Dark Storm (Dark #23)(23)
Author: Christine Feehan

Woolly monkeys arrived in masses, far more than one troop of forty, dropping through the trees faster than the humans could get on their feet. The battle was something out of a horror movie, vicious and unreal. Her mother’s screams abruptly stopped. Riley’s heart jumped and more adrenaline flooded her body. The lack of sound was far worse.

Cursing, sobbing, Riley fought her way through the solid barriers of maddened primates to get to the place where Annabel had been driven off the trail. There was blood everywhere, dark pools of it. As she kicked away an aggressive monkey, a crimson arch sprayed into the air, splashing across the leaves of nearby brush, across tree trunks and the monkeys. For a moment she thought the monkeys were bleeding, but then she saw him. The porter. Not Raul, but his brother, Capa, chopping down over and over with a bloody machete.

Her heart stopped. She couldn’t see if it was her mother or the monkeys he was attacking, but there was so much blood. Far too much. With another vicious kick, she sent another monkey sprawling on the ground, giving her a glimpse of her mother’s body. She squeezed the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine into Capa, running forward as she shot him, knowing it was already too late. She slapped the second magazine into place.

Simultaneously, Gary shot, his bullets entering the porter from the side, spinning him around. Uncaring that she was running into a blaze of gunfire, Riley rushed forward, kicking and punching and even shooting the monkeys to get to her mother. Capa went down hard, the machete flying from his hand. Gary continued to shoot the primates surrounding her mother.

Riley pushed aside the brush and stopped abruptly, her mouth wide open, an agonized scream nearly shredding her vocal cords. She stared into the brush with absolute horror and shock filling her. She wasn’t even certain what she was seeing, comprehension impossible. For one moment, it looked as if she’d stumbled on a massacre. Her mind tried to tell her that everything soaking into the ground and brush was from monkeys, but her body had gone into some kind of shock, almost numb, frozen and somewhere deep inside she knew, she just couldn’t accept the truth. There was so much blood. She couldn’t see flesh, only strips of cloth and hair. She forced her body to move forward, bile rising.

"No, Riley." Arms came around her, preventing her from moving. Hands covered hers, removing the Glock. "Come away from here. There’s nothing you can do and there’s no need to see this." Gary’s voice was extremely gentle, coming from a long distance away.

The world faded in and out. Her stomach lurched and she tried to turn her head, to look away from the mangled body, but it was impossible. The blood was so dark. Curly hair lay on the ground, strands and tufts across fronds of fern, matted and muddy red. She saw fingers and part of a hand. Strips of clothing covered in blood. There wasn’t a place in a five-foot radius that wasn’t soaked red. It was impossible to tell what lay in that dark dense foliage.

She was aware of the sudden silence in the rain forest. No sound at all. No drone of insects. No gunfire. No shouting. The buzzing in her head was gone, to be replaced by her silent screams of protest. The world around her receded and then sharply focused, only to recede again.

"Riley," Gary spoke in her ear, his voice calm and firm. "You have to come with me now. Looking at her isn’t going to help."

His hands urged her frozen body to move, to take steps, but she had no control, the shaking, the anger, the grief welling up like a volcano, from deep beneath the shivering ground, straight through her body, until her heart wanted to stop beating and her lungs refused to work.

She tried to tell Gary she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t draw in air. The scent of blood was too heavy, permeating the entire area. He simply lifted her off her feet and began to stride away. She caught a glimpse of Capa, the porter, lying in his own pool of blood, the machete a few inches from his hand. His body was intact, although all life had run out of him onto the ground.

A sob escaped and she gripped Gary’s arm hard, her only reality in a world gone mad. Annabel murdered in such a savage way was unthinkable. Her mind just refused to process, but her body was wholly aware and reacting with shutting down. She wasn’t certain she could have stood on her own if her life depended on it. Gary allowed her to sink into the carpet of vegetation, a short distance away from the site of her mother’s murder.

She was aware of her traveling companions on some level, actors in a play. Their slow reactions. Turning heads. Mouths open with shock. The bodies of dead monkeys were scattered like litter across the ground, adding to the macabre scene. Everything around her blurred, and it took a moment to realize her eyes were swimming with tears.

The monkeys that hadn’t suddenly taken to the trees appeared as confused as she felt, wandering in circles, as if they’d lost all direction. On the edge of her vision, she saw the three guides picking themselves off the ground, all disheveled and streaked with blood from the attacks of the woolly monkeys. The three brothers ignored the scattered primates and looked uneasily toward the rain forest and the two bodies that lay just out of their sight. They whispered to one another in low, hushed voices, before making up their minds to see what had transpired.

Jubal moved out into the open to face them, his clothes torn from the vicious, concentrated attack, showing evidence he’d tried to get back to Annabel and was stopped just as Riley had been. The three guides hesitated, but continued slowly forward, craning their necks, hands gripping weapons.

Dr. Henry Patton picked himself up gingerly from the ground and hurried over to help one of his students, Marty Shepherd, up. The man appeared to be in tears, almost hysterical, slapping at Patton and fighting when Todd Dillon rushed over to aid him as well. Marty was pulled to his feet, but instantly sank back to the ground with the other two men bending solicitously over him.

Riley rocked herself back and forth, trying to take in that her mother had been murdered just feet from her. She looked down at the rich dirt, thick from hundreds-thousands-of years of vegetation, of death and rebirth. Above her head, the sky darkened subtly. She glanced up as she dropped her hands and buried them deep in the layers of black dirt. Clouds swirled ominously overhead, forming towers rising high. The wind stirred her hair, even there, under the stillness of the canopy, while the branches of the trees emerging from the canopy whipped back and forth in a frenzy of activity.

She took a breath and let it out. A long keening moan escaped from her throat. At the sound, the remaining monkeys took to the trees, the mourning notes following them through the rain forest. Instead of moving up the mountain, the troop of woolly monkeys moved away from their natural home high up in the cloud forest.