Page 1 of Consumed
CHAPTER1
Allegheny National Forest
Pennsylvania
August 1994
Conrad Becker should have known better.
Correction: hedidknow better.
He’d certainly been warned during training, and he’d listened carefully and taken copious notes in his spiral-bound notebooks. He’d studied those notes. When he’d undergone the final round of exams, he’d been able to faithfully recite every word of every rule he’d learned. And this had been one of the Big Rules, one of the obvious ones:Don’t enter unidentified risk situations without backup.
Duh.
Yet less than a year after he completed his training, his Bureau badge still all shiny and new, here he was. Chained. Naked. Dying.
“And nobody’s going to rescue me because I went in without backup. Nobody even knows where the heck I am.”
A skull, lying nearby on the stone floor, chuckled silently. The darn thing clearly found Con’s situation pretty hilarious. It probably appreciated the entertainment, considering it had sat inside this cave for goodness knew how long with only a bunch of other bones for company. By comparison, Con’s suffering was a laugh riot.
He turned his head away and groaned, not sure whether he was delirious from fever or simply losing his mind. Either option seemed a decent alternative to focusing on the agony of his wounds. On the grimness of his fate. On the pure stupidity that had put him here to begin with.
“I figured it was no big deal,” he continued. Con’s throat was dry, so he cleared it a few times but he didn’t shut up. Talking felt important, even with no living person to listen. “Bureau gets reports all the time of monsters in the woods, and it almost always ends up being a fox with mange or some guys doing a meth cook.” Con’s boss had assumed that this particular assignment would end up as nothing but paperwork, which is why he’d sent his most junior agent, solo.
“But it’s not Chief Bettaglia’s fault I ended up here. I was just supposed to talk to some of the locals and try to figure out if there was anything worth pursuing.”Worth sending in the big boys, Con had thought wryly at the time. So when he’d arrived in Podunk, Pennsylvania, and four different sources had reported seeing something humanoid lurking among the trees, Con had decided to take a look for himself. At the very least he figured he’d have a nice bust to hand over to the goons at the DEA.
Pride goeth before destruction.Yep, Con could recite Bible passages too—that was thanks to his parents rather than the Bureau—but this one hadn’t done him any good either.
When Con rolled his head to look at the skull again, the movement hurt—and the skull was still laughing. But now it felt as if the two of them were sharing a joke, so Con laughed too. It sounded like someone gargling gravel. Maybe whomever the skull had once belonged to had also succumbed to the sin of arrogance.
Or maybe it had been some poor guy just out for a hike, thinking vaguely about bears or snakes or ticks but not having the faintest idea that he might get eaten by orcs.
“Orcs!” Con exclaimed to the skull, which thought that was funny too.
They didn’t call themselves orcs. At least, probably not. Nobody knew what they called themselves, actually, or where they came from, or really much else about them. Just that they started showing up a couple of decades ago in widely scattered locations, and they appeared humanoid and seemed intelligent and for the most part kept to themselves.
Except when they attacked and ate people.
“I heard that someone at the Bureau started calling them orcs after the ones inLord of the Rings. Which I understand were not very nice characters.” Con had never read the books. His parents had believed that fiction was a lie and therefore sinful, and when Con grew up and escaped them, he hadn’t had time for pleasure reading.
He shifted a little on the ground, moaned, and sighed. “I guess that’s one of my regrets—that I didn’t stop to have some fun. I mean, all that studying obviously didn’t do me much good, so I might as well have taken a weekend off now and then. I could’ve tried drinking and drugs to see what all the fuss is about. I could’ve—Ishouldhave—tried sex.” He sighed again, and this time it came out in a painful shudder.
“I hope you didn’t die a virgin,” Con said to the skull. And even in his confused mental state, he couldn’t bring himself to say the rest:I hope you didn’t die unloved.
And then he moved again, and this time the pain was too much and he grayed out.
* * *
Water on his face woke him up.
He instinctively opened his mouth and swallowed what he could, and nothing had ever tasted so good or so sweet.
Then Con opened his eyes and wished he was still unconscious.
Six orcs loomed over him. It must have been nighttime, because no light came in through the distant cave opening, but each of the orcs wore some dimly glowing thing on a chain around their neck. They talked quietly, their sounds like grinding gears and lispy snakes, and of course Con couldn’t understand a word.
They were built more or less like tall, muscular humans, although their skin was a mottled brownish-gray that probably gave them excellent camouflage among tree trunks. As far as Con could tell, they were hairless. Their eyes had no whites, just large yellowish irises with vertical pupils, like lizards; their ears were large and pointed, like cats; their noses were somewhat snubbed and upturned; and their wide mouths were full of very sharp teeth. Con’s parents would have assumed they were demons, but Con had seen demons—twice—and they didn’t look anything like these orcs.
