Lost Souls in the Hunting Ground

Penelope Hill

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I was moving.

That was the first sensation that registered; a stomach-churning motion that held no immediate information, just abrupt alarm.

Almost immediately afterward, it stopped.

I stopped.

In a body-jerking impact that rattled my entire frame, that whipped through me with violent reaction. I was thrown forward, into hard surfaces, then jerked back into a more yielding obstruction. Pain followed. A numbing pain that crackled through me, as if someone had taken every single bone in my body and deliberately snapped them, one by one.

"What the...?" I gasped, opening my eyes, staring blearily at images that made no sense. Everything around me was a shimmer of arrested motion, of shattered glass spinning lazily downwards, of hazy greens and shadows that surged and patterned my world with light and darkness.

The pain took the focus of my first attentions; it had no centre, just insistent presence. I closed my eyes and tried to pinpoint its source, only to find it had none. Something inside me howled at its impertinence, and something else reacted to it. I felt a cold shiver run through my frame, a shiver that left a sense of emptiness behind it.

An emptiness that the resulting absence of pain did nothing to fill.

My eyes snapped back open, my heart - which should have been pounding in my ears - offering nothing more than a slow drumbeat of deception. I was lying sprawled in the wreckage of what looked like the cockpit of a small plane; the windshield above me was shattered, letting in a spill of green-filtered light and the dampness of humid air. There was the faint smell of spilt gas, and the soft crackle of settling damage, but neither scent nor sound provided the primary impact on my senses. What registered most was something I should not have been able to feel at all.

An innate sense of surrounding, of space and structure, of the warmth of quiet life, the whispered protests of broken trees and the mute screams of torn and dying vegetation.

The sense of immediate fire, of a more vital spirit, somewhere close by and vulnerable.

And the beast, curled inside me, reacting to it, always hungry, never still.

I'd Leaped.

I'd left behind the trauma of my master's defeat, hoping to be free.

Hoping to be redeemed...

Yet I was cold in a world of warmth, lying in the pretence of another's image, sprawled among the wreckage of disaster, sensing the aftermath of impact, of precipitate descent.

And I was haunted by the hunger, embraced by the vampire's curse.

Which also meant that I was still dead.

I picked myself up carefully, easing limbs that should have protested, yet merely complained. The beast in my heart muttered, and I clamped down hard on its presence, feeling the hunger lying within me, the nagging hollow that would never be filled. It was barely stirring, yet it was there, a bitter reminder of what I had become, of the 'gift' that McFarlane had given me.

Eternal life...

Eternal death.

The impact should have killed me. Would have killed me, had I not been already far beyond that final barrier, had I not been a defiled soul dwelling in a deceitful corpse. I leaned on the twisted edge of the pilot's seat and sighed.

Why had I expected anything else?

Miracles do happen when I Leap. Sometimes. I save lives, prevent heartaches, and refashion events with regularity. I put right what once went wrong.

But not even I have the power - or the means - to return a dead man to life.

So what the hell do I do now?

Well, I had Leaped. And it wasn't home, so I had to be here - wherever and whenever here was - for a reason.

Didn't I?

I thought about it while I employed my new perceptions to measure my surroundings and assess the possibilities of threat.

Humid air, thick with disturbances; torn greenery, spilt gas, spilt blood...

 I could smell death more certainly than I could anything else. It hung in the air with a strength I could practically taste. Beyond it stretched the impression of an empty world, of an isolation that reached for miles.

Nobody here but us corpses...

Well, not quite.

There was one point of fire in that entire existence. A familiar one. An intimately familiar one after recent events; no longer a mere flicker, but returned to full and brilliant intensity. Al had Leaped along with me, I realised as I began hauling myself out of the twisted wreck. We'd been so closely linked - tangled together at that moment, my existence sustained and anchored by his gift - that the impetus of the Leap had dragged our shared souls through the same gateway of time.

But where and when to?

I paused to look down at what I was wearing; a battered leather jacket that might once have been black, a faded sports shirt, and a pair of khaki canvas pants, cut loose and buttoned, not zipped. The leather boots appeared as battered as the jacket, and the peaked cap I found pushed to the back of my head might once have held a badge but hadn't done so for a long time. I straightened that so it sat a little more comfortably and went back to squirming my way out of the cockpit. My brief examination of self had revealed very little; I'd already figured I had to be the pilot, since I had been the only one sitting at the controls of the plane, and the outfit itself might fit into any of several decades. Early rather than late, I thought. Fifties perhaps, accounting for the lack of trouser zippers and the absence of denim, although that wasn't a cast-iron clue by any manner of means.

The plane seemed to be lying at an angle, nose up, half-buried in toppled treetrunks. I climbed down the incline, intending to emerge into the belly of the vehicle, but quickly found myself climbing through bark and other vegetative debris. There was no belly to the plane; it had been ripped open from nose to tail, scattering its contents into the steeply sloped ravine over which it had settled. I was looking down into a chaos of torn jungle and fragmented junk, walled in by rock and metal barriers.

Jeezus ...

At first glance nobody could have survived such an impact. The wreck hung over the landscape like a egg cracked open by a dextrous cook, its interior tipped into the waiting basin and well scrambled by the descent. But the certainty of my friend's presence sent me scurrying down the slope with alacrity. The day was well advanced and the sky heavy with cloud; the ravine was a grey-green world of shadows and half-light. If I'd had nothing but the expected senses with which to find him I might have searched for hours, but the heightened awareness of the predator I had become directed me without hesitation. Partway down the slope - a sideways push through a tangled mass of broken bushes and uprooted trees - and there he was, sitting amongst the wreckage, staring at it as if he didn't quite believe his eyes.

Or rather - there someone was, a young man dressed in safari colours, the natural ivory of the fabric he wore stained and torn. I blinked and refocused, watching as the overlying image blurred and faded, waiting until what I saw matched the truth of what I felt.

The dead see past all illusions.

I smiled a small and bitter smile to myself, assessing the situation with a predator's eye. It made a change for me to be watching him unobserved, to be able to stand and measure what I saw without his being aware of it. His body language was anxious, although I could detect no obvious signs of physical distress.

"Al?" I called as I slithered down the remaining distance to join him. He reacted with immediate startlement, scrambling up with panicked haste and backing away, spreading his hands in a defensive gesture as he did so. It took him a moment to identify the source of the sound, and when he did so it was to stare suspiciously at my arrival, his whole body tense and his heart beating red alert.

"You okay?" I asked, a little disconcerted by the intensity of his reaction. He lowered his hands slowly and nodded a wary acknowledgement to the question.

"Uh-huh," he affirmed cautiously. "Are you?"

I found him a twisted grin. "Well," I considered wryly. "I'm doing pretty well - for a corpse."

His uneasiness became subsumed in a disconcerted frown. "A what?" he reacted, as if he thought he might have misheard me.

"A corpse," I repeated patiently. "A dead man?" I added, since his expression hadn't changed. "I died, remember? A few hours ago? Or whenever that was in relation to whenever we are now. I thought the Leap might cure me, but it hasn't."

"The Leap..." he echoed softly. Revelation dawned with a look of pure astonishment. "Sam?"

"Who did you think...?" I began to say, then realised that - while I could see through the deception of his adopted image to the reality of the man beneath - he was looking at a total stranger. No wonder he was confused. "Yeah," I assured him. "I guess we Leaped together."

"Guess so," he acknowledged, his tone still edged with doubt. He took a step closer, reaching out to touch my arm with a cautious hand. Something sparked between us - a shiver of misplacement, an adjustment to reality - and the wary contact became one of firm connection , a measure of relief replacing the tightness in his eyes. "That's better," he announced, finally returning my smile with one of his own. "Welcome to hell, Sam," he growled.

My turn to look confused. "Where?" I questioned, glancing around the ravine, at the sprawled wreck and the indications of jungle that had received it. Surely he didn't think...?

His smile became a haunted one; his fingers tightened on my arm as he half-turned to sweep the world with a gesture from his free hand.

"Hell," he repeated firmly. "Sometimes known as Vietnam."

Oh, boy...

"You sure?" I asked, once the initial impact of his declaration had sunk in. The rugged terrain bore little resemblance to the images of 'Nam that I carried in my head. We were halfway up a mountain by the look of it, not knee-deep in flooded paddy fields. Al gave me a thoughtful look.

"You sure you're still dead?"

Was he avoiding the question, or trying to make a point? I couldn't be sure. I looked down at his hand where it rested on my arm, the contact between us conveying a warmth of soul that had nothing to do with physical heat, then up to meet his eyes. Their depths were troubled, but I couldn't read the reasons for it. He was sweating I noted distractedly, a reaction to the humidity, to the closeness of the air.

It's hot. I guess. I don't feel hot. I don't even feel warm...

The air around me was heavy with tropical heat. I was cold. Not cold as ice perhaps, but chilled through, an absence of body warmth that reached through to my bones. I lifted my free hand and pressed the back of it to his cheek, feeling, as I did so, the disconcerting separation between physical temperature and the raging fire of his existence.

"What do you think?" I asked, throwing the question back at him, just as he had done to me. He flinched at the contact. In that heat the touch of my hand must have felt like ice.

"I see what you mean, kid," he breathed with a wince, releasing my arm and capturing my fingers instead. "You are kinda cold."

Cold as the grave.

Sunlight would have no power to dispel that chill, nor would a fire or any other source of radiant energy. Were it not for the impact of his presence, the sense of gentle heat that spread through my skin at his touch, I might have believed I could never feel warm again. I could. I knew I could.

But I also knew how.

And the comprehension of that jerked my hand from his, sent me pacing away with sudden self-anger.

I won't. I can't ...

I had been Leaping for a long time; through a complex succession of lives, in an intricate series of hopes and traumas and challenges. In all of that - through all of that - Al had been there with me, an intangible navigator, helping me steer a path between the demands of my heart and the needs of my existence. A creature of light and image, nothing more. Just a voice - and not always one of reason either.

My personal hologram.

My best friend...

How often had I wished that I could reach out to him? How many times had I wanted to make contact, perhaps to convey my feelings with the impulse of a hug, or even to punch his lights out when occasion demanded it? How many times had I wanted to just touch him? To reassure myself of my existence with the solidity of his own?

Well, now I could. And it was the one thing I should not do.

Would not do.

Because to touch him now was to want so much more...

To covet the warmth I no longer possessed, wanting to drown myself in the splendours of soul, to fill my heart with the pretence of something I would never have again.

With the sweet illusion of life...

Dear god, what have I become?

"Cold has nothing to do with it," I snapped, my hostility spurred by the need for self-control. "Try moribund."

"Saaam..." His admonition held a note of impatience. "Look - you're a doctor. What's the clinical definition of death?"

The clinical ...? For god's sake, Al.

I stared up at the rise of the ravine, focusing the surge of my anger to where it was needed most - deep inside myself, locking the beast away, locking out that lurking temptation. We had no idea who we were, little idea of where, and he was standing there asking me for definitions?

As if he were still in the Imaging Chamber, as if this were any other Leap...

"Ah - I don't know. Absence of normal metabolic functioning, I suppose. Cessation of heartbeat and total lack of neural activity..." My voice trailed off as I considered what I was saying. "Well," I had to admit reluctantly, "maybe I don't fit the definition exactly. But, believe me - you're the only living man around here for miles. You got-" I paused to allow unfamiliar senses to convey uncomfortable information, "-four corpses for company, only one of them happens to still be on his feet." I finally turned back in his direction, finding him perched back on the edge of a tumbled packing crate and watching me with wary intensity. "There are some things you just know, right?"

"Right," he echoed softly.

There are some things you just know...

He had been making a point. And I should have learned to listen to him by now...

I let the last of my anger fade into quiet despair and dropped my weight back against a tilted treetrunk. "Okay," I sighed, pulling off the pilot's cap and running my hand through my hair. "We Leaped. Out of the frying pan and straight into the fire. Well," I corrected, "straight into a plane crash somewhere in 'Nam, anyway. Sole survivors."

He couldn't help the twist of his grin; after a moment I returned it with one of my own.

"That was sole - ess oh ell ee," I protested. "Not - uh - well, maybe that too. I took the impact pretty hard back there, though. I guess I might not have made it if I wasn't a graduate of vampire school."

"Student," he corrected firmly. "You don't graduate until you kill. Remember?"

I remembered. It wasn't something I was likely to forget.

Not when he was so close ...

I pushed the thought - and the need it stirred - away with determination. I could cope with it, and he was better not knowing anything about it. "So," I tried to joke, finding it easier than I thought it might be, "I bounced. What's your excuse?"

He shrugged. "Luck of the Irish?"

"You're Italian," I pointed out. "And going by the state of the rest of this plane you shouldn't even be alive, let alone in one piece."

"Well, maybe the whoever I am is Irish." He didn't sound very convinced of the possibility. "Hell, I dunno, Sam. I don't even remember the Leap in. Just waking up in those bushes over there and-" His hesitation was discomforted, "remembering. The scents and the feel of the place. As if it were yesterday."

Yesterday?

It was over twenty years in his past.

The heat and the hate of a war nobody asked for.

The long days of his imprisonment, the abuse of his captors, and the cumulative despairs of terror and pain and desperation...

"You know," he went on with an unsteady half-laugh. "For one crazy moment I thought it was yesterday. You scared me half to death, kid. I thought you were the VC coming to get me."

That explained his reaction. It wasn't a very comforting thought; the possibility might still exist.

"We need to know when we are," I said. "And who."

Al glanced up at the sky with anxious consideration. "We also need to salvage what we can before the rain sets in," he pointed out. "Survival takes first priority, Sam. Food, water - anything that can give us an edge. But you're right. If we know when, then we'll know how quickly we have to get out of here. If we do have to get out of here. We're in the central highlands somewhere," he explained at my enquiring look. "Could even be over the border in Laos. But if we're lucky about the where, then the best place to be might be right beside the plane when the search parties arrive."

"And if we're not?"

His features folded down into a wry and resigned smile. "Then pray we're in not in trouble, kid. 'Cos if we are, it'll be big trouble..."

All things are relative. In another place, the mere prospect of having crashed in a remote jungle with no one but a vampire for company would probably count as trouble enough. But I knew what Al had meant and - for the first time since I'd first realised what my existence had become - I was actually grateful for the heightened senses which gave me a wider view of the world. If the VC were out there in the encroaching night, then I would be able to spot them long before they even knew we were there.

I said as much, earning myself a troubled look that Al quickly concealed, although not so quickly that I didn't catch it. He was discomforted by my situation, and I didn't blame him. He'd looked into McFarlane's eyes. He knew what I had become.

What I might yet become ...

I had to keep reminding myself of that.

I suspect the immediacy of the situation was the primary reason for my not sinking into bleak and total despair; that and a certain level of disbelieving denial. It had been hard for me to come to terms with Leaping, back in the early days of it. There'd been times I was sure I had to be dreaming, no matter how real events had seemed. And I'd been so many things, over the intricate tangle that made up my lifetime.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor ...

Wasn't this just one more mask I had to wear?

It was a good excuse to cling to, there in the humid heat that had no power to touch me.

Surrounded by the scent of death...

"Ah - Sam?" Al was enquiring doubtfully, studying the twisted remains of the wrecked plane. "Did you say something about corpses?"

"Yeah." I got to my feet and started to move further down the slope. "There must have been other passengers on the plane."

Which meant luggage we could search for information, along with the scattered cargo that might deliver the 'edge' Al was looking for. I was quite prepared to bow to his expertise when it came to surviving in this kind of situation. He'd been trained for it.

He'd even done it - once. Baling out of a wounded plane over hostile jungle.

I remembered, he'd said. But how much? And how much of what came afterwards?

"Other passengers. Right," I heard him acknowledge. The note in his voice halted my descent; I turned to find him hesitating just where I'd left him. The disconcerted reluctance on his face was a picture; that of a man steeling himself to do something he really wasn't going to like at all.

"Aaal..." I started to say with exasperation. A dead man can't hurt you...

I swallowed the rest of my words with a gulp. It hadn't been that long since one had tried to tear his soul apart.

"Are they going to be - uh - icky?" he asked. I grinned, despite my sense of sympathy.

"Probably," I announced blithely. "Impact damage isn't usually pretty." I let my grin get a little wider. "You're not that squeamish, are you?"

His scowl held vague embarrassment. "I just don't like - dead things," he protested, then realised what he'd said. "I didn't mean you, Sam," he added hurriedly.

Yes, you did.

He didn't mean it personally, though. I could have understood his trepidation if it had been recent experience that had spawned it, but he's always been antsy around corpses, and I've never really known why. Just that - most of the time - it's been a personal quirk I've found kind of funny. I'd put a lot of it down to superstition, since it seemed to go hand in hand with his wary belief in the supernatural.

And that's been proven with a vengeance.

Suddenly it didn't seem such a joke any more...

"Why don't you climb up to the cockpit and check out the radio, find the flight plan, search for maps and stuff?" I suggested. "I wouldn't know where to look, let alone what for. I can - uh - deal with things down here for a while."

His look of gratitude was heartfelt, but the echo of his embarrassment remained.

"Sure, Sam," he agreed, as if I'd made a sensible suggestion rather than an excuse to spare his sensitivities. His thumb jerked tentatively in the relevant direction. "This - ah - Tri-motor didn't have a co-pilot, did it?"

"No." I grinned, recognising the question as the joke he intended, the attempt to defuse his own anxieties. "The only dead man in that cockpit got up and walked away..."

Death can be a messy business. Particularly when it comes with unexpected violence. I found the first corpse still in its seat, held there by the branches that had penetrated flesh and upholstery alike. The man had died almost before he knew what was happening; his face carried evidence of startlement rather than pain or alarm.

A European, late middle age, suffering from middle-aged spread. A lot of it. His light grey suit bulged at the seams. His blood smelt of indolence and self-satisfaction; the little sense of his life that lingered held hints of cloying smugness. A bureaucrat, I thought, hauling him free and dragging him out into the afternoon. A man whose world had focused on trivial problems and paperwork.

Beside him I placed the second body, this one torn and broken like a rag doll. Limbs lying at the wrong angles, his head turned too far on what might have once been an elegant neck. Another suit - perhaps another bureaucrat - but the fabric had been carefully tailored, and the scattering of grey in his hair spoke of authority and bearing. A man of rigid attitudes and set ideas; the remnants of his essence held strength but little warmth.

And the third? I regretted the third the most, the young man with his glazed eyes of china blue that were no longer concealed behind their circles of broken glass. He was wearing what looked like uniform: a lightweight jacket and matching knee-length shorts, the pale colours drenched in the darkness of his spilled life. Hope, expectation, eagerness; I breathed them in along with his scent, the whispers of what he had been.

Three corpses, laid out by a fourth. Their bodies were warmer than mine, their distance from death accountable in minutes rather than hours. Empty shells, extinguished candles; souls snuffed out before their time. I straightened bent limbs, closed staring eyes, and stepped back to give them their peace. My efforts had left my fingers sticky with blood.

I'd licked half of them clean before I realised what I was doing.

Oh my god...

I took a step back in abhorrent reaction, staring at my hands, although the horror of what I was was scarcely something from which I could walk away.

How could I...?

Too easily, of course. The instincts of the beast were strong, even if the faint echoes left after death were nothing compared to the heat of a living soul. It wasn't even as if the taste on my lips was a nauseating one. Far from it, in fact. I could savour the hints of spice that had once made up three different lives, a cocktail of experience blended by the common trauma of death.

A sharp and tempting appetiser.

One that paled into tasteless insignificance when matched against the sweet memory of a living man's soul...

No. No!

 I twisted away, reaching down to scrub my hands clean in the debris of the jungle. Sharp, angry movements, wanting to tear my hands, to feel the pain of torn skin, to see my own blood flow free...

Only it didn't. My hands were pale, bloodless and cold. The minor tears I inflicted simply closed and healed, leaving me just as I had been at the point of my death. Suspended between mortality and decay.

Nooo!

I dropped to my knees, shaking from head to foot. I wanted to weep, but I'd shed all the tears that remained to me, back in the claustrophobia of my murderer's lair.

This isn't fair...

No. It wasn't. It was downright infuriating.

I knew I was dead. I'd accepted that. Was, perhaps, willing to go on accepting it, if I could cope with what it meant, with all the horrors it implied. I'm not the suicidal type, and, right then, even the pretence of life was something precious to me.

But if I was going to live with myself I was going to have to be on my guard every minute of every day...

What will you do, a little voice whispered at the back of my mind, when the hunger grows and the need consumes you? I tried to ignore it.

Just as I was trying to ignore the part of me that yearned - so desperately - for the intoxicating glory that had filled my heart with fire.

I wrapped my arms tightly around myself, quelling the shaking, trying to focus my thoughts, to regain my equilibrium. Wasn't it at this kind of moment that the Imaging Chamber door usually slid open? The moment that Al would choose to appear; to offer his guidance and his support, to help me face the crisis and to understand my place in it? The moment when I knew I was not alone, not lost forever in the eddies of time, not forgotten or abandoned to a fate I could no longer control.

But my personal genie no longer lurked in the depths of the bottle. He was here with me.

Because of me.

Because when words alone had not been enough, he had been willing to offer so much more...

The warmth of his soul, the strength of his heart.

The sweet elixir of his life...

I took several deep and unnecessary breaths. I couldn't afford to go to pieces; I had to deal with this.

I can deal with this.

I got determinedly to my feet, and began to drag pieces of twisted metal over the silent bodies. Burying them deep beneath a cairn of steel.

They had the peace I would never know, the release I had been denied. In many ways I envied them.

And I didn't even know their names...

The sky had grown much darker by the time I completed my appointed task; dark with cloud as much as with the approach of night. I paced the remainder of the wreck with hurried steps, checking tumbled packing cases and retrieving several likely looking items to stack them under the shelter of a shattered wing. Gas had soaked into the ground in some places, but there didn't seem to be as much of it as I might have expected. The cargo itself was scattered in a pattern of abandonment that suggested the belly had been torn open on impact, and not before. It was a strange assortment that included sacks of spilled rice and boxes packed with machine parts. I found a few blankets and a case full of dented tins that claimed they held corned beef, and added those to the stash, alongside the empty jerry can and the other bits and pieces I'd been able to salvage.

The young man in uniform had been wearing a gun. I'd dropped it into my pocket, along with the spare ammunition he'd been packing, without giving it more than a cursory glance, but as I examined more and more of the debris and wreckage a nagging suspicion began to grow in the back of my mind. Eventually I pulled the gun out again and studied it in the dying light.

It was a stubby .38 revolver, machine tooled and kept beautifully clean.

It also looked practically brand new.

Which, for a weapon that looked like it belonged in a 1940's gangster movie, was a pretty neat trick.

When am I? I wondered, adding the pieces together and coming up with confusion. The plane was vintage, the cargo filled with brand names I didn't recognise, and the technology that surrounded me was primitive, to say the least. But there were too many things that felt new.

The proximity of fire drew my attention; Al had emerged from the broken nose of the plane, and was looking out into the ravine with an expression of concern. In the late evening light he should have been no more than a pale figure surrounded by shadows, but I could still see him with effortless clarity.

In the eyes of the dead, darkness holds no mysteries.

I thrust the gun back in my pocket and went to join him, ascending the slope with an easy stride.

It didn't immediately occur to me to wonder why I didn't feel tired; I should have done. I'd been hauling hefty weights about in a heavy heat for a good hour, and that after surviving an impact that should have shattered me with as much efficiency as it had the plane. I could see Al wiping sweat from his face with the back of his hand, and I thought the humidity must be getting to him; his anxious expression held evidence of strain.

The observer and the observed...

For as long as I could remember - remember for certain, that was - he had stood on the sidelines of my existence; a piece of trick photography that the world in which I walked could not affect. I had sweated in effort-filled heat, or shivered in icy winds, and begrudged his shirtsleeved casualness; not to mention his easy nonchalance and his tendency to make flippant remarks that were no help at all.

Could I help the quiet smile I found at the evidence of his discomfort? It wasn't malicious pleasure, just a sense of poetic justice. There wasn't a lot I could smile about right there and then - nothing at all if I really allowed myself to think about our situation - and that brief moment of self-satisfaction came from the depths of my heart. Spawned by the warmth that lingered there; the affection in which I held him, and the understanding of just how much he had risked on my behalf.

Welcome to my world, Al.

I'd taken several more steps before I realised he wasn't alone.

"I didn't mean to startle you, Admiral," Gushie was saying in distinctly apologetic tones. His holographic image flickered against the twisted edge of the sheared metal, spurts of interference running across the pristine surface of his white coat; Ziggy's handlink was a bright point of colour in the overcast dusk. Al threw him a very suspicious glare.

"The hell you didn't," he growled. He sounded a little embarrassed; I wondered just how startled he'd been. There had been occasions when he'd given me cause to jump half out of my skin, but then again, a hologram can hardly let you know he's there until after he's arrived. I had no sense of Gushie's presence at all; the illusion of the image carried no inner fire, no hint of warmth or temptation.

But his being there was reason to cheer my heart, if nothing else. We were not lost, not abandoned or forgotten; the Project was still tracking me, and I...

"You do that to me again, Dr Gushman and I swear to god, I'll ... I'll..." Al's voice faded into silence as he considered the possibilities of threat that might be open to him. Gushie was looking distinctly alarmed. "Oh, forget it," my friend muttered after a moment. "There's not a damn thing I can do to a hologram, anyway. I ought to know that by now."

"I really didn't mean to-"

"I know, I know. I just wasn't expecting you, that's all. Where the hell have you been, anyway?"

My Project's chief programmer looked uncomfortably embarrassed. "Well," he admitted reluctantly, "after you Leaped we lost Dr Beckett's signal completely, and Ziggy had real problems focusing on yours, and... To be perfectly honest, Admiral, we thought we'd lost you as well. Until you Leaped again. And even that was problematical until we remembered to widen the search parameters." Gushie quirked an awkward grin. "You're a hard man to pin down, you know."

That was a joke. Not a very good one, and not one his audience appreciated very much. My mind was busy working overtime.

... we lost Dr Beckett's signal...

Cold horror slammed sharply into my soul. I could only Leap in my own lifetime.

And I was dead.

Ziggy could no longer find me.

It wasn't me Gushie came to.

This isn't my Leap...

"Ziggy spent three days in a total funk," Gushie went on, his face creased into unhappy lines. "She refused to accept that you'd been unsuccessful, and wouldn't listen to any kind of reason. But we finally managed to persuade her that you were now her priority, and that she had to accept Dr Beckett's loss the same way we had to." He sighed. With feeling. "It wasn't easy though. Especially when both of our guests left us - and two more came back."

Al had turned to look at him with a distinct frown of puzzlement. "Gushie," he growled, a little impatiently. "What are you twittering about?"

The hologram's expression went from unhappy to totally distressed. "Dr Beckett's - murder?" he explained with disconsolate hesitation. "That is what you Leaped back to prevent, wasn't it? You said ... maybe you don't remember that," he concluded with a gulp. Al was glaring at him. Hard. "Well, you did, and then we lost the signal, so we had to conclude ... well, we still had Chris Kneally with us then, so Dr Beckett clearly hadn't Leaped out, and..."

"Gushie," my friend interrupted with impatience, "how many people do you have in the Waiting Room right now?"

"Uh - two, Admiral. A Doctor Carl Schuster - that's you, by the way - and a Steven Frazel. He was the pilot of the plane? He was killed on impact, according to the original history. Dr Beeks suggested that..."

"So, even with that," came the second interruption, this one with a hint of increasing exasperation, "are you still saying that Ziggy has lost Sam completely?"

The intangible figure in the white coat winced. "Yes, Admiral. I'm afraid I am. I'm sorry. I mean - I'm really sorry. We're sure you did your best..."

Al wasn't really listening to him. His gaze drifted out, across the dusk-filled ravine, settling on a non-existent point of focus while he considered what this particular piece of information implied. I watched the thoughts play over his face, while Gushie went on stammering out awkward commiserations and tried to offer a supportive sympathy that was absolutely no help at all.

I told you, Al. I died back there. There's nothing that can change that now. Nothing at all.

"Damn," my friend said eventually. A word delivered without heat, almost without emotion. Just bleak acceptance. "Oh well," he sighed almost immediately afterwards. "So we're not knee deep in caca, we're up to our waists in it. It figures." Al leaned his weight against the torn metal edges of the wreck and turned to consider Gushie with pointed expectation. "Okay," he demanded. "So where are we, who are we, and when are we?"

We? Gushie mouthed in clear alarm, glancing down the ravine. I saw his gaze sweep right past me where I stood in the undergrowth, and I allowed myself another bitter smile. No need to panic, Gushie. There's no-one down here but the dead.

I pushed my way up the rest of the slope, walking with soft steps; stalking, like the hunter I had become. A quiet shadow in the dusk, materialising out of the gloom with silent efficiency.

"Hi, Gushie," I said softly, practically in his ear. He jumped. Spectacularly.

"What the...?!"

Al laughed; a wry chortle of amusement. "Payback," he noted with smug satisfaction.

"Who-?" Gushie blinked at the persona of the pilot, then made the required mental jump. "D-d-d-doctor Beckett?" he stammered, stepping backward in his alarm so that he half-merged with the metal doorframe behind him. I smiled innocently.

"Yeah?"

"But - but - you're dead. Ziggy said so..."

"Oh yeah," I agreed, disconcerting him even further. "But since when have I let a little thing like that slow me down?"

Al half-choked at that one, managing to turn what might have been hysteria into a cough instead. "Saaam," he growled, once he'd recovered himself enough to breathe properly. "Give the guy a break, willya? And close your mouth, Gushie. I want to be able to breathe inside the Imaging Chamber when I get back."

When I get back...

How often had I thought that very thing? What if there were no way to return at all? Not even death had released me from my journeying; not this time at least. Perhaps this was a Leap of transition, a means for me to pass on the torch; as if by stepping into the Accelerator that fateful day I had started some kind of cosmic relay race that was never going to end...

"You can tell that putz of a supercomputer," Al was saying, "that she might have lost Sam, but I haven't. Not yet, anyway," he added, half under his breath. There was an odd note underlying the remark; I recalled how guilty he had been about what had happened and wondered if he still felt that way. If there had been fault in the way he had allowed himself to be distracted by Dixie, then he had repaid the sin several times over; with his trust and his faith, and with the generous gift of his soul.

With the fire that the beast still craved. That I still craved, still yearned toward; needing to fill the emptiness of my heart, to warm the ice-cold ashes of myself...

Gushie was staring at me. The handlink beeped for his attention and he went on staring at me; a dazed I don't understand this stare that made him look more like a myopic owl than ever.

"I think Ziggy wants you," I offered helpfully, and he jumped.

"Ah - yes - umm..." He lifted the link, tapped a few keys and stared at the result for a moment; then he went back to staring at me. "Ziggy says I'm telling lies," he announced. "You can't be here, Dr Beckett. You just can't. We've no signal, and this says you're Steven Frazel - only you can't be because he's in the Waiting Room, and anyway, he died in the crash, and even if that wasn't it, you can't have Leaped here because it's 1937 and that's way before you were born, and-"

"Hey, hey, hey." Al firmly interrupted the staccato stream of words before the hologram could run out of breath. "Just take it easy, willya? One thing at a time? Any minute now the skies up there are gonna start spewing goop at us, and we are gonna be getting wet. So let's get our priorities right, okay?" He turned toward me with a hopeful look. "Is there somewhere down there that's a little more sheltered than this, Sam?"

I nodded; the place I'd been storing my salvage wasn't going to be a first class hotel by any manner of means, but it would provide a little cover at least. "Down this way," I said, heading back down the slope. Al fell into step behind me. We'd taken half a dozen paces each before the import of what Gushie had said actually registered; we turned as one man to stare at the hologram - who was still hovering uncomfortably by the wrecked cockpit - with equally startled faces.

"Nineteen thirty seven?" we chorused together, then went from looking at him to looking at each other.

"Oh boy..."

...so I believe that the search for Lao Tzu's secret in the heart of China would prove a fruitless one; the documents clearly show that the original shrine was destroyed and the monks massacred sometime in the Fourth Dynasty. But the Emperor clearly did not obtain the elixir, otherwise the world today would be very different indeed...

... the records seemed to show that a group of Chinese students was given permission to travel south and west - beyond the boundaries of the empire...

... the prayer was to Kuan-Yin, asking for her protection and her blessing...

... the oracle's answer was 'seek then in the valley of bitter mists. At its heart lies the temptations of all men. The true seeker will find life eternal; yet only the dead may claim it'...

... the piece from Indo-China had the same markings as the ones from the Collins collection. There must be a connection. Perhaps the monks founded a new shrine; the reference to the 'vessel of crystal and gold' matches the one in the earlier documents...

... the village called Lao Fe is rumoured to hold a shrine where Kuan-Yin sits at the Buddha's feet - and in her hand is a scroll inscribed with the names of thirteen sacred herbs. The precious elixir is said to have been brewed from such a list...

I lifted my eyes from the neat scrawl of Carl Schuster's handwriting and stared at our holographic company. "The elixir of Lao Tzu? Is he serious?"

Gushie shrugged. "He seemed pretty serious to me," he said. He sounded vaguely apologetic about it, although that might have been due to the way he was still looking at me; warily, his eyes anxious and his body language discomforted. I suppose finding out that your dead director has turned into a vampire isn't the most reassuring discovery for anyone to make.

Al frowned at the both of us and reached out to pull the leather-bound notebook from my hands. "Who does this guy think he is?" he muttered, squinting at the close-packed words in the flicker of the meagre firelight.

"Try Indiana Jones," I growled, shifting that little bit further away from him as surreptitiously as I could. The angled roof of the damaged wing sheltered a space that was barely six feet by four; beyond it the rain fell in solid sheets of water, walling us in with efficiency. I felt a little like a juiced-up junkie locked in a cell with a kilo of heroin.

Tempted by what lay within my reach, enticed as much by memory as by need; only too aware that soon - too soon - the need might become compulsion and the memory almost too hard to resist...

"Who?" Al questioned absently, too absorbed in his study of the notebook to make it a serious request for explanation. I threw a conspiratorial wink in Gushie's direction; he just looked more baffled than ever.

Swiss cheese, I mouthed for the hologram's benefit, making a suitable gesture of explanation, and understanding dawned in the programmer's eyes.

Oh - right, he mouthed back; the bafflement became another layer of disquiet instead. One more thing for him to take back into the future, one more factor to write into Ziggy's calculations.

Well, Dr Beckett's Leaped outside his own lifetime, and he says that it doesn't count because he's dead, and the Admiral says he's actually a vampire, but we're not to worry about it, and by the way, they're both Swiss cheesed now, and do you think I could possibly go and lie down for a while...?

I suppressed the grin that the thought threatened and turned my mind to more important things. Like why a perfectly respectable Doctor of Chemistry - which Schuster seemed to be - would drop everything to go chasing such an obvious piece of fiction.

"It's just a legend," I decided after a moment or two. "You know - like the Lost Ark of the Covenant, or the Holy Grail - even that tale about the monkey made of gold that's supposed to be in the Pacific somewhere. The world is full of those kind of stories and none of them have any substance. Why should this one be any different?"

Al had turned the book sideways to study a map that Schuster had scrawled across two pages. The contours of French Indo-China stood out in savage red ink. "Perhaps," he considered slowly, closing the book into his lap and studying me instead, "because we're here, Sam."

The elixir of Lao Tzu. The distillation of immortality. The physic of the gods that could cure the incurable.

Even, it was said, bring the dead back to life...

"No!" I denied with vehemence. "That's crazy, Al, and you know it. There is no hidden shrine, no magic elixir, and no such thing as a miracle, okay?"

He gave me a considered look.

"The way there's no such thing as a vampire, Sam?" he enquired softly. I glowered at him; I couldn't afford false hopes, and neither could he. There was no way I was going to fall for that argument.

"Just because one superstition turns out to have a grain of fact behind it," I told him firmly, "doesn't mean every other crazy myth and legend has to be gospel truth."

"Like UFOs?" he growled, reaching down to feed another handful of twigs to the fire. "Or Bigfoot? Or even time travel..."

"That's enough," I snapped, with sufficient venom to make Gushie jump and Al look up with wary alarm. Being dead obviously made me cranky.

Or maybe it was just the beast snarling its hunger behind my defences.

"I'm prepared to keep an open mind," I allowed into the awkward silence that followed my outburst. "But that's all I'm prepared to do, okay? What does Ziggy have to say, Gushie? Has she figured why we're here yet?"

"Ah-" The hologram poked at the handlink. "Well, umm, originally? The wreck wasn't found until '68. An American Army patrol stumbled over it; they sent what was left of the bodies home for burial, but Schuster's wasn't among them. We think he probably tried to find a way back to civilisation but never made it."

"This," Al observed a little hauntedly, "is no place for anyone to get lost in." He tried to cover his recollective shiver by reaching behind him to tuck the notebook back into the pack we'd found it in. I noticed; I don't think Gushie did.

It was well over twenty years ago - and now it lies thirty years ahead. Part of the bitter harvest that was reaped from seeds sown by oppression and exploitation; the same crop that's flourishing around us right now...

"So it's simple," I decided. "We get Schuster back to civilisation and - uh, how do you usually put it, Al? Wham, bam, slam, we're outta here."

The man I paraphrased grinned; even Gushie had to crack a smile.

"Simple, he says." Al shook his head in quiet amazement, and reached into Schuster's pockets with reflex habit; he didn't find what his subconscious was expecting and the fact registered on his face as a vague and distracted frown. "As if hacking your way through trackless rainforest were as easy as taking a walk around the block."

I dipped my own hand into the inside of the jacket I wore, pulling out what I'd found there earlier. "Isn't it?" I asked in assumed innocence, and threw him the silver case. He caught it; his puzzled reaction became a wry smile as he registered what it was.

"No way, Sam," he denied, extracting a slim cheroot from among its fellows and savouring its scent with appreciation. Gushie sighed, and lifted the handlink to study it; his anxious expression tightened into disconsolate lines.

"Ziggy says - uh-" He shook the link. It protested with a squeal. "I'm not getting-" Another shake, a little more desperate. "That is-"

Al and I exchanged a glance. "You could hit it," I suggested. "That's what he usually does."

"Only when I have to," he defended instantly. "I have to a lot," he added, half under his breath. I grinned, reached down to pull a twig from the fire and offered it across the space between us. My friend leaned forward with a smile of thanks and used the flicker of flame to light the cigar.

The hunger in my heart muttered a quiet protest; he was a source of light and heat far brighter than the lowly flicker of flame in my hand.

Why pamper his addictions, the voice of the beast growled softly, if you will not gratify your own...? I threw the twig at the fire and pulled my hand back as if I'd been burnt; the look that Al gave me over the curl of smoke was a concerned one. I deliberately ignored it. Just as I tried to ignore the cravings that tore at my soul...

Gushie had half-lifted his hand to follow the advice, but let it fall away instead. "This is hopeless," he concluded. "I think she's sulking again. I could maybe..."

"Gushie," Al commanded patiently, "why don't you go back to Imaging Control and sweet-talk Ziggy into co-operating properly? We're gonna need a map, and an idea of which direction to take, and since we can't make use of either until the morning, you got all night to do it in, right?"

"Uh - right, Admiral." The hologram looked relieved at the idea. He keyed up the Imaging Chamber door and vanished through it, pausing only to throw me one last glance of disquiet. Al sighed, leaning his weight back against the wall of our shelter and taking a long pull at the cigar.

"Sheesh," he remarked, shaking his head with a hint of amusement, "but that guy can be a real putz. Do I ever drive you that crazy, Sam?"

"All the time," I grinned. He half-threw me a wounded frown, then chuckled softly instead.

"Guess I deserved that," he noted. "You hungry, Sam?"

To the depths of my soul...

"No," I lied, probably a little too promptly to sound convincing. "I don't think the dead eat, Al. Not- well, if you want to cook something, go ahead. I'll be okay."

He looked a little sceptical, but refrained from comment; he turned to study the descent of the rain instead, breathing a second sigh around the tobacco smoke. "How's the cigar?" I asked, conscious of the threat that silence invited, the thoughts and considerations that lay in wait to ambush us both.

"Cheap," he shot back, his eyes still fixed on the rain. "But welcome. Sam?" he asked, not looking at me, almost - it seemed - not looking at anything at all.

"Yeah?" If I were truly breathing I would have held my breath; there were a thousand questions he might ask, and I didn't really want to consider any of them right there and then.

"When the hell did I manage to become an Admiral?"

Talk about coming out of left field-! I gaped at him. "Uh - I don't remember, Al. Didn't you know?"

He shook his head. Slowly. "It's - like looking at a jigsaw puzzle, right? You got odd pieces, here and there. Some of 'em fit together, and some of 'em don't, and the bits of the picture you think you can see don't make much sense on their own..."

I stared at him. That was it; that was it exactly - the frustration of absent memory, the indefinable holes that the Swiss cheese effect of Leaping had left in my sense of identity. Things came back to me in pieces, things that had no sense of context, and old memories that came with a sense of immediacy because they seemed so fresh and new. It was constantly unsettling, and sometimes it hurt.

Sometimes it hurt more to remember than it did to forget.

Al suddenly slapped savagely at his own cheek - a sharp, reactive motion that made me jump. "Damn bloodsuckers," he muttered, studying the resultant smear of dead mosquito that sat on his fingers. The comment was reflexive; he said it almost without thinking. Then he froze, his own words registering with sharpened irony. He turned and looked at me with a stricken expression, guilt and apology written all over him. I suppressed a shiver of my own. The comment hadn't hurt at all, but the look cut deep.

I can't help what I've become, Al. It wasn't my fault - or yours, either.

I wondered what he was thinking. I knew that McFarlane had hurt him, had struck with intentional savagery, and the memory of it would not be an easy thing to live with. I ought to know.

He'd killed me...

I was McFarlane's child, the reflection of his curse and the inheritor of his power. A demon by nature, if not by intent. I understood the horror of what I might become only too well.

The trouble was, so did Al.

"I think I'll turn in, Sam," he announced, the sudden awkwardness between us almost tangible. "You want to take the first watch?" I trust you, he was trying to say. I didn't really believe him.

I didn't really trust myself.

"I'll take the whole night," I offered guardedly. "I'm not sleepy."

McFarlane's gift had denied me sleep.

Denied me oblivion.

Denied me even my dreams...

 He shot me a wary look, then nodded his agreement. "Sure, kid," he breathed, reaching for the bundled blankets as he did so. "Just don't let me sleep late, huh? The best time to travel around here is early morning. The air gets pretty heavy come midday."

I knew that. Remembered that. I'd been in this part of the world before, hadn't I?

"I'll make sure you see the dawn," I promised.

And all the ones thereafter, I added softly to myself. It was a promise I couldn't be certain of keeping. Not when the hunger I carried grew more desperate, when the beast began howling to be free of its cage.

But I was sure as hell going to try.

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Lost Souls in the Hunting Ground. Part Two. Disclaimer:This story has been written for love rather than profit and is not intended to violate any copyrights held by Donald P Bellasario, Bellasarius Productions, or any other holders of Quantum Leap trademarks or copyrights.
© 1996 by AAA Press. Written and reproduced by Penelope Hill. Artwork by Joan Jobson