Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  Half-heartedly, Sylvia had begun wandering around her drop zone, searching in vain for her lost eye. Dinny, too fidgety to sit still for long, was trying to help. They lifted handfuls of decaying flora hoping there was no fauna mixed in, poking carefully through it before dropping it to one side and grabbing another. Finally, Leotu returned with the plastic container nearly full. Rather than bring it to us, he moved down to the pond, added water, and using a rock from under the water, he ground what he had found into a paste. He came and sat near us, next to the blazing fire pit. He took handfuls of the goo, which looked like tapioca pudding, and wrapped it in large leaves, tucking each bundle in at the base of the fire. “This has much protein.” Using a stick, he turned the leafy packages periodically for a few minutes, then picked them carefully out of the fire, piling them into the container. Picking up one, he blew on it, tossing it between his hands as he peeled the leaf off, revealing a golden brown glob which he ate like a peeled baked potato. He passed the container to me. “We will reach the plane today. Soon.”

  I followed suit. It didn’t taste like tapioca pudding, more like some kind of seafood dipped in thin peanut butter, but I managed to swallow some and handed it to Dinny. “We might find more food at the crash site,” she said hopefully. I could tell she was tempted to skip this strange mixture, but she locked eyes with me for moral support and ate some anyway. I wasn’t sure if her comment was just wishful thinking. Team C would have had to live on something all this time.

  Badger took the container next, helped himself to a leaf and licked his fingers between tosses as he peeled it open. His lips smacked distastefully. “What is it?”

  I suspected I knew what it was, and I was pretty sure Badger, deep down, had come to the same conclusion, having taken the same survival class we all had.

  “It is called mboga za unga.”

  Badger tasted the words as much as he tasted the paste. “Mboga za unga. What does that mean?” Had we had Internet access on our cell phones, he would have looked it up already. “Wait. It’s some kind of insects, isn’t it?”

  “You would call them mealworms.”

  Nitro backed off. “I’m vegetarian. Are there edible plants nearby?”

  Leotu got up and went with Nitro to find him a suitable breakfast. The rest of us, reluctantly, continued to pass the container, encouraging each other to eat. At least it was cooked. And we had plenty of water with which to wash it down. “Good job, guys. I’m proud of all of you,” I said.

  A few minutes later, Leotu and Nitro returned, the latter with a fistful of mushrooms and berries which he popped into his mouth like Skittles. The rest looked at him almost jealously. “If I’d known, I would have claimed to be vegetarian, too,” said Agnes. “Although, actually, the mealworms weren’t that bad.”

  Once again, Leotu tossed dirt on the fire we no longer needed until not even smoke remained, then tossed water on the spot as well. And after making sure all the water bottles were full, we started on our way again. This time, we all noticed the bonobos following us. They were curious, but frightened, hoping we might have more food for them to steal. Before long, I could pick out the sound of their feet and large hands landing on the branches overhead. They would stop and drum on a branch to alert the rest of the tribe. It was hard to tell how many there were, but they seemed to multiply as we went, like the people following Forrest Gump as he ran across America.

  “Don’t they have a territory? How far are they going to follow us?” Sylvia sounded angry. I sensed that she blamed them. If they hadn’t stolen our food she would not have lost her artificial eye. She trotted as the ground dipped into a shallow valley, almost knee deep with groundcover. Roxy noticed, and made sure her snap-on heels were secure before proceeding. Avis had Billings hold her hand. It was a little like walking through opaque water, with no idea what kind of footing each step would find. I watched Leotu wade through and tried to follow his path.

  He turned toward Sylvia who was slightly behind him. “They will follow us as long as they think we might have food.”

  “They ate all our food,” said Badger glumly.

  “They do not know that. Perhaps they find the smell of humans intriguing.”

  I picked up my pace to get closer to him. “But they know we’re not food, right?”

  He smiled without looking at me. “They do not know that, either.”

  Sylvia pushed past me as Leotu glided over a small rise easily. “Tell me again about that village where they would treat me like a god,” she said to Leotu.

  I had slowed down, and all I heard of Leotu’s reply was the vague rumble of distant thunder.

  We reached the end of the valley and came to a totally unfair steep incline. Large rocks jutted out of hard packed earth sewn together with tangled roots at about a sixty degree angle. Leotu started climbing without hesitation, leaning forward to balance himself on a rock or root as he went. Climbing was our thing. Billings followed Dinny, but even she seemed to have very little trouble. There were plenty of handholds, unlike our climbing wall, which Nitro sometimes removed holds from just to be mean. It was kind of invigorating, actually, breaking the monotony of the jungle walk. Still, after we all reached the top, we stopped to take drinks from the water bottles.

  As we caught our breath, I heard Sylvia almost choke on her water. “Oh my God.”

  I followed her gaze. Ahead of us and to our left was a small but nearly sheer rise seemingly held in place by a very large boulder. On top of the boulder sat a juvenile bonobo, flipping something small over and over again in his agile lips. It flashed white, then green, then white, then green.

  Sylvia’s eye.

  Yeaster

  Chapter One

  We all stood there a moment, watching the young monkey playing with Sylvia’s eye. At the front of the group, I saw Leotu examining some branches and looking up. Maybe he saw more bonobo. I looked at Sylvia, who was breathing slowly and shallowly, afraid of startling the monkey. “Sylvia,” I said, “we don’t have time for this. We have to get to the plane. You can get another eye.”

  “I’ll catch up. This won’t take long.”

  “There will be no catching up.” I stepped in front of her, accepting the annoyance without fear. “We’re in a jungle, not a shopping mall.”

  She met my gaze solidly. “This won’t take long. I can track you. Don’t wait for me.” She indicated that it was time for me to move out of her way, but I didn’t budge. “He might swallow it,” she argued. “It could kill him.”

  I bit my bottom lip. It was a good argument. We in CURDS don’t condone the loss of animal life. That was why Sylvia had been allowed to rescue Harelip. That’s why we hadn’t run the car through the herd of cattle in Ireland. It was why we once postponed backyard workouts at HQ when hummingbirds nested at the top of the jungle gym.

  Leotu was pointing up at the leafy canopy. “Ms. Montana.”

  “Yes, Leotu?” I expected him to tell me the rest of the bonobo were watching and planning an attack. I almost wanted it. We’d been traipsing through the jungle for nearly a full day now and I was getting impatient about finding the plane. I was hot and sweaty and tired and I wanted to find the crew of the CURDS3 and get out of here.

  He held up a slender branch with several leaves still attached. They were slightly limp, but still green. “I believe this came from up there,” he said, pointing again. “Up very high.” The branches we saw on the ground were much thicker or older than the one he held.

  I took it, and held it myself, imagining what could break it off from that height. “The plane?”

  “Yes.” His finger traced a trajectory in the air. If he hadn’t pointed it out I doubt any of us would have noticed. It was slight, but I could just make out a trail of broken branches through the canopy, pointing southwest. The altitude of broken limbs seemed to drop precipitously fast.

  Sylvia took a step toward the bonobo on the boulder. Moving very slowly.

  I grabbed her shoulder. “We’re moving
on. I’m sorry.” Any primate who was dumb enough to eat plastic should probably be removed from the gene pool anyway, I told myself.

  She shook me off. “Go on. I got this.” The shoulder shrug seemed to cause a look of sudden understanding to wash over her face, and she wiggled her torso. She lifted the edge of her shirt and reached underneath it, taking out a badly crumpled paper bag. “I’ll trade for it.”

  Billings said, “Trade?”

  She shook the bag, then peeled it open. Reaching in, she removed a piece of Squerky about three inches long.

  Badger almost tackled her. “You had jerky? Where were you at breakfast?”

  “I forgot I had it. I’ve been carrying it around since Ireland. Weird,” she added, examining the bag. “I bought it because it was unusual. It’s made from squirrel meat. I mean, I like jerky, not sure about Squerky.” She bit off about half an inch and chewed, “Eh. It was a good price, though. I have a hard time passing up a bargain, I guess.”

  “I ATE WORMS!!!” Badger shouted at her.

  “Sorry,” she offered him the remainder of the three inch strip.

  He tore it from her hand angrily and just as angrily stuck it in his mouth and ripped off a bite. He spit it out and gave the last bit of Squerky back to Sylvia. “The worms were better.” He tried desperately to get the taste out of his mouth.

  Sylvia held out the slip of Squerky toward the bonobo. “I really did forget about it. The bag fits so nicely in that pocket I don’t even feel it.” The bonobo froze, the eye facing forward in its mouth.

  Badger, his eyes slightly crazed, turned to me. “Helena, I ate worms for breakfast!”

  “I know. We all did.”

  “The early worm gets eaten! Christ, Helena, where did you buy those fortune cookies?”

  The fortune cookies again? “Some new place. I don’t remember the name.” I didn’t have time to explore it. I had one team member trying to approach a wild animal with Squerky and we had the first sign that we were catching up with the CURDS3. Leotu stood expectantly, machete in hand, waiting for the rest of us to join him, but it seemed Sylvia had a few confederates. The twins, Roxy, and Nitro were positioning themselves around the bonobo in case it bolted. As if they would be able to catch it. More likely they might be able to recover the eye if the bonobo dropped it. “Did I mention we’re here on a rescue mission?”

  The bonobo was getting a scent off the Squerky. Sylvia had its attention. She edged closer to the boulder until she could toss the piece of Squerky up. It landed at the bonobo’s feet. It picked up the dried meat, first with a food and transferring it lazily to one hand, sniffing it. Please don’t swallow the eye, I thought. Please don’t swallow the eye. Quickly, she took out another piece to show the animal there was more. Then its mouth opened, allowing the eye to drop, and it stuffed the Squerky in. He jumped up and down excitedly, reaching for more with a primal screech.

  Before Sylvia could dig another piece out of the bag, Roxy, the closest, dashed forward. Her movement startled the monkey, which screeched again and bounded off into the trees, but she had watched the eye fall and dived through the groundcover directly for it. A moment later she was holding it high in the air in triumph. “Got it!”

  She handed it to a grateful Sylvia, who was tucking the bag of Squerky back under her shirt. She looked at her artificial eye doubtfully. “Thanks. I better not put it in, though, huh, Nitro?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it. We know where it’s been. Put it someplace safe.”

  Her shirt had a few small zippered pockets, and she unzipped one, hiding the eye inside and zipping it shut. Her shirt seemed to have more pockets than her HEP belt. She patted the pocket with satisfaction. “See. I told you it wouldn’t take long. Come on. Let’s go find that plane.”

  We resumed walking, the height of the ground varying in increasingly erratic patterns. When we looked up at the green canopy above us, we could see gradually more obvious damage as we followed Leotu, who used his machete to hack repeatedly at vines and branches to make us a path. Filtered sunlight dotted our path and the tree trunks around us. Some of the trees were well over a hundred feet tall. I recognized junipers and rosewoods, but most of the species were unfamiliar and felt almost prehistoric. There were roundish leaves, and pointy leaves, and even leaves with white or yellow flowers mixed in. There was a constant smell of moss and mud, and the buzzing of insects we’d only get glimpses of until they landed on a sweaty arm and had to be swatted away. About twenty minutes after we left the bonobo boulder, we discovered the first sign of the wreckage. Dinny spotted it, wedged in the crook of a tree branch just above eye level. Using both hands, she lifted it down. A wheel, with a broken piece of metal rod attached to it. “From the landing gear,” she said. “The gear retracts on liftoff. If this broke off, they had time to put it down again.”

  “Or they couldn’t retract it to begin with,” suggested Badger. “Some kind of mechanical failure may have caused them to come down.”

  Dinny glanced at him. “In the movie Con Air, they couldn’t retract the gear because a dead body was in the way.” She took a closer look at the broken edges, and in the treads. “I don’t see anything that looks like blood. Nitro?”

  Our chemical biologist moved forward and also looked. “Nope. No indications like that.” He wasn’t protecting us. If he’d seen even a single drop of coagulated blood he would have told us. “I think they were trying to land safely.”

  Dinny dropped the wheel. There was no point in carrying it around. We walked on.

  We found a few pieces of torn fuselage, but nothing major. The damage to the jungle trees grew worse. Several, dozens of feet tall, had been sheared off or knocked over, in turn ramming into other trees radiating right and left. The destruction blocked our path in some places too thickly for the machete to cut through, and we had to divert around it, trying to stay centered on the flightpath, and finally, after more than another hour of walking, we came to the body of the plane.

  It rested on the jungle floor, battered, dented and torn, nearly wingless and listing. The nose had stopped just inches from hitting another tree that towered over us disapprovingly.

  It was quiet.

  I’d been hoping for a grateful welcoming party. Some “thank God you’re here”s. Or even a “where the hell have you been?” But there was no one to greet us, friendly or not.

  Leotu sheathed his machete behind his back, and stood guard with crossed arms as the rest of us spread out. We walked around the plane, the fuselage towering over our heads. The tail had broken off, leaving the bathroom exposed, the rear blocked by collapsed walls and ceiling. It was probably stuck in a tree somewhere above, too high to see. Billings ran ahead, straight to the access door. It hung open, as if blown out from the inside, but it was several feet off the ground, that side tilting up and away from us. After just a moment’s hesitation, he backed up as far as he could to get a running start and leaped up at the door, bouncing a step off the side of the plane to build momentum. He managed to grasp the bottom rim and quickly pulled himself up and in. Like our plane, the door opened into a locker room. He took a couple of steps in, then backed up and jumped to the ground. “It reeks,” he said, coughing as if he were going to retch. “The lockers are all open, personal stuff scattered around. The arms locker is empty.”

  Nitro, not particularly bothered by the smell, went in next, with Billings giving him a boost up. He came back a moment later, hanging his head out the door. “One body.” He went back inside to examine it more closely.

  The twins used both their heads to span the perimeter. “So where did they go? And why? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to stay with the plane?” Agnes asked.

  “Dinny, where would the cargo hold be?” If they had wanted to stay away from the dead body, they might have gathered in the cargo hold. It was also possible it was too well insulated for them to hear our activity, or that they were too weak to call out.

  Dinny pointed rearward. “Toward the back of the plane.
Back where it’s collapsed, but there might still be space.” She looked reluctantly at the main doorway. I was starting to smell the decay even from down on the ground. It mingled with the jungle odors of moss and mud into a thick soup of disgust “The cargo door is on the other side.”

  She walked back the way we had come, around the blunted tail section and to the other side. The door to the cargo hold was badly bent, and rammed up against the ground. It was ajar only slightly and wouldn’t open any further. At my left hip, I had a small flashlight. I pulled it out and snapped it on, slipping through the narrow opening. “Hello?” My voice echoed as I panned the light around the dark space. “Anyone?” All I saw was bare metal and a startled family of mongoose huddled around the unmoving body of an alarmingly large snake. Their startled eyes reflected the light in a Steve Martinesque “Excuse me?!” look while the snake’s unseeing eyes seemed to beg futilely for mercy. Other small mammals scurried along the walls moving too fast for me to see what species they were, mostly hidden by piles of leaves and twigs that had been dragged in. The jungle had wasted no time in claiming the unexpected shelter that dropped from the sky, the wedged door providing convenient protection from larger predators. I snapped off the light, hoping the mongoose would appreciate their privacy, and slipped back out.