Lost Souls in the Hunting Ground - Part two (cont)

Penelope Hill
Once the rain had stopped I went out into the night, putting the sense of warmth that lay within our small shelter further from my reach.

Distancing myself from temptation.

Al had taken a while to get to sleep, and once he had done so it was to claim a discomforted kind of slumber, one in which he turned fitfully, wrestling with unspecified dreams. I left him muttering soft protests in the night, and went to stare at the stars instead. They were a stark scattering of beauty, untouched and undimmed by the hand of man. There was no hint of light pollution in the sky that arched above me; it was a pure velvet, spread with diamonds.

A mosquito buzzed past my cheek with barely a pause; I was no source of fire, no temptation for a hungry parasite.

I was the predator, not the prey...

My hand shot out, capturing the indignant insect with ease. It struggled between my fingers, a bare spark of flame, but still a living thing, still a warmth that tempted me. The night was full of such sparks, a glittering reflection of the stars that hung with such indifference above me. The shift of nightlife skittering through the jungle; hints of fire scattered around me like sweet berries just waiting to be plucked...

Unthinking instinct brought the insect to my mouth, just as it had licked bloodied fingers earlier in the day. The mosquito popped under the pressure of my tongue, spilling its life into my mouth; its brief sweetness stirred the hunger in my heart.

Like eating popcorn; barely a taste. Just enough to wake the appetite.

I snatched another without thinking, then another, picking them out of the night air with a speed and precision that no living man could have matched. They struggled and died in my hands, and I let their husks fall away, intoxicated even by that small taste of glory.

What am I doing?

I held my next captive between thumb and forefinger, watching it fight for freedom, conscious of the energy with which it fought to be free. Did I have the right to feed on any living thing?

Even mosquitoes have souls...

A hint of one, at any rate. Enough for me to taste, enough to tempt me. Could I live like this, hunting for lesser prey rather than the fire I craved?

Could I?

I popped the insect between my teeth, something that I would never have dreamed of, only a short while ago. It was fat and bloated; its own blood was barely a whisper of spice, but the booty it carried was sweet and echoed a familiar richness...

Somewhere in the night a man's voice cried out; a moan of terror, voiced with alarm, just as quickly swallowed. I spun on my heel, all my heightened senses alert. Nothing moved in the night, no unseen enemy stalked through the wreckage. Only a single flame flickered and trembled close by, the uncertain sleep of a living soul, disturbed by memory, unsettled by discomforting dreams.

"Al?" I took half a step in his direction, then drew myself to a halt. The excuse was an easy one to make. Just a nightmare. Dismissing the event as unimportant in preference to facing what it might imply. It was the lingering sweetness on my tongue that frightened me; that was what I craved, and to go to him then...

The understanding of what I had become tore at my heart. With it came other, starker, recollections. McFarlane's eyes, whispering of power. The anguish of my death, the bitterness of my downfall.

And the sadistic delight with which my master had reached to desecrate what I had been so freely given.

The glory of a man's soul...

How would it be, to wake from a bad dream, and find the truth of it bent over you?

I turned away, ignoring the return to muttered protests, the evidence of my friend's distress. I wouldn't wake him. I couldn't wake him.

I would not question his nightmares, not there, not then.

I was too afraid that I might be one of them.

Dawn came with clouded skies and fingers of scarlet light. I didn't have to wake Al; he was already coaxing life back into the fire when I came back down the side of the ravine.

I'd sat at the edge of the gorge for a long time, staring out into the night beyond its confines, wondering what I should do. I had no yearning for self-destruction, but the truth of what I had become was inescapable. I had not been saved from McFarlane's curse, but become entangled by it instead. Neither utterly damned, nor totally redeemed; I stood balanced between heaven and hell, like a beleaguered soldier lost in no-man's-land. The war raged on around me - within me - and in the heat of that conflict this quiet night under the stars seemed merely a breathing space.

Even that was a ludicrous thought. Dead men don't breathe. Nor should they walk about and hold intelligent conversations.

I am become an offence against god and nature...

Truth be known I didn't know what I had become. Only what I fought so hard not to be. The desperate struggle that I had no chance of ever being able to win.

Restraining the beast, denying the hunger...

I was cast adrift from the boundaries of time, cut free from the ties of my life by the terrors of my death. The lure of the jungle had tempted me; I knew its depths would swallow a dead man with efficiency.

It had devoured Carl Schuster whole.

Which was one of the reasons I hadn't succumbed to that particular temptation. Old habits are hard to shake, and the objective behind a Leap was always what had given me purpose in the past.

Or should that be the future now?

This might not be my Leap. But a man's life was depending on it all the same. The lives of three men perhaps; Schuster, Frazel - and that of a stubborn-minded, crazy-headed friend of mine. Who'd risked absolutely everything to come after me. To keep me safe.

To save me from my own damnation.

I felt I could hardly offer him less in return. Which was why I tried to push the terrors of myself aside; we should have talked about it, there in the chill of the morning. Should have dealt with the issues that sat between us, unspoken and unexpressed. But we didn't.

I didn't know how to broach the subject, and Al seemed to be too busy occupying himself with practical matters; picking and packing for the journey ahead of us. He didn't even remark on the way I slid so silently out of the jungle. He did react; with the same defensive startlement that he'd employed the day before. But after realising it who it was, he simply threw me an exasperated frown and went back to what he'd been doing.

Suppressing the sudden pounding of his heart with determined self-annoyance...

The opportunity to talk was there - but I let it slide away, not wanting to face the reasons behind his reaction, not really wanting to know.

He needs me, I lied to myself in justification. Not my problems.

And studiously ignored the voice of conscience that tried to point out the possibility that I might be more of a danger to my friend than anything else he was likely to meet.

"You have to go east," Gushie appeared and announced, while Al finished his mug of coffee and dealt with the stubble on his chin. I seemed to have no need to shave, and my friend's insistence on attending to that particular detail bothered me a little. It might have bothered him a little, too; it was Schuster's blue eyes that stared at him out of the broken mirror while he wielded the man's cut-throat razor with deliberation.

You look in the mirror and you wonder where you have gone.

I knew that feeling all too well; sometimes, on a Leap, I have become so caught up in the life of my host that the certainty of myself has been hard to hold on to. I didn't think there was much danger of that on this particular occasion - not for either of us. My determination to remain me - to stay Sam Beckett, and not succumb to the beast - was the most important thing in my life right at that moment, and Al? Al knew all about hanging on to his sense of identity. He'd had a lot of practice at it, last time he was in 'Nam.

Once he'd finished and bent to pack the razor away in his pack, I walked across and appropriated the piece of silvered glass, turning it over to stare at what it revealed to me. Gushie hovered at my shoulder, trying to act surreptitiously and failing miserably. No doubt he thought I shouldn't have a reflection, but Stephen Frazel looked out of the glass at me, just as I expected.

I had to crack a quiet smile.

One that became a positive grin as I angled the mirror to include my company.

Gushie and I were staring at complementary images; at a young man with a flop of dark blond locks and a lanky physique, and at a slightly older figure with short black hair and a hint of swarthiness in his complexion.

"We're the wrong way round," I noted with amusement. Al looked up from his packing and grimaced at me; in the mirror the young man I was looking at adopted much the same expression.

"Took you long enough to notice," he growled. "I don't get it, Sam. Why make you the pilot and me the scientist?"

"Because the pilot died," I shot back, still amused by the unexpected comparisons. I glanced at my friend in the flesh, reassured by familiar features, by the expressive lines of character that his life has cut into them: just enough weathering to add charm to his maturity, just enough to say this man has lived without offence to the eye. Frazel's reflection - my reflection - was, by way of contrast, vaguely unkempt, that of a man who'd nurtured a permanent five o'clock shadow for most of his life; his face looked decidedly lived in.

"He was an Ace," Gushie supplied from over my shoulder. "Frazel - in the Great War? He flew Sopwiths over France. He told me," he added in defensive explanation as both Al and I turned to stare at him. "He's an Australian, but he was in England, and he volunteered, and he even fought the Red Baron once... Well," he trailed off, "that's what he said, anyway..."

"He's shooting you a line," Al decided, shouldering his pack, jamming Schuster's battered Fedora on his head, and taking a last look around as he did so. I slipped the fragment of mirror into my own pack and then shrugged into its straps. I lifted it easily. Too easily. Despite the things it contained it seemed to have no weight at all.

"East, the man said."

Al nodded, studying the compass he'd pried out of the cockpit panel. "That way." He indicated the relevant direction before sliding the compass into his pocket and tugging the point of his salvaged machete out of the ground. "You ready for this, Sam?"

Was I?

I took a moment to answer him, using senses that I'd never possessed in life to measure the world in which I stood.

The jungle was stirring from night to morning; soft echoes of the eternal cycles of life whispering around me. The day that lay ahead was a soft promise behind the dawn; a day that - for Al, at least - would fill with heat and effort and heavy air. All I felt was cold. I would always be cold from now on, an empty shell in which my heart pursued its slow cadence of deceit.

And close, so close beside me, I could feel a fire raging. A fire alight with a sense of presence, a flame that I coveted, a warmth that I yearned towards. An incandescence of life that my hunger would only serve to extinguish long before its heat might banish the unnatural chill from my soul...

I shook the temptation away with an inner shiver, dropped Frazel's cap onto my head, settled the pack on my shoulders and waved my friend ahead of me. "I'm right behind you, Al."

If you don't mind walking with a dead man at your heels...

We made our way down the ravine and through the dawn, Gushie trying to explain the situation as we did so. Ziggy was still sulking, it seemed; denied her help, our team had dug out what maps they could find and consulted with Frazel about them. He'd given a rough approximation as to where he thought we might be, and that was the basis of our current heading - out of the hill country and down toward the more fertile and populated lands that skirted it. The going was tough; this was virgin rainforest and the land rose and fell almost indiscriminately.

"Dr Schuster says it's not really the elixir he was looking for," Gushie told us, walking through the undergrowth as if it wasn't there. "Just the ingredients. He was researching ways of improving existent drugs and got interested in Chinese medicine. He thought he might find a source of natural painkillers, new ways of tackling fevers, that sort of stuff."

That made more sense. Hadn't someone once said that the world's rainforests were potentially the best drugstores the world ever had?

Of course, by our time, there weren't that many left...

"A man ahead of his time," Al muttered, picking his way down a steep incline with care. I followed him with equal caution. It was still quite dark under the trees, and the footing was treacherous. "They say there's a cure for everything hidden somewhere in the world, don't they? Cancer. AIDS..."

I didn't like the way his thoughts were heading.

Cures, maybe. But not miracles. Not for me.

"How about something for overactive hormones?" I joked, winking at Gushie as I did so. He frowned at me. Al laughed.

"There's a perfectly good cure for that," he shot back over his shoulder. "But you never take advantage of the opportunities."

"Yeah?" I reacted without thinking. "The way you did with Dix?"

I regretted the remark almost at once. I couldn't immediately see how Al reacted to it, but the look Gushie threw me was - at first - decidedly startled, and then vaguely smug for some reason I didn't have time to pursue.

I was too busy feeling guilty.

I hadn't meant that the way it sounded - not accusatory, not implying bitterness, not meant as anything, just a friendly jest - but how else was Al going to interpret it, when the matter was something for which he'd not yet forgiven himself?

"I wonder if they've built the Scarlet Lotus down in Saigon, yet?" he wondered aloud, as if I hadn't said anything, as if - in desperation - he'd let his mind skitter onto whatever track first came to hand. "There was one girl..." He paused in his descent to half-turn and let his hands demonstrate the picture that came to mind. "Slender as willow, skin like almond butter, and her eyes..." The details were missing from the memory; I watched a frown crease across his features as the recollection slipped further from his grasp. The images that lurked behind it were not comforting ones. "Vietnamese women-" He snatched at a smart remark, trying to make light of the moment. "They're something else, Sam. You know - half an hour after you've had one-"

"You want another?" I picked up the remark with deliberated indignation. "Aaal..."

Familiar territory - and safer ground, however bad the joke might be. His grin held a hint of relief, along with its more usual salacious overtones. "Did I say it?" he demanded, feigning wounded innocence. "Did I?"

"You were going to," I growled, trying not to laugh as I did so. He did; a low-throated chuckle as he turned and hacked at the obstructing undergrowth that lay ahead. Gushie seemed vaguely disconcerted by the exchange; he glanced at the handlink as if it might magically rescue him from a situation he clearly found uncomfortable.

"Ziggy talking to you yet?" I enquired, taking the same careful path down the slope that Al had done. Our attendant hologram shook his head.

"Then get outta here," I suggested, not unkindly. "We'll be walking for hours yet. No point in you using up power just to keep us company."

"He's right, you know," Al called over his shoulder. "I wouldn't hang around."

Liar...

If it had been Al, standing there in the Imaging Chamber with so little information to help me and knowing I faced a hard trek through difficult terrain, then he would have been harder to shake than a bull terrier clamped to a bone. He'd have dogged my every step, making inconsequential conversation - irritating the hell out of me - and I'd have snapped at him, growled at him, and loved him to death for it. For keeping me company, for distracting me, and thereby fending off the opportunities for despair. At least while I was busy getting mad at him, I wouldn't have time to brood...

Right then, of course, the Imaging Chamber door was as far from his reach as it had ever been from mine. And Gushie - nice a guy as he is - is no great conversationalist.

"M-maybe I could help Research with the data upload," he suggested, a hope of escape glimmering in his eyes. "We never thought we'd have to go back as far as this."

Before I was born...

"Get outta here," Al turned round to growl at him, half laugh, half exasperation. "The last thing I need right now is someone reminding me how old I am."

The hologram quirked a sheepish attempt at a smile. "Uh. No. I - uh - guess not, Admiral," he apologised, and hurriedly keyed up his exit to the future. "I'll - get back - as soon as I've anything to report..."

The Chamber door slid shut with its characteristic shush. Al sighed. With feeling.

"It's not easy, is it?" I offered softly.

"What?" His question was defensive. I smiled.

"Having to stay this side of the door."

He opened his mouth to answer that, and then thought better of it. He shook his head instead - an exasperated dismissal, backed with a wry smile - and went back to his trailbreaking without a word.

I don't know how long we travelled, that first morning. It seemed like forever, the day slowly advancing around us, bringing humid heat and filling the space beneath the trees with liquid light. As the hours passed, the world around me began to take on a strange quality. My sharpened senses had added a layer of clarity to my perceptions; at first I thought it was that, finding it harder to ignore the details, catching myself becoming absorbed in the colours of a single leaf. But the further we walked, the harder it became for me to focus. It wasn't that things became distant. Far from it in fact. Everything retained its sharp distinction; everything was just as intense as my new perceptions demanded it be. But I seemed to slip away from the equation. I put one foot in front of the other, and watched myself do it, remote, unattached...

We'd not been making conversation for a while; the trek was hard going and Al's efforts were focused on the journey. For him the atmosphere had grown oppressive; he was soaked in sweat and pacing his energy with care. So there was no cause for him to comment on my silence; I'm not even sure he immediately noticed when I began to fall behind.

Eventually I was moving like an automaton whose motor was slowly grinding down to a halt. Everything around me was made of crystal, everything seemed filled with light. I was walking in a vast cathedral whose windows glittered with colour, whose arching pillars were carved from the soft warmth of wood. A place of worship, a world of spirit and fire. A world to which I no longer belonged.

A world in which my friend existed, unaware. Part of it; part of the pulse of life that surged and echoed around us both. The symphony of creation...

The curve of a leaf caught my eye; it trembled with endless delicacy, disturbed by the passage of the man ahead of me. I followed the arching descent of dislodged droplets, counting each one, able to discern every shift of colour within their depths.

A thousand images, a thousand colours, an orchestra of sound. None of it within my reach, none of it real...

One more step; into a space where a fallen giant had torn open the upper canopy and let in the light of the day. I moved from emerald shadows into a shaft of sunlight, drifting, mesmerised by the world.

And gasped with startled pain.

Just a small sound. I was beyond dramatic reaction, distanced and divorced even from myself by then. I could do no more than stand in that impact of light and lift my hands, feeling the sun eat into my skin, knowing that it hurt and that to stay there was to die.

But aren't I dead already...?

"Sam? Sam!"

There was pressure against my shoulders, hands of fire that seared and stirred my existence as they pushed me back, pushed me away. There had been no heat in the sun's touch, only acid, only pain, only dissolution. But his presence was both a warmth and an agony; it burned me and it sustained me all at the same time. "Sun..." I managed to whisper through unresponsive lips. "Hurts..."

"Jeezus," I heard Al swear; saw him swear - saw his face and the horror that dawned in his eyes.

No, my heart denied. Don't...

Don't fear me. Please. Don't fear me...

I tried to say it, tried to plead against that anguished look, but my voice no longer answered my demands. Nothing answered my demands.

Helpless, the beast howled, a distant protest. You're helpless.

He knows what you are.

And now he will destroy you...

The clarity of colours was blurring. All the images were blurring. It wasn't darkness that claimed me, but light. A terrible light; one that I could neither comprehend, nor deny.

A light that cut me adrift, and banished everything: sight, sound and all sensation.

It took me screaming. Silently screaming. Wanting to survive, not wanting to let go.

Wanting to deny what I'd thought I'd seen, in eyes that once had held nothing but faith, nothing but trust.

But, in the end, even the panic went away...

The dead do not dream.

But they do remember.

Remember what it is like to live, and how it is to die.

I remembered McFarlane's smile, and the pain with which he took me; it wrapped itself around other, older memories, far sweeter ones. Ones of home and family, of friends and times spent in triumph, of simple delights and joys now denied me forever...

I remembered so many things, there in the nothingness that was not sleep and not death but might have been a little of both. If I could have done, I would have wept.

Wept for the anguish of losing it all, for the joys and terrors of life that I would never know again. And wept too because - as quickly as I recalled all those things - they slipped away from me again, my life lost in the eddies of time, my self stripped away just as my soul had been...

And, eventually, I woke.

Slowly. A crawl back into awareness, a recognition of event and the passage of time. The light was gone; I was lying on my side, my eyes closed, draped by a weight of fabric and enwrapped in a familiar chill.

Close by - close - there burned an equally familiar fire. One toward which my heart yearned and for which the hunger howled. Stronger now, more compelling. The first thing I did was thrust the urgency away, chaining it with determination, and refusing to even consider its demands.

Then I opened my eyes.

I'd thought - in those moments of dissolution, in the panic that had taken me away from the world - that I might never do so again. But it seemed my companion had not taken advantage of my helpless state and liberated me from my unnatural life; instead he'd made me comfortable. Had even - it appeared - protected me. The weight of fabric was actually the drape of a blanket; one that covered me entirely, so as to act as a shield against the sun.

And - in my return to awareness, to the horror that had become my existence - I actually felt angry at the realisation.

Damn you, Al, I cursed to myself. Why can't you let me go?

I reached out and dragged the blanket from my head and shoulders, emerging into a world of afternoon shadows. The sky was clouded over, much as it had been the day before; the air was heavy and stultifying, a heat that did not touch me. I scarcely even noticed it.

What I did notice was Al - sitting nearby, his back resting against the rise of a twisted treetrunk. There was the inevitable cigar in his hand, its smoke drifting around him like a curtain and keeping the mosquitoes at bay. His face was unreadable - carrying a distant, pensive expression that gave nothing away - but his body language was defensive and on edge.

I could feel the anxiety practically oozing from him.

I was still angry - although, if I'd thought about it, I'd have realised it was an anger with myself, with my situation, rather than with him. Angry enough to read that anxiety as evidence of misgivings and mistrust.

And that thought killed the anger, replacing it with dejected acceptance. With bleak despondency.

He is afraid. Why shouldn't he be? He knows what I am. What I'm capable of. Just as I know it.

He looked round as I stirred; a tense reaction of alarm that he quickly covered, quickly suppressed. Not quickly enough; it added one more weight to the desolation in my heart.

McFarlane had killed me, had cursed and corrupted me - and he'd come pretty close to fulfilling his threat to my friend.

I would tear out your soul, feast on your heart and throw away the empty husk when I was done...

No wonder Al looked at me the way he did; carrying the scars of my master's attack, haunted by nightmares and the memory of what I had done to him.

I won't hurt him, I swore with determination. I won't.

The promise was fierce.

And I knew it to be a lie...

"Welcome back, kid." My friend's drawl held a quiet note of irony. "That's one hell of a way to call for a rest stop."

"Yeah?" I sat up, the strange lassitude that had seized me completely banished. I was totally alert again, my senses sharp, my reflexes at fever pitch. He was watching me with a wariness I misread entirely.

Let it pass, Sam. He let you live - if this can be called living. Don't force the issue. Don't rake over the ashes...

"Did I miss anything?"

For a moment a hesitation hovered in his eyes, as if he too had wondered if this was the moment that we should talk, should face the issues we had both been avoiding. Like me, he let it slide.

"Nah." He stood up, easing tired muscles and adopting his usual confident grin. Camouflage, of course, but a pretty good one. It would have fooled anyone but me. "Just the midday mess call. Oh - and Gushie dropped by."

"Oh?" I got to my feet, retrieving Frazel's cap and jamming it back on my head. "Did he have much to say?"

Al shrugged. "Not much. Ziggy seems to be still having conniptions back there." His grin widened with more genuine amusement. "Serves 'em right, that's what I say. It's about time she drove someone else nuts. Anyway - Frazel's been claiming that the plane was sabotaged. She was fully fuelled before she took off, and all three engines conked less than an hour into the flight. One might have been bad luck, Sam, two bad maintenance, but not three... He's as mad as hell with Schuster about it, apparently."

"Why?" I'd bent to fold the blanket back into my pack, and looked up with puzzlement. That didn't make much sense. After all, nobody would try to sabotage the plane they were flying on. Would they?

He chuckled softly. "Because," he informed me, with the same kind of wry intonation he might have given it had he been reading it off the screen on the handlink, "our Doctor Schuster had persuaded him to take a little detour in his flight plan so as to overfly these mountains. He was looking for landmarks to match the ones on his map. And he found 'em. Just before the caca hit the fan..."

I frowned. "So - Gushie thinks we may be close to the place Schuster was looking for in the first place?"

"M'm-h'mm." Al shouldered his pack and tossed the machete across to lie at my feet. "Your turn to trailbreak, Sam. Kinda odd, though."

"What?" I picked up the machete, unable to help wondering if he'd suggested I take the lead simply because he no longer felt comfortable with me at his back.

"Well, according to Schuster's notes, the Colonial Administrator in Da Nang insisted that he'd never heard of a place called Lao Fe. Or 'three lakes feeding a single river', or 'a mountain cut half away', which is the other signpost he talks about."

I looked up, past the overhang of the treeline, to the cloud-shrouded peaks that lay around us. Most were nondescript formations, their shapes obscured by their blanket of vegetation; but one stood out in stark relief. Had stood out all day, I realised with a frown. We'd walked in its shadow for most of the morning. A single peak, shallow on one side, steeply sloped on the other; as if - just as the notes suggested - some giant knife had cut away the rest of it.

"You could see that for miles," I protested worriedly. "It's got to be a local landmark, surely. Either the Administrator doesn't know anything about his territory or-"

"- or he was lying through his teeth," Al concluded thoughtfully.

I frowned at him, sufficiently distracted by the puzzle to let me forget the tensions that now sat between us. "What for? What would anyone gain by keeping this place a secret?"

My friend shrugged. "A head start?" he suggested. "Sam-" he added at my look, "just think about it, huh? Schuster turns up, with a pack full of tales about some magic elixir and a map to help him find it. This is nineteen thirty seven, kid, not ninety seven. Folks back here are a lot more willing to believe that things like that exist. And if it does, it's worth a fortune."

I shook my head, striding into the waiting jungle, and venting my inner frustrations against the protesting undergrowth. "That's crazy, Al," I decided, turning to make sure he had followed me. Not that I'd needed to. I could sense his presence with undeniable clarity. "You're suggesting someone might have lied - and maybe even killed - for the sake of a legend?"

"Maybe," he agreed, reaching to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. "But then, there might be those who think the prospect of immortality worth it."

Immortality...

I shivered, there in the heat, in the oppressive air, untouched by either. Worth it? Worth killing for? To exist forever, untouched by time? McFarlane had certainly thought so.

But then his immortality was no more than a hollow lie...

I turned back to the trail, hacking my way through with savagery.

Nothing is worth the cost of a man's soul, I told myself fiercely. Nothing.

Unless-

My hand tightened on the handle of the heavy blade: I was glad that the man behind me could neither see nor read my face at that moment. There was one purchase that might be thought a bargain, even at that price. The price he had been prepared to pay. The redemption of a friend, unjustly damned...

We went on like that for three days: a hard slog through hard terrain, hacking our way through trackless forest, down the steep slopes and around the unexpected gorges it concealed. We would seek shelter as the dusk approached, the heat of the day ending in the inevitable downpour of rain, and I would take the night watch, sitting brooding in the dark and trying to ignore the way Al wrestled with demons in his sleep. When the dawn came, we'd move on - at least until the sun breasted the mountains - and then rest through the height of the day; I'd retreat beneath the safety of blankets and leave Al to sit and brood in his turn.

Three days. Three oppressive days, in which we both retreated, first to small talk, and finally to silence. The journey was hard - and exhausting for both of us, although in different ways. It was easy to explain our reluctance for conversation; he was tired, and I was hungry - and getting hungrier by the day, the demand growing each time I returned from my strange state of dormancy.

Easy to explain - impossible to excuse. The tension between us remained unspoken, undefined, and indefensible. Occasionally I'd catch him watching me with haunted eyes, and at such moments I'd deliberately turn away. I didn't want to see what I had thought I'd seen, that first day in the sun; didn't want to see fear where once there had only been friendship. So I didn't look - and I kept my counsel to myself, contending with the beast that clawed inside me, locking away the need that was slowly growing from nagging insistence to screaming pitch.

Pretending that I could master it, sustaining myself with lies and self deceptions.

Until the moment came that I could lie to myself no longer.

It had been an uncomfortable morning, the route Gushie had advised us to take pitching us down a series of staggered ravines, each one steeper than the last. It would have been a demanding climb at the best of times, but after two days of hiking through heat and humidity it was positively daunting. Had we been able to help each other it might not have been so bad, but by then I could scarcely bear to be within several feet of my company, the thirst that racked me raking sharp reminders across my soul whenever we came too close. Al had been sullen and irritable for hours, barely saying a word except to snap at me and the world in general. I ignored him, which probably just made matters worse; I was just too self-absorbed to care.

I had no difficulty with the climb; I could have made the long descent in half the time and with a lot less fuss. The heat had no effect on me, nor did the effort sap my strength. Yet every moment stirred the hunger, whispered its demands into my heart; had it not been for the distancing effect of the day, matters might have come to a head even sooner.

We stopped once we reached the floor of the steepest ravine, facing the prospect of less steep but no less demanding terrain ahead. Al glanced up at the sky, across at me, and then just shrugged the pack from his shoulders without a word. I was well adrift by then, and echoed his actions with languid reluctance; I sat myself down amid a curl of tree roots and was soon lost in the helpless swirl of light and memory over which I had no control.

I came back to a sense of overwhelming need.

Back to a cramping, savage agony, twisting my guts, ripping at my soul. The beast howled and tore at me from within, fighting for release, demanding surrender...

The pain was almost unbearable, the hunger practically beyond my control; I uncurled from my huddled refuge with what almost amounted to a snarl.

"About damn time," I heard Al growl with irritation. He was sitting close by, perched on an outcrop of rock; a raging fire, filled with frustration and undirected angers.

A fountain of life for which my thirst yearned, anxious to be quenched...

Oh, my god.

I scrambled to my feet, my hands clenching with savagery and my senses swimming. I even took half a step forward - drawn by instinct, dragged by need - before I realised what was happening to me. Had we been sitting any closer...

I stood there for a moment, fighting down a strangled cry of protest, a struggle of denial - then turned and deliberately walked into the undergrowth, striding away with determined steps, not sure where I was going, but sure of the why.

No, I found myself repeating, over and over again. No. No. No!

 My heightened senses were on edge. I was aware of everything, could almost taste the intricacies that surrounded me. The jungle seethed with fire; tiny pinpricks of it, scuttling away from my approach, distant conflagrations that took wing, or fled from my footsteps - and behind me blazed that one incandescence, the siren presence that pulled at me with almost irresistible force. To walk away from that was to drag razor-sharp edges through my entire existence. But to stay...

I won't do this, I won't.

I'd run like the wind, as though the devil himself was on my heels, run until another fire took his place, until some other helpless creature came within my reach.

Until I killed because I had no choice, until I sealed my own damnation with the terror of some innocent's death...

I'd stumbled only so far; ahead of me there yawned yet another narrow ravine, rock edged and just that little too wide to jump.

Damn!

The fire I was trying so hard to ignore was close on my heels; following me. I stood there and seethed, trapped between impassable terrain and impossible desire.

Why can't you leave me alone?!

"Sam? Damn you, kid, where are you going?"

He arrived like a blazing comet, filled with fury and passion, a whirlwind approach that battered at my diminishing self-control.

"What the hell are you playing at?" he demanded sharply. "This is no place to just take off like that."

I'm trying to save your life, damn it...

"There's nothing here can hurt me, Al." I made the announcement with tight words, with clenched hands. He was just too close. "I'm dead, remember? Past saving. Damned."

"You don't know that," he shot back. "You can't know that. What makes you so goddamn certain all of a sudden, Sam? You used to question things all the time. Used to worry about the assumptions that lay behind every single thing you knew. That I remember. And now-

"Now, you're ready to just accept this? To give in?"

There were three days of accumulated anger packed into his words; had he watched me accept what I'd become, while expecting words of protest, expecting me to express rebellion against my fate?

Why hadn't we talked this through before...?

"When the hell did your world become so black and white, huh?" He spoke with vehemence, a snarl of words packed with explosive expression. "This is right, this is wrong? It's never been that simple, and you damn well know it. You have to figure the odds, kid, play the percentages. Isn't that what Ziggy does - picks the best compromise, not the ideal solution? You're not god, Sam. You can't know everything. The man upstairs has his own agenda, and you and I - we just have to muddle along as best we can. Face it - what you are is never determined by what you do. It's why you do it that matters. And believe me, sometimes you gotta do things you don't like, because not to do 'em just makes things worse in the end."

My fists clenched that little tighter. I wasn't really listening to what he said. I was too conscious of his presence, the passion with which he harangued me.

"You listen to me, Sam, and you listen straight. You're not damned until you surrender, and you're not gonna surrender, right? There's only one way to survive in this crazy world of ours - and that's to dig in your heels and take what comes, and never, ever let go of who you are..."

My inner conflict slipped into desperate struggle; I turned, almost without conscious awareness of it, and lunged forward, catching his shoulders, slamming him up against the nearest obstruction. Breath - and argument - went out of him with a gasp. I held him there, wrestling for my self-control, losing ground moment by moment.

Fight me, I wanted to scream. But all he did was relax with unexpected sympathy.

"Ah, sheesh, Sam," I heard him say, through the surge of need, through the demand of the hunger. "If that's your problem, all you gotta do is ask."

Ask...?

The beast had been howling for resistance, and it backed away from the generosity of surrender with decided bewilderment. I centred myself with an effort, focusing on where I was and what I was doing; my eyes met his, reading only anxious comprehension where I had thought to find abhorrence waiting for me. My grip was so tight on his shoulders that it had to hurt, but he'd made no effort to escape; I uncurled my fingers with deliberated care and stepped away, shaking.

How can you say that? How? After what he did to you? After what I was about to do to you...?

"You really mean that?"

His expression lapsed into one of those frowns, the ones that start with you gottta be kidding me, kid, and end up somewhere along the lines of I wasn't born yesterday, you know...

"Saaam ..." he protested patiently. "We went through all of that last time, remember? Besides," he added, sliding the frown into a disparaging grin, "if it comes to a choice between giving you what you need or having you tear my throat out..."

There was no need to finish the sentence. Put that way, the answer was obvious.

If only it were that simple...

I shivered with inner pain; the beast howled.

Take it. Take it.

Take it all...

"Not here," I decided, slamming down hard on the hunger, locking it away as best I could. "Wherever we camp tonight. Someplace out of the rain, I hope."

The look Al gave me held shrewd assessment. "Yeah?" he breathed. "Well, maybe we ought to camp sooner than later. Particularly since that's gonna hit us any minute." His thumb jerked skyward, indicating the weight of cloud that had gathered overhead; his voice held more than a hint of irony. He didn't give a damn about the rain right then. Neither did I.

"How about," he suggested, "I head on up this gorge a ways and see if I can find a cave or something. You can go fetch the gear."

The practicalities - oddly mundane when set against the need that churned inside me - provided a focus I seized on with relief.

"Sure," I agreed, turning away to do just that, wondering - as I did so - if perhaps he realised how he might be offering me another solution after all. The one I had been chasing to begin with. All I had to do was keep on walking - and never catch up with him.

Sure, Sam. And for the sake of your friend's life you'd let yourself be swallowed by the darkness, give yourself up to damnation and eternal murder...

The thought left me cold - shaking with more than the hunger, facing a darker image of myself, there in the jungle.

Is that the choice I have to make?

Temptation hovered - an excuse, a reason to accept my inevitable downfall. I did it for love, I could say...

And I was watching myself take one more step down the road toward hell, those lurking good intentions drawing me deeper into the mire.

When it comes to picking the lesser of two evils, by whose judgement should they be measured?

I didn't know. All I really knew was that I was afraid - afraid of what I had become, afraid of what I might yet come to be-

- and afraid, too, of the memories that haunted me, of the richness of a man's life and the glory of the heady vintage that had fired my soul...

I half-turned, catching sight of him in equal hesitation, there at the edge of the narrow clearing. The moment was brief; he sighed, set his shoulders and vanished into the jungle. I could still feel the sweet brilliance of his life as he walked away.

Do you know what it is you offer me?

Maybe not. But he knew why - and to refuse his gift was to betray the faith he clearly still had in me. That I could be saved. Somehow.

What was it McFarlane had said? Monsters we are, lest monsters we become...

Now I understood exactly what he'd meant.

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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