New names, new faces, they clutch at his coattails. In his short and feverish dreams, Taylor sees them along with his brother. They stare at him whereever he goes, oil portraits with moving eyes in a hotel of endless halls.
This is the only way he can remember them.
It is in this way, half-asleep, that he comes across a girl. If he thought Merrick was ominous, this girl was Lovecraftian. Like the dark, turbid afterimage you get after staring at the sun for too long. More ghost than girl.
He approaches her with halting, awkward steps, head tilted in a way that supported both his fatigue and his hearing. His face is unreadable.

Wordless. She is wordless. She reminds him of himself from just a few months ago. The thought tugs at something painful inside of him until he snuffs it out. Easy as killing a fly.
She smells of life, of death, of the Valley, but most of all, of Merrick. He appraises her with shuttered eyes. He did not know who really masterminded Ursus (other than the bears of course) and he thinks that he wouldn't be surprised at all if she was the one that was weaving the web after all.
I'm Fields, he says. He doesn't take his eyes off of her. He feels as if he is dealing with a loaded gun or an angry bull, which were fundamentally the same thing.

A simpering smile, her night-sky eyes narrowing in a small black face.
An alien, impossibly intelligent, impossibly perceptive, but still childlike. He has never met anyone quite like her. But then again, he has never met someone quite like Merrick either.
He finds that he likes the girl's mute nature. There is no pressure for him to respond, to construct the proper words and facial expressions in a timely manner. Suddenly he's aware of how much conversation exhausts him. So Taylor eagerly catches up to her with long strides, equal parts cautious and painfully curious.

He watches her face sharpen. Like watching a periscope surface from an opaque ocean. The open and close of a massive telescope looking into the sky with its mirrors.
Through his closed eyes, he sees the deep red thrum of sunlight through flesh. A warm and colorful x-ray. The smell of coyote wafts into the fine hairs and the organ just under the bone of his nose bridge.
From somewhere to the right, he hears a twig snap underfoot. His ears perked, his postured lowered, his face already halfway in a sneer. Predators were born this way, and they lived this way, and they died this way.
This time, it is him that leads, quietly through the undergrowth. Quiet like sarin gas. The fog on its little cat feet.

Something in his DNA coils and uncoils. Millions of years of evolution— had speech and language been around for even a fraction of that?
The black-haired girl surges forwards, and Taylor unlatches himself from his thoughts. He lets muscle memory control him, as if in a cruel interpretive dance. The coyote growls, high-pitched and grating. It breaks into a run, unaware of its proximity to sharp and hungry teeth.
Taylor leaps into its path in a smooth and frictionless perpendicular collision; it whines, and then wheezes as the air is punched out of its lungs, and the noise grates at his ears even more. Annoyed, suddenly enraged, he grabs it by its pale throat and shakes it. Like a ragdoll, it falls to the floor. Still dimly alive, but barely. 
His breathing is hard and heated. A black anger tears through his chest, a forest fire on full throttle.

The screaming— it rakes through his head and splits him apart down his nervous highways and alleys. There's an unbearable pressure on the back of his neck. He sees two of the dark girl, two of the coyote, twice the amount of blood as she tears its leg from its joint.
Warmth and wetness spray all over his legs, up to his chest. Screaming, more and more. Louder and louder. He thinks vaguely of how bodies are held together by bones and muscle and sinew. How hard it was to cut through, unless you knew where all the seams were. He closes his eyes, tries to steady himself. The noise pushes its fingers into his ears into his brain and it does not stop.
Bloody and shaking and hunched, he pivots sharply, and marches in the direction they had come from. His steps are curt, his footprints unusually deep. Though his face is turned away, there is a fleeting expression of pain and despair that wracks his boyish features.