by David Gilman
Flint offered a farewell handshake to Max. “I don’t want him. He’s yours.”
Xavier scowled. “Blood fall vein,” he said in Creole.
“What did he say?” asked Max.
Flint spat to one side, partly to rid himself of the small fly that had settled on his lips, but mostly in disgust. “Blood follows vein-he means relatives look out for each other.” Flint snorted. “Good luck, son. I’ll wait until you’re across; then I’m out of here. But I’d watch my back with this one,” he said, looking at Xavier.
Xavier dared to point a finger at the grizzled face. “You bush crazy, you know that, plant man? You got weeds growing in your brain. This boy is my friend. I wouldn’t wanna stay with you even if you asked me nicely.”
Flint smiled at Max. “ ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!’ ”
Xavier pleaded with Max. “You see? This guy has been smokin’ stuff that’s bad. An’ you trustin’ him to send you in there?”
“It’s Shakespeare.”
“I don’ care what it’s called-I just hope there was none of it mixed up in that cigarette you gave me.”
Max smiled but felt a stab of uncertainty. There had been moments when being with Orsino Flint was the safest refuge he had had in days. Now he was going back to a violent environment. The moment passed. Fear was a good thing-it would keep him alert and alive along with the inflamed energy of anger he felt for his dad. He would not run away. That thought drove him to his feet, and he ran across the barren, exposed ground.
Xavier was startled by Max’s aggressive burst of energy. The boy looked primal, caked in sweat and dirt, armed with blowpipe and bush panga, carrying the flint-headed spear, hair plastered to his head and with a wild look in his eye. It made Xavier think twice about following him. Orsino Flint grabbed his shirtfront and pulled his face close to his own.
“Get out of here, drug scum. You ever come back, I make you croc bait.” He shoved Xavier out of cover. Like an uncoordinated bird fallen from the nest, Xavier stumbled, arms floundering, but then gave chase to Max, who was already halfway across the wasteland. More than anything else, he did not want to go where Max was going, but he could not stay with Flint.
Max did not look back. He wanted the safety of the trees and prayed hostile eyes were not watching his pounding approach. He made it to the edge of the forest and ran in a couple of meters before stopping, turning and looking back for Xavier. He saw the gangly kid run across, and in the distance Orsino Flint eased back a tree branch and disappeared. As Xavier ran, Max saw him turn his head to one side. He faltered, and fell, sprawling into the dirt.
He got to his feet, confused, and then ran on, looking wildly for where Max might be. His uncertainty made Max step back into the open. He raised his spear arm, and the boy swerved to run toward him. As Max grabbed him and yanked him into cover, Xavier coughed and wheezed, shaking with exertion. “There’s someone comin’!”
Max pulled him down. “Don’t move. Stay absolutely still, whatever you do. There may be men in the trees as well.”
Now Max could hear the sound of a pickup truck approaching. He moved position slightly so he could see down the wasteland. At first he saw only the plume of dust from the vehicle, but then, as he raised his head slightly through the cover, he saw the open-backed 4?4. Two men in the front, two more in the back, all of them armed. Maybe this was a routine patrol, but it was very bad timing as far as Max was concerned. The pickup truck slowed. A man in the back was pointing at something ahead of the vehicle. And then they stopped almost opposite the place where Max and Xavier were hiding.
“What they doin’?” Xavier whispered.
“I don’t know,” replied Max, keeping his eyes on the men who now climbed out of the vehicle. One of them was pointing to something on the ground. He bent down and picked up something that glistened in the sunlight. It took Max a second to realize what it was, and as he did so, Xavier’s hand went to his neck.
“My gold chain,” the boy muttered.
The men were studying the ground. Max could hear them talking, and then they looked up toward the trees. They had seen the boys’ tracks. No sense in hiding now; they would be caught in a couple of minutes. Max grabbed Xavier’s shoulder. “Come on. Run for it!”
The boy faltered. In that brief moment, Max saw the fear on his face: he did not want to run into the jungle, but then he smiled. “It’s OK, it’s OK! I know a couple of those guys. They’ve worked with my brother. Max, you go on-I’ll be OK here. They can take me back with them. I won’t say anything. I’ll cover for you. I can get home now.”
Xavier’s smile broadened. He squeezed Max’s arm. “I can keep these guys off your back, chico. You get outta here. Go on! I’ll never forget you, cousin.” And before Max could stop him, Xavier ran out into the open, waving and calling to the men. In an instant, weapons were raised to their shoulders and Xavier had the good sense to stand still and raise his hands above his head. “Ronaldo! Alonso! It’s me! Xavier Garcia!”
All the men lowered their weapons except one, who kept an eye on the jungle, the butt of a pump-action shotgun on his shoulder. Max held his breath. The men had reached Xavier, and they seemed to be smiling. He heard them greet each other and embrace, and then Xavier began telling his story, never looking back to where Max lay hidden.
Orsino Flint’s words came back to him about not trusting Xavier and that he would sell him out at the first opportunity to save his own skin. Max was desperate to believe that Xavier would do no such thing, and for a few brief moments his faith in the boy held out. But then one of the men gently pushed Xavier against the side of the truck. They did not seem happy with the boy’s explanation. Xavier was protesting too much. As one of Xavier’s “friends” held him, the others turned to stare toward Max’s hiding place. These men might have known Alejandro, but now they were working for someone else, and that someone must be paying them big money not to take anything at face value. Max ran. The men saw the movement. The chase was on.
20
There were no tracks to follow in the jungle, so Max ran purely on instinct. Keeping his head down and his shoulders hunched, he brushed aside many of the low branches. If he couldn’t see any tracks, then neither could the men following him, but they would hear him crashing through the undergrowth, and that would lead them to him.
Before he plunged into the undergrowth, his last sight of the three in pursuit was of them running in a V formation. That was clever. It meant that Max’s arc of escape was in a confined area.
He tried to keep a sense of direction and run in a straight line-almost impossible in these conditions-but he knew that if he could, he would reach the ravine and hopefully find the entrance to the cave. The going was hard, and already the heat and difficult terrain were sapping his strength.
He crouched, wiped the sweat from his eyes and tried to slow his breathing. If he could not see his pursuers clearly, then the same was true for them. He waited. These men were clumsy, just pushing through the undergrowth. There was a rustling movement nearby-one of the gunmen. Max lay flat.
He concentrated on his breathing-it sounded so loud. The man was less than three meters away.
Max eased the blowpipe from his back and, with agonizingly slow movements, loaded a dart. He got the blowpipe into position, brought it to his lips and in his mind’s eye pictured the man’s route.
The jungle floor rustled with insect life, and the largest spider Max had ever seen emerged from the twisted growth. Its long, prickly legs must have spanned almost twelve centimeters and supported a hairy, misshapen body. The legs picked their way through the debris and came straight for him. The spider’s fangs for biting and poisoning its prey were clearly visible, and its globular eyes seemed to be focused on his own. The man’s footfalls had obviously flushed it out. Max froze. The spider straddled the blowpipe, and with silk-like softness walked across his hands.
Max’s heart thumped into the ground. He squeezed his eyes
shut and felt the spider clamber across his face. Every part of him wanted to scream and jump clear.
His back muscles quivered. The spider picked its way across his hair and onto his neck. The way Max was lying meant his shirt collar was pushed up. It crawled underneath.
Like a tickling piece of cotton, its hairy legs touched his spine. It seemed to hesitate. Did it think being under his shirt was a safe refuge? Should he roll quickly onto his back and crush it? Impossible. He’d be dead. Certain death from the gunman or from a fatal spider bite. Neither was a happy solution.
It crept its way along his spine, and then he felt it move out from beneath his loose shirt.
The moment its weight left the back of his legs, Max jumped up, leveled the pipe and aimed at the man, who had gone past by four or five meters. It was a clear shot-the gunman’s shoulders were above the low undergrowth.
Max spat breath down the pipe-and missed.
The man half turned. He must have heard the dart cut into the branches. He stopped and listened for any other movement. Max already had another dart loaded. He deliberately took his time, aimed the pipe, took a deep breath and blew.
The man yelped as the dart struck the muscle over his shoulder blade. As he twisted round to feel what had bitten him, Max ran.
The man shouted. An answering voice called from a distance away. And then Max heard the howling of a high-revving engine. He knew it couldn’t be the pickup-this was some kind of machinery that had been started. Max dodged through the undergrowth, ducking and weaving as gunfire raked the branches, but it was high, way too high. Max risked a glance back. The gunman was down on his knees, the AK-47 spraying the air. Then he fell facedown.
Max dropped to his haunches, trying to see if there were any animal tracks or paths that would allow him an escape route-nothing. Now the sound rose in intensity as a churning, slashing rending of the forest came closer and closer, as if a huge beast was on the rampage.
In places the jungle was lighter, less dense, and that was his best way forward. He pushed on, but still that sound grew closer and closer. He turned and looked at the canopy. The leaves shuddered and shook. He could feel the vibrations coming up through the ground, and for a moment he thought some trick of his imagination was conjuring up an earthquake.
The noise surrounded him. He felt a moment of blind panic but refused to yield to it, because then he would be helpless. He turned and ran, ignoring the whip stings of branches on his face, determined to put distance between himself and the ever-increasing roar. And then he saw the monster. Its teeth devoured the forest before it.
It was a tractorlike machine, its operator sitting in a mesh safety cage as he drove it forward. Whirring blades with clawlike teeth reached out ahead of the machine, their power ripping and tearing every living thing in their path. If Max made the wrong decision and became entangled in the undergrowth, he would be shredded.
But could he outrun it?
He turned his back on the howling, thrashing noise. The ground leveled out before him, and he looked for where the light penetrated the canopy the most. He used the shaft of the spear to push away some of the low-lying branches in front of him and dared, once, to look behind him. There was no sign of the other man who had come into the forest, but the one driving the machine had obviously spotted Max and was increasing the revs, speeding up as he focused on the retreating boy.
It took twenty seconds to break through the next dense patch, and in that time Max was out of sight of the pursuing killer. A muddy bank suddenly gave way to a sheet of rock. Max slipped, grabbed at roots and stopped himself slithering over the edge of the sheer drop that lay camouflaged beyond the curtain of trailing branches and vines.
As he hauled himself to his feet, the machine burst through the undergrowth. All he could see were its vicious blades, blurred with speed, bits and pieces of root and leaf caught up in its teeth like a carnivore’s incisors after a kill.
He saw the man’s eyes through the mesh cage, glaring in anticipation of a gruesome kill, and the unmistakable push of his arm as he shoved the throttle lever forward. He knew he had Max. The surge of power that went into the tanklike treads churned up the ground.
The man saw a boy frozen in fear.
Max saw a man smiling in victory.
Then, dropping his spear, he reached up onto a vine, grabbed a couple of handholds higher, bent his torso and pulled himself out of harm’s way.
The blades chewed the dangling vine trailing below him. The rush of air from their vicious, lacerating spin caught the back of his legs-it passed barely a handbreadth below-and then it fell away.
In seconds the machine had disappeared. The engine raced without the traction from the ground, and Max knew that suffocated in that cacophony was a man’s scream as, trapped in the cage, he plummeted to his death.
There was a distant crash as metal tore on rock, and then, except for the cries of alarmed jungle birds, there was silence.
Max dropped to the ground, retrieved his spear and, using it as a staff to steady himself, peered over the edge. The overhang hid what must have been a sheer drop. He had to skirt round it and find another route down. But the third man was out there somewhere. Max focused and ran, hoping his peripheral vision would allow him to spot the enemy. Now the silence was uncanny. Death had stalked the jungle and won.
Small gullies, a couple of meters wide, crisscrossed in front of him. He leapt across one, turned and followed the narrow strip of water that ran away to one side, convinced it had to lead to the river and the ravine. The blood pounded in his ears, and his smashing through the undergrowth muted the sudden slashing of the leaves. It was as if someone was using a thin flexible stick to lash the greenery around him.
This ripping sound was immediately followed by the hacking chatter of an automatic weapon. The things snapping angrily around Max’s head were bullets!
He jumped into one of the water-filled gullies. It was waist-deep and the bank allowed him some cover. Trying desperately to control his breathing, he peered into the thick jungle, looking for any sign of his enemy’s approach. Reason cut through his fear: these men were not jungle fighters; they were armed thugs paid to control the outside area. This gunman was shooting blindly. Max smiled to himself, the hunter’s instinct rising from his belly into his chest-a different type of energy now, the need for survival putting him on the offensive.
Keeping his eyes on the jungle and letting his breathing calm so his hearing could pick up every sound, he scooped mud from the low bank and smeared it across his face and shoulders. Then he crawled into the low undergrowth, using ferns for cover, and pressed himself against the broad roots of a big tree.
Max could smell him.
Stale cigarette smoke, sweat and alcohol settled on the air like the scent of a pungent flower. His pursuer was fairly close. No matter how skilled the man might be-and he wasn’t-it was impossible not to make any noise. Max closed his eyes and listened. About five meters away, the man’s heavy footfalls and stumbling approach were as good as shouting out his location.
Max felt for the darts. They were gone. He must have dropped their holder during the chase. He refocused, looking for anything that would help him defeat his pursuer. A couple of meters away, a large brown clay ball of a termite nest clung to a trailing vine. No sooner had Max seen it than the man’s face appeared through the foliage. Acting purely on instinct, Max threw the spear and heard it thud into the target. Inside the ball a honeycomb swarmed with termites, and as the clay dome shattered, it fell across the man’s head and shoulders. Suddenly engulfed in thousands of small biting insects, the man floundered and the AK-47 fell to his side, held by its strap, as he tried to beat them away. He yelped and swore.
It was a momentary diversion; Max knew the man would recover quickly, but the few moments it might buy him were vital. Max still needed his weapon, and he ran hard, skirting the man, to retrieve his spear. The gunman reacted as quickly as he could when he heard the sound of the crashing underg
rowth. One hand went back to the AK-47 while the other tried to brush the termites from his eyes and face, but as he swung an arc of gunfire, he spun on his heel, and the combined effort of shooting and beating at the termites made him lose his balance. He fell backward into the shallow gully, which gave Max enough time to reach his spear. He yanked it from the ground, turned and powered on, knowing he had to get farther down the watercourse. He hoped the stream would take him to the ravine’s edge. The man dragged himself from the water, gasping, still plucking insects from his eyes, but his anger had given him the energy to scream what Max took to be a full-blooded threat. One very angry man with one very lethal weapon meant Max had a long way to go before he was safe.
He jinked left and right. Another stream, another gully, and then he could hear tumbling water. Roots of trees crept into the low banks, and he realized that the water had become shallower, so he would make quicker time. He just had to be careful not to run blindly over the edge; he had to find a way down.
His pursuer had recovered quickly and could be heard splashing through the shallows; he, too, had realized that this was the easiest route. Suddenly there was no place to hide. The man came round the bend of the gully, and he was in plain sight. If Max tried to move now and clamber back into the undergrowth, he would be spotted immediately, and a burst of gunfire would rake him to death.
The gully’s low overhang was his only chance of concealment. With any luck, the man would be looking ahead and might bypass the dark shadow that was Max unmoving among the tree roots. There seemed to be no choice. He lay down on his side, feeling the mud suck at his clothes as he eased himself backward until the bank pressed against him. Bits of tangled root and leaves offered some camouflage in front of his face, and he hoped he could settle his breathing-right now he felt as though the whole world could hear him gasping for breath.
A huge snake, five meters long, stirred. Alerted by movement, its muscles flexed. At full length it resembled a dead tree trunk, its mottled-brown shaded patterns camouflaging it almost to the point of invisibility. Heat-sensitive pits on its head guided it toward the creature that had blundered into its territory. It had not eaten for a couple of weeks. The deer it had crushed to death and swallowed whole had taken that long to digest.
