"That definitely looks like it could be the spot," Tammy said as she scrolled around the photo on the screen. "I wish you would have had time to get a better shot of how deep it was." She let out a long sigh and zoomed the photo back to to its normal size. "I'm sure they made sure to destroy that spot now along with anything else we didn't get a chance to go see."

"If it really was so condeming though, wouldn't they have destroyed it long before we got here?" I questioned. It seemed like everything so far had been part of some elaborate conspiracy that they were rather bad at or too lazy to cover their tracks.

"I don't think they anticipated a couple researchers to jet out to their location with the serious idea to investigate," she explained. "They likely anticipated that most normal people would hear about it being a cryptid and role their eyes at the idea. The only reason I thought there may be something to it is how quick the story was scrubbed from the internet. Someone looking for attention or glory from reporting a citing only provides more evidence or background, not try to retract their statements."

Another evening thunderstorm was raging outside, the intense lightening making me flinch nearly every time the window lit up. I could not understand how Tammy seemed to be able to tune it out. For me, it seemed like it only added to my apprehension and anxiety about the whole situation, like we were messing with something dangerous and the elements were trying to give us fair notice.

"This impression at least gives us some information about the creatue," Tammy continued, flipping through the other photos in the file folder. "Like this picture," she said while bringing it up on screen, "what does this tell us?"

It was a picture of the broken twigs leading up to the depression in the vegetation. It was a little blurry thanks to my mediocre camera skills and how much I was shaking at the time.

"Uh..." I stalled for time, I felt like this was an impromptu quiz. "The creature was walking before it laid down?"

"That's a start, what else?"

"Well, some of the twigs broken are on the larger side, so it was decently heavy." I scrunched my nose in thought, she was looking at me like I was missing something major.

"And?"

"Well, uh..." I hesitated, searching desperately for anything obvious.

Tammy pointed to the very beginning of where the vegetation was broken and traced the path to the depression. "It walked to where it laid done from inside the yard."

My eyebrows shot up in understanding and I felt stupid for not seeing that before. She was right, whatever had been found had not walked out from the jungle, but was walking to the jungle.

"That doesn't make a whole lot of sense," I said.

"I agree, unless it was a centaur with a day job in the city and was just going home for the night," she let out a dry laugh. "Seriously though, this revelation has me a bit worried about what we're actually dealing with here."

"Maybe it's not a cryptid at all?" My stomach sank as I voiced my concern aloud. It would be a big bummer to come all this way and brave through what we had so far for it only to have been something like a deer or dog. An annoying thought whispered at the back of my mind that it was probably much more likely to have been something normal and boring.

Tammy's mouth turned up into an awkward half-smile. "Actually, the fact that it's not an undiscovered species is likely the least of our problems. If they are taking lengths to try to hide what happened, think of all the dark deeds people would like to cover up, we might be talking murder here. Think about it, it would be a pretty useful way to get people to ignore a discovery of a body, though perhaps a bit unusual."

"Murder?" I asked. "I definitely didn't sign up for that."

Tammy didn't say anything for a moment and leaned back from the computer, crossing her arms in front of her.

"Neither of us did," she admitted. "So the question really is: do we back out now?"

For the first time on the trip, she was looking to me for direction. My gut instinct was to get out of there on the soonest flight we could book, but there was another part of me that wondered what had really happened in that field that day. If there was a murder, how would I feel not helping to expose and bring the criminals to justice? At the same time, was it really my business? Was the outcome worth the risk? It felt like everything we had done since arriving had lead us towards an ever increasing sense of danger.

Reading the indecision on my face, Tammy nodded and closed her laptop. "It's a lot to decide and I know what I would like to do, but I don't want to force you into anything you're not prepared for. I've already done a bit of that, but from now on we'd be working with a lot more potential risks. There is a conspiracy here, whether it has anything to do with what we intially set out to find we won't know until - if, we see it through." She patted me on the arm and awkwardly rose to limp her way to the bed. "Take a night and think on it."

I laid awake long after Tammy had fallen asleep, the only sounds around me were that of her soft snoring and the leftowever rain from the leaving storm tapping gently on the roof. I had gone over what to do again and again and was coming up against the same roadblock: I was terrified of what could happen to us. Tammy had seemed almost excited to see that there was a story, even if that meant getting hurt, but I had not come along with the idea that I would put myself in danger. Jungle creatures, poisonous plants, and other rainforests risks were one thing, but to potentially be mixing myself up with people willing to commit murder had not been on my lists of things I was willing to participate in. I also felt like it was partially my responsbility to ensure that Tammy left before she got hurt any more. I knew that she wanted to continue investigating and if I stopped, then she would be responsible for make sure I made it home okay. The longer I thought about it, the more certain I became that there was only one choice, I had to tell her in the morning that we were leaving.

Decision made, I rolled over onto my side, facing the room to find a comfortable position to sleep in. Lightning flashed in our window for just a brief moment and I grumbled in my head about having to try to sleep through more storm. After several moments, I craked my eyes open again, there had been no thunder following the strike, in fact the rain had trickled off to nothing as well. I locked eyes on the window, my chest tightening in fear. Surely this impending sense of doom was just my mind playing tricks on me, I told myself over and over in my head that I was just being paranoid and to go to sleep, but there it was again in the window, a light, but now it stayed in view, adrenaline rushing through my veins as I realized that it was a flashlight. The beam was trained on Tammy's sleeping figure, it swept up and down from her head to her feet. I wanted to scream her name and wake her up, but all I could do was tremble, clumsily pulling myself to the edge of the couch and slumping to the floor. I hastily, but quietly crawled over to her bed to wake her without being seen, but as soon as I reached her, the window smashed open, sending shards of glass flying into the room. Heart pounding in my ears and the desire to ensure my own survival kicked in and I flung myself under the bed, pulling the blanket that I dragged with me along behind me.

I heard Tammy scream and felt the bed shake as she tried to get up. There were two people in heavy boots that hurdled through the window and they were on her in a flash. Covering my mouth with my hand to prevent giving myself away, I listened in horror as they fell on Tammy, silencing her cries with something that made her sound like she was screaming through balled up fabric. She kicked and swung, the impacts making the attackers grunt in pain before securing her limbs. There was the sound of more struggle, then the bed creaked as her weight was removed. The boots thuded back to the window and then there was the terrifying silence. They had taken her, whomever the "they" was behind the conspiracy and all I could do was hyperventilate under the bed, shaking and near vomitting out of fear. This wasn't some prime time drama show, this was real life, and who knew what they had planned for her.

Once I was finally able to control my thoughts and body once again, I climbed out from beneath the bed, using the blanket as a buffer between my skin and the glass. A part of me had hoped that it was all just a bad dream, maybe some sort of weird sleep paralysis, but the bed was empty, she was really gone. I heard the sound of our host rushing through the house towards our room, awoken by the chaos, but there was nothing either of us could do. She was gone and all the worst of my fears had been confirmed.