Chris Stiles stood there in the mud and the leaves and stared into the gloom around him and felt his sanity slip away. That’s what it had to be. There was nothing there. No Alex, no ’Cong, no nothing. Jeez, you really went this time. Forget about numbness and daydreaming. Now you’ve gone completely wackadoo. Brothers you haven’t seen in years suddenly pop up, casually dressed in shadows and doing a Casper routine. That’s it, you’re out of here. It’s Section Eight time, back to the World and a padded room with a great view of the shock-treatment ward . . .

“Quit dreaming, asshole,” yelled a voice, too loud to be concerned with being heard. By anyone but him, that is.

He scanned the trees, from one identical trunk to the next, until a waving arm caught his attention. Alex was straddling a branch about forty feet up, waving and pointing at himself, at the center of his chest. Chris shrugged. What else could he do? He shouldered the rifle, switched it to semi-auto, centered the Aimpoint, and squeezed one off. The shot echoed through the jungle, giving flight to the monkeys and flushing birds from their roosts. Then the silence returned.

He lowered the scope from his eye. Alex wasn’t there. The tree was empty. “Well?” he said under his breath. “I wonder if I hit anything.”

“Absolutely,” came his brother’s voice now from behind him and about twenty feet away. Stiles stared into the darkness, knowing it impossible to find a shadow among shadows, but somehow a faint figure became apparent to him as if wrapped in an amber glow. “Pick up the pace now,” Alex counseled. “They don’t know that you’re onto them yet. Go to automatic, too.” He danced back and forth. “There’s a bunch of ’em here.”

Stiles opened up on the figure with three shot bursts, following it wherever it moved. One scream rang out, strangled and eerie in its solitude. Then the jungle seemed to come alive with gunfire.

He dove for cover even as a volley sizzled overhead and shredded the smooth bole beside him. He responded not to the attacks but to the figure that still pranced out there in the open, vanishing here and popping up there, giving Chris barely enough time to fire before moving on to the next target. Each of his shots was apparently dead-on. The barrage of incoming rounds was decreasing.