Tracked by Terror by Brad Strickland Page B

sight of the barrier, because the underbrush grew thick and dense off to their left. Jarvey felt bewildered, on the verge of panic. Moving from the theater of Junius Midion to the ship and then the town had been disorienting enough, but this wandering in the wilderness threw his sense of direction completely off. They had to pick their way through the trees and brush, and now and again some animal bellowed or howled in the distance. The air felt as thick and wet as steam. Moisture dripped from the leaves, like a slow rain, and when a drop splashed Jarvey’s neck or face, it felt almost as warm as blood.
    As they pushed on, the trees on either side of them crowded thicker and darker, and the trailing vines looped down as if trying to slow their progress. Finally they hit a thicket they couldn’t force their way through, a tangled barrier of thorny vines and interwoven saplings. “No good,” Betsy panted. “We’d need saws and axes to cut our way through this mess.”
    â€œGo back?” Jarvey asked.
    â€œCan you find the way?”
    Jarvey shook his head. “I got lost about five minutes after they threw us out,” he confessed. He squirmed. He didn’t like the heavy, humid gloom under the trees, or the sense that the screeching, yowling animal sounds had been coming closer. They climbed over the tortuous roots of a huge tree with a lumpy, knotted trunk, its dark gray bark deeply grooved in an odd diamond pattern. “Let’s rest,” Jarvey said.
    They sat on one of the gnarled roots, and Betsy leaned back, squinting up into the green canopy overhead. “If we could only see the sky, we might have some sense of direction. We could at least judge the time.”
    â€œBut we can’t,” jarvey said. “Maybe—”
    The root beneath him moved, surging slowly. Jarvey yelped in surprise and leaped up, and Betsy scrambled to her feet at the same time.
    The tree opened two huge misshapen eyes and stared at them.
    Jarvey felt frozen. Two round lumps on the trunk of the tree had split, and the splits had widened. Vast eyes, pale woody brown with black pupils, gazed at him without any trace of emotion. Beneath the eyes a horizontal slash opened—a mouth of sorts—and in a weirdly creaking voice, the tree spoke: “The hunt has begun. The Nawab has entered the forest.”
    â€œHunt?” Betsy said, her voice rising in pitch. “What’s being hunted?”
    â€œYou are,” the tree said. The eyes and mouth closed and sealed themselves. A moment later it was just a tree again.
    â€œOh, no,” Betsy said.
    â€œHe’s hunting for us,” Jarvey said. “He’s somewhere in the jungle.”
    â€œWorse than that, he’s hunting us. We could wind up with our heads hanging on his trophy wall or something! Come on. We can’t stay here.”
    They trudged on, winding between stands of trees, pausing every so often to listen for sounds of pursuit. Hours dragged by, a long, dreary time of trying to find a passageway through the forest, backtracking, and trying again—long, exhausting, frustrating work. They heard nothing but the clamor of birds and the buzz and rattle of insects. “This is hopeless,” Jarvey gasped. “We don’t know which way were going. We don’t know where the Nawab is. We don’t even—”
    A clatter of wings and an explosion of high-pitched shrieks burst out not far away. Jarvey spun around and saw a dozen or more bright green birds speeding through the trees, dodging the trunks and banking to the left and right as they fled some disturbance. One of the birds wheeled sharply in the air and landed on a branch just above Betsy’s head, ruffling its feathers and shaking its wings. It was the color of a parrot, but it didn’t look like any parrot Jarvey had ever seen, but more like a smaller version of a vulture, despite its coloring.
    From its perch above them, the