“You did. I’m here, too.” He felt JD patting his right shoulder.
“I…I…” Panic entered his voice. “I’m blind. I can’t see a thing. My eyes are wide open and it’s completely black.”
“You are not blind,” JD firmly assured him. “We can’t see anything either.”
“Yeah, Iz, you’re okay.” Gregg gripped his hand more tightly. “There’s no light. Some lunatic thought it would be fun to put us in a deep cave. JD and I were separated until we ended up here, can’t say exactly how long ago—”
“Twenty hours ago is a good approximation,” JD interjected, but not with his usual strength of voice. He sounded unusually weak to Izzy’s highly trained ears and that was alarming enough to make him forget how freaked out he was trying hard not to be, though with limited success.
“JD? Are you okay? You don’t sound quite like yourself.”
“I’m fine,” JD assured him, a little too quickly. “I had a little get together with our host last night that was…challenging. But all is well now. Nothing for you to worry about. The main thing is that we’re all together again and you’re on the mend. You really gave me and Gregg a scare when all those log splinters impaled your chest.”
“Not to mention that whole raging infection thing on top of it,” Gregg added. “You were in real bad shape, buddy. But JD made a deal to get you the right medical care. Surgery, stitches, antibiotics, good pain meds, the whole nine yards. Do you remember any of that?”
Izzy struggled to think back, answer the question, keep his mind off where they actually were. Deep cave. No light. A crawling dread inched up his spine.
“Maybe…sort of…kind of? I was really out of it but I thought I was back at the 8th Field Hospital. The surgery, the ICU—whatever room I was recovering in—it all seemed familiar.”
“Yeah, probably because it was all stolen US military equipment,” Gregg told him. “As far as we know, you never left the area and the medical facilities are on the estate.”
“What estate?”
“It belongs to someone known as The Pale Man,” JD answered. “He’s the one responsible for killing The Poppy King and all the fun times you had there in the jungle.”
“And you worked a deal with him for me? What kind of deal?”
“Just that I wouldn’t try to escape.”
“What he’s leaving out,” Gregg added, “is that if he did, the consequences to you and me would be severe. Like”—he made a throat slicing sound—“JD saved us, bro.”
“Hey, piece of cake. Least I could do.”
JD and Gregg chuckled, the sound bouncing from wall to wall. Izzy wondered if they had developed some dark humor between them to lighten things up. He wished he could laugh with them. With his grogginess wearing off, some serious pain was kicking in. And it really, really did not help that he had severe issues with claustrophobia.
“I—I’m very grateful, JD, and I don’t want to sound like I’m not, but…I don’t like this,” he said a little too loudly. “I don’t do well in confined spaces. I do not like this. I have to get out of here.” The last he said on a wheeze, close to hyperventilating, while he struggled to get up.
Gregg held him down. “Whoa, pal. Come on, breathe, relax. You still have stitches and we don’t need those broken do we? If they get broken, it’ll take longer for us to spring ourselves out of here.”
Izzy felt a needle in his right shoulder. He tried to rise up but sank back down, quickly losing consciousness.
“Not good,” said Gregg.
“Not good at all,” agreed JD. “At least they gave us some knock-out juice.”
“Yeah, helps make up for the lack of water and food. It’s pretty sick to think that bastard went to all the trouble to get Izzy back on his feet, just so he could slowly starve all of us together.”
“He wants us to turn on each other, see who’s the last man standing. That’s his game. But, now that Izzy’s here and somewhat put back together, we can plan our escape. It’s the only way we’ll get out alive.”
“And get you some more medical attention yourself. How are you doing?”
“Well enough and better than our host probably thinks. Thanks for helping to patch me up with the mud and the moss available in our nice quarters here.”
“Not that I could see anything, just feel around where you showed me to put it, but I think you lost a lot of blood.”
“The body has an amazing way of replacing what is lost. I’ve survived worse than this, trust me. The only thing that matters now is getting out of here once Izzy wakes up again. What do you think, a few hours?”
“Yeah, and hopefully it’ll keep him calmed down awhile longer since…” Gregg sucked in a deep breath. “I don’t look forward to telling him about the snake.”
When they told Izzy about the snake—and not just any snake; it had to be a freak of nature, an albino, man-eating python that was bigger and longer than JD wanted to say—Izzy thought he might faint. He wished he would faint, just faint right here where they sat, huddled together, on the cold, stone floor. Then he wouldn’t feel as if he was suffocating on his own claustrophobia or have to listen to his stomach growl around its empty contents, or try to swallow his spit to compensate for only half a cup of water to last him until more was delivered. JD wasn’t holding his breath for that.
“But how could they bring us in here and not worry about the snake themselves?” He was grasping.
“Because ‘they’ have a nice, secret tunnel that our host would absolutely love for us to venture into and emerge right where he would like to have us. I saw it. Lovely dungeon. Well-guarded. We do not want to go there.” JD paused and Izzy wondered if there had been more to “the deal” than JD or Gregg had let on. Before he could ask, JD asserted firmly, “No. No, we will not risk that. That’s exactly what he’s counting on because he’s also counting on us being too fearful to venture the other way.”
“Maybe he’s lying. Maybe there’s not even a snake?” Izzy knew he was pleading. He was terrified of snakes. Even little snakes. His claustrophobia was only exceeded by his ophidiophobia.
JD’s laugh was short. “Oh, no. There is most definitely a snake. The Pale Man made sure I saw it and wanted to assure me that he was taking all this quite seriously and didn’t want us to do anything to jeopardize our health.”
“Gregg, you saw it too?”
“No.” Gregg’s voice was very quiet. “They broke the three of us up and I was taken to a cell without any windows or room service beyond a meal a day, but I’m fairly certain the accommodations were nicer than JD’s. He hasn’t wanted to discuss much of his own experience, but I gotta tell ya, I was really glad to see this guy. Well, not exactly see, but, you know.”
“Listen,” JD cut in, “every minute counts. This can be done. I had hoped that help would come, that word from the inside would reach the right ears, but if it hasn’t happened yet, I’m not willing to wait another day to see if it does. Izzy, you must believe me that now is the best, if not the only, time. You, all of us, are the strongest mentally and physically that we can ever be in this place right now. The first rule of escape is to try to do it as soon as you can, and that could not be truer for us. We will be starving down here and going thirsty until we get hauled out, and when that happens…We can’t let that happen. I cannot lie to you, given what you both have already gone through, the darkness will soon become mentally crushing. We have to leave. Tonight. From my estimation, it’s nearing midnight. We have a small window of time to get out of here while darkness is actually our friend.”
“I can’t breathe.” The walls had closed around him, the utter darkness, the terror inside, the terror lying in wait in the blackness…
“Izzy, listen to me.” JD gripped his arm, gave him a shake. “Wake the fuck up. If you do not wake the fuck up and get mad, get desperate, scrape together every ounce of courage and guts that you’ve got, you’ll never see Margie again. You’ll never eat your mother’s soup again. This is g
oing to be the hardest thing you ever do, but after this, you’ll be out of here. You can do this, and you will. I demand it of you.”
The force of JD’s demand had the effect of a double slap to his rising hysteria. Izzy tried to focus on what JD might have already been subjected to, just to keep him alive. He didn’t have the will, and he didn’t have the hope of Frankl, but, dammit all to hell, he had to see Margie again, and his mother’s soup was worth climbing over a pit of snakes to get to. Well…maybe it wasn’t quite that good. But he sucked it up. He scraped what guts he had together and managed a tremulous, “Okay.”
“Not good enough,” JD barked, just before Izzy felt a painful jab to his upper arm.
“Hey, that hurt!”
“Oh, you think that hurt?” JD taunted. “What do you think about this?”
A sequence of jabs so fast it felt like his arm was being tattooed black and blue, and Izzy forgot about his fear, forgot about his thirst and hunger. Furious at JD for treating him like a human punching bag, he snapped, “Stop it! That’s enough, JD. Don’t make me hit you back.”
“That’s more like it. Stay pissed. Anger’s your friend and it’s going to help buy your freedom. Now you and Gregg are going to follow me and do everything I say. Here’s the plan…”
Izzy didn’t at all like the details JD laid out, but his arm hurt like hell and the physiology of his fighting instincts outweighed his fear. JD’s explanations about snake behavior helped, somewhat. While he could not guarantee the snake had recently fed, if it had their chances of escape were substantially increased, since the snake would want to rest and put all its energy into the long process of digestion. Presuming that, they simply had to maneuver over the snake and try not to disturb it where The Pale Man had it protecting the cave’s exit. There would hopefully be some light at that point and, if so, they were to ignore the eyes if they were open, since snakes did not close them to sleep.
Just as Izzy could feel his breathing start to escalate again, JD gave him another punch. Judging from Gregg’s swearing, he got some of the same before JD issued his orders. “Gregg, on your feet. Izzy, your mobility is compromised but we’ll do this just like we did before. Okay, I’ve got you on the right. Gregg, you’ve got the left?”
“Yeah, you bastard. Do I say thanks for not hitting me on both sides?”
“You’re welcome. Now one, two, three, and…Up!”
Izzy felt himself hoisted to his feet, or at least his one good foot, the other one thoughtfully held together inside a cast, and with that JD commanded, “Let’s go.”
As they made their way through utter darkness, JD kept making weird clicking sounds.
“What are you doing?” Izzy finally whispered.
“Echolocation. It’s what creatures that hunt in the dark do. You know, like bats. Dolphins, too. It’s something I learned in school. Came in handy for those thousand nights I lived in a cave before. It was only one hundred and eight nights and one day more to be exact, but it felt like a thousand.”
If anyone else had said it, Izzy would have rolled his eyes, even in the dark. But this was JD. He believed every word.
After what seemed like a thousand nights, they found water. Actually they found quite a lot of water. Izzy awkwardly splashed through it in intervals as JD continued his impersonation of a bat, clicking them along in the pitch black that Izzy constantly felt compressing all around him. He tried to keep the suffocation at bay with visions of Margie, of a bowl of his mother’s best, waiting at the end of this endless ordeal, and when that failed to sustain him, he remembered JD hitting him for seemingly no reason, and when that made him mad all over again, it was clearly reason enough.
“Stop,” JD suddenly whispered, going stone still.
“The snake?” Gregg whispered back, his voice wavering but only slightly.
“Yes, you smell it now? It’s quite close. Which means, so are we to escaping.”
Izzy sniffed. His nostrils rebelled against the rank scent. It mingled with the smell of his fear, threatening to return with the sensation of hot piss running down his leg.
JD issued his instructions. They were to soak their bodies in the water to lower their heat signature, and then rub themselves with the slime from the cave walls to better cover their scent. “We will just be three little snakes sliding right by,” JD summed it up, “and of no interest to the big sleepy.”
Izzy wanted to tell JD he was out of his mind, that this was a horror movie, that they weren’t Bilbo tricking a dragon and what he was asking of them was absolutely insane and impossible. They could figure out something better than this. Even getting tortured had to be better. Please, he just could not do this.
“Got it,” he forced himself to say. “Now get us the hell out of here.”
“Right on, brother,” echoed Gregg.
They lined up exactly as JD directed, with JD leading the way, Izzy in the middle, Gregg bringing up the rear. All of them on their bellies, remaining connected like a “Barrel of Monkeys” game, only hand to foot instead of arm to arm, so they could emulate the serpentine motion of one long snake themselves. As the scent of the snake zoomed to an ungodly stench, Izzy felt his terror escalate, inducing him to disassociate. He felt certain he was outside his body looking down into the pitch dark as they made it over the first coil of the python and then another. The snake was not slimy at all but smooth as leather, and so huge it felt as if they were crawling up and over a school bus.
He was vaguely aware of still hanging on to JD’s ankle while Gregg held on to his good one, when a coil moved. And then Izzy couldn’t. The cast on his bad foot, with most of his whole leg attached to it, was trapped between the heavy weight of the snake and a cave wall.
A scream lodged in his throat. Izzy could feel Gregg pushing, pushing, trying to get him loose, but it was like being trapped against a railroad car made of flesh. Izzy was certain he would never get out until the monster woke up, and as long as JD and Gregg stayed with him, neither would they.
He wanted to do the noble thing and tell them to go on without him. Izzy was trying to find the best and bravest part of himself to say it when he felt JD slip loose from his frantic hold.
A stalled heartbeat later, JD whispered into his ear, “We’re almost there. Margie’s waiting and so is your mom’s soup. All you have to do is push right here…That’s it…Just gently, keep pushing…”
Izzy tried. He tried really hard to do what JD told him and not scream from his pain, from his adrenaline-pumping pure fear. Nothing happened, then—
There was a sighing sound from the huge reptile. The coil moved, just slightly. Just enough.
JD slithered away and Izzy latched back onto his ankle, hanging on for dear life. With each passing second he was consumed, swallowed by the blackness, the stench, and he told himself to think of Frankl, of all the things he still had to live for, not to imagine he was crawling right down the mouth of the thing, until…
He was crawling through more water, not snaking his body over his worst nightmare, and then he thought he saw a pinpoint of light. JD reached under his arms, lifting him up as if he weighed no more than a toddler.
The three of them made their way a little further, him in the middle again, the two best friends he could ever imagine having in his life if he lived to be a hundred supporting him on either side while the pinpoint of light grew brighter, then brighter still, until they emerged outside the cave and waded out of a lily-pad pond—only to be greeted by a tall, concrete surround that seemed as daunting as The Great Wall of China.
Not that JD seemed to notice. He slapped Izzy’s chest.
“You did it, Izzy. Good man. Gregg, you too. Sorry about hitting you guys but, you know, tough love. Now let’s get out of here. I smell jungle on the other side of that wall.”
“I wish you could smell Manhattan instead.” His relief so immense, Izzy was close to sobbing. “Coney Island, even.”
“I’ll count on you giving me the grand tour one day. Both of us,
right Gregg?”
“I’m there. But first, mind me asking how we get over that wall?”
It was only then that Izzy saw the moon shine on JD’s once perfect face. From his upper left cheek and down to his jaw was a thick line of what looked like mud and moss, covering God knew what. Part of an earlobe was missing. It looked as though one of his arms might be injured, too.
The doctor in Izzy wanted to examine him, ask what had happened. But he didn’t have to ask. He knew. JD had endured something terrible to get them this far, and if the three of them had to scale a tree and fling themselves over the wall from the furthermost branches and into the jungle where the VC could be waiting, sign him up.
And that’s exactly what they did. Amazingly, no broken necks in the process, just plenty of bruises and a broken leg cast, but they were free with no immediate sign of pursuit or VC in the vicinity where they landed.
Propelled by hope that the worst was over, and determined he would show JD and Gregg the time of their lives in his kind of town, they moved forward as a unit, faster and faster through the jungle, while JD hurried them along, making sounds as they went that were not those of a human, but eventually summoned one who was.
A girl. A very beautiful Asian girl who flung her arms around JD, touched his encrusted cheek, and spoke quickly in another dialect. Then she did something odd. She flicked a Zippo. She pressed it to her chest and looked as if she wanted to cry, but didn’t.
JD bowed to her, then explained, “This is Missy, one of my associates. She spent the past week looking for us on the inside without any luck—imagine that—and managed to barely escape herself. She was able to make contact with the others who have been searching for us since we took off on the elephants, but weren’t sure where we went.”
The girl, Missy, made a silencing motion, then signed a message before pointing in a certain direction. They collectively made haste until the first glimmer of dawn shook hands with the parting moon. It was only then that Izzy asked, “Where are we going?”
“To meet Zhang. He has a boat hidden and is waiting for us.”
UNKNOWABLE (Murder on the Mekong, Book 2) Page 33
