Doc Savage: Skull Island (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (24 page)

As Doc observed it, the avian monstrosity searched the foliage below, its hot orange eyes questing about menacingly.

Doc could see its plumed legs hanging vulture-like, talons distended. There was nothing in those hooked claws. No man, or other prey.

That was a relief. Reinserting his head into the canopy, Doc went in search of the missing Mayan.

“Chicahua!” he called out.

No answer came, no reply of any kind. Neither sounds nor motion.

Doc moved about carefully, golden eyes roving, missing nothing, but finding nothing either.

At last, he returned to the original tree he had climbed, and began working his way back to the forest floor.

When he was halfway down, Doc called out, “No sign of him.”

Captain Savage failed to respond, and Doc took that to mean he was not encouraging conversation that might carry to hostiles.

But once he came within sight of the ground, Doc saw that his father was no longer standing on the spot where he had left him.

The bronze giant dropped to the ground, his powerful leg muscles cushioning his fall.

Coming erect, Doc made a circuit of the tree.

“Captain!” he called in a stage whisper. No reply echoed back. Not even his own voice.

Doc was forced to raise his voice. “Captain! Captain!
Father?”

This time his voice echoed back, hollow and unanswered.

Chapter XXIX

DOC SAVAGE WRENCHED to a halt. There was no sense in running around in aimless circles. Concentrated thought, not wild action, was what mattered.

Deliberately, he made his trilling sound. It became one with the jungle, coursing through its cool confines, like a creature composed of pure melody searching for its soul mate—a call more supernatural than animal.

After a minute, Doc suppressed the sound. He listened for a replying whistle.

It came. It sounded human-like. But there was an uncanny quality to it that evoked the unknowable.

Doc made his trilling again, stopped after twenty seconds or so.

Seemingly in response, the uncanny whistle came again. Its duration exactly matched Doc’s own. Only then did the bronze man realize that this had been true of the first interval of whistling.

Doc essayed a third tune, this one limited to seven seconds.

After a pause, seven seconds of a whistled bar came and went.

This allowed Doc’s supremely acute hearing to zero in on the sound’s source. It came from northeast. Doc struck off in that direction. This time he kept his lips compressed and his boots made no sounds on the rocky soil.

As Doc moved, something struck him at the side of his head.

He had not sensed the attacker, but immediately dropped to the ground, eyes questing about.

Something clattered to the ground. Doc spotted it out of the corner of one eye, reached for the thing.

Bringing it up to his face, he saw that it was a clay pellet, identical to the ones that Chicahua used.

Doc looked about, saw no movement around him.

Carefully, he stood up.

Again, a pellet struck him—tapping him on the chest. This time Doc had been listening for the preliminary intake of breath, followed by a powerful puff of air that preceded the expulsion of the tiny missile.

Doc veered off in that direction.

He found Chicahua crouching under a great cluster of fan-like ferns that might have originated in the Devonian Period.

“Where is my father?” asked Doc, joining him in the lacy green shelter.

Chicahua attempted to pantomime a reply, but Doc had difficulty following, much less interpreting the man’s gestures.

Suddenly remembering the Mayan’s use of the non-native term
cenote,
Doc switched to Spanish.

“Habla Español?”

“Si. Un poco.”

It stood to reason that the man might have picked up some Spanish, and Doc wondered why this had not occurred to him before.

As it turned out, Chicahua’s Spanish was rudimentary at best. But it allowed the conversational trend to become somewhat more efficient.

According to what the man seemed to be conveying, Chicahua had been distracted by something moving through the bush and paused to get a clearer view of it. The need for silence had prevented him from warning Captain Savage.

“Qué?”
asked Doc.

“Hombre.”

“Qué aspecto tenía?”
What did he look like?

“Gigante.”

Doc asked Chicahua how tall was this giant.

Chicahua wasn’t certain, or perhaps his grasp of the Spanish terms for feet wasn’t certain. But he showed eight fingers.

“Eight feet tall?” asked Doc in Spanish.

Chicahua nodded. With a finger, he tried to draw the giant, but a finger in the dirt is no fine instrument for artistry. He depicted something that might have been a man, or a simian monster. The head was a mass of hair.

“Negro?”

Chicahua shook his head.
“Blanco.”

Doc could not tell whether Chicahua meant that the man was white-skinned or his hair was white. It was frustrating.

Doc decided that he had gotten all he could out of Chicahua and that it was high time for action.

He signaled the Mayan to follow.

THEY MOVED in the direction where Chicahua had spied the man, who evidently had melted into the dank forest almost immediately upon being seen.

The search brought a sign of Captain Savage’s boot heels. They were very distinct for a time, then seemed to peter out. This was the way of it. The forest floor could run for yards sufficiently soft to take prints, then change to a rocky material that left little trace.

Doc tried every trick he knew. Looking for mica specks that might have been disturbed was an old cowboy tracking trick. Sunlight would glint more brightly on the freshly exposed side, but there was insufficient sunlight present in the canopy for that, never mind the fact that mica was unlikely to be found in such a lush locale.

Grass or reeds depressed by a boot would take their time rising, and Doc looked for these, but found none.

Captain Savage, if made prisoner, would know to break branches or make some similar disturbance to show the direction in which he was being conveyed.

Nothing such as that revealed itself.

At length, Doc came to a halt.

“If we stray too far in the wrong direction, we are only making matters worse,” he said.

Chicahua seemed to understand.

They paused, standing back to back protectively, covering one another’s blind spots, searching their surroundings with their penetrating eyes.

At a loss for anything more productive, Doc gave forth with his trilling sound.

To his astonishment, the whistle he had heard before came filtering through the forest. And it was not coming from Chicahua!

Fixing its location with his ears, Doc signaled for the Mayan to follow him carefully.

Doc kept on, one hand on the butt of his automatic. He had not unshipped it before now due to the risk of firing at shadows that might be friendly.

The whistle came again, and this time Doc made the answering call.

His keen ears attempted to unravel the flavor of the thing. It sounded as if a human throat had produced it, but why had the caller not spoken up?

“Captain?”

No reply came.

“Is anyone here?”

No response.

Doc switched to Malay.

“Jawaban!”
Answer me!

Still no response. He offered his trilling sound and this brought a clear comeback.

A lilting whistle, pleasant but eerie, traced the air, leaving a haunting echo after it died away.

Picking up his pace, Doc Savage marched in its certain direction. Chicahua followed, wordless and alert, machete swinging in one fist.

Soon, they broke into a clearing, a space of some thirty yards in circumference where the jungle seemed to hold back.

In the center of the clearing stood an upright thing of fabulous construction. Generally, it resembled a man-sized ostrich—but one assembled out of an avian nightmare in which an ostrich body, eagle talons and chicken legs had been scavenged. The long, narrow face brought to mind a cross between a lizard and a monkey, but was neither.

Ebony of plumage, crisscrossed by haphazard scarlet slashes, it stood on two scaly bird-form feet. Deep violet eyes regarded him with a wise intelligence.

Doc studied the strangely-still thing. He realized that it was some species of feathered dinosaur that science had yet to describe, or categorize. In its unwinking sapphire eyes lay a cold, calculating intelligence. Doc began to suspect that this might be one of the slasher pack leaders Penjaga had called a deathrunner.

This creature greatly resembled a slasher, but looked more powerful, and differed in other anatomical details. Its lower jaw was more pronounced and sported a tuft resembling a rough beard. But the eyes were the thing that was most different. Unlike the slasher’s orbs, which were placed further apart in the manner of a bird or a reptile, these were set well forward, staring with a cold sapphire malignancy.

It made no move, offered no threat, so Doc began to circle it warily.

Closer and closer, they got to it. Still it stood rooted, as if in fear.

One three-clawed hand slowly lifted, displaying a sharp set of talons. The claw scissored open, but otherwise the creature stood rooted in place.

Then, the thing’s powerful jaw parted, displaying vicious yellow-ivory teeth and a thin black tongue.

Out of that aperture came the whistling that had seemed so human.

A rustling of feathers erupted all about—and suddenly the sky was filled with more of the scaly plumed things!

The slashers descended in a mass, landing on the outer perimeter of the clearing.

Doc Savage had the eerie feeling that he had fallen into a clever trap within a trap, conceived and executed by a creature of near-human intellect.

His trilling was yanked out of him, unbidden.

And from the scarlet throat of the creature, came an answering whistling, beautifully half-human, but also menacing in its cool superiority.

As one, the nightmare flock advanced on him.

Chapter XXX

DOC SAVAGE COCKED his Colt .45 automatic and whirled on the nearest slasher, a stork-like monstrosity plumed like a tropical macaw.

The weapon convulsed in his steady hand, spouting saffron tongues of flame. Three smoking cartridges spat from the jerking receiver.

The slasher was knocked off its spindly bird-like legs and gave a screech of half-human horror.

The others charged in, screaming rage, hot orange eyes ablaze.

Doc swung around and knocked another off its legs, finishing it off with a single blunt bullet to the skull.

Chicahua was busy with his sturdy blowgun. Unfortunately, it proved ineffective. The poisoned darts had no immediate effect on his thick-hided assailant.

Doc had to deal with that one, too. He fired once, clipping a talon off an outstretched limb, then his gun ran empty.

Stepping in, machete in hand, Chicahua began hacking furiously, removing one arm and then parrying the other talon with the flat of his blade. Twisting and advancing, he maneuvered until he was in a position to strike a decisive blow.

A ferocious downward slice removed the upper and lower jaws of the thing, maiming its face horribly. Emitting weird strangled cries, it fled.

Others of the nightmarish pack hesitated, colorful eyes glaring. Then, they began creeping ahead on their raptor-like bird feet, stepping as turkeys do.

From somewhere close, a voice called.

“You! Kendra’s boy!”

Doc searched his surroundings.

Up in a tree limb, half concealed, stood a man so tall he seemed unreal.

White was the color of his long hair and bushy beard. Sunlight filtering through the overarching canopy made his skin gleam as copper as a Red Indian. One cat-yellow eye winked at him mischievously.

“I mean you. Take to the trees! You can’t fight them all.”

Reversing course, Doc seized Chicahua by one arm, and flung them both in the direction of the sheltering forest.

The slashers pursued them. Some spread scaly arms and lifted off the ground, gliding short distances. The sapphire-eyed deathrunner remained behind, like a general calmly observing its troops, confident in the outcome of battle.

Doc proved faster than the nearest attackers. He found the base of the tree from which the call had come and pushed Chicahua ahead of him.

Chicahua grabbed the bole and began shinnying up it, eyes wide, broad face twisted in horror.

Doc followed him up, pausing only once to break off a stout branch and fling it at the head of the first slasher who reached the spot.

The thing grabbed the branch in its strong jaws, shook it violently and snapped it in two, like an angry chicken.

A cluster of them stood stamping at the tree roots, stretching angry arms, but otherwise acting helpless in a frustrated way.

Doc realized that they could not fly in the manner of birds, but only glide if they found a perch of sufficient height from which to launch themselves. Nor could they climb, it seemed.

Reaching a high vantage point, Doc looked for the copper-skinned wild man who had called him “Kendra’s boy.”

There was no sign of the hirsute apparition. Only then did it register on Doc’s quieting mind that his mother had been named Kendra.

“Father!” he called. “Father?
Grandfather!”

The buzz and drone of jungle insects was his only answer….

DOC SAVAGE motioned for Chicahua to follow him. They began working along the branches, farther inland where the weird slashers could not easily follow.

The burly Mayan was good at tree-work as he was in his forest craft. He almost kept up with the agile bronze man.

Doc had no clear objective in mind; only to reach safety, a place from which to take stock of the situation.

Reflecting upon the slasher ambush, he realized that his father had not fallen prey to any of those insane creatures. There had been no blood on the ground, or smeared on their claws or snouts. That much was a comfort. Cold comfort, perhaps. But it gave hope that his father yet lived.