Short Stories.

Going Home

Alex slowly, ever so slowly crawled forward; he couldn't see his target yet, but he could hear him and smell the cigarette smoke. He knew that whoever this man was, he was alone and he was in Alex's way; it would take too long to circle around and cross the small river up stream, so this man had to die. He knew that this was an innocent, a noncombatant, but he had no choice; he only had eighteen more hours to reach his target and he couldn't wait this man out any longer. He continued to move, the man unaware of his presence and the jungle uncaring that he was here; Alex had spent much of his adult life in jungles just like this and he understood them, knew what would upset the creatures around him and knew how to become part of his environment.

He belonged in this primitive place, he was as at home here as he was in his small cabin in the states; it didn't happen often to white men but it happened to him, the jungle and the wild creatures that called this dark foreboding place home, had accepted him as one of their own. It hadn't always been this way, there was a time when he was a normal man, a time when he had a home, and a family, and even a name - but no longer. He no longer belonged in the company of his species, no longer belonged with the civilized, no longer belonged with the living; he was a shade, a ghost trapped between life and death and he hated the living as much as he hated the dead that visited him every night.

Alex, and that wasn't even his real name, not the name his mother had given him; he had a name once but he had forgotten it, well not forgotten but left it behind. That name was a part of his past life, a life he had walked away from because it rejected what he had become; when he left that life behind he left behind all the things that it contained: his name, his friends, and his family. Of all the things lost to him, the only thing he missed was his family; his mother and sisters that he had not written, called, spoken to, or seen in nearly a decade - it was hard to see their faces now, behind the fog of time.

Alex froze, stopping his snail like movements when he saw the bluish grey smoke rise above the small bush ahead of him; whoever this intruder into his world was, the fact that he was smoking proved he didn't belong here and that would ensure his death. Alex felt no sympathy for the man, no empathy, only remorse for what this man's death would do to him; this man shouldn't have come here and if Alex didn't end his life, some other creature of the jungle would. This primordial world didn't treat it's visitors with hospitality, didn't welcome guests, and here the price of trespassing was death. Alex saw the man stand and use his nearly spent cigarette to light the next one he would smoke, he knew instinctively it was time; Alex stood and fired two quick rounds from his suppressed weapon, the only sound was the quiet metallic cough, as the two rounds left the muzzle of his weapon, and the two wet smacks that were so close together as to almost be the same sound, as the rounds struck the man's head.

Whoever this had been, he died quickly, so quickly in fact that it took a moment for his body to catch up and let his corpse fall softly to the rotting jungle floor; Alex walked over and grabbed the man, flipping him over to see who he had been, after all it was only polite to see the face of the newest member of the legion of dead that visited him in his sleep. Alex sighed when the human shaped lump of meat rolled over and he saw what was left of the thing's face, a ragged gaping and bloody hole bordered by the man's lower teeth, eyebrows, and ears - Alex really hated the faceless ones! He grabbed the already decaying refuse and pulled it deeper into the bush, rolling it under a large downed tree and covering it with the moss and sparse grass that grew in this dark wet place. He didn't worry about it being found, the jungle wasted nothing and meat didn't stay in the forest's larder for very long; by this time tomorrow there would be little left but slick and shiny bones that would quickly sink into decaying morass that served as the ground in this depressing world. Alex sighed and turned, walking back to where it had fallen, stopping for a moment and watching the small scurrying creatures of this place already cleaning up the blood, bone, flesh, and brain tissue that had been deposited on the rotting leaves; they would clean this stain away like an army of primordial maids.