Down in Flames – Part Eight – In Which they Find Danger and Death…
Author's Notes: Thank you to: Hyperactive Forever, rozzy07, Zelenis, crystalpheonix, Lady Lestat, adele, cl-roxy, little dragon 25, Space-Case7029. You guys are great!
Disclaimer: Same as every other freaking chapter!
"We go east," Nigel replied, saving himself the trouble of reading the riddle.
"Then east we shall go!" Alex exclaimed, starting north.
Nigel waited for Sydney to climb down before just standing there while Alex walked.
"Uh, Alex?"
"Yeah?" he asked, stopping to turn and look at her.
"That way," Sydney pointed to the left.
"I knew that," he replied sheepishly, starting east this time.
So they started walking again, this time in the right direction.
The silence the three endured was broken only by the occasional muttering of the English man muttering to himself as he translated more of the map. He just couldn't fine tune the damn thing.
The leaves and twigs underfoot snapped and crackled so loudly, that Sydney almost missed the soft click that came from her right. She knew instinctively what the noise was.
"Guys?" She held up a hand for them to stop.
"What are we --?"
"Shh!" Sydney interrupted Alex. "When I say 'drop!' everyone drop to the to the ground quickly, understand?"
Alex opened his mouth to question her again when Nigel elbowed him sharply in the chest.
"Don't question her. She knows what she's doing."
Alex caught a glint of something more that adoration in Nigel's eyes but said nothing.
Before he even had a chance to say something about it, they all heard a soft 'click!' and recognized exactly what it was.
"Everyone, drop!" Sydney yelled.
But they were all down before she finished her sentence anyway. A hail of gunfire, sounding like three machine guns, exploded into action.
A bullet whizzed through Sydney's hair, while another grazed Alex above the elbow. One shot through Nigel's shirt, missing him by centimeters and exploding into the tree bark right next to his head.
Their arms covered their heads and they lay completely still, faces buried in dead leaves and moss. They could only wait for the gunfire to stop. Bullets rained down, missing them by mere inches. Everywhere they stood before seemed to erupt. The bark on the trees exploded, leaves flew into the air.
After what seemed like forever, all the noise finally stopped, leaving everyone's ears ringing with the deafening silence.
Alex, Nigel, and Sydney stood up after she deemed it safe. They brushed the dirt and dead foliage away from their clothing and hair.
"Anyone hit?" she demanded, looking around for any sign of blood.
A trickle of red escaped from the crook of Alex's elbow, but not enough to be considered serious. The guys both shook their heads before Nigel repeated the question to her. She also shook her head.
After they were sure everyone was okay (not to mention the murder of Nigel's shirt), they continued to walk with their senses heightened. All of them sensed death.
And sure enough, not even ten minutes later, Alex took another step and gagged violently.
"What, Alex?" Sydney snapped at him.
He didn't answer, looking down on what he had stepped on, fighting the urge to gag again.
A decapitated human skull.
"Okay… Ew," Nigel said to himself, turning away.
The sight that greeted him wasn't much better than the rotting skull.
"Okaaaaay… EW!" he exclaimed, jumping back and landing on the skull with a sick crunch. He gagged, and spun off of it, straight into Sydney's shoulder.
Nigel stood still and tried to breathe deeply through his mouth to avoid the stench of decomposed flesh.
In all Sydney and Nigel's time together relic hunting, they had never come across a sight like the one they beheld…
Dead, decayed bodies, still trickling body fat through their clothing, suddenly hung from nearly every tree. The rotted purple and green skin hung from dried muscle and bone, almost dripping off. The closest bodies were pinned to trees by thick staffs of wood.
Others were pinned to the ground by grids of the sharpened sticks while still others hung from tree branches by some hidden trap.
But even that wasn't what got to them. It was the looks on the bodies' faces.
The decayed faces – the ones you could tell that had faces anymore – were all frozen in horrific screams of pain. The ones that had no flesh or muscles… those skulls were grinning eternally at the prospect of their deaths.
Nigel stepped back, straight into an almost skeleton. He leapt away from the gooey body.
"Oh… my… god…" Nigel's face was white, tinted with a faint green. His breathing was coming in short shallow gasps, like someone about to be sick.
Apparently Sydney caught on.
"Nigel, calm down," she tried to sooth his nerves but it wasn't working.
Alex stood there, snickering as Nigel became sick.
"Poor Nigel, can't take the stench of death," he mocked, still laughing.
When the contents of his stomach lay on the ground, Nigel stood up, wiped the sweat off of his upper lip and faced Alex dead in the eye.
"As a matter of fact, I can handle it. Touching a sticky dead body is what gets me," he said coldly, "So until you know a damn thing about me, Alex, you can keep your bloody mouth shut!"
"Wow, Nigel actually has balls!" Alex replied lightly, grinning.
The Englishman flipped him a rude hand gesture before walking through the worn path between the body laden trees.
"Be careful, Nigel, some of these traps could still be active," she warned.
Before the end of her sentence, however, they all heard a snap and instinctively threw themselves to the ground again.
A hail of ancient arrows passed over them quickly. Sydney and Alex heard a gasp and a thud. And when they looked up, they saw Nigel was laying on the ground, unmoving, with one of the arrows protruding from his body…
TBC…