Excerpt: Apeman

The sun rose slowly over the fine, spun-silver mists; catching against the massive, bent-giant-back humps of the trees, and casting their shadows in long strides over the roiling fog. It hung in the sky like a pink coin, rays diffused and soft, waking the flights of morning birds to soar above it all.

The mists merged and mingled freely with the noxious black smoke rising in billows from the swatch of new-born desolation slashed deep in the treeline, the only thing marring the otherwise pristine landscape. It looked almost as if someone – the giants in the trees, perhaps – had taken the world’s largest magnifying glass and decided to take out the entire ant (and, incidentally, all other assorted wildlife) population out in one go, and had followed up with a rather thorough weed-whacking.

The first two layers of the towering trees were shorn off halfway down, branches torn and trunks toppled, bark peeling off in long stripes of elephantine grey and terra cotta and stucco. The path of devastation carried on deeper into the forest for a good hundred yards, until it finally petered out in a pitiful heap of metal and fabric that smelled rather strongly of jet fuel and carnage.

If the path of pitiful trees and smoldering leaves wasn’t enough of a beacon, it was also, rather helpfully, still on fire. The flames were already licking their tentative way into the thick trunks and the dead ground cover. It wouldn’t take too long, in this dry section of the jungle, for this to get out of hands.

Somewhere, deep within the surviving trees, something shifted in a creak and a crackle of branches. That same something – someone, to be entirely accurate – groaned in a long, low, groggy sound that was all but devoured by the morning calls of those to whom this jungle truly belonged. The groan lingered, and then grew to become a voice.

“H’llo?” The shout, as hoarse as one might have expected from the goan, echoed unchecked ad unheeded through the trees and smoke. “Is there anyone out there?”

Silence reigned for long seconds – a disconcerting silence, a silence-that-wasn’t, silence in name only that was filled with the calls of unfamiliar birds, alien insects, and a sound that the owner of that solitary voice couldn’t place off the top of his muzzy, roaring head.

He could see the sky from where he lay tangled in vines and almost buried by what remained of his seat and what felt like half a tree trunk turned into splinters. It was still grey with mist and smoke and early morning; broken by the trees that loomed like so many skyscrapers. Even the small patches he could see through the dark leaves looked too big, too wild around the edges, for him to look at long.

He tried to sit up, subsequently discovered that he could also see his arm from where he lay, and promptly tried to stop moving. And, possibly, to stop feeling. One worked. The other did not.

His arm was a mass of cuts and scrapes and blood and – in one stomach clenching place – white-yellow bone. It burned, itched, stung and throbbed, all angrily, all at once, and the sudden realization and pain shocked wetness to his eyes in a way that would have had him embarrassed and lying, had there been anyone around to see. But, anyone who had been with him was, it seemed to his pain fogged brain, probably in the burning husk of the plane that he could just barely see.

He was alone.