Natural Selection (A Free Spider Shepherd short story) Read Online Free Page B

forceps, like a piano tuner using a tuning fork on a piano. ‘Middle C,’ he said. ‘Shows the skull’s intact. If you get a dull thud that means trouble. As it is, if he survives the blood loss, he should have nothing worse than a headache to show for it.’
    He sutured the scalp wound, then began treating the man who had brought the others in. The reason for his bloodstained face became obvious, because his lips had been cut off, though he looked even more frightened of the needle Geordie was using to stitch his wounds.
    Pilgrim had been questioning him, speaking in Mayan with only an occasional prompt from the alcalde. The man struggled to form his replies, his words slurred by his injuries. ‘He says they were hunting monkeys in the forest,’ Pilgrim said, ‘when Guatemalan soldiers surrounded them. They used these two for bayonet practice and told the other one to take them back as a warning to the others about what’ll happen to them if they don’t get out of this region.’
    ‘They cut off his lips by the look of it,’ Shepherd said.
    ‘A traditional Guatemalan remedy for those they think are spies and informers,’ said Pilgrim. ‘They know we’ve been working with the Maya, so the military junta is obviously stepping up their terror campaign; they even treat their own Mayan population abominably. Among the villagers here are the only two survivors of a massacre that wiped out an entire village on the other side of the border. The Maya here will now have even stronger reasons to fear that they’re next in line for that treatment. It’s a mess. A bloody mess.’
    Pilgrim radioed a report back to base and then moved the patrol out, following the trail of dripped blood on the ground but working their way through the jungle flanking the track, rather than using the track itself. They had been following the trail for about an hour when they saw ahead of them the place where the Mayan villagers had obviously been attacked, for the vegetation to either side of the track was splashed with blood and the ground soaked with it. Two dead monkeys lay in the dirt, still bound to the wooden pole on which the Mayan villagers had been carrying them when they were attacked.
    Pilgrim took in the scene, his expression unreadable, then led the patrol back about a hundred yards and signed to them to huddle around him. ‘They may be lying up in ambush,’ he said. ‘They use monkeys as a food source so I can’t see that they would have left them behind.  I’m sure Guatemalan rations aren’t so ample that they’d ignore some good protein when they had it.’ He paused. ‘Liam, Geordie, Jimbo, take the far side of the track. Dan and I will take this one. Move twenty paces, scent and listen for one minute, then another twenty paces, and so on. We need to clear the area to a hundred yards past the place where the Maya were attacked. Safety catches off - if they’re there, you’ll have no more than a fraction of a second to see them and fire. This isn’t a drill, lads, this is for real. So keep your wits about you.’
    The other three crossed the track and at a signal from Pilgrim, they melted into the jungle and began to advance. ‘You’re lead scout,’ Pilgrim breathed in Shepherd’s ear. He nodded, and began to inch through the jungle, keeping the dusty track on his left just visible on the periphery of his vision. Shepherd was totally focussed, leaving no sign and making no sound, but scanning the jungle ahead and to either side at every step, tracking the path of his gaze with the barrel of his weapon, alert for any movement or sound, or the slightest thing out of place, that might give warning of an enemy. After twenty paces he paused, listening intently then, hearing nothing, he moved on. Shepherd sensed that Pilgrim was behind him, though the veteran SAS man made not a sound as he moved through the jungle.
    Shepherd moved even more cautiously as they approached the scene of the ambush, raking the vegetation