by WW Mortensen
“Where’s Jess?” Ed said, spinning about.
“Owen’s gone too…” Rebecca said.
Sanchez turned and disappeared soundlessly into the brush.
• • •
Trailing Robert, Rebecca burst through the bushes with Ed to find Jessy sprawled semiconscious amongst the leaf litter, Owen kneeling over her.
“Jess!” Ed said, surging down the embankment. At the bottom, he fell to his knees and cradled her head in his hands.
Jessy moaned, her eyes fluttering open. “Are they gone?” she groaned.
“The spiders? Yeah, they’re gone,” Ed said. Again, Jessy’s eyes fell shut.
Owen turned to Ed, then Rebecca. “I’m sorry for taking off… it’s just that I saw the third creature leap towards us. I didn’t look back… I have no idea what happened to it, how far it chased us.” Owen told them he’d trailed Jessy the whole way, catching glimpses of her through the trees. Then she’d dropped from view. Pointing to Jessy’s leg, he whispered, “I think it’s broken.”
Clearly Sanchez had concluded likewise. Having already collected two sticks to use as splints, he knelt beside Jessy and gently roused her. Then, searching his pocket, he removed a small, plastic bag, and passed her something from inside it. “Here, chew this. You’ll feel better.”
Jessy struggled to focus. “What is it?”
“Coca leaf.”
Jessy chewed obediently and seemed to calm. Rebecca knelt beside Sanchez, elevating Jessy’s leg while Sanchez applied the splints. Fortunately, the bone hadn’t pierced the skin; the blood was the result of superficial cuts. Sanchez attended to these, too, as well as a nasty bump to the back of Jessy’s head. “You’ll be okay,” he assured her as he got up. He nodded to Rebecca, suggesting they give Ed and Jessy some breathing-space.
With Owen in tow, Rebecca followed Sanchez out of earshot.
“Fuck me,” Owen blurted in a low voice. “What the hell just happened?”
Rebecca shook her head. No longer able to contain them, she let the tears flow freely. “Dear God… poor Enrique.”
“I thought Ed said the place was deserted? A ghost-town!” Owen said. “Bec, what was that thing doing? First, they’re jumping, then they’re building webs, and now they’re coming out of the ground!”
Rebecca looked up and blinked, trying to piece her thoughts together. “I don’t know.”
Owen grasped her by the shoulders. “Hey, come on! I don’t mean to be insensitive, but we need you. Are we safe here?”
“I saw three of them back there,” Rebecca said. “Robert killed two. I don’t know what happened to the third.”
“I thought it chased us. Surely it didn’t follow us this far?”
“I don’t know,” Rebecca said again. “Perhaps it lost you, pursued you to the limit of its territory and gave up. I don’t know.”
“Amigo,” Sanchez said, scanning the trees, “I believe we are safe for now.” He turned to them. “Ms Baxter’s break is bad, and she’s concussed. We must get her to hospital.”
Owen nodded, heaving a breath and adjusting his Marlins cap.
Rebecca, too, tried to compose herself. “Let’s get on the sat-phone to Base Camp right away.”
At that moment, Ed pushed through the ferns. He shook his head. “Enrique was carrying my shoulder pack when we went down to the moai.”
“What?” Rebecca said. “You mean the phone was in there? You’re not serious…”
Ed nodded.
Owen spun on him. “Ed, you said it was safe to be here! What the hell just happened?”
Rebecca put her face in her hands, panic rising in her. “Ed, please tell me you’ve got a PLB.” She removed her hands and held her breath. Personal Locator Beacons worked like EPIRBs, emitting a distress signal relayed by satellite to a rescue centre.
Ed frowned, tossing her an orange-coloured device the size of a cell phone. The unit was sticky to the touch and punctured with ragged holes.
“It was in my backpack,” Ed said. “Like everything else, it’s destroyed.”
Rebecca dropped the PLB to the ground and wiped her hands on her shorts. “You carry only one?”
“Enrique had one.”
Rebecca looked from Ed to Sanchez, and then back again. An uncomfortable weight settled in her stomach. “So, what’s our situation, then?”
“Fucked,” Owen murmured.
“Let’s stay calm,” Ed said.
The weight in Rebecca’s gut grew heavier. “Let’s get this in perspective. I’ve got a cell phone back at base camp—I left it there because I haven’t had service for days. I brought my laptop but without the sat-phone, we can’t connect to anything.” She turned to Sanchez. “What about the radio? We could try Base Camp with that.”
“We are long out of range, senhorita.”
“Someone else might hear us.”
Sanchez shook his head. “They would need to be within a few miles, and on the right frequency. It is unlikely. We are in pretty deep here.”
“You’re not fucking joking,” Owen murmured.
Ed held up his hands. “As I said, let’s stay calm, okay? I think we should go back and conduct a search of the area where Enrique was… taken. Maybe something was dropped, left behind.”
“Are you kidding?” Owen said. “There could be dozens of them there now! They could be all over the place!”
Sanchez replied bluntly, “Amigo, we have no way of getting in contact with Base Camp, or anyone else. What would you suggest?”
“Have we got anything we can use?” Rebecca asked.
“Signal flares,” Sanchez answered.
Owen rolled his eyes. “What good are they? There’s no commercial traffic here, and as for private aircraft… outside of the plane caught in that web, we’ve seen nothing.”
“Which is why, despite the risk, the search makes sense,” Ed said. “If it proves fruitless, we’ll return to Base Camp. There’s another sat-phone there, we’ll call for a floatplane—it’ll be faster than calling in the Tempestade. It’ll have to land in the main river, but we can use the Zodiac to rush out and meet it.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Owen said. “How the hell do we get her back to Base Camp? She can’t walk!”
“We carry her out by stretcher.”
“What?” Owen blurted. “It’s almost two days back to Base Camp, and that’s for the able-bodied! You can double that if we have to carry her. And what about the ravine? This is crazy.”
Rebecca rubbed her brow. “Getting angry won’t solve anything, Owen.”
“What do you suggest, then, Bec?”
Rebecca turned to Sanchez. “What about a helicopter? Two of us could head back to Base Camp and call from there—we’ve got the GPS coordinates; the chopper could be sent to this exact location. The other two could sit tight with Jessy and wait for it.” It sounded like a good plan, but then she recalled what Sanchez had said to her before departing Base Camp yesterday. “But of course, we’re in too deep for a chopper to get to us.”
Sanchez cocked his head. “Maybe for civilian or privately chartered aircraft, senhorita. But a long-range search-and-rescue team, perhaps the military… it’s a possibility.”
Ed looked at Sanchez and nodded. “I think it’s our best option.”
Sanchez seemed to agree. “I will go. But alone. I am much quicker than any of you and will get there fastest. I will send the chopper.”
“Hang on,” Owen said. “What if you fall and break a leg like Jessy, or get bitten by a snake, or worse still, one of those creatures comes after you? If you don’t make it, for any reason, the rest of us are as good as dead!”
“Then join me,” Sanchez said. “One of us will see it done.”
Rebecca nodded. “I think it’s the best we can do. You two head back to Base Camp, call in a chopper. Ed and I will stay here and look after Jessy.”
“Not here,” Ed said. “We’ve got another camp, remember? But first things first—let’s get b
ack and conduct that search.”
23
“That’s it. That’s it there,” Rebecca said. She was lying prone in the undergrowth with her elbows propped up and a pair of binoculars to her eyes. On either side of her, Owen and Sanchez lay in similar fashion. All around them, broad, spreading ferns rose skyward. It was still raining.
“This is crazy,” Owen said. “Why can’t either of you see that?”
They’d relocated Jessy to Advance Base Camp—the S2 campsite—on a triangular stretcher: three long sticks with the camouflage-netting from the crates they’d brought from S1 strung tautly between them. Ed had stayed with her while the remainder of the group had returned here—the lip of the large bowl that looked down on the spot where Enrique had been taken—to determine if anything had been left behind and could be salvaged. It didn’t appear so.
“Are you sure that’s it?” Sanchez said.
“Not entirely,” Rebecca answered. “Usually there’s a trigger mechanism: silken trip-lines, sometimes a silken mat or a root or stick or something with a thread attached. Brushing the trigger will set off the alarm and alert the spider in its burrow that prey is approaching, like a fisherman feeling a bite on the line with his finger. But finding either the trigger or the door is notoriously difficult—disguise is the whole point—and right now, I can’t see anything out of the ordinary. But from memory, I think that’s the spot.”
“We’re not going anywhere near it,” Owen said. “I can’t see the trigger, or the door. Let’s check it once more with the binoculars and get out of here.”
Sanchez agreed, and scanned again. “I do not see anything. Do you?” he asked Rebecca.
Through her binoculars, Rebecca scoured the area around the trapdoor. She shifted her view to the right, towards the two giant moai. In the end, Ed hadn’t managed to slip the stone disc into the recess; the sudden attack had prevented him. To her at least, the relationship of the disc and the indentation remained a mystery. “No,” she said, “Nothing at all.”
“Okay then, let’s go,” Owen said. “They could be back at any moment. We didn’t see them arrive the first time until it was too late. Robert?”
Sanchez nodded. “There is nothing here. We shall go.”
The bushes ahead of them shivered, their leaves rustling.
A flash of brown launched into Rebecca’s field of vision, too close for the binoculars to focus. Reflexively she threw them to the ground, rolling off her stomach and crossing her arms defensively in front of her face.
Priscilla leapt straight into them with a frightened cry.
Rebecca let out her own involuntary yelp before clutching the tiny monkey to her breast. “Oh, you gave me a fright,” she panted. She stroked Priscilla’s head, shielding her tightly. “The poor thing’s shaking like a leaf.”
Without further comment, they got to their feet and retreated to Advance Base Camp as noiselessly as they were able.
24
By the time Owen and Sanchez were ready to leave camp, the forest had grown dark, the sun sinking from behind blackened clouds in a spreading pool of orange. They would travel light, taking with them one of the Weatherby rifles, a tent, and a few basic provisions. Ed had insisted they also take an X40. A single unit weighed no more than a couple of pounds and offered 2,000 square feet of cover—ample for their requirements.
They’d fixed the remaining three devices in a triangle around the campsite, surrounded by the eight motion sensors.
Rebecca helped Owen into his pack, lifting it while he slipped his arms through the straps. The plan was simple: double-time it to S1, catch a couple of hours sleep there beside the moai and then aim to get into Base Camp by mid-afternoon the following day. Unfortunately, this meant crossing the ravine not only in heavy rain—the downpour had yet to relent—but in the dark as well. After two days of hard slog, it would test them physically and mentally, and Owen had wondered aloud if he was up to it. But what choice did they have?
Conversely, Rebecca, Ed, and Jessy would have plenty of time to rest and recuperate, although they faced a different plight. While a helicopter might be dispatched as early as tomorrow afternoon, with no means of communication, they could only sweat on its arrival, eyes peeled, and fingers crossed. The fate of their two companions was entirely out of their control, and only time would tell if Owen and Sanchez had made it.
The two men gathered the last of their equipment, including the necessary climbing gear, and prepared to say their goodbyes. They paid Jessy a visit first. Since the group’s arrival at Advance Base Camp less than two hours ago, she’d been resting. They beelined through the rain to the other side of the clearing and Jessy’s khaki-coloured dome tent.
Sanchez had discovered the clearing that now housed Advance Base Camp back when he and Ed had first found the city. Although not as generously set-up as Base Camp, it had almost everything they’d need. The site—which, for the next 24 hours would serve as refuge to half the group—was situated some two hundred yards or more from the city, tucked well out of view. The small, natural and elevated clearing was dominated by the remnants of one of the biggest trees Rebecca had ever seen. Once upon a time, the thing must have been enormous, wider at its base than the length of a bus and towering well beyond the canopy. Now, though, all that was left of the once-proud giant was a woody outer shell, comprised of a mass of parasitic strangler vines that had consumed its massive girth like a kind of organic armour and starved it to death. The tree itself had long since rotted away, the remaining ‘skin’ a lasting tribute.
They had dubbed this hollow core the ‘cave’, for obvious reasons. It was so big—and now, thanks to two well-placed tarpaulins, dry—that it served not only as a storage area for their supplies and equipment, but as a plot for their tents as well. They’d been able to set up two of the compact, dome-shaped dwellings side by side within it, with ample room to spare.
The clearing itself was fully screened by the thick canopy above. On all sides, the ground fell away steeply, so that their camp was ringed by a natural, looping moat. This ensured adequate runoff for the teeming rain. Around the edge of this moat, the motion sensors had been set.
At the clearing’s southern end—right at the cave’s entrance—a large tarpaulin had been tied off to the surrounding trees as further protection from the rain. It sheltered a small, lightweight but sturdy aluminium table, a couple of chairs, and, powered by small, stand-alone generators, several high-intensity LED lights that bathed the area in a stark artificial glow.
As Owen and Sanchez disappeared into Jessy’s tent, Rebecca saw Ed standing by the fire pit, staring vacantly ahead. “You okay?”
They’d dug the fire pit into the soft, damp soil, lining its rim with logs and shielding it from the elements with a tarpaulin pegged to the ground and angled upwards about forty-five degrees.
Ed poked the fire with a stick, another tarpaulin above his head. “It’s all falling apart, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“This isn’t how it was meant to turn out. Once the rescue team sees this place, it’ll be a circus. Others will come. I didn’t need this, Bec, not now.”
“You didn’t need this?” Rebecca leaned into him, straining to keep her voice low. “You’re kidding me, right? Forgive me if I don’t sympathise, but you have no right to feel sorry for yourself! Enrique’s dead, for Christ sake! You’ve got to live with that, we all do. And now Jessy’s hurt. We have to get her back, and that’s all there is to it—whatever the consequences here. Right now, your only concern should be with her.”
Ed bristled. “What the hell do you take me for? I’m devastated about Enrique. And Jess? I hate seeing her in pain. But for now, we’ve done all we can. We’re getting help. But the rest of it? You’re wrong, Bec. I’ve earned the right to feel this way. This is my project. This is my life.”
Rebecca softened, but she wasn’t swayed. “What do you want, then? You’ve found the city. You’ve fulfilled your grandfather’s dream, your ow
n dream. Who cares if others come? What more do you want out of this?”
He frowned at her, tilting his head. “You have to ask?”
At that moment Owen and Sanchez emerged from Jessy’s tent and exited the cave.
“You’re mad, Ed,” Rebecca said hurriedly, suddenly understanding. She lowered her voice even further. “It can’t be done. It’s not worth the risk. You won’t make it.” She looked at him, eyes narrowed. Owen and Sanchez were almost upon them. Ed made to move, but Rebecca held him back. “Don’t make this harder on Jessy.”
“Okay, then. We’re off,” Owen announced, he and Sanchez drawing up beside them. Rebecca tore her gaze from Ed and gathered Owen in a hug. “Be careful, won’t you?”
They were ready to go. Sanchez retrieved a foil-covered tube from his pack, tore it open, and removed a long cylinder. He bent it in half, and the chemlight sprang to life, glowing a bright, luminescent blue that would last for the next twelve hours. He clipped it onto his backpack. The plan was for Owen to trail the light through the forest while Sanchez—aided by a pair of head-mounted night-vision goggles, or NVGs—guided them back.
“Stay safe,” Ed said. Handshakes gave way to more hugs.
“We’ll be seeing you,” Owen said.
Without wasting another moment, Owen and Sanchez disappeared into the gloomy surrounds.
Rebecca watched their backs and hoped desperately there was truth in Owen’s words.
25
When they were gone, Rebecca spun on Ed.
He held up his hands. “Don’t waste your breath.”
Rebecca scowled. “I’m going to check on Jessy.” She charged through the rain. Ed followed her to the tent.
“Knock-knock,” Rebecca said, waiting for Jessy to invite her in before drawing aside the flap.
Jessy sat up. She looked terrible; scratches consumed her face, and her hair and clothes were messed and muddied.
“How are you feeling?” Rebecca asked.
“I’ve seen better days. Got a killer headache, too.”
