by David Coy
There was a hum inside the tube, and Joan felt a slight tingle in her left foot that got wider and smaller and shifted from foot to foot as Rachel changed the focus.
“Well, that’s easy enough,” Rachel’s voice echoed.
There was a pause when nothing at all seemed to happen. “Oh, so that’s what that is . . . hang on. Sorry.”
Another pause. Joan coughed nervously. The sound rang hollow in the tube.
Rachel stuck her head in the tube.
“I think I’ve got it. You let me know the second it starts to feel too strange or hot.”
“You bet.”
Rachel’s head vanished.
“Ready?”
“Yes.”
There was a deep hum and Joan’s feet felt as if they’d been dunked in hot water. As the seconds passed, the scanner’s heat built up and up, making her finally wince, then grimace. “That’s pretty hot!”
“Is it too hot?”
“Pretty much!”
“Okay. I’ll turn it down a little.”
Joan was expecting the feeling to subside, to cool, but it didn’t. It didn’t get any hotter, either.
“How’s that?”
“Hot.”
“Can you stand it?”
“For how long?”
“A minute longer. You’re almost done.”
“You didn’t just say that.”
“C’mon. It was funny.”
“Not on this side of the fucking machine.”
Joan winced and grimaced and puffed and sweated.
Finally, the hum inside the tube stopped and, with it, the heat. By the time Rachel rolled her out of the tube, there was no sensation of heat whatsoever.
“How’d I do?”
“Great. Now all we have to do is see if the temperature you just endured will kill the larvae.”
“That wasn’t fun.”
“Sorry,” Rachel said, helping her to her feet.
“And good job. Give some of the painkiller to Mike. I know where the upper temperature limit is now.”
The Xercodan put Mike right to sleep. They put him in the scanner, and Rachel irradiated him, keeping a close eye on the thermometer as she stepped up the energy. A few minutes later, Rachel scanned Mike’s tissues and couldn’t find a single larva that was moving. They left him right in the tube and checked him again an hour later to be sure. There was still no movement.
“His body will absorb the dead organisms in time, and I think the swelling will go down fairly soon. All we can do now is keep an eye on him and let him rest.”
“So he’s cured, do you think?”
“Well, the things are dead.”
Joan carried him all the way to her shelter and put him in the bed in the spare bedroom. When she tucked him in, he was still sound asleep.
She left the shelter and headed back to her office. On the way, she stopped and told security about Eddie Silk—but only that he was upset and had run into the jungle. The guard looked at her as if she were nuts, but she finally convinced him Eddie was stressed over the death of his mother—stressed enough to run into the green. She didn’t say a word about the drugs; she’d worry about that later. She hated to lie, but if he didn’t make it out, it wouldn’t matter much anyway.
16
She’d gone over it in her head a thousand times. Looking down from the shuttle, she’d seen the installation and the clean-cut edge of the jungle’s perimeter. She let the thought, the evil thought, that perhaps she’d missed the installation,
somehow walked past it, exist just long enough to shove it back down into the dark pit from whence it came.
She had to be on course, she just had to be. It couldn’t be that far.
Please let me be on course.
She checked the time. It would be dark in another three hours. She would continue for one more hour, then stop for the night. That would be enough for one day.
The sleeves to her coveralls were frayed and tattered from the constant abrasion of vines and rough limbs on cotton. Her face stung in a dozen places, and she had a patch on her leg that burned like fire. She wanted to take a look at it, but not yet. Just a few more steps then she’d take a little rest.
She finally stopped and sat on a moss-covered limb a full meter thick. She untied the vine from around her ankle and pulled up her pants leg. The rash was right along her shin in a narrow, raised and angry line. It burned when she touched it. She had no idea what had caused it. Her best guess was that some crawler had left a noxious trail on her leg during the night; but, for all she knew, something "hazardous" in a blowing leaf had come into contact with her skin.
She lowered the pants leg and retied the vine around her ankle, promising herself she’d bathe the spot when and if she came across clean water again.
She stared out into the formless mass and wished she could see something else, anything else for only a moment. A wide ocean vista with cool, blowing wind and clean, blue air would be nice.
She snorted at the absurdity of it.
She rose heavily off the limb and continued on. With one stumbling, awkward step after another, she fought her way through the tangle.
The ground under her feet began to get softer and mushier as she walked. When the mud got half-way over her boots, she began to get concerned. She forged ahead a few hundred more meters before she pulled back a wide, heavy frond and saw it.
“Yes!”
There before her was the swamp she’d seen from the shuttle, its still, glass-like water pierced by thousands of plants and trees. The installation couldn’t be more than a few kilometers away. Once she got past the swamp, she’d be home free. She would have her vista, her light and air. The swamp was her last obstacle.
All she had to do was get across it.
* * *
That could be tough. She remembered how long and serpentine the swamp had seemed from the air. It had stretched to the horizon in both directions. There would be no going around it.
She decided to back track to drier ground before she set up camp. She didn’t like the idea of camping too close to a swamp with nightfall approaching. The jungle was bad enough without a million acres of nearby water from which things could crawl.
She found a slightly higher piece of ground well back from the mush and pronounced it good. Building the yurt went slightly faster than it had the night before; she’d learned some things about making it tighter and more bug-resistant. She used more vine and laid the leaves in a heavily overlapped pattern that left fewer spaces. It fell far short of having flow-through ventilation, but she didn’t think she’d suffocate.
With nightfall approaching, she slipped into the yurt and sealed the door behind her. By the pale light of dusk, she ate her last bundle of grapes, dreading with each measured bite, the coming darkness and its promise of frenetic buzzing, whirring and crawling activity.
Munching a grape with one hand, she lightly tested the strength of a leaf with the index finger of the other.
When the first insects started bumping and fluttering against the tent, she lay on her side, curled up and tried to sleep. What seemed like hours later, she managed to doze a little.
Sometime during the night something passed by the yurt with a sound of leaves shaking, up high. It seemed to jump from limb to limb with incredible speed, and she could hear the trees shake, far into the distance, as it hit them, one by one.
In shallow twilight sleep, she imagined and dreamed about the raft she would build that would carry her across the swamp. It was made of neat, clean logs lashed together just right and had an oscillating paddle attached to the back. She worked the paddle back and forth easily and within minutes propelled herself to the dry, raised bank on the far side.
The vision was still with her in the morning when she woke up and crawled out of the yurt. But the pale monotony of the jungle’s fallen and rotted trees and branches literally twisted the spirit from the dream, wrung it out and left it juiceless and dead. There was no way she could mak
e a raft like the one she envisioned. She had no logs, no rope, no paddle, no tools. All she had was a dream; a stupid dream turning into a lie before her eyes.
She wolfed down a bundle of grapes and headed for the swamp.
She slogged across the mud flats, walking on logs and branches when she could. She’d just climbed up on a thick, fallen tree trunk when something bolted from the other side of it and dashed toward the water. It took her a second to recognize it as one of the horse-things she’d seen the night before last. The creature had probably come to drink, and she’d surprised it. The creature galloped right into the swamp, splashing loudly; and when the water got so deep it could no longer leap, it started to swim, its head held high. The encounter left her unnerved all the way down to her feet.
“Chicken,” she said, smiling at it.
She watched as the creature turned to parallel the bank for a short distance, then turn toward shore.
Suddenly, with a single yelp of distress, the animal vanished beneath the surface without a trace. There was a massive swirl and swell at the spot suggesting something huge under the water—then nothing.
“So much for swimming across. Sorry horse.”
The fallen tree she was standing on lay all the way out into the water where its thick, broken branches stuck up and out, dead and rotting. She walked carefully out along its rot-slickened surface, watching as the trunk slowly sank in the black water, and the swamp bottom faded, then finally dropped off into blackness. She was still twenty or thirty steps from the tree’s branches.
“That’s far enough, Donna,” she whispered.
The water under the trunk wasn’t opaque, but it was deep, black and shadowy. The idea of being down in it made her shudder. Looking into its dark and menacing depths filled her with an apprehension greater than any the jungle itself could spawn. She could imagine the little evil things down in there bumping against her skin, biting her, attaching to her, squirming into her orifices.
She wanted to run away. She wanted to beat something with her fists. This was impossible. The big monster was nothing. There was no way she could bring herself to submerge herself in that evil, squirming stew. She opened her mouth to swear a stream, but sighed a deep and loose-jawed sigh instead. If she was going to live, she had to find a way across, even if it meant bathing in that scary water—big horrible thing and little scary things be damned.
She stood there, as still as one of the branches, and studied the situation. The swamp was peaceful and primordial on the surface. A thin layer of mist hung like a veil over it. The swamp was too wide and too overgrown to see the far side, but she guessed it was less than a kilometer away. There were wide spaces to navigate through where no plants grew above the water line. She guessed those were the deeper channels. The horse-like creature had been grabbed in just such a channel. As appealing as the channels were at first glance, she decided not to use them under any circumstances.
It made sense that activity like splashing attracted the big bastard. Maybe it took a lot of splashing to get its attention. If she knew what its attack threshold was, she might be able to sneak past it.
That was it. Float quietly past the big monster and keep the small ones from wriggling up my ass. Sure . . .
She turned around, being careful of her footing and walked back toward shore. When she was clear of the water, she hopped down into the mud and slogged back to dry ground.
I’m dead.
* * *
She found a tree limb and sat on it. From where she was she could see a patch of swamp water through the foliage. The thin layer of mist, level with her line of sight, looked like a white line drawn across the scene.
As she stared, her anger grew. She’d come this far and now this last barrier stood in her way, mocking her. She hated it. She hated the length and breadth of it. She hated everything in it.
Think.
Stilts were out. If she tried to swim, the thing would catch her and eat her. She couldn’t fly or climb over it.
Raft. Somehow. Somehow, build a raft and paddle with my hands as gently as I can. Stick to the shallows where the plants grow. Become a piece of floating debris moving slowly across. It might take me days to get to the other side. But I might make it.
She yanked a big leaf from the branch above her head and looked at it. It was heavily veined and tough. She tore it in half. The leaf itself was thick, leathery and porous. It would float like a sonofabitch.
She tore a couple more leaves off and wadded them up into a ball about the size of her head. Then, using her knees to help hold it, she tied the ball up with a piece of vine. She hefted it. It was light and tough.
She carried the ball back along the fallen tree until she was over water and dropped it in. It splashed quietly and bobbed once then rolled over. It floated high in the water.
“Excellent.”
She lay down on the trunk and retrieved it, then picked a likely looking spot in the closest channel and heaved the ball over the branches into it. The ball smacked loudly, splashed and bobbed. A moment later a familiar swell and heave of the water under it gave the monster away. There was a quick, loud sucking sound, and the ball disappeared, only to float up a moment later in pieces.
“That answers that question.”
She went back and started to visualize what she had to do, what she’d need and what the raft had to look like.
Vines and leaves are a jungle girl’s best friends.
When the raft was done, she wouldn’t want to haul it any farther than she had to, so she picked a dry spot as close to the mud flat as she could get to build it. She stomped the area flat and uprooted what she could until she had a good place to work.
The raft would need a frame made of one central piece and at least two cross members. They wouldn’t have to be huge; just light and tough. She chose the straight stalks of the same pulpy plants she used for her tents. She picked one and bent it back and forth until it broke, then twisted it and worked it around until it tore off close to the ground. She started to trim off the smaller limbs but left them in place; they could only help to hold the leaves in place.
She ripped a few more stalks out of the ground and laid them out in a design she thought would do, adjusted them, added another one, played with it, and finally got what she thought would work. By the time she was finished, her already bruised and blistered hands ached even more.
The structure would have the shape of a canoe with outriggers. She would lie prone on the middle part and paddle gently with her arms in the spaces between canoe and outriggers. She would cover the entire raft with a canopy, like a floating blind. If she were quiet, it might just work. If she could stay in the shallows, she could use a pole and shove her way along. A pole with a hook on one end to grab with would be even better, quieter.
She started to gather her building materials in great armfuls. There was no shortage. In an hour, she’d stripped all the pulpy leaves she could reach from the plants in the area and had a pile almost as tall as she was. Vines were next; and before she stopped to eat, she had miles of thin, tough vines to work with.
She started by binding the cross members together as tightly as she could. Then, layer at a time, she strapped rolled-up bundles of leaves to the cross members, lashing each one on tight. She worked until her hands were stiff and her arms ached. By dusk, the thing actually looked as she’d imagined it. When she lifted one corner, it felt light and strong; she would have no trouble hauling it to the water. She’d widened and flattened the middle part enough so that when she lay down, she would have a comfortable platform to support her. She could even roll over and lie on her back if it turned out she’d have to spend the night on the raft.
She decided to start on the canopy in the morning since it was getting dark. She walked down to the swamp’s edge and pulled up some of the onions she’d seen earlier. She washed them off and plucked a few bundles of grapes. It wasn’t gourmet eating, but it was filling and hydrating.
That night she hear
d more of the violent movement going through the tangle around her. Whatever it was didn’t sound friendly. It seemed to come from the same direction as the night before, and she counted at least six of the whatever-they-were's passing through. One sounded low, almost touching the yurt as it stormed past. She couldn’t tell if they were flying or running.
She slept deeply that night, and dreamed a nightmare of awful creatures that chased her down and ate her alive. She awoke with a start to the pale, silent light of dawn, and once again was thankful for the safe passing of the night.
By mid-morning, the raft was nearly finished. The domelike canopy wasn’t as tight as she would have liked, but it would serve to hide her from above, as planned; and by blocking the light, it would at least slightly hide her arms from below when she paddled. She had a good window up front and one on each side. These she could seal with a leaf if necessary. The canopy was open in the back so she could enter, and she included an extra bundle of leaves and vines to seal it once she got onboard. She also stacked a thick bundle of leaves as a rest for her head as she paddled. As a final touch, she tied clusters of sticks and branches and pieces of vines to the outriggers. Once she was afloat, she could tie them off, pointing down into the water as additional camouflage for her arms.
She made a rough net to hold a larder of grapes and onions; this she filled to overflowing and lashed to the left outrigger.
The last item was the pole, made of the same tough stalks she’d used on the raft’s cross-members. She lashed one side of a forked branch to the end, backwards, as a grappling hook.
To haul the contraption down to the swamp, she tied a vine across the front of the outriggers, stepped inside the loop, put it against her hips and pulled. The going was better than she thought. The lightweight craft slid easily over the plants and grass in the mud flats. Once or twice, the raft jammed against a stump, but she easily freed it and soon had it against the fallen tree—her launching point.
After she climbed up on the tree, she tugged and yanked the raft along, trying to keep it from binding against the moss-covered trunk. When she reached water and the craft actually began to float, she tied it off.
