A Subtle Hiss

by Kurt Cagle

Specialist PD Hawkins, Special Ops, was royally pissed. The damn drug pick-up had gone badly, with Medellin cartel thugs waiting in ambush for the chopper. He'd told Sarge that this whole thing was a bad idea, playing one damn warlord against another, and Sarge had said what PD knew full well Sarge would say.

"It isn't our effin' business to ask why, PD. Some muckity muck at the CIA wants his stash, more'n likely. We just gotta be good soldiers, and collect our bonus pay for this."

Yeah, the bonus pay was nice -- real nice. When he got out of this bloody outfit, there was a nice little piece of property he was looking at paying a cool million for, not bad on a grunt's salary. He had to keep his eye on that property right now, because the way things were going, a million bucks wouldn't do a damn bit of difference if he was dead.

He'd known it had gone sour almost instantly ... someone higher up had talked, or decided that it was time to end this little operation and anyone who knew about it, and that was that. PD'd run drugs in Chicago when he was a punk kid, part of why he was here. He enlisted as the only alternative to spending time in the Rockford penitentiary. His records were scrubbed, of course, especially after he'd shown enough aptitude to handle Special Ops, and enough savvy to know which way the power plays went with the right special ops. He also knew who paid the price when the big boys got cold feet. He was a goddamn foot warmer.

"I spot at least twelve out there," PFC Steig (aka Stiggy) muttered into his mic. "Armed and hostile."

They shouldn't have landed, though the copter was still hovering. Their contact wasn't there, but his muscle was.
 
"I don't like this, Sarge," PD breathed into his own mic as he kept his hands glued to the controls.

"I hear you PD. Let's wait a few more ..."

The first shots hit like hail against the armored skin of the bird.

"MOVE out PD ! Now!!" Sarge screamed.

The rotors spun faster, but still not fast enough - one shot hit the cockpit's window, leaving a spider-web pattern in the reinforced glass. They rose up above the canopy of the trees, the shrill whistle of bullets diminishing in the distance. That was when PD discovered that the thugs also had an RPG.

The sky turned a brilliant white for a second as two air grenades went off, one fore, the other, a few seconds later, aft. Neither hit them directly -- they'd be a fireball if the grenades had made contact, but PD's sigh of relief was cut short as he noticed the fuel gauge needle sliding preciptiously to the left.

"Sarge, they ruptured a fuel line. We're leaking fuel like crazy."

The response took longer than PD was expecting.

"PD, its Steig. Sarge took a bullet."

Damn, damn and double damn.

"Status?"

"Back of the neck. He's not dead yet, but he won't survive long without help."

"Clark, can you raise HQ?" PD asked of his radio man, reluctantly. This wasn't a white op, not even close.

Contacting HQ would cause ... problems.

"That's a negative. Something's jamming our signal."

Damn. This was going from bad to fucking awful fast. He did a quick calculation in his head looking at the rapidly diminishing fuel supply ... five minutes with some control, beyond that it was a crapshoot, especially as it was heading into night. This was wild territory, dense rain forest interspersed with Andean ridges, lightly populated at the best of times. The maps were useless here, contractor crap that someone had paid far too much money for. Swearing under his breath, PD went to visual to scan the area. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Wait ... there was an old Aztec temple, with a rocky clearing that wasn't perfect, but would have to do. He could only hope that the jamming would eventually end long enough for their transponder signal to get picked up. Yeah, and fucking pigs'll fly.

The copter lurched as it landed, the last of they fuel unbalancing the blades just enough to make them impossible to control. A trickle of blood ran down PD's chin where he'd bitten his lip. Some rich white bastard was going to pay, big time, when he got back to the states.

One by one, they awoke to the scent of quickening blood. Glass bead eyes caught what little light permeated their home, pale pink tongues flashing in and out to taste the air. As they stirred into their own limited awareness they also prodded the awareness of their mistress, two dozen points of light dispelling the the gloom of an immortal's sleep. They were waking up, and they were hungry.

Pulling off his helmet, PD crawled out of the seat and into the cabin in back. A helicopter is cramped at the best of times, and having one man sprawled in pool of his own blood didn't help matters much. Sarge looked bad. The bullet had been a lucky shot - the windows could break if you hit them at just the right angle, and the second shot had been right behind the first. It had caught Sarge along the side of his throat, ripping muscles away and missing the carotid artery by millimeters. Already his head lolled strangely on his neck, the tight muscles now so much hamburger. What made it worse was that he was, incredibly, still conscious.

"You'll be okay, Sarge," PD said, and even he could hear the lie in his voice.

"Should'a ... trusted ... instincts", he croaked. "Field pro - ... motion."

Shit. Just what he didn't need. PD was the senior member of the crew at this point, besides Sarge, who'd just passed the baton. Meant nothing to the military admin, of course, but for now he was Sgt PD Hawkins.

"Okay, you heard the man," he said to the other four soldiers in the cabin. Clark, you stay with the Sarge and keep on that damn radio until you raise somebody. Gonzales, Brown, I want you two to do a two mile perimeter sweep east and west then return here -- if you find someone with a radio, great, but I want to make sure we don't have company. Stiggy, you're with me ... this place has been cleared recently; maybe there's an archeologist or something in the temple. Night gear, arm for bear."

Maybe an archeologist. Yeah right, PD thought as he pulled the automatic from its rack. More likely some local narco-lord who's found a nice, isolated little spot to do business. Full spectrum night vision goggles went over the helmet, everything as non-reflective as possible. This was hostile territory, doubly so because they were not that far as the crow flew to where he suspected the home base of those turkeys was. If his suspicion was right, they were going into a snake pit.
"*Nothing here but us monkeys," Steve Brown's voice crackled in Jose Gonzales' headset. Faintly, he could hear the sound of water, or at least something liquid, streaming through the mic. The kid was taking a piss.

"You've got that right, at least for one of us," Gonzales answered quietly, "and it sure as hell ain't me, Monkey Boy."

Truth to tell, there was something about this place that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It was almost too quiet ... which was weird. A jungle's a raucus place, even at night - monkeys, night owls, bats, various and sundry lizards. He'd been in Colombia for four years, and out in the jungle more often than in supposedly civilized places like Bogota. Yet it was real quiet now, more quiet even than a few soldiers creeping around should make it.

Without his night goggles, he would have easily missed the statue. With both UV and passive IR enabled, however, the foot high figurine glowed with an eerie light, a once warm but rapidly cooling statue of  a monkey, a marmoset, crouching on the ground, its face upturned, its mouth extended in an exaggerated grimace that showed its teeth. He's seen monkeys like this before in the zoo in Bogota, though never one with such an expression -- not so much anger as fear, though it was hard to ascribe that to a marmoset.

The detail of the piece was incredible. The sculptor had curved enough texture into the fur that you felt you could almost feel the softness, yet when he did touch it, the fur seemed to crumble in his hand. Powdery fine. A scar ran along one side of the mask-like face, seemingly out of place with the fineness of the sculpture. Who the hell would leave a work of art like this out in the middle of the rain forest?

Gonzales spoke into his mic, "Yo, Steve, there's something seriously weird here."

He didn't here the sound of the man pissing anymore.

"Steve? You there man?"

The headphones remained silent, save for the sibilant rush of wind through the trees.

Wind through the trees? Gonzales looked around. The night air was about as still it could possibly be.

He and Steve had keyed in one another's GPS transponders when they went out on patrol, but were surprised when neither of the units would lock onto the satellite signal. After stumbling around for a bit, Gonzales could make out the distinct US military issue boot pattern, a trail he could reliably follow. In time, he came to a clearing, and he drew a deep breath in relief to see Brown standing up beside a bush, facing away from him, apparently still doing his business ... or something. Whatever it was, he seemed awfully intent on it.

"Okay, come on, man," Gonzales said as he walked up to his buddy and gave him a playful tap across the shoulders. "You know the rules ... one shake onl-."

The punch was just enough to push Steve off balance. He fell face forward, straight as a plank, to the ground ... and shattered upon impact within the camouflage military clothes into hundreds of dry shards. Steve's head, pale as marble and still wearing the helmet, rolled to a stop in front of him, a look of embarassed shock upon his face and his colorless, sightless eyes wide, as if he had been caught with his pants down.

Stark terror held Gonzales, terror more profound than anything he had faced in ten years of combat, as he stared at the goofy grin on the transformed, severed head of the young private.

"Pity," said a woman's voice behind him in an oddly accented English, a voice as smooth as a good Bourbon, a voice that completely bypassed the brain and went straight to the groin. "The private's privates were quite remarkable."

Despite himself, Gonzales turned, looking down, then up his dark hardening. The woman was quite nude, her legs long and curvy, her hips flaring just enough, her breasts, god her breasts, were full and firm and ripe with brown, hard nipples over which two snakes played. Snakes ... yes, that was the sound he had heard, not wind through the trees but many snakes quietly hissing, tasting the air. The framed a face that was heartrendingly beautiful, luscious lips that she licked and two large green eyes that drew him in ...

The woman drew herself up next to the statue, kissed the now stone mouth, then unzipped the pants and let them fall, her hand riding on the contents within.

"Yours, on the other hand," she said in husky tones,"are none to shabby either."

Then she laughed, amidst a chorus of serpentine hisses.
"Charlie Baker One Niner, Charlie Baker One Niner, Mayday, Mayday, Over."

Nothing. This felt wrong to Clark ... he knew ECM techniques, and generally they heard a certain sound signature - more modulated, less random. He'd checked everything out, and as near as he could tell, the whole setup was working fine. The satellite uplink should have worked even if the RF band message was being distorted, but even the GPS was done. Someone had some impressive jamming capabilities, that was all he could figure out, though what there'd be in the middle of a Columbian rain forest he was a loss to say.

He saw a figure in camouflage re-enter the clearing ... Gonzales by the size of him. Gonzales was a tough little runt, but Clark's girlfriend was only a little smaller than the tough talking LA kid. Clark waved at him then went back to trying to figure out why the damn communications console in general should decide to fail him.

He was buried within the guts of the communication station on his back when the Gonzales climbed into the copter's cabin. The headphones he wore had been picking up an unusual amount of static, but it was weird stuff - full spectrum static seemed to fill up the audio, but this was more like the hissing of snakes, and for a second there was a weird ringing in his ears.

He called out blindly to the PFC. "Hey, Gonzales, is Brown with you? He's had some electronics training and I could use another opinion."

"Brown's ... gone to pieces, I'm afraid," said a female voice who was definitely not Gonzales.

Clark banged his head on the bottom of the com unit as he sat up suddenly, then wincing he looked up ... right into a pair of boobs barely covered by army camouflage, the cloth nametag "Gonzales" suspended next to a peekaboo nipple. "What ...?"

He looked up at the woman wearing Gonzales' helmet with the IR goggles obscuring her eyes.

"Who are you, and what happened to Gonzales?" he asked, trying to remember where he had laid his gun.

She ignored the question, "I can see in the dark with these," she said, seemingly drawing out the last s way too long. "Everything is so colorful."

"Listen lady, I don't know who you are, but what the hell did you do with Gonzales?" His groping hand fell on the grip of the 45, and  in one quick motion he had it pointed at her.

Her head tilted down, following the motion and the gun pointed at her.

"Oh, a gun," she replied in that intoxicating accent. "How novel."

"Take off that helmet ..." he said.

"Um  ... if you insist..." she said, playfully.

As she pulled the helmet off, her long, black hair spilled from within it then lifted up of their own accord and started blinking at him with cold, beady eyes. A couple of the black snake heads opened their jaws, exposing the razor sharp teeth and pointed tongues in their blood-red mouths. Then he looked past her and realized that the dying sergeant had become completely gray, a corpose, or a statue.

His eyes snapped back to hers, deep beautiful glowing green eyes that seemed to hold allure and mystery ... and the numbness of death. Panicking Clark tried to shoot, but his hand wouldn't respond. He looked away only enough to see the hand gray and cold and marbled around the black pistol, his other hand as frozen and dead, a feeling of utter blackness rising from his legs.

"What ... are ...yo --"

The question froze on his face as his face became a stone mask, as his brain, desperately trying to survive, turned from flesh and blood to cold marble. His last thought as he died was that he finally knew why the static sounded so strange.
"Medusa!" Stiggy said, staring at the statue of the Aztec warrior, nude save for a woven loin cloth that failed to hide the stone erection behind it. Hawkins had gone round the other way, out of radio contact in this bizarre temple, and Stiggy had wandered into what could best be described as a very deranged garden of statues.

There were dozens of them here, men in loin-clothes, and disconcertingly a couple in field cammies and one in a very expensive Italian suit. The clothes were unaffected, but the men within them definitely were stone. The older ones showed obvious signs of weathering, and here and there limbs or heads were missing.

As ridiculous as it seemed, Stiggy could think of no other explanation, especially given the highly aroused state that he found many of the statues in. Stiggy played Dungeons and Dragons, knew exactly what a medusa could do. A five hit die monster, you didn't dare look them in the eye or you'd be turned into stone. Stiggy knew that his grip on reality was considered to be the butt of jokes more often than once, but he knew, man, he knew that they were in grave danger.

The muted hissing warned him. Closing his eyes he spun around, his submachine gun's catch off, and laid down a field of fire.

"You won't turn me into stone, you monster!" he screamed as the bullets slammed into stone statues,  the staccato screaming of bullets joined by the sound of falling stone limbs and heads and ricocheting bullets. Again, he swept the statue garden, until his automatic chunk-chunked around the empty magazine. He waited then, listening intently for the sound of snakes. When he didn't hear any, he cautiously opened his eyes.

"Boo," the gorgon said. Stiggy turned to stone.

"Idiot," she muttered, then headed back into the temple.
Hawkins heard the staccato of gunfire go off, heard it end as abruptly. He too had found statues, native girls and foreign beauties, some apparently brought as sacrifices, some no doubt seeking something from the creature that lived here. He'd seen her from the temple door, the odd snakes visibly moving even from his vantage point sixty feet away, and was thankful that she had chosen to go the other way when she left the helicopter. Hawkins had no doubt that the others were dead ... it didn' t take a genius to figure out what he was dealing with, as unlikely as it seemed.

Thinking about it for a bit, remembering what little he could about greek mythology, he put his blast helmet down and set the polarization of the visor to black, enough to filter out most of the light of a nuclear blast. Then he clicked on the IR view, and a line mode in UV that would show edges and outlines. It was an odd feature, one that was occasionally useful to the onboard computer system for determining telemetry, and he wouldn't even have known how to access it except that Sarge had shown him the "debug modes" that he'd picked up from the contractor.

When she came out of the temple and turned toward him, he stiffened momentarily in fear, but the modifications worked. She showed up only slightly above the background radiation, though there was an intense fire within her brain and the smaller brain tendrils of her snakes. He had his machine gun out, and the medusa stopped.

The line mode wasn't perfect - it was intended to detect edges, not render things artistically or realistically, so there was an odd caricature effect looking at her as if she were a very attractive cartoon.

"You have taken care of my men, I presume."

She laughed, a little nervously. "They were very good."

"You speak English? Not something I would expect of a Greek Goddess."

"Greek, phah. I am not Greek. The Greeks were invaders into my realm, our realm, and they killed us when they could. I am Mykanean."

"You look remarkably well preserved for someone who's three thousand years old."

She giggled. "Flatterer."

"Where did you learn to speak English? Or is it some kind of goddess thing?"

She sat down on nearby rock, one of her former lovers, he suspected, and started to run her fingers through her snaky hair. "I have been around. It is not so hard for my kind to hide in your world as you might think. I lived in England, and learned your tongue there with the help of a blind poet. I was his ... mussse."

"Yet you end up in the middle of the Colombian jungle."

"I had wearied of travelling, had been sated. I am ... cursed with immortality. It is the gods' cruel jest upon me. So I came here to rest."

He hadn't put down the machine gun. "So I could shoot you, and I could probably slow you down, but in the end when I thought I was safe, I'd turn a corner and there you'd be, and there would be an odd statue of a gringo in the middle of Bogota, is that correct?"

"That is correct. I am awake now, and this place has become too ... busy. The Colombian men came here earlier, to use as a base to sell their opium I think. They didn't count on me. You come here with your flying machine -"

"Blackhawk helicopter"

" ... your Blackhawk, and no doubt someone will come looking for it. They will not like what they find, no doubt, and I will be tortured to find out my secrets."

"You are remarkably cynical."

"I speak from experience," she said, shifting, and the snakes seemed to stir up in agitation. For all the horror of what she was, Hawkins had to fight hard not to throw her to the ground and make love to her right there and then. Of course, doing so with the helmet would have been dangerous at best - one slip and the passionate embrace would be his last.

"You say you were taught English," so you can live with someone without turning them to stone.

"So long as they don't look me in the eyes," she said, interest in her voice. He suspected that sex with completely passive partners palled after a bit. Then she bit her lip and looked straight at him "You would make for a most intriguing lover, but it is not possible..."

"Anything is possible ..." he muttered, then got an idea, one that both repelled and fascinated him. He wondered if making love to this dangerous creature was worth what he had in mind, then swallowed as the odd heat-enhanced caricature of the gorgon - the woman - stretched out, here breasts clearly visible in the heat scans.

"I'd like that too. I'm going to reach into my pack and get something. I promise I won't be pulling out a weapon."

She looked at him, suspicious, but her body language showed that there was another hunger within her, a more carnal one, and quietly, barely audible above the snakes, she whispered "Okay".

He dropped his pack and tore upon one of the pockets to extract a small tube, with a plastic cap on the tip and warnings written in red on it. Bonding glue ... as permanent as a weld. His hand shaking a little bit, he shut his eyes, then carefully applied the liquid glue to the outside of his eyelids. He sighed, counting for two minutes as the glue set. He could still move his eyes, but the lids were securely glued - nothing short of surgery would unseal them now. Hawkins had blinded himself.

He heard the gorgon approach, her writhing snakes seemingly as curious as she was, then when she realized what he had done, she breathed a sigh of startlement.

"You are a brave man to make love to me, or a fool," she said, then he felt a pair of lips brushing against his, followed by a dozen small tongues that played against his two day old growth of beard. He kissed her back, tasting the coolness of her mouth, the brushing of the snakes against his cheek and nape. He reached out and touched her breasts, large, cool, luscious, and he ran his hands over her nipples as she undid the buttons oh his camouflage shirt. She slipped out of the borrowed uniform shirt she'd been wearing, and then crushed herself against him, the tips of her nipples as hard as any rock, dragging across his chest. Snakes wrapped around his ears, rolled over his head, their smooth pebble-like skins a subtle counterpoint to her attentions.

She undid the clasp on his pants and he found as his hands cupped against the perfect hemispheres of her bare buttocks she had long since discarded the old uniform she'd been wearing. He was hard, throbbing hard, and she delighted in teasing his with her nether lips before bending down and taking his member into her mouth, the snakes now nipping playfully at his crotch and twining up his arms as he held her head. He stumbled then onto the ground, his legs giving way in pleasure as she took him to the edge. Then she stopped, her husky voice growling, and she pushed him down on the ground, straddling him as she pushed herself down his shaft and let out a scream of delight that  wasn't quite human.

He held onto her breasts, squeezing them and delighting in their feeling as she bounced up and down on top of him, up and down, pushing them both closer and closer until a brilliant light exploded within Hawkins as he felt his seed shooting into her. And then he felt something else - his hands had frozen as they cupped her breasts, had taken on a cold hardness that was echoed in his feet as his limbs turned from flesh to stone.

"What's happening!" he screamed as his legs froze, as his erection became permanently hard even as the last of the seed escaped. "I can't see you! What about the poet?"

"Oh," the gorgon said, breathing hard as her own orgasms swept her, "I forgot to tell you..."

Her breasts resting heavily on his chest and the brushing of her lips on his now petrified ones were the last sensations that he felt as she whispered into his ears" ... he was gay."

Regrettfully the Gorgon pulled herself off the the statue on the ground, a look of shocked anger on the stone face, and put her hand to her belly. This one will quicken, she thought,  and I will have another daughter.  Then she laughed, a throaty erotic laugh echoed by a sibilant hiss.

Gathering up the discarded clothes, she walked away from the castoff remains of her former lover and into the clearing, her snakes feeling languid and sated, resting lazily on her breasts. As she crawled past the petrified sergeant and radio man into the cockpit, she wondered if there was an instruction manual for the helicopter.
The End ?






[To be continued]
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