We first waited for Jessica to take out her flashlight from her backpack, which took quite some time since she had to be very careful not to give even a tiny scratch on the carved stone artifact. Thankfully, it only took around four or five minutes before she could take it out and thus we began to walk our way to the second village.
Just as I flashed the road that we must take to proceed, I realized how muddy and messy the path ahead of us was. Fortunately for the three of us, we were all wearing good treaded footwear and so traversing the sticky road should not be really that big of a problem. Unless of course, if the soil ground was also slick.
'sputch sputch sputch sputch'
"Um… who is making that… footsteps noise?" Billy asked as he turned back a little.
"Gue… Bill…" Jessica said with a low voice, probably a little embarrassed in admitting that it was her footstep.
"Eng… mungkin elu bisa sedikit nyeret – nyeret langkah kaki elu, supaya langkahnya gak kedengeran…" Billy responded to her, advising her to drag a little before taking each steps in order to reduce the noise.
Apparently, his advice worked perfectly since right after that we could no longer hear any similar sounds. We then continue to walk along the dark and muddy path for some more time, possible around six to seven more minutes, before I suddenly heard a very faint but convincing leaves cracking sound on the distances behind me. Since there were barely any leaves on the path so far, I was quite sure that it came from quite deep inside the forest.
"Is something wrong?" Billy asked me, possibly also turning to me when I stopped and glanced for a little while behind me.
"Hopefully it was just my imagination, but I thought I heard leaves cracking sound just now…" I responded to him in a low voice.
For a very short moment, I could feel the atmosphere between the three of us suddenly tightened up just after I finished telling them what I had just heard. If I had to guess, the oppressing air would most likely came from Jessica, who had clearly been holding her fears and anxiety since we met for the first time at the first village, while also holding up to her duties as an archeologist.
"Well… Let us just continue heading towards the next village again for now…" I said to the both of them again after about three minutes had passed as I turned on my flashlight.
We proceeded again along the path, which somewhat seemed to get a little steeper then while also keeping our guards on in case the soil was slick and preventing ourselves from slipping. However, the second same leaves cracking sound was then heard again, and was significantly louder. It was loud enough to make both Billy and Jessica turned around and put themselves into alert position. In reflex, I also crouched and readied my submachine gun.
"Gather up, and turn off all lights! Do not make any moves!" I told them in a low voice as I aimed towards the direction behind me.
If somewhat useless since I could barely see anything in the complete darkness, I aimed exactly at the direction where the sound seemed to be originating from. At first, I could only focus at my own heavy and slow breathing sounds as the silence once again enveloped the darkness between us.
Slowly though, I could also feel Jessica's deep breath right behind me. The more I paid my attention to it, the more intense that I could feel. In order to make my mind focused again, I decided to ensure her to stay close behind me.
"Yes. Stick close to me." I said to her with a very low voice.
"O-okay…" she responded to me, somewhat with both a worried yet relieved tone.
The sounds then shortly came right back for the third time and was yet more vivid and louder than the second one, and then the fourth, fifth, still continuing until it seemed to be coming from right besides us, just several feet away from inside the completely dark forest. I could feel Jessica tightened her grip on my right arm as I carefully and silently aimed towards the direction of the sound.
However, either it should be a relieve for us or rather a worry, whatever thing that caused the sounds then seemed to just disappear into thin air, as there were no more sounds that could be heard after that. We first waited for a minute, then two, three, until it was probably ten minutes that we decided to begin to proceed again.
"Okay. We should go, but no lights…" Billy whispered from the direction in front of me.
For me, it was not the first experience to walk or to go ahead without any forms of light sources since I had a similar experience back when I was escaping from the destroyed military base back in Chicago three year before. The different thing was, if back at that time I could still keep track of where I might be going to, based on the splashing sound of the river shore beside me, I could not use the same method to our current situation since it could give away our position to whatever the thing that seemed to be following us.
I actually had the idea of crawling for the rest of our journey to the second village in order to eliminate any accidental noises from us, but I kept it to myself for that time being since I also thought that it would be only necessary if there were no other choices left. Fortunately for us, we could crouch-walk all the rest of the way to the second village, and a huge feeling of relieve could be felt around us as we reached saw the written wooden signboard 'Desa 50m', a sign that told us the second village was just fifty meters ahead.
We kept on crouch-walking until we could finally see few lights on the second village, a sign that apparently electricity was still running there. There were several houses nearest to the path, but we did not spend any more time in being picky and instead we took the smallest house on the right side of the path.
We opened the door very carefully and slowly, entering the house one by one and closing it without making any sounds. As the clicking sound of the door was heard, I let out a couple of huge sighing, relieving myself of the tense situation that we had on our way there. I also turned on my flashlights again as I finished calming myself down, and began to look for any sources for heat.
"Perfect…" I muttered to myself as I found that the house was still using a firewood stove.
Apparently, the stove was located very near to the living room, and therefore I could consider it as a form of heating for the rest of the night, also, Billy was the one who light the fire, which he did it with ease. When all preparations for the stove were already completed, we could finally rest ourselves there and sat down, releasing all of the fatigue that we had endured so far since the very beginning of the operation.
I looked towards Jessica, only to realize that she was already out cold with a rather sweet and peaceful but tired face as she was leaning against her own backpack. Billy then chuckled a little, saying that we would also need the rest for what might be coming in the morning, or maybe even dawn. I only nodded as a response, and before I forgot, I looked at my watch and realized that the time was then 07.43 p.m.
"First day of the operation, and we all are already looking like a mess…" Billy said as he was sitting casually right across of me.
"Yeah… tell me about it…" I responded to him with a loud sigh and a smirk.
Indeed, so many things had happened to us during the day, and even followed us into the night. There were also few things that I was completely sure to be necessary to discuss with Billy, such as my hypothesis behind the reason on why we were able to see the flying aliens underwater, as well as the possibility of the connection between the aliens and the prehistoric sites. As I continued on recalling the things we had experienced for the whole day, I began to stare blankly into the gentle flames of the firewood stove…