Sam

Since she didn’t see anyone when she got into the yard, Sam figured she would have to make her own fun. Her head was feeling a lot better already, and she was raring to put her new body to a proper test.

Deadlifting boulders is one thing, but what else is there?

Looking over the property and considering her options, she had the idea to go for a run. It would be the perfect way to work off some energy and help take her mind off a certain despicable someone.

With no other real paths in evidence, Sam picked the one she had seen Mongrel use to head west into town and started off along it. The trail was bumpy and circuitous, and looked like it might have been made by animal feet originally before human traffic had broadened it. But the crookedness of the path did not bother her, because it gave her a chance to see how deftly she could move. Beginning at a slow jog, Sam gradually quickened her steps until she was eating up ground at a frightening pace, leaping over roots and dancing around rocks with the rush of air howling in her ears.

Faster, she thought, and faster she went.

The trees became a corridor of smeared green and brown, passing by so fast that she could not observe the rise and fall of the landscape if she’d had a care to.

Sam laughed, and the sound was swallowed by the roaring wind. Her body had never felt anywhere near this responsive, this powerful. Before, no matter how hard she’d trained, she had always been slower than she expected, than she needed to be. Now, it seemed to do what she wanted even before she had a chance to think it, moving around obstacles that she had barely observed by the time they slid past out of her view.

It was pure bliss.

A shuddering scream of anguish broke Sam out of her breakneck trance, had her skidding and stumbling as she tried to come to a stop. She ended up panting and bent-double with a hand on the trunk of a broad pine to steady her. Whipping her head around, sweaty hair throwing off droplets of sweat, she tried to figure out what she had just heard, and where it had come from.

It hadn’t sounded human, but… it wasn’t like any animal she had ever heard, either.

The forest was too dense for her to make anything out more than twenty-or-so feet off the trail. Suddenly paranoid, Sam reached down and picked up a sturdy-looking branch to wield as a club, whipping it against the nearby pine to make sure it held.

She listened for what felt like minutes, but the cry didn’t come again. Straining her ears, there was only the rustle of pine needles and occasionally the scratching of a rodent or the trilling of a bird. Nothing untoward, certainly.

Or…? Did that sound like… footsteps? Was she imagining it? Maybe it was just… trees settling, or something.

There was a blur of movement, something falling out of a treetop right at her, and Sam let out an undignified squeak as she raised her improvised weapon to bat away whatever thing was trying to murder her.

Her pounding heart did not slow when she realized that it was only a vested chimp, having landed on top of a rock beside her.

‘1’, read the patch on his breast.

Sam began to lower her club, deflating with a long breath. “Holy shit,” she said. “You scared me!”

The old chimp slowly put a finger over his lips, raised his eyebrows pointedly. Feeling another rush of alarm, Sam stifled whatever she had been about to say, teeth clacking as she snapped her mouth shut.

Number One nodded, then motioned with an open hand for her to keep low. Sam immediately dropped into a crouch, and the chimp came to pull her over so they both stood behind the tree she had been leaning against. He peered around its edge into the distance, and she did the same, though she had no idea what she was looking out for. She wished that he could let her know, but she had no idea how to interpret those hand signs the chimps used.

The chimp unslung a shortbow from a case on his back, pulled out a fletched arrow from a quiver attached to the same case, and nocked it.

The ‘footsteps’ Sam had been hearing seemed to be growing louder until she felt confident she wasn’t imagining them. The way the sound echoed through the forest made it difficult to pinpoint a direction, but she had to imagine it had its source where Number One was staring.

There was a brief snatch of movement between the trees, then another. The chimp did not move at all, except to chew on the end of an unlit cigarette held between his lips.

There was nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Time stretched on. Sam’s vigilance was beginning to fray when, all of a sudden, something emerged out of the backdrop. Something that walked on two legs, its shoulders brushing tree trunks when it moved, upsetting pine crowns and sending needles rustling to the forest floor. Something enormous.

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The creature was almost shaped like a person, but Sam would never have believed that it was human. Standing nine or ten feet tall, it was thick with blubbery fat and corded muscle, surely weighing at least as much as a large car. Its skin was a brownish-green that made it blend frighteningly well into the background given its size. Its head was lumpy and misshapen, with only a few stripy strands of black hair slicked to its tumorous pate. Thin lips were drawn back in a snarl of rage—or maybe pain, she thought—and fists like some of the medium-sized boulders she had just been lifting were balled tight at its sides. The creature wore only a putrid hide to cover its crotch, which swung and flapped when it walked.

Worst of all, however, were the huge, gaping sores that covered the creature’s body, especially about the torso and arms. They wept off-yellow pus that congealed like candle wax in countless little trails down its doughy body. Insects crawled in and out of these open wounds, having seemingly made their homes there. Wasps the size of fists—a whole swarm of them—buzzed in a loose cloud around the lumbering behemoth. Occasionally raising an oar-blade of a hand to swat at them, the creature only managed to disperse them for a moment or two before they gathered back into formation.

Holy fuck… Sam thought, forcing back a wave of bile with a hard swallow. She had never seen anything half so disgusting in all her life. Both her lives.

Number One remained stiff as stone, even stopped fussing with his smoke. The creature moved roughly in their direction, bound to cross the trail and pass them with only a few feet to spare.

To their good fortune, the giant—or whatever it was—appeared to have too much on its mind to notice them. It cried out in a rough, guttural voice that shook the ground whenever it tried to scratch at one of its many wounds. Sam could not help but pity the thing, as it was obviously in agony, but the chimp’s reaction implied that it would likely not be happy at seeing some tiny strangers cross its path.

As it staggered past, upsetting trees in its almost blind shamble through the woods, the monstrous wasps that patrolled about their living home drew frighteningly close until Sam could make out the sheen of their mad kaleidoscope eyes and the iridescence wings that thrummed like small engines.

Sam held her breath and squeezed herself against the bole of her beloved pine tree. One of the wasps hovered toward her, the size of a small rodent. Her eyes went wide as it landed on her forehead, feeling its legs scrape about between her eyes, the occasional buzz of its wings reverberating through her skull.

Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck…

The insect—if something that enormous could still be called such—stilled on top of her head, and she felt its legs shift as it readjusted itself.

Slowly, slowly, Number One took his hand off the bowstring and reached out toward the thing.

The wasp buzzed suspiciously at the appendage drawing near it, and she thought it was preparing to do something, could already imagine the feeling of its dagger-like stinger carving into her.

Then, suddenly, some sort of box slid into existence around the bug, like a cage of bluish glass. Number One caught it as it began to fall out of the air, pulling it into his arms. The wasp battered itself soundlessly against the walls of its containment in impotent rage, but did not put a scratch on the see-through material, whatever it was.

The giant moved on. To her great relief, the other wasps did not appear to realize that one of their comrades had gone missing, and soon their buzzing receded into nothing along with the giant’s heavy footfalls, leaving the forest in serene silence once more.

As soon as they were gone, Number One placed his cube of glass on the ground, stood, and drew back an arrow until the fletching brushed his cheek. For several moments, nothing happened. Then the glass shattered in a shower of shards. Before the wasp could move at all, the chimp loosed, and an arrow impaled it to the ground by its bulbous abdomen, gross yellow insect guts leaking out into the undergrowth.

“Ew,” Sam whispered.

Number One shrugged. Drawing a long knife from the inside of his vest, he cut the scrabbling insect clean in half, then cleaned the blade against the grass and replaced it. He withdrew his arrow, inspected the edge, and cleaned it in the same way before sticking it back in the quiver.

“What was that?” Sam asked, realizing immediately that Number One could not answer.

The chimp flashed several hand signs, and when it became clear that she did not understand, he sighed and put on a patient expression, as though dealing with a child. He held up both hands with forefingers extended so they looked like horns coming off his head, cocking a questioning eyebrow as he waited for her answer.

“Demon?” Sam asked, and got a head shake in reply. "Evil?"

The chimp nodded, letting his hands drop.

“Monster?”

Another nod.

“You’ve got those here?”

A shrug.

Number One began leading her back along the trail, and Sam trotted sheepishly behind. He looked back frequently to make sure she was following, which made her feel like she really was an unruly kid who had gotten into some irresponsible mischief.

At least I know what Will meant when he said there are worse things than slavers in these woods, Sam thought. She did not want to begin imagining the haranguing waiting in her near future.

They made it back to the farm without incident, and Sam waited in the yard feeling suitably ashamed while Number One went out back to fetch Will from his workshop.

Fortunately—and surprisingly—Will did not look particularly angry as he came wandering across the yard side-by-side with the old chimp. He stopped in front of Sam, and a packet of cigarettes changed hands between him and Number One before the latter hobbled off.

“You hurt?” Will asked neutrally. “Aside from the brain damage, I mean. We can chalk that up to a preexisting condition.”

Sam decided to swallow her retort to that, figuring that it was best to take her dressing-down with grace. “I’m not hurt,” she said. “Sorry for leaving the farm. I thought it’d be fine.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She endured Will pacing around her in a circle, occasionally tugging at her clothing or lifting one of her arms. “All right, you’re good.”

Sam blinked at him as he stood back. “I thought you’d be a bit more angry with me for running off.”

He cocked his head in a sort of shrugging gesture. “Nah, it was my bad. I didn’t explicitly tell you not to leave the farm, after all.”

“You did say it was dangerous, though.”

“I did. But I should have guessed that words like ‘dangerous’ would only activate the contrarian in you.”

Sam folded her hands together, going small. “Sorreee.”

“It's okay. Let’s consider it a learning opportunity. Now you know why it’s not a good idea for you to leave this place yet, right?”

“Yessirrr.”

“Good.”