The nightmare was the expected, but I remained totally lucid throughout.

"Hey Billy... come here...", Howard called to me in it, grinning like an evil clown, the grin somehow larger than the rest of his face. "Come into my home!!", he said, gesturing to a rainforest temple with a pit full of snakes, evil mummies, and all kinds of traps.

I didn't move an inch.

"I said come here!!", he called again, this time in an angry, frustrated, thin voice.

"Fuck you.", I said to his apparition. "You're not Howard. You're just a bad dream. Howie's right next to me and I'm sound asleep. And you know what, fucker? I'm not going to even wake up because of you."

The figure and the rest of the dream vanished, I felt something coming after me, and I did wake up- at Sarah's touch. It was first light and my head was pounding, screaming at me to get back to bed. Nope. We gotta keep going. Sorry, brain.

"Ow...", Howard muttered to himself. "Six more nights of that? This is going to suck...", he said, before looking around and trying to hear something, anything. There was not a thing- no people, no animals, the faraway jabbering of birds the only sound. And a hissing sound in the bushes- the sound of a snake lazily moving around, either hunting or full from eating some mammal or other.

"Well, we survive another day.", I muttered. "It could be worse.. How far did we go?"

"I'd say.. well, we were going all day. Thirty miles would be my guess.", Sarah said. "At least we better hope it was that much."

We trod on like tired horses, spurred on by the fear of death and worse. Pain meant nothing to me on the second day, and it probably meant nothing to him. If we stopped now, for any length of time, we would be dead meat. Period. He'd end up in a small glass cage for the rest of his life - or dead - and we'd... we'd... 'Hey! Who wants these servants?' The thought chilled me in spite of the tropical, humid climate.

Boredom set in immediately. Sheer... boredom. Boredom and fear don't go well together. I had to stop.. but I couldn't stop, that was the command, and if he stopped... we would... he's not gonna stop.. gotta keep going.. the only thing that interrupted the sound of feet in mud was the assorted hills and logs we've got to get over...

..how far, how long, NO, can't start watching the clock, or I'll go crazy in an hour... just like school... except that instead of asleep at my desk, I'm asleep on my feet.. the sights are grand, the atmosphere is excellent, the forest is beautiful and alive... and I'm trudging through it in a death march.

We did stop again, even if it only was to piss.

slish, slosh, slish, slosh, sound of feet going through the puddles.. no one to hide from, no one out here, just us and the animals.. and the pain! Legs feeling cramped and chest just annoying. Not a candy bar, not a car, not a computer for miles...

.. just another week of painful hell, if we survive, another eternity of slightly less painful hell.. does this forest even end?

slish, slosh... the mud's sticky and slippery at the same time, loves to stick to feet (the suit stops some of that, but not all) but hates providing traction... the deep, soft puddles are practically invisible until you step in them... tree roots will avoid mud but then you have to walk on a slippery, uneven surface..

...oh god.. "..this SUCKS!!!", I heard myself say out loud.

"No shit, Billy. This sucks big. Too big. I'm going to rape the guy who thought this one up.", Howard said, clenching his fist and examining his blades. "Let's rest for a few minutes...", he said, slowing to a stop and sitting on his ass, then reclining onto his elbows and eventually laying all the way down. I sat as well, but didn't want to lay down and make my body actually think it was going to get some sleep. Sarah shrugged, and leaned on a nearby tree, stretching her legs.

"Howard.. I get the feeling that if we stay stopped for too long... we won't be able to get up. You wanna sleep as much as I do..", I said. It would be so easy...

"Yeah.. I hate this shit. Secrecy my ass. There probably isn't a Homo Sapiens within a ten mile radius, except for the spies. Hey spies, and hey whoever's watching through their eyes, fuck you. Hard. You've got mental deficiencies thinking this shit up." he said in an average-volumed voice- although he probably could have whispered it and they would have heard every word. Then he muttered "Fucking.. let's go.", got up, looked at the ground, shook his head, and we kept going.

For a brief moment I envisioned a possible outcome- some tribe member, expert in the ways of forest stealth, would see us, and run back to his tribe to tell them all about it. And of course we'd just have to spot him, or we'd have to kill every man, woman, and child in the village. It was possible, and I looked around nervously- before I just shook my head and kept going.

It didn't take long before we started to get hungry. "Sarah, we need food.", Howard said casually.

"Let's see...", she said, looking around and up. "Leaves look about right.." She led us about a hundred yards under a large tree with big leaves.. and yellowish-brown spotted bananas hanging from it about thirty feet up. There we go. She smiled, grabbed the grappling hook from her pack, easily snagged them, and with a quick, sharp jerk, sent them hurtling down. She caught the bunch as it fell and handed both of us our breakfast.

Howard ripped off the top, peeled it, and took a bite- and immediately spit it out. "Gah!", he shouted, spitting. "Fuck that!" I was about to dig in to mine, too.

"What's wrong with it?", I asked.

"Look for yourself!", he replied, showing us what he'd taken. Sarah and I did. The colored spots were seeds- it was full of them, much worse than an average seeded watermelon. "It tastes like shit, too." I dropped the one I was holding, and Sarah made a 'shit, should have seen that coming' expression- she didn't realize they'd be like this. Howard threw the banana to the ground, annoyed, and stomped on it. She tossed the bunch to the ground as well, shaking her head. "Sarah, there's more than this out here, isn't there?"

"Definitely. I saw some Brazil nuts ten minutes ago, probably should have said something. Let's keep going." Since she was actively looking for food now, she found it in five minutes- a large tree more than a hundred feet tall, with what looked to be black coconuts around it that had fallen into the muddy ground. On the other side of the tree, an animal that looked like a big, tailless rat saw us, and immediately ran away. It knew predators when it saw them.

Sarah looked at the coconuts and slashed the top off one with her machete. It was full of... Brazil nuts! So that's how these things grow. With blades, claws, and engineered strength, we quickly broke the shells of the nuts to get to the sweet, oily nutmeat within. It took three more coconuts like that one before we were satisfied.

And then, surprisingly, Sarah picked up all four shells- and smashed them to pieces, using her feet, her hands, and the tree trunk itself. "The cuts were too clean.", she explained, as she scattered the shell pieces randomly around the tree. Ah, yes. Can't have people asking 'Who the heck turned these coconuts into open cans and left them here?' If they weren't so much of a pain in the ass to carry, they'd make great water containers... which is something else we need.

"Sarah, what water should we drink?", I asked. There was water everywhere.

"Water that hasn't had time to stagnate." Finding a small nearby mini-stream pouring off a rock was easy.

Three hours later, we did see a small human settlement (Camp? Tribe? None of us could tell from the distance), but avoided it by at least a quarter of a mile. I think the steady amounts of worry were actually causing all of us to speed up, much to my legs' protest. Sarah pretended not to mind, but I knew she was hurting as well, and the paranoia's even worse in her case. She's trained to avoid people anyway, but not when covering this much ground for days.

Fifteen minutes later, Howard and I climbed up two nearby trees, leapt, and simultaneously took down a sloth from the tree in between, each of us breaking one of its forelegs on one of our legs with a double SNAP, Sarah used her fingernails to rip out the beast's back leg muscles, and the three of us tore off the fur and dined on the flesh and the vital organs as it cried its death screams. It was quick as the kill of any predator. Grab and tear. It's the law of the jungle- does that make genetic engineering and bladed weapons a form of cheating? Nope. Rule #1: There are no rules.

About a half hour later, we met a river. Not a big one- we'll have to cross the Amazon and its bigger tributaries at some point, and this ain't it- but it was still flowing pretty damn fast, even if it was only thirty feet or so wide. "Shit.", we all muttered upon seeing it.

"How deep?", Howard and I simultaneously asked. Sarah looked into it, but couldn't tell. There was about two feet of embankment to the river, and it was dirty (almost black) enough to not see the bottom- which meant there was really no way of knowing.

She sighed. "Well.. these are long enough, we can grapple and swim it.. but that's going to be a pain."

"Shit. We can eat predators and we're having problems with a fucking river.", I said with a sigh.

"Predatory animals don't have that many watts' worth of push. Oh, we could hang on, all right.. but that's going to be a pain. Isn't there an easier way?", Howard replied.

"One word for you, Howard.", I said.

"What?"

"Tarzan." The trees' upper limbs were close together and thick enough to support us.

"Good choice.", he said, as the three of us made our way across the limbs, bending most and breaking a few. That was the high point of the day. We spotted a few signs of civilization- a couple of dirt roads and a small village- and went past all of them with no interference and no spying natives wondering who was moving through their forest. The real spies, of course, couldn't be seen.

More treading, more meat, more fruit, more bowel movements (whatever we're eating is really fucking with our insides- the food guides don't say what they'll do to your guts, just if they're poisonous or not), more annoying pain. I felt like it was about time to go to sleep (even though it was the afternoon), another hour's worth of walking through increasingly slushy, infirm ground with increasing amounts of near-impenetrable vegetation- but then we came to it, then I felt that lump in my throat, then it was time to find a damn good way to try to cross. We had reached a tributary of the Amazon. Sure, we could probably swim across it (it was wide, probably deep, very dark, and not flowing all that fast) if we tried hard enough, but then if we kept walking, we'd reach the Amazon itself with no real way to cross- if we really wanted to, we could probably swim that too.. but then there's tourists and other boaters to potentially deal with. Also, if anyone saw us, it would destroy secrecy.. and if we got tangled up in anything on the bottom, that's that.

We shared a three-way look. Now what do we do?

"Grapple-swim this one, find a way to cross a bigger one when we get to it.", suggested Sarah. And what other immediate choice did we have? Howard said to do it. She expertly slung her grappling hook in the bend between a limb of a tree and the trunk, almost running the rope out of slack, pulled on it hard to make sure it was secure, and we grabbed hold and plunged into the water, letting the laws of physics push us to the other side, then clambering up the dirty embankment. We were soaked and filthy, but this clothing is everything-proof and we didn't get slammed into any rocks.

"Sarah, how're we doing?", asked Howard after we finished getting up.

She pulled the hook off the tree and recoiled the rope. "If we keep doing what we're doing, we'll be there on time. But.."

"But what?"

"You remember about the ecology here. Rainforest proper is easy to walk through. As we get closer, we're going to have more and more jungle to deal with, we're going to be wade-swimming quite a bit, some of the forest is flooded and the water levels are high... what we need to do is commandeer a boat. We can go straight from here to near our destination very fast if we use one.", she said, checking her map. "We can't keep walking.. not for very long, anyway."

"Sarah.. dammit.. I thought that wouldn't be so much of a problem."

"Heh, you wish. This place doesn't have as many tourists as I thought. We need to steal one from some village or something.. a jet-boat, if we can get it. Canoes are too slow, propellers can get stuck on shit.", Sarah said.

"A jet boat. A fucking jet boat. Out here?", Howard said.

"Not impossible. Missionaries are out here..", she replied.

"So instead of avoiding civilization, we need to find it, without it finding us.", I said. "Nothing like challenge." Alternatively, they spot us, and we kill every last one of them... which is next to impossible if they scatter in different directions.

"This is more than challenge.", Howard said, shaking his head. "This is luck." Genetics do not affect statistics...

"You think I don't know that?", Sarah asked rhetorically, as we finally picked up our feet to drudge on again some more. "But there is no other solution. We can't swim it and it might take days upon days for us to smuggle ourselves. I hate not being able to plan as much as you do, but this defies planning.. this is just one of those take-it-as-you-can deals. Whatever you do, don't get depressed again."

"Yeah.. that's certain failure.", he said in Latin, and I'm surprised I immediately understood it. "We just keep going for now. Next village we find, we look for a boat." We kept going through the same general monotony. My legs constantly protested as they tried to regenerate the slight muscle damage I was still causing by walking. We used a machete to break off a long branch and pole-vaulted a river with it. A small bird with a broken wing was twittering its last- Sarah put it out of its misery by biting a large cavity in its torso, and then put the carcass in another nearby river. Piranhas snapped at it hungrily, and she simply pulled the splashing mess out very fast with both hands and we had a small fishy snack, spitting out the heads and their razor-sharp jaws. The water was dirty, but it was natural dirt, not toxic chemicals.

The problem was that there was no next village. Who the hell would build one out here? There's almost no solid ground to build it on! Crap. We can't be getting close to a major river already! Not the Amazon, not yet, something probably much smaller.. but we'd have to actually swim it, wearing packs and these suits. I groaned audibly.

"Relax.", Sarah said. "Maybe you didn't take a careful enough look at the map, but I did. This is going to end soon." Howard breathed a sigh of relief. "You didn't know either?"

"No, I figured you were taking us around something, or upstream of something before we hit a river."

Sarah shook her head. "I am taking you strictly as the crow flies. I don't know how fast the current will be and I don't know when or if we'll have a boat or of what type. You thought this was solid ground looking at it from the air, didn't you." Howard and I both sighed and nodded. "Like I said, relax. There's a hill a few miles from here and swimming through the trees shouldn't be that hard." 'Swimming through the trees' isn't a concept I'd had until today.

Sarah was right. It wasn't that hard. As the soggy ground became muddy water, we stayed on as many roots as possible before swimming to the next batch of roots. We didn't always need to swim- occasionally the water was only waist-deep, or for a few fleeting moments, knee-deep. Occasionally we power-leaped from tree to tree to avoid having to climb in and back out of the water, a thing we found ourselves doing anyway. Had we been in better spirits and without threats hanging over our heads, we could have made a game out of it. A long game. Jump when you can, stay in the shallow spots, try to avoid swimming as much as possible.

Sarah was in a waist-deep spot when she looked startled, reached down into the water, and came back up holding up a huge fish, which gulped the air, its body expanding and contracting with its breaths. Huh? Must be a lungfish..

"Arapaima gigas.", Sarah said. "Hangs out in warm water, breathes air, rather rare find." The fish must have been as heavy as Sarah herself, and thrashed to and fro in her vise-like grip. Sarah used the struggling fish's body to flip open her face shield before taking a bite as wide as she could possibly take. "It's a local delicacy when it's cooked right, but it's still good raw." Sarah walked-swam over to a nearby tree, climbed onto the roots, and held the still-struggling fish in her lap. It had only been an hour or so before we ate the piranhas, but we didn't care. Howard and I found room next to her and the lungfish was shortly deprived of much of the muscle it used to struggle with, and it bled to death long before we threw it into the water for the scavengers to finish. We were full. Incredibly, unbelievably full. And yet I knew that with our continued exertion of our dense, powerful bodies, we would eat another, similar meal sometime soon, assuming we could find it. Ugh. I didn't want continued exertion. I wanted a nice, soft bed, or Howard's plush couch would be nice. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep for as long as I fucking felt like, and whatever Howard needed me to do the next day would really be all right with me, because I would have gotten some fucking rest.

It was not to be. "Billy, Sarah, you know the old adage about not swimming right after you eat?", Howard asked. I nodded.

"The one we broke after we ate those peasants?", Sarah replied.

"Yes, we're disfollowing it again.", he replied, and set off into the dirty water once more.

We continued what could have been our long game. The rain started up again and quickly turned into a full-on torrential downpour. After what felt like too long of a time- we weren't going fast at all- we finally reached the hill, and became able to walk instead of the wading we were doing. Dirty water ran down our feet in rivulets as the constant rain pounded the ground sibilantly. Unfortunately, the hill didn't last for as long as we would have liked, instead sloping downwards into more flooded forest.

"This is bullshit.", Howard observed.

"Yes, it is. I wonder if-", I started.

"Be quiet.", Sarah said instantly, turning around.. and actively listening for something. It was a slight r-r-r-r sound.. an engine, a boat! "This way, quickly." We wade-swam in a direction about perpendicular to the way we were going, no longer screwing around but going as fast as we could, effectively sprinting in a place where it was practically impossible to sprint. "And above all, just stay the hell out of sight." As if we needed a reminder for that.

Eventually she got us where she wanted us- the edge of a river- and we listened and looked at the yacht coming our way. A whole fucking luxury liner, two stories tall. Wouldn't it kick ass if we could just sail there in that? Or at least a little ways, which seems to be Sarah's idea. "Hmm.. all right. No, we can't..", Sarah thought out loud. "ah, it has those. All right, let's do it this way. You two go about.. eighty meters down that way. Stay out of sight, and climb on the same way I do when it finally gets there. We're going to kill everyone on that boat, but when you start killing, do it bloodlessly." I'm so glad we have an expert for this.

"Your plan is the best way to ensure my success?", Howard asked her.

"The best that I can see.", she replied.

"All right, the seven-meter command is gone.", Howard said, releasing us from his proximity. "C'mon, Billy. We're going to follow her plan." And we went ninety yards or so away from her, where the boat was going to pass, waited, and watched.

Sarah was barely visible as she swam to the ladder on the side of the boat. She grabbed it immediately as it passed, and climbed with unearthly silence and speed... all the way to the top of the boat! What the hell is she doing? She started attacking.. the radio antenna. Ah, yes. Can't have anyone sending distress signals, can we? She then found a door and opened it. The ladder made its way to us, and we climbed up and inside, quickly learning the layout of the small cruise boat as we would a map in a game.

The next few minutes were a nightmare for the normals and sport for us. We didn't waste time talking or mocking- we just killed. Four guys were in a recreation room playing pool and we snapped their necks instantly. Out on the deck, we overheard two half-drunk fat guys talking about who to sue next in the game of mass tort lawsuits- Howard crushed one of their skulls by simply pushing his hands together (but not too hard, so as not to splatter it), and I imploded the rib cage of the other (again, not too hard, it pierced the heart but the blood didn't leak out of the skin), both of us doing the world a huge favor. Locked cabins were kicked in, bathrooms were raided (god that woman was ugly.. it didn't even feel like I killed her, she looked like she died already some weeks ago.. and I got to see her naked, gag!), and the crew was exterminated right along with the passengers. None of them, not even the stronger ones, reacted well enough to put up any kind of fight. One guy did actually have a rifle in his room (what the fuck kind of endangered species was he going to hunt?), but never got the chance to even pick it up. I killed a baby by simply shaking it back and forth with engineered force. We killed them all in a few minutes, and spent another few minutes making sure they were all, indeed, dead. Yup, we got 'em. Nothing alive on this boat but us, we confirmed.

"Okay, plain English, here's what we have to do.", Sarah said. "We have to make most of them look like they died naturally, which should be doable, because most of them are going to go near the fire," Fire? Ah yes, she's going to burn this boat.. and it's the same sort of servants-are-doing-it trick Howard used in the first test. "but put a few of them under something heavy. Some you'll have to toss overboard, and for those, cut them open first, don't get any blood on the boat, but pierce the organs. Otherwise they'll bloat up and float instead of sink.", Sarah told us, going down to the engine room. "Hopefully they'll have a lot of fuel and we'll be able to blow this boat to bits, but if not, the rest of it has to look natural." An incredible string of bad luck, in other words, with no survivors because of things that could happen, not some secret organization killing people. Hey, how many secret organizations do you know that can exterminate everyone on a boat without even spilling a drop of blood?

"What, we're going to burn it now?", Howard asked, as I started repositioning some nearby bodies.

Sarah stopped, turned around, and said, "Of course we are. C'mon guys- the boat has to go down at about the same spot it went when the GPS signal died. We're going to nuke it right here, but we're taking one of those lifeboats." Howard and I nodded and smiled. Said lifeboats were small, and ran on propellers. Much easier for secrecy than this big yacht! "By the way, when you're done faking the deaths, each of you bring a body on the lifeboat- for secrecy we might need them." We moved bodies to various positions, lifting heavy objects and pinning the normals under them, pretending that those had killed them instead of engineered hits; Sarah had already taken a few of them down to be burned. Some others that we couldn't plausibly fake were slashed and tossed. Howard outsmarted me for the lifeboat bodies; he found a 60-pound girl, and I carried the 200-pound lardass I'd ruptured the heart of. Oh well. We tossed the corpses into it and then went back to where we were before, and I heard Sarah moving some heavy objects around down there, and then she came rushing out of the engine room like a bat out of Hell. "Let's get the fuck out of here!" We ran and got into the boat immediately, Sarah jumped in, she turned the propeller on with a single hard yank, and we hauled ass. "Fortunately for us the sides of the boat are pretty high. Just stay down.", she said. She then did something I didn't expect- she flipped up the face shield and forced her whole head through it, stretching the fabric to its limit, so as not to look like the cloaked assassin she is. Damn, these things don't have removable headpieces. She piloted it well, but unfortunately, since we were actually following her plan and keeping our heads down, we couldn't tell which way she was going, or even look up to find out what got blown up as we heard a terrific BOOM behind us. Howard was probably more embarrassed than I was.. Sarah's like our big, all-knowing sister for this sort of thing, leading her little brothers so they don't get killed. Laying down and doing nothing as we were, I promptly let myself relax.. and then fell asleep.

"All right.. we're going to hide ourselves.. here.", Sarah woke me (and Howard, too, I noticed) up with, carefully piloting the small boat under a large tree's roots, scraping its sides against the wood, and making me feel like it was some monster's fingers clamping down on us. Son of a bitch, I'm having childish fears, and I just finished killing even more people.. Sarah turned off the engine, then forced her head through the face-shield again, wearing it properly once more. She got out of the boat, broke off large branches from the trees, and proceeded to cover the boat's engine with them, putting them into a position where it would be blocked from the air. "The bag will protect us against infrared detection, but not this thing.", she explained.

"You intend to get more use out of it, then.", Howard said.

"Bet your albino ass I do.", Sarah replied. "By the way, you can slice and toss the bodies now- take some bites of them now if you want." We did. Although it wasn't fresh as we usually eat it, we took sizable hunks out of them with our teeth. Looks like my decision to bring the meatier guy wasn't so bad after all. When we were full, we ripped holes in the organs that would bloat them, and tossed them overboard. "And you two are going to like this one- it's time to sleep. We can't afford to move now." We, indeed, did like that one, after taking a few drinks of water from the river.

Before we actually went to sleep in the slowly rocking boat, we heard a splish-splash, the sound of piranhas chewing the carcasses we'd tossed. Those little guys really do make secrecy easier, don't they?