by Michael Todd
Ava’s stomach lurched with disappointment. She’d followed this guy for an hour, away from the wreckage of the helicopter—the only landmark a rescue team would have any hope of finding—only to discover he was not only violent but certifiably insane?
“I am a bad boy and the mushrooms tasted so good.” The yell issued through the thick growth of the jungle.
She had thrown in with a lunatic or possibly a drug addict and now, she was doomed.
Aghast, she stared into the underbrush into which he had disappeared but shrieked when something dropped from the trees above her. It was huge—easily as big as a horse—but when it spread its clawed hands, it seemed to grow even bigger. Instead of leaping onto Ava and crushing her, it somehow caught the air and glided off toward where Manny had disappeared.
Ava saw its face for a moment before it vanished into the jungle. With white eyes, pointed ears, and a mouth full of needle-like teeth, it was the image of a demon. A flying demon, as large as a horse that, despite being in the canopy above them, hadn’t made a sound. And it now chased after the bad boy who stole all the mushrooms.
Chapter Seven
Ava didn’t know what was worse, the darkness or the noise. The frail light the moon cast couldn’t penetrate the tree canopy at all. What little light there was came in blinking yellow flashes—insects presumably—or strips of orange that sometimes vanished before they slowly illuminated again. Fungus, she thought, but whether it was a variety that was lethally poisonous she didn’t know, so she remained where she was, crouched beside Bradley’s still unconscious body.
The sounds, though, might’ve been worse. There was a constant whine of insects. She felt like she was surrounded by abusive crickets, but every now and then, an impossibly loud drone was followed by what felt like minutes of silence. Worst of all was when this symphony of dread was punctuated by the snap of a broken branch.
The crack and crunch of leaves and other vegetation absolutely terrified her. Each sound set her mind to racing. She didn’t have a weapon—not unless she counted the broken razor she’d used to cut her boss from the helicopter, and that was as likely to hurt her as any attacker. There was the gun in Bradley’s waistband, but she thought she’d rather die than reach for it and inadvertently wake the man. He would surely take any such action as consent.
What shape would her attacker take, she wondered? The monster that had dropped from the trees—that horrible floating demon—was the apparition that plagued her imagination the most, but there were other, even less savory possibilities. A swarm of those locusts. More of those cat-sharks led there by a trail of her own blood left on a hundred thorny plants.
Or, worst of all, Manny. Although she tried hard not to, she constantly thought of him and the way he had run off into the jungle screaming about mushroom pie like a madman. Maybe he’d lost his mind. And if he had and could somehow defeat or distract that demon-creature, would he come back for her? And if he did, what then?
Ava’s thoughts drifted to a fungus she’d seen on Planet Earth that infected the minds of ants that made them try to infect and thereby kill their fellow insects. Could Manny be infected with something similar? What else could have caused him to run off?
She shook the toxic thoughts from her mind. There were dangers out here, but he wasn’t one of them. He couldn’t be. If he was, she was doomed.
Something snapped barely inches away from her and Ava jumped.
“Fucking hell, Ava, calm down.”
Bradley had woken up.
“Please, be quiet,” she whispered and raised a finger to her lips.
He ignored her. “Where’s the kangaroo-fucker?” he asked and rubbed his head where Manny had punched him.
“Please, Mr. Bradley, don’t speak so loudly,” she whispered and crawled closer to him so they could speak in low tones. He smiled as she did so and his perfect white teeth were all she could make out in the dark like a floating rictus.
He drew the gun from his belt. “The moron didn’t even take the gun. I dare him to come back. I dare him.”
“I think he might have tried to save us,” Ava whispered.
“Yeah, right. That was some alpha-male bullshit if I’ve ever seen it.”
“I don’t think so.” She was now so thoroughly frightened of the dark jungle that contradicting him didn’t seem so bad. “He told me to be quiet, then ran off into the woods screaming. I think… I don’t know. He must have a plan.” Saying it out loud made her realize how ridiculous she must have sounded.
“Whatever. He’s a fucking coward and won’t catch me unawares again.”
A rustle alerted her to something coming toward them. Her heart hammered in her chest, and she scrambled for a stick to defend herself. Whatever it was, it moved steadily closer. Ava—her hearing now highly attuned to the sounds of the jungle after doing nothing but listening to it for hours—heard another branch snap, then another, and finally, it pushed through some brambles.
Bradley cocked his gun.
Manny stepped out of the underbrush, illuminated by a branch covered in glowing fungus. “I told you I’d get those mushrooms.”
“Is this some kind of a fucking joke?” her boss demanded and took a threatening step toward the other man. He didn’t lower his weapon.
The pilot threw his glowing stick at Bradley’s face. The man flinched and raised his arms to protect himself. Manny stepped forward and punched him in the gut, hard. Bradley dropped to his knees and wheezed. Without a word, Manny took the gun from him, put a boot on his shoulder, and pushed him over backward.
In a voice so low Ava could barely hear it, he said, “Even for a lawyer, that is a particularly stupid idea. If you fire this pistol, every creature in the Zoo hears a dinner bell. But you won’t have the luxury of being eviscerated by some freaky critter hungry for some junk food. Oh no. You aim that weapon at me again, and I swear it on the wombat I nursed on I’ll kill you myself. Good old-fashioned murder. Maybe I’ll choke you to death like I did that crooked gambler in Reno or maybe I’ll drown you in my own piss. That’d be new for me. It won’t really matter, though, because no one will ever look for some limp-dick lawyer’s corpse in a place like this.”
“You…you wouldn’t,” the other man stammered, his voice appreciably lower.
Manny grinned and held the gun out to Bradley.
“You…you’re giving me the gun back?” he asked and made no effort to take hold of the weapon.
Ava couldn’t believe it either.
“I made you a promise, mate. This way, maybe I’ll get to keep it. Plus, Ava and me might get lucky. Maybe you’ll shoot yourself in the foot and distract the Zoo long enough for us to get out of here.”
The pilot shoved the gun back into Bradley’s hands hard enough to knock him back on his ass.
“Now,” he whispered cheerily as if they were discussing a surprise brunch. “I’m gonna get some sleep. Ava, you probably should too, unless you snore. Brad here can be on watch seeing as how he’s already had a nice little nap.”
“It’s Bradley.”
“Sure Brad-lee, but don’t make another fucking sound unless you want to meet our new friend again. Is that American enough for you?”
Bradley nodded. Manny, true to his word, lay down and went to sleep.
Ava found sleep came easier than she expected. Part of her—a part she found she listened to less and less—said that was because Bradley was on watch with a gun. But another part she’d always wanted to listen to but never had knew it was because Manny was back and that tomorrow would bring an adventure beyond her wildest dreams.
Chapter Eight
Ava had thought that after last night, she would no longer be surprised by Manny, but the crazy Australian pilot had proven her wrong yet again. He’d woken them by wafting protein bars under their noses, said something about the breakfast of champs, and shouldered his pack and set off.
That was two hours ago, and he hadn’t stopped once.
Bradley had done admi
rably thus far, but he now started to slip. Ava knew it couldn’t have been easy to keep going with his legendary caffeine addiction, but the lack of coffee now finally got to her boss.
“Does this fucking guy ever stop?” he demanded between breaths. Despite Manny being the only one of them who carried a pack, he set the pace and was a good fifty feet ahead of the other two.
“I don’t know. I think it’s good,” she said, relieved to be walking next to her boss so she didn’t have to see him leer at her. “We’ll be out of here sooner this way.”
“Did your parents raise you to be this naïve or does it come naturally?”
She turned to glare at him and in doing so, caught her foot on a root, stumbled, and fell.
“For fuck’s sake, Ava,” Bradley said.
“Are we all right back there?” Manny yelled from up ahead.
“We’re fine,” he yelled back in a tone of voice he usually reserved only for placating executives.
The pilot nodded and kept walking.
Bradley pulled Ava to her feet and leaned in as they walked to whisper conspiratorially, “Do you really think he’ll lead us out of here?”
Ava stumbled onward for a few steps before she replied. “Where else would he take us?”
“He’ll kill us. Of course, he’ll probably try for me first since I’m stronger and have the gun. Plus, that way, he can save your sweet little body to have his way with.” True to form, he ogled her as he said this.
“Mr. Bradley!” Ava said before she could catch herself.
The odious man said absolutely nothing but his eyebrows raised quickly like she’d slapped him.
“Excuse me?”
“I… I don’t think that’s appropriate, is all. He saved our lives yesterday—twice. No, three times.”
“No shit he saved our lives. He doesn’t want to lose fresh meat to the fucking Zoo. The man is probably taking us to some hideout as we speak. Think about it—the helicopter crashed and the radio is undamaged? That’s fucking suspicious. He probably has a whole team of fucked-up Australians—what do you call them? Aborigines.”
“I don’t think so, Mr. Bradley,” Ava said, slightly shocked at herself for so openly contradicting him. She’d learned long ago not to do that but then again, they weren’t at the office. She decided not to censor herself. What could he do, after all? “If you have a problem with him, then maybe you should…I don’t know, ask to see the radio equipment or something.”
“That’s stupid,” he scoffed. “I don’t know anything about radios.”
“Well, what do you want me to do about it then?”
“I have a plan. You distract and get him to take his pack off and maybe his jacket, and I’ll check for weapons.”
“What?”
“I’ve seen the way he looks at you, the fucking pig. We’ll use that. Next time we stop, butter him up a little bit. Drop something, let him look down your shirt, maybe fall in his lap. I don’t know. When you do, I’ll check his stuff and make sure we have the upper hand.”
“Fall in his lap?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one who knows about all this shit.”
“I do not!”
Bradley said no more. He simply turned to her and looked her up and down as they walked on. Ava hated that look. It said that she knew exactly what she was doing and that obviously, she’d done it to him. When she didn’t respond, his brow wrinkled in frustration.
“Why the fuck do you think you got this job, Ava? Clara fucking Barton?”
She was dumbfounded. Without a doubt, she’d thought she’d been offered the job because she had perfect grades and had busted her ass at the internship. For that matter, she thought her letter of interest had been exceptional, too. “As a matter of fact, yes. I…I assumed you read my letter and…I don’t know. I thought you respected Clara Barton too. I thought you had similar reasons for working at the EPA.”
He laughed, a loud, ugly guffaw. “Holy shit, you are the real deal. I don’t give a shit about the EPA or the fucking Red Cross. I only know her name because it’s an easy way to get a nurse back to my place. Do you know how many blowjobs Clara Barton has earned me?”
Ava was speechless. Absolutely speechless. The nerve of this man. There they were in this bizarre and horrible place, and he was thinking about blowjobs? He really was disgusting.
“You know, you’re a real creep,” she said and hurried ahead to catch up to Manny.
She glanced back only once to see her boss nod at her. “Good start,” he mouthed like he actually believed she would do what he had told her to.
As she approached Manny, she realized that he was singing under his breath.
“Never gonna mess you up…never gonna make you cry…never gonna shout too loud, about you.”
The tune was almost familiar, but the way he crooned every time he said “you” made her forget wherever she’d heard it before. For a moment, she almost asked him about the tune, but she very much doubted he’d give her a straight answer—if he even had one.
“Hey,” Ava said.
Manny turned to her and winked. He seemed to wink almost by reflex. “Do you wanna play questions?”
“What?”
“Oh, you’re good. What are you doing up here?”
“Uh… I wanted to talk to you.”
He shook his head. “Nope, gotta be a question.”
“Oh, well…” He’d said he wanted questions, she thought. “Why did you run into the jungle last night?”
“Did you see that freaky monster’s face?” he asked in response.
“Yeah. Do you realize it was really weird for you to start screaming about mushroom pie and vanish?”
Manny laughed. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Yes, I did. And that wasn’t a question, was it?”
He grinned, clearly impressed. “Can you describe the bitch?”
“It looked like a demon,” Ava said and immediately forgot the game as the events from last night crashed through her mind. “It had a weird nose, white eyes, and big ears. You know—” She stopped herself and rephrased what she was going to say. It was better to play a game than be lost in the memories of that thing. “Do you think it looked like a bat?”
Manny nodded. “Most of the creatures here are like mushed-up versions of two normal animals, except way bigger. But it’s never the cute parts. I’ve waited for a baby goat with the head of a kitten and it simply never happens. Or maybe a half sloth, half bear cub. Wouldn’t you like to cuddle a half sloth, half bear cub?”
“Do you really think that counts?”
He shrugged. “The best part of games is breaking the rules. That’s why I love this place. The rules here don’t make sense to anyone. Just when I thought I understood, bam, we crash landed. You gotta respect a place like that. Either that or let it kill ya, but it’s kind of the same thing.”
“I thought you said earlier that we didn’t crash.”
Manny only snorted a laugh and said nothing.
“Okay.” Ava had learned that the man didn’t believe in keeping his stories straight. “Well, what about the monster that tried to kill us last night? The one that made you run away screaming about pie?”
“Mushroom pie.”
“You were saying?”
“I think it was listening to us. I thought I saw something up in the trees when the sun first set, but it didn’t get any closer until Brad-lee turned all pissy. Anyway, I didn’t want to let it eat you and miss an opportunity to clock old Brad-lee in the skull, so I took a gamble and tried to distract it. I’m glad it worked.”
Manny said her boss’ name broken up like it was a first and last name. She didn’t know why exactly, but she found that indescribably hilarious.
“Did you kill it?”
The pilot laughed at that. “Hell no! That’s like asking to take down a Tasmanian tiger with only my feet. Which I almost did once, by the way. I had to let the sucker go. The last of its kind and all that.”
“Do you think it will come back?”
“The Tasmanian tiger? I doubt it. There’s not enough of a breeding population.”
“No, the demon bat thing.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
Ava stifled a smile. Manny was fun but exhausting. That he could banter so much while he walked with such a big pack on his back was almost impressive.
“I don’t know if it’ll come back. I think its eyes aren’t right. Did you see them? Like a cow’s teat sprayed ʼem with curdled milk. I’d bet it can’t stand the sun. I think we only move during the day and don’t make a peep at night. Maybe smother Brad-lee with a pillow if he curses or pulls a wristy in his sleep.”
“You wouldn’t really do that?” She tried to make that come out as a statement. Surely Manny wouldn’t kill someone in their sleep, but her curiosity got the best of her.
“I shouldn’t need to. If all goes according to plan, we’ll be out here before it gets dark again.”
Ava nodded. That sounded better than she could hope for.
Before too long, the thin, loamy soil beneath their feet gave way to larger rocks and the undergrowth of the jungle gradually opened up. It seemed that whatever force could turn a desert into a tropical jungle didn’t have quite the same power over rock that it did over sand. Plants still grew among the stones but in much less profusion. As they continued, the ground sloped more and more steeply with even wider spaces between the plants. Soon, they could actually see the sun overhead.
At first, Ava thought the going would be easier as she wouldn’t have to watch every single plant she brushed up against, but she soon found that this wasn’t the case. The biggest difference was the sun. It was hot in the jungle. She had thought it was unbearably hot, but out on the rocks with the sun on her back, it was even hotter.
The terrain wasn’t the best either. She tried to be careful, but it seemed that with every other step, a rock would tumble from under her feet and she’d have to catch herself to avoid a fall. It made for slow going.
Manny, though, seemed even more at home on the boulders than he did in the jungle. He jumped from rock to rock with real glee in his step and left the other two behind as he scaled the growing hill in front of them like a mountain goat.
