Jake Atlas and the Hunt for the Feathered God

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  “Dad—”

  “You can do this, Jake!”

  My feet hit the top of a tree. From high above, the canopy had looked soft and welcoming, like a bed of moss. But the moment I hit it I knew this was going to hurt. Branches slapped and scratched me as I fell. My head struck another branch, and then I was plummeting to the forest floor. My cry was cut short as I jolted to a stop, hanging thirty feet above the ground. I looked up, surprised to see that I was still clinging onto Dad’s ankle. Above him, the parachute had caught in the lowest branch of the tree.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Dad, great…”

  “Keep hold of my boot. I’ll lift you with me as I climb the ropes.”

  Thick vines, tantalizingly close, hung down to a stream that gurgled through a bed of leaves and fallen branches. Some sort of animal sat by the water, looking up at me. My eyes were watery, but I swear it was a big cat. The creature vanished into the forest as Mum and Pan charged from the other direction.

  “Jake! John! Hang on!”

  “We are hanging on!” Dad roared.

  “Don’t let go!” Pan added.

  “That’s rubbish advice!” I yelled.

  “And don’t look down.”

  “Stop saying stupid things!”

  “Fine,” Pan snapped. “Then I won’t help you.”

  “How can you help me, unless you’ve got a ladder in your utility belt?”

  “I’m not catching you when you fall.”

  “Pandora,” Dad barked. “You will catch Jake when he falls.”

  “Stop saying when I fall. I might not fall.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Jake,” Mum replied. “Of course you’re going to fall.”

  “Dad’s going to climb up the parachute. Aren’t you, Dad?”

  “To be honest, Jake, I was just saying that. You’ll fall before I reach the branches. But your jungle suit will take some of the blow, and your mother is going to catch you. You too, Pandora.”

  “Not until Jake apologizes,” Pan replied.

  My grip slipped on Dad’s boot. They were right: I couldn’t hang here much longer. “Dad, if you swing me I think I can grab those vines.”

  “You’re not Tarzan!” Pan shouted.

  Dad refreshed his grip on the parachute ropes. He swung his legs – just a little at first, and then harder, to gain momentum. I swung with him, dangling from his leg with one arm as I reached for the vines with the other. I missed, and cursed.

  “Watch your language, Jake,” Mum called.

  “Mum,” I grunted, “I’m trying to save my life!”

  “Even so.”

  Dad swung me harder. My grip slipped further down his boot. I couldn’t hold on…

  “This time, Jake,” he urged. “Grab it.”

  I let go, hoping to flip from Dad to the vine like a trapeze artist. Only, my weight tore the vine from the tree. Clinging on, I swung over Mum and Pan, smashed into another tree and then splashed face forward into the stream.

  Mum dragged me onto the bank. I lay on my back, looking up at my family through a haze of pain and … well, just pain.

  “That went well,” I groaned.

  Pan laughed. “Welcome to the jungle, brother.”

  14

  “We are now in the most hostile environment on the planet. Step only where I step. Stay alert for everything. Do not wander off for any reason. If I say stop, stop. If I say run, run. Do you understand?”

  “What if you don’t say Simon says?”

  Mum stared at Pan. “Even then, Pandora.”

  I’d expected her to snap at my sister. I’d wanted her to, so things felt more normal. But Mum’s voice was calm, her eyes narrow. The last time I’d seen her so focused was in Egypt. That meant we were in big trouble.

  We’d only just set foot in the jungle, and already things were going badly. Someone had shot us from the sky – who, and why? Had Pedro survived? And where was all our kit? I’d hurled the bags from the plane, so it had to be here somewhere. I’d thrown our food supplies, water purifiers and tents out too. This would have been hard enough with that stuff. Now all we had were our utility belts, smart-goggles and Pedro’s jungle suits.

  Dad put a hand on my shoulder. “Just stay alert. Losing concentration is the number one killer in the jungle.”

  I nodded, adding it to the list of number one killers in the jungle, while wondering which one would actually kill us. At least we had the tracker to guide us to Alpha Squad’s signal. Dad slid the device from his belt and typed a code into its screen. It still worked: two flashing dots showed on a green background.

  “The red dot is us,” he said. “Blue is Alpha Squad. Or whatever is left of their corpses, which I doubt will be much after the wild boars have—”

  “John,” Mum said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Let’s get moving,” Mum urged. “We have a long walk.”

  Walk. I was used to walking. I did it all the time – one foot in front of the other. No problems. But there wasn’t much walking in a jungle. The best I could manage was a trudge, over the sodden, muddy ground. With each step, my boots sank deeper into a carpet of leaves and rotten wood. Everything was wet, even the air. The mist that floated around us was so warm it felt more like steam, as if we were trekking through a giant sauna.

  Pedro had given us machete knives for hacking at all the plants, but I’d chucked those out of the plane too, so we cleared a path as best as we could with our hands. We yanked back giant ferns and huge waxy palm leaves, and pushed away hanging seedpods and long thorny shoots that were like evil bamboo. Sometimes we crawled under tangles of vines, other times we scrambled over fallen trunks.

  Pedro had warned us that it was simple to get lost here, and I quickly understood why. I could easily imagine myself walking off alone and not finding the way back. Light came down in weird ways, never just as light. Sometimes it fell in thin spears stabbing through gaps in the trees, at others in stripes that shone through spiky palm fronds like sunlight shining through blinds. Just occasionally, where the trees cleared, light fell in great big spotlights, like a tractor beam in an alien abduction. But most of the time there was simply no sunlight; the jungle canopy blocked it all, and we walked in almost constant shadow.

  To make things worse, the ground always looked the same, and gazing up all we saw were branches and vines broken by dark flashes where animals scrabbled among the trees.

  “What was that?” Pan asked.

  “A howler monkey,” Dad replied. “Don’t touch that plant!”

  Pan snapped her hand back from the ferny branch. “Why not?”

  “It’s poisonous.”

  “A plant is poisonous?”

  “Strychnos toxifera. Very poisonous.”

  “Which bit of it?”

  “Every bit.”

  My sister became convinced that everything in the jungle was out to get her, especially the things that moved. For a place that seemed so unpleasant, it was incredible just how many creatures had made it their home. There was so much noise, it was like a constant alarm going off. There were chirps and bleeps and blurts from insects, screeches and howls from high in the trees, and menacing growls that were usually far off, but occasionally worryingly close.

  “Is that beetle poisonous?” Pan asked.

  “No,” Dad replied.

  “What about those ants?”

  “No.”

  “That frog?”

  “Only if you lick it.”

  “Why would I lick it?”

  “Just don’t.”

  “What about that snake?”

  Dad stopped and nudged his glasses up his nose. “What snake?”

  “The one that just slid under that bush. It was black with a yellow diamond pattern.”

  Dad stared at Pan for a moment, and I swear his face turned a little green. “We should walk faster,” he said.

  “Please tell me she didn’t say yellow diamond pattern?” Mum called.
>
  “Just walk faster!” Dad yelled.

  Things buzzed and flapped and crawled and wriggled and swung all around me – swarms of weird green flies, beetles as big as mice but with horns like a rhino, giant red ants carrying leaves five times their size. I spotted a monkey with a baby clinging to its chest and another on its back, and a butterfly the size of a dinner plate, with bright patterned wings.

  Slug-like brown leeches stood up on the ends of leaves like over-excited students calling to their teacher, “Me! Me! Pick me!” You should have heard Pan scream when she discovered one on her wrist! She tried to slap it off, but Mum barked at her to stay still. You can’t just slap leeches off. They dig in harder. You’ve gotta burn them off.

  “Pedro gave us a gadget for leeches,” I remembered.

  “Get it!” Pan cried.

  “I chucked it out the plane.”

  Pan swore at me and reached to her utility belt. “I’ll use my sonic force field.”

  “Pandora!” Mum snapped. “That is for emergencies.”

  “This is an emergency!”

  “It is one leech. Stay still. I’ll use my laser cutter.”

  Mum had to get the shot just right so that the beam sizzled the leech rather than Pan’s arm. There was a lot of shouting about that, but she got it bang on every time. I lost track of how many leeches managed to latch onto us, but Mum was pretty handy with her laser cutter. Each of them sizzled and fell away, leaving a smear of blood where it had been sucking.

  The leeches were gross, but they weren’t the real problem. This place was home to all sorts of dangerous creatures – poisonous spiders, venomous snakes, big cats – but there was a reason it was called the Mosquito Coast.

  I swear every single mosquito on the planet was in that jungle. At times the air was thick with them, the noise a constant buzz. They were huge, too, with dangling legs – the size of the daddy-longlegs I was used to back home. I’d thrown our repellent from the plane, so all we could do was swat and curse, pull our shirts up over our chins and slap our legs and arms.

  I’ll be honest, the jungle was pretty awful at first. It seemed like just locating Alpha Squad’s tracker signal was going to use up all of our energy. How could we manage that and find a lost tomb?

  Only Dad seemed to like the place. He kept pointing at bugs or butterflies, and telling us their Latin names, as if we were on a school trip.

  “Have you been in a jungle before, Dad?” I asked.

  “A few of them,” he replied.

  “Where?”

  Dad checked the tracker device and changed our direction to stay on course. “Last time was Malaysia, wasn’t it, Jane?”

  Mum yanked back a tangle of vines. “Don’t bring that up again.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Your father tried to befriend a tribe,” Mum said. “He hoped they might give us the location of a temple if he accepted their offer of hallucinogenic drugs.”

  “What happened?” Pan said.

  “I…” Dad hesitated, choosing his words. “Well, you have to understand that archaeology is as much about interacting with indigenous peoples as it is—”

  “Your father spent two days up a tree thinking he was a monkey,” Mum said.

  Pan and I laughed, and even Mum joined in. I was about to tease Dad about it, but he stopped and raised a hand.

  “Nobody move,” he hissed.

  Mum was at his side in an instant. “What is it?”

  “Alpha Squad’s signal,” Dad replied. “We’re close.”

  He turned a full circle, eyes fixed on the tracker device. The flashing dots were now right on top of each other.

  “Mum, Dad, Pan,” I said. “Move north, east and south. Ten paces in each direction. I’ll take the west.”

  They all looked at me, surprised. I don’t actually know where the command came from; it just blurted out.

  “Ten paces,” Dad agreed. “No one moves out of sight.”

  We split up and moved in separate directions. I didn’t actually know which way was west, so I waited for the others to set off and went the only way left.

  I moved slowly, scanning the ground and looking up to the trees. I turned over a fallen branch, kicked a rock. Ahead, all I saw was solid jungle, so thick it looked almost impenetrable.

  Unless… Was it too impenetrable?

  I took another step, reaching for the wall of leaves and vines. My hand trembled, half expecting something to leap out and bite my fingers. Edging even closer, I slid my hand deeper into the foliage and touched something that was not foliage. It felt like … a net.

  I gripped it and pulled.

  It came away in one go – a camouflage sheet disguised as jungle. Hidden in a clearing behind it was Alpha Squad’s camp. Hammocks hung between trees, and an awning shelter protected high-tech military kit. There was a holosphere screen, and kit bags similar to those Pedro had given us, with food supplies and jungle suits. A large, spider-like machine sat on a camp table. I recognized it from Sami’s tech training – it was a megadrone, a super-strong drone that could lift treasure from tombs. That was cool, but right then I was way more interested in the thing that sat beside the drone.

  A Mars Bar!

  I was about to rush to it, when Dad grasped my shoulder.

  “Don’t move,” he hissed. “Put your smart-goggles on. Infrared.”

  I’d rarely seen him look so serious, so knew this wasn’t the sort of advice I should question. I did as he said, and yelped. My goggles’ infrared view revealed dozens of lasers zigzagging around the clearing. They were alarms, the sort of security you see in bank vaults in movies.

  “Stay here,” Dad instructed.

  He rolled his shoulders and stretched his hamstrings, limbering up to weave his way through the crisscrossing beams to the middle of the camp.

  “John?” Mum said. “Really?”

  Dad looked at her, and then at the beams. “Actually,” he muttered. “Maybe someone else should do this…”

  “I’ll do it,” I volunteered.

  “No,” Mum replied.

  That was all she said, no reason. She didn’t warm up either, just set off into the laser beams, jumping one, ducking under another, rolling and moving again. She reached the holosphere screen and activated it. Several files whooshed up, and a few seconds later the lasers cut out.

  I’d like to tell you that I went into high alert, searching for clues as to what happened to Alpha Squad. In fact, Pan and I both just collapsed into hammocks, scoffing half of the Mars Bar each and agreeing it was the nicest thing either of us had ever eaten. I couldn’t stop myself; the chance to rest was too tempting. Everything ached from the hike – my legs, my back. My head throbbed, and there can’t have been a drop of sweat left in my body.

  It was all I could do to watch as Mum swiped through the files that projected from the holosphere. There were maps of the jungle, satellite photos and images of the Aztec codices that the Snake Lady had bought and destroyed.

  “Is there anything to tell us what happened to Alpha Squad?” I called.

  Mum shook her head. “They sent a status report from this camp on the evening they vanished. They’d searched almost every area of the jungle close to the Storm Peaks for the first marker to the tomb, the Place of the Jaguar, but found nothing.”

  “So what happened to them? This camp doesn’t look like it’s been attacked. And who turned their tracker signal back on?”

  “Maybe just an animal,” Mum suggested.

  Dad had been silent this whole time, tinkering with Alpha Squad’s tracker beacon. He seemed lost in thought, and from the look on his face, they were not good thoughts. He looked at Mum and nudged his glasses back up his nose.

  “It wasn’t an animal,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Howler monkeys are known for their intelligence.”

  “Are they intelligent enough to memorize a four-digit code and key it into the beacon’s touchpad?”

  Even I knew
the answer to that. “So someone came back here two weeks after Alpha Squad vanished,” I said, “and set off the signal. But why?”

  “Yeah,” Pan agreed. “Whoever did it must have known another team would come looking for Alpha Squad.”

  Still Mum and Dad stared at each other across the camp. Dad nodded, and Mum closed her eyes and groaned, and I knew then what they were thinking. I sat up in the hammock, wondering if Pan had realized too. She had.

  “Whoever set off the tracker wanted us to come,” she said.

  “The signal was bait,” I added.

  Mum rose from the holosphere and rummaged in one of Alpha Squad’s kit bags. She brought out a machete and stared at her reflection in its blade.

  “We’ve been lured into a trap,” she said.

  15

  None of us slept much that night. Somehow it was even more humid than in the day, and my clothes were damp and smelly from the trek. We pulled mosquito nets over our hammocks so that we hung in protective cocoons, but I still heard the things buzzing at my ears. Each time I swatted, my hammock swung and I tumbled with a curse to the jungle floor.

  And then there were the other noises. The jungle had been loud during the day, but at night it really came alive. Dad had set up Alpha Squad’s laser alarms around our camp so nothing big could get in without us knowing. But there were things close by. Thousands of things. I heard snarls and growls, hoots and howls, all around us in stereo. I heard rustling in the trees and shuffling among leaves. I heard twigs snap yards from our camp. Pan cried out in fright several times, and I wondered if she was sleeping with her smart-goggles set to night vision. I was.

  Mum and Dad stayed up in shifts, keeping watch. I offered to take a shift, but Mum told me off for not sleeping.

  Somehow I did fall asleep. I was too exhausted not to. When I woke, sunlight trickled through branches, stinging my eyes. My head throbbed, and my back ached from the position I’d curled myself into in the hammock. My mouth was so dry it felt like I was chewing sand.

  “Water,” I gasped.

  Dad handed me one of Alpha Squad’s flasks. The water was purified with iodine, so it tasted like metal, but I downed every drop.