Black Mariah: El Desaguadero River, Nicaragua (Black Mariah Series, Season 1 Book 2)

by Burke Bryant

  Contents

  Defy and Persist

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Operation Black Mariah

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About this book

  Season 1, Episode 2

  When a member of a private research team deep in the Nicaraguan jungle succumbs to an unknown contaminant, the team is desperate to find help in the razed villages along the El Desaguadero River.

  After a team member succumbs to a fatal respiratory infection, Chris Rake is forced to sail his research team upriver through dense Nicaraguan jungle in search of help. Instead of medicine, they find a deserted village still-smoldering from the fire of a mass grave and one survivor: a young blind girl too in shock to explain what’s happened to her people. Down one man and with a vessel unfit for sailing, the team sets out on foot with the girl in tow. A plane crash in the middle of the night sends Chris and his team to investigate another horrific scene where again they find only one survivor—a Nicaraguan woman named Maria.

  When a survivor of the blind girl’s village is the next to perish, Chris’s suspicions demand answers. But when Donovan confronts Nadia and demands to know who she is and what she knows, Maria has a question of her own: who is he, and what was he doing so deep in the Nicaraguan jungle?

  Operation Black Mariah has begun.

  Black Mariah

  Season 1, Episode 2

  Burke Bryant

  El Desaguadero River, Nicaragua

  Defy and Persist

  Every day, we killed them by the millions. We controlled, eradicated, exterminated, and culled them, because to us they were unnecessary.

  They were problematic.

  They were pests.

  To eradicate something is to pull it up by its roots and do away with it completely.

  Never in a million years did we think it would happen to us.

  Never did we imagine that one day someone or something would do the same thing to us. Never did we imagine we would become the pests.

  When the first wave began, like a black wind of death they filled our skies with trails of chemicals our bodies could not fight. They put poison into our rivers and oceans and lakes.

  They attacked our cities, our suburbs. They even came to our doors, thousands and thousands of them, and sprayed toxins.

  We didn’t know who they were or what they were or where they came from—or why they were doing this to us—but as we stood on the brink of extinction enough of us decided to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and find a way to organize, to defy, to persist.

  And that is exactly what we did.

  On a quiet Thursday afternoon in the year 2025, the eradication of the human race began…and so did our fight for survival.

  –Jolene Riley, “Defiance”

  Indiana

  Dedicated to my faithful companion Five9, who laid there next to me during this entire journey, and to my parents who left me alone and ignored me until I had completed it.

  1

  The boat was sinking fast. The raging river had already begun to swallow everything inside the flimsy vessel, including Grace Comely, who lay stiff and unbreathing in two inches of rising water. Nick Brannon hovered above the woman, his expression grim.

  “Even if I can bring her back, we're taking on water too fast. We'll all drown at this rate.”

  The crash of the river and the loud whine of the overworked, two-stroke engine was almost loud enough to drown out Nick's voice right along with the woman in the belly of the small boat. Grace was turning blue, her body thin and lifeless.

  “Rake, do you hear me?” Nick's tone had grown desperate.

  “I hear you.”

  Nick was right. The fiberglass boat was taking on water, and a lot of it. A mile or so back, a crosscurrent had caught the back of the boat and spun it into a rock, causing a small section of the aft to splinter into pieces. Now a two-inch, unpatchable wound hemorrhaged water by the gallon through the boat's hull.

  Chris Rake wiped away a sheen of sweat from his furrowed brow, struggling with the damaged craft. Piloting a small boat down a river was one thing—he'd done that a thousand times during his six-year stint in the Navy as a Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewman. Piloting a small boat with a gaping hole in its hull and a dying woman in its center down a thrashing waterway was something else entirely. A wave of water smashed against the hull, spilling another inch of liquid into the boat. Chris felt the vessel drop deeper into the river as its nose began to dive. He was losing his ability to control the boat—fast.

  Shit.

  Caroline Hunter, Chris's second-in-command, gripped the hull. Her knuckles were white, but her eyes stayed locked ahead, scanning for signs of the village. She shook her head, flinging water from her cropped blond hair. “Just get her to breathe, Brannon. She'll manage the rest.”

  “Doing my best here, Hunter.”

  “Do it better.”

  The boat pulled hard to the right as Chris narrowly missed a large log barreling toward them in the turbulent current. He almost hadn't seen that one. It had been close.

  Too close.

  Caroline's iron grip on the hull came loose, but she recovered quickly, scowling. “Careful, Rake,” she snapped. “Some of us don't have all nine lives left.”

  Chris tightened his mouth and said nothing, too focused on the task at hand to argue. Besides, if Caroline was keeping count … well, Chris was fairly certain he'd used up more of his lives than both his two teammates combined.

  Another downed branch sped toward them in the swirling water, and Chris yanked hard on the wheel. The boat pulled sharply to the left, this time dipping to the point that water flooded over the edge. Four inches. Things were getting dire; any more water and the weight alone might pull them under.

  The rough movement had caused the band in her hair to come loose, and Grace's long gray hair wrapped around her face like wet spider webs. Nick brushed it into a murky cloud behind her head and checked for a pulse—nothing—then resumed chest compressions.

  The boat's motor began to sputter. Chris peeled his gaze off the water long enough to meet Caroline's eyes. He'd worked with the woman long enough to decode the message in them: we're fucked.

  Not yet. He jerked his head toward Nick.

  Caroline understood. “Brannon, talk to me.”

  “I don't have time for small talk, Hunter,” Nick managed between compressions. Sweat ran in rivulets down his body. “I'm doing better, remember?”

  Nick was exhausted. Chris knew it. But he also knew Grace's fate depended on two things: Nick's ability to bring her back and whether or not Chris could get them to the village upriver without the boat capsizing and pulling them all under with it. If he'd had any other choice—any other choice at all—he'd never have taken to the river, not in these conditions. But there had been no choice, and if he didn't get Grace to the hospital at the village they were currently headed to, she had no chance. As it was, they didn't even know what was wrong with her. One second she'd been fine. The next, her temperature had increased to 107, her lungs had seized, and she could barely breathe. She'd been unconscious soon after, and then she'd stopped breathing altogether.

  “Keep working,” he barked at Nick
.

  “Rake, she—”

  “Keep her alive! We haven't made it this far only to lose one of our own.”

  Nick cracked the tension from his neck and leaned over Grace. He resumed the same CPR pattern—three breaths, three compressions. Pause. Three more breaths, three more compressions.

  Grace didn't stir.

  The boat sank lower into the water. The sound of the engine got deeper as it began to bog down. Four waterproof packs floated in the boat. Caroline quickly gathered them afraid they were going to spill over into the river and be lost forever.

  If Grace dies— No, Chris refused to think about what her death would mean.

  After another series of compressions, the woman's eyes suddenly fluttered open. Grace's age-veined hands reached for her throat as she gasped for air. Her gaze was glassy, unfocused, and she looked half-drowned in the puddle of water at the hull of the boat. A thin string of phlegm hung from her bottom lip. But she was breathing.

  “We've got her back!” Nick helped the woman up into a sitting position and gave Chris the all-clear. “Welcome back, Grace.”

  Welcome back is right.

  Grace slumped against the wall of the boat, and Nick used his weight to brace her against a cross-section of wood used as a bench. She was breathing, but if they didn't get help soon, it wouldn't be for long. Her fever had been high, but the chilling temperature of the river had cooled her down …

  “Rake, look!”

  Chris's eyes followed the direction of Caroline's finger. Just around the next bend in the river, smoke. The village. They were close.

  Thank God. Chris allowed himself a measured sigh of relief. Grace was breathing. The village was only a little further upriver, maybe half a mile. He just needed to keep them afloat a little while longer.

  But something wasn't right. The smoke was too thick for the everyday campfires of the small villages that lined the river this far north. Too heavy. And despite the rushing sounds of the water and the whine of the boat's straining engine, the jungle around them was too quiet, too still. Humans weren't the only ones who inhabited this area; monkeys, alligators, snakes … Chris should have been able to see evidence of the jungle's wildlife around them. He scanned the treetops, tried to find the familiar shapes of fish in the water below.

  Nothing.

  Dread crawled over Chris's skin, making him shiver in the intense heat. What had happened here?

  “Rake!”

  Caroline's voice startled Chris back to the struggling boat, the raging river. Grace was still conscious, but they had taken on more water, and the vessel was sinking. Its lip was now only a few inches above the waterline. Caroline held on for dear life. Her hands gripped the hull, one arm looped through the packs securing them to her body.

  “Rake, we need to—” Nick cut in.

  “I got it.” Chris eyed the smoke ahead. The speed of the current had propelled them, and they were close now. What could have produced such a dense plume? An acrid scent hung on the air.

  Chris didn't have time to worry about it now. He searched for a safe space in the shoreline, but the current was too wild, too fast, for him to see. Finally, a break appeared in the dense foliage at the edge of the river, a narrow opening big enough for the boat. He cranked the wheel hard.

  “Hold on,” Chris yelled. The boat crashed into the shore. All four of its passengers were hurled into the standing water in the boat's waist as the craft rebounded. The river tried to suck it back out, but Chris was on his feet. He jumped into the shallow water at the shore's edge, relished for just a moment the feel of the firm ground beneath his boots, and then kept moving. Caroline threw him a rope, and he dug his heels into the soft mud and began to trudge to shore, bringing the boat along with him.

  The water's current beat against his back, pummeled his knees. He slipped, and the boat began to pull away. Shit. Chris summoned what was left of his strength and pulled, using all of his might to bring the sinking vessel closer to land. The rope cut into his hand, bits of fiber splintering into his skin, but he continued to hold.

  When the boat's keel made purchase on land, Caroline jumped out. She flung three backpacks—Chris's, hers, Nick's—to shore, then sloshed back into the water to help Grace out of the boat with another pack on her back. The woman’s hands were still clutched around her camera case, but Caroline tore it loose, left it in the water swelling in the boat. Nick tried to keep the vessel steady as Caroline wrapped her arms around Grace's waist and half-carried, half-dragged the woman to shore.

  She sat Grace against the trunk of a twisted fern and leaped to help Chris with the rope. “That was a close one, Rake. Even for you.”

  Caroline grimaced as she watched the rope burn through Chris's hands, peeling the flesh of his palms into bloody ribbons. Unable to spare any strength for words, he blinked his response to Caroline—tell me about it.

  Nick readied to jump out of the boat, comm pack in his hand, but a wave caught the vessel, sending it thrashing back into the current. The impact ripped the rope from Chris's hands as the boat was thrust back into the water, Nick still on board. Before anyone could react, Nick was swept downriver.

  Blood dripped from Chris's fingers. He lurched forward, but Caroline caught his arm.

  “No! We can't risk losing both of you,” she hissed. “I've got him.”

  They both watched as the boat smashed into a rock. It spun, lifted into the air, and crashed back down, capsizing in its own wake. Nick was hurled into the turbulent river and instantly swept underwater.

  Chris gasped.

  “Brannon!” Caroline screamed.

  “I've got Grace,” Chris yelled. “Go!”

  She took off down the shoreline without hesitation, running in the direction the current had taken Nick. Chris watched her as she ran, moving deftly amongst the tangled roots and gnarled arms of the jungle trees. She disappeared into the row of banyan trees and out of his line of sight.

  “Chris?” Grace's voice was small, almost childlike, from her position on the ground.

  Chris squatted down beside the woman. This was the first time he'd had the chance to examine her since they'd gotten into the boat. She was soaking wet and looked as if she'd aged years in the past few minutes. Lines cut through her weathered, pale face.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  He couldn't bring himself to tell her the truth, not all of it. Instead, he reached down and took her hand, stroking his thumb against the outside of her palm. "A lot. I'm glad you came back to us. We're here to get you help."

  A shuddering in the trees announced someone's approach, and seconds later, Nick and Caroline emerged from the tree line, wet and out of breath, but alive. Caroline gave Chris a thumbs up. All good.

  Chris exhaled deeply.

  “That was close,” Nick breathed. “Too close.”

  Nick caught Chris’s eye “We lost our comms bag. Swept downriver. I couldn’t recover it.”

  “Sat phone?”

  Nick bowed his head. “That’s probably gone too. Soaked.”

  “We’ll figure it out. You okay?”

  Nick nodded.

  Without comms there would be no way to communicate with each other if they got separated, and without the satellite phone their ability to reach the outside world would now be impossible. The phone was also a lifeline for their loved ones in the case they had an emergency. Now—nothing in or out.

  Caroline's gaze jumped from Grace to the river and back to Chris. "What now, Rake?"

  Rake starred in the direction of the village, studying the gray smoke billowing into the sky just beyond the bamboo grove separating the river’s edge from the village. "Now we find out what's going on here."

  2

  The village lay just ahead.

  Chris led his team down a winding, dirt path crisscrossed with tree roots and undergrowth. Animal trails cut through the dense grove. Caroline and Nick followed a few feet behind Chris, carrying Grace and what little of their gear Chris hadn’t been
able to handle. The team moved swiftly through the jungle without speaking, their feet only barely scuffing the earth as bamboo stalks clapped together behind them, echoing in a haunting, ominous sound that rustled through the dense patches of dark green overhead.

  As the four broke through the tall strands of foliage, the village emerged into view. Chris, Caroline, and Nick froze, staring in wide-eyed dismay at the sight before them. Grace, barely conscious, groaned at the sudden stop.

  The village was gone. Burned. The small huts, the crop of outbuildings, the hospital … It was as if the Devil himself had passed through here, razing anything and everything in his path.

  Don’t let her see, Chris had half a second to think, but the thought came too late. Even with her eyes mostly closed, Grace’s gaze flitted in the direction of what used to be the village, and Chris stepped in front of his team, obscuring her view.

  Caroline’s grip slipped around the gear she was carrying, and the bags thudded against the ground at her feet. Her voice stabbed into the quiet as she quickly readjusted to keep her hold on Grace. “My God. What happened here?”

  “The hospital—where’s the fucking hospital?” Nick asked, readjusting the sick woman’s weight on his shoulder.

  Chris scanned the area, then pointed at a pile of rubble in the center of a ring of still-burning rubble. “There. It used to be there.”