a sea star. Only this, whatever it is, has maybe twenty tendril appendages each close to the size of one of the leeches. And it isn’t just leeches, it isn’t slimy and jet black. It is mottled gray and brown like a catfish. It seems to hug the bottom of the river too, or it moves like it is at least. I can only see the top of this thing, whatever it is.
No one says a word as it slowly writhes closer to the bank of the mound. No one fires a weapon into it. It doesn’t slither onto the mound. It doesn’t touch the boats. It swirls around slowly, like a pinwheel in maple syrup. And I can’t look away. There is a ringing in my ears and I can’t help but shut my eyes in response.
I am in darkness. I picture two huskies slowly walking out into the water from the bank of the mound and disappearing beneath the water. And then Andy doing the same, walking in and her feet never leaving the bottom. And then the water rises and I am ankle deep. Knee deep. Waist deep. Neck deep. The tendrils of the creature are twisting under my feet. Chip deep. Mouth deep. Nose deep and I can’t breathe. All the way under. My lungs are burning.
Like I am being pulled free from the water itself I feel a hand on my shoulders and my eyes burst open and I am gasping for air. I am crying. My fingers are curled around the railing of the metal staircase by the docks, clenched white-knuckle tight. I have one foot on the bottom step and the other hovering in the air as I step off the wooden platform. My back is to the water.
“Attaboy, Harve.” Dennis whispers. “Breathe deep.”
I can feel fur under my elbow. I don't care about the creature's teeth any more. Its fur is the best thing I have ever experienced touching my skin.
I only just hear Dennis say, “Everything you saw today was classified.” as the ringing leaves my ears.
I don't feel the bumps of the head stumps as I ride in the second row of the jeep. James and Dennis don't say anything in the row behind me. Stiles and Curtis don't say anything from the front seat either.
Charlie and Ziggy don't make a sound.
We’re out of the fog entirely now. But it's clung to us. It's damp in our clothes, in our hair, on our skin.
I'm shaking but I'm not trying to laugh. It's just cold.