Jake Atlas and the Hunt for the Feathered God

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  “Get some more rest,” Dad said. “Exhaustion is the number one killer in the jungle.”

  I wanted to, but I was too uncomfortable, fidgety. I tried to climb out of my hammock, but messed it up again and thumped to the ground with my loudest curse of the trip so far.

  Breakfast was one of Alpha Squad’s vacuumpacked rations of dried food. Some were supposed to be porridge, others beef stew, but none of the foil packs said which was which, and they all just tasted of cardboard. I didn’t mind – it was food and we were hungry.

  We didn’t wash, but Mum insisted we brush our teeth. I think she liked having something she could control. We kept our jungle suits on – they were our best protection in this place – but Mum made us change our socks for fresh ones from Alpha Squad’s packs, insisting that foot rot was the number one killer in the jungle.

  They were trying to act calm, as if everything was going to plan, but they were both on edge. Mum kept stroking her amulet and saying weirdly optimistic things like “Looks like it will be a lovely sunny day,” or “Perhaps we’ll spot a toucan today.” They hoped we’d forgotten that someone had lured us here. Was it the same person that shot down our plane? Were they out there now, watching us? It didn’t really matter. We had to find the tomb of Quetzalcoatl and recover its emerald tablet.

  Up until that morning the jungle had been mostly hard work. But things definitely improved as we ate our cardboard sludge breakfast and made plans. Mum said Pan could help, but I was surprised she let me get involved too. Perhaps she thought it would keep my mind off the whole “we’ve-been-led-into-a-trap” thing.

  We sat around the holosphere studying maps and projections of the Aztec codices, as well as Alpha Squad’s notes, which left Mum seriously unimpressed.

  “What sort of treasure hunters were these people?” she asked. “They were just randomly searching rivers near the Storm Peaks.”

  “Is that not good?” I asked.

  Mum looked at me, surprised. “Did you not study the codices?”

  “I… Which bits?”

  “Jake doesn’t read Nahuatl, Mum,” Pan said. “Neither do I.”

  Mum didn’t look convinced that that was a good enough excuse. “In the documents, the Aztecs describe two rivers close to the Storm Peaks as the location of the Place of the Jaguar.”

  “You mean, where the second marker is hidden?” I asked. “So which river should we look along?”

  “Exactly,” Dad said. “The marker can’t be in two places. What Alpha Squad don’t seem to have known is that the Aztec script is incredibly literal. Two rivers means two rivers.”

  “You mean… What do you mean?”

  “A junction of two rivers.”

  Dad enlarged an area of the map on the holosphere, zooming in on one of the coffee-coloured rivers where it weaved between the two Storm Peaks, and then joined another, much wider river.

  “There are two major rivers in this part of the jungle,” he explained, “and they meet right here.”

  The projections gleamed off his glasses as he zoomed in even closer to where the two brown squiggles came together to form a single, larger brown squiggle.

  “This is where we need to look,” he said.

  I was trying to act cool, but I had goose bumps all up my arms. Alpha Squad had spent six weeks searching for the Place of the Jaguar. My parents might have found it by looking at a map for two minutes.

  “Is that close?” Pan asked.

  Dad studied the map again. “I’d say an eight-hour trek. If we set off first thing tomorrow, we should reach it by—”

  He flinched back as another hologram shot up from the screen – a small flashing dot that expanded into a larger file. A face appeared on a live video feed. I recognized the smug smile instantly; it made me want to punch something.

  Even on the fuzzy video, the Snake Lady’s black eyes seemed to glint.

  “There you all are!” she said. “Wonderful. How is the jungle? Jake, you haven’t been causing trouble, have you?”

  I swore at her. She stuck out her lip, pretending to be sad.

  “How beastly,” she said. “Now tell me, what is your mission report?”

  Dad held her gaze, refusing to look intimidated. “We’re here to find the emerald tablet. We don’t have to report to you until we have.”

  Her smile vanished, but her eyes flashed even brighter. “Oh, don’t you? Don’t you, John? I say you do. You work for me, and my employees provide me with regular status updates.”

  “We don’t work for you,” Pan spat. “How do we even know that Sami is still alive?”

  The Snake Lady turned the camera, and there was Sami in the hospital bed, hooked up to life support machines.

  I heard Mum gasp as she saw her old friend, and Dad’s hands tightened into bloodless balls at his sides. They had come here to save Sami, but until then, I guessed, they hadn’t realized how much danger he was really in. Our friend’s condition seemed to have got worse. He looked even paler than when I’d last seen him, except for his veins, which were as dark as if they were flowing with ink.

  A drumbeat grew faster inside me, a mix of anger and guilt. Mum must have noticed how close I was to lashing out. She gripped my arm, urging me to calm down.

  “Your teeth,” Mum said.

  The Snake Lady turned the camera back to herself. “Excuse me?”

  “If Sami dies,” Mum added, “I will find you and break every one of your perfect teeth.”

  Mum meant it, no question, but the Snake Lady’s mouth curled into another smile. She ran her tongue along her front teeth, and whispered into the camera as if she was telling us a secret.

  “They are all fake anyway.” She clapped her hands. “Now, your status report?”

  “Someone followed us from the airport,” Dad replied. “Our plane was shot down and Pedro is dead.”

  That wiped the smile off her face! It was the first time I’d ever seen the Snake Lady look thrown.

  “I… Can you repeat that?” she said.

  “You heard,” Pan replied. “Did you have us shot down?”

  “No,” she said. “Why would we?”

  I believed her. The People of the Snake wanted us to find the tablet. They had no reason to sabotage our mission. And anyway, her face told us that she had known nothing of our troubles so far. The glint in her eyes had been replaced by confusion.

  “Listen to me,” the Snake Lady said. Her voice had lost its fake sugary tone. She sounded deadly serious. “You need to be very careful. There are—”

  “Thanks for the advice,” Mum interrupted. “Status report over.”

  She flicked away the hologram, cutting off the video feed.

  “Sami…” Pan muttered. “He looked bad.”

  Dad took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Mum glanced at me, and then turned away, gazing into the trees as she stroked her amulet She’d only given me a quick look, but it felt like a long, hard stare. Was she thinking what I was? That it was all my fault?

  “Three days left,” Mum said, finally. “Leaving us one day to get the tablet back home. It’s an eight-hour march to the Place of the Jaguar. We need to get moving now.”

  “What was that?” Pan cried. “Over there, something moved!”

  Dad rushed to where Pan was pointing. He slid on his smart-goggles and scanned the jungle beyond the camp.

  “What did you see, Pandora?” he called.

  “I thought… Something moved between the trees.”

  Dad looked to Mum, who frowned. From the look on her face she believed Pan had seen something. Or someone.

  She grabbed one of Alpha Squad’s rucksacks and began filling it with supplies for our trek. “Boots on,” she barked. “We leave in five minutes.”

  16

  I don’t know how far we trekked. Mum had said the march to the Place of the Jaguar would take eight hours, but eight hours in the jungle felt like eighty anywhere else. All I know is that it was a long, long day.

  It wasn�
�t just the physical effort of trudging through mud or clambering over fallen trees. The jungle exhausted your mind, too. There were so many things growing all around us. Each tree was its own mini jungle, its trunk covered in mosses and ferns. It was claustrophobic, like we were imprisoned by nature. I couldn’t wait to reach the river, where I could see the sky and spread my arms without fear of being bitten by some insect or other.

  Pan was never an outdoors person at the best of times, but you should have seen her that day. She’d shoved headphones in her ears and had the music turned up so loud that when she swore at a bug – which happened a lot – it came out as a shout. Every now and then I noticed her hand move to her utility belt, and wondered if she might use her sonic force field to blast away the mosquitoes.

  Even with nets over our heads, the mosquitoes were a constant misery. But every now and then, for reasons I never worked out, they all vanished and I actually saw the jungle, not just swarms of insects through a net. In those moments I realized how beautiful the place truly was.

  I got so used to seeing green and brown, but, really, the jungle was full of colour. Even the greens were different: bright ferns, deep rich palms, yellow-tinted vines. We saw white-faced monkeys watching from the trees, purple butterflies, delicate pink orchids, minuscule blue frogs squatting on leaves, and bright red flowers that reminded me of the Snake Lady’s painted lips. I stamped on one of those, and Mum told me off.

  For about an hour of that trek my opinion of the jungle changed. It wasn’t just beautiful, it was stunning.

  And then it rained.

  It’s a rainforest, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. But it wasn’t just that it rained, it was how hard it rained. It didn’t start spitting. There was no warning rumble of thunder. It just began to pour. Rain gushed between the trees, sprayed off leaves and ran in streams down trunks. And it was so loud, like a constant drum roll, so we had to use the microphones in our smart-goggles to talk to each other.

  “It’s just a shower,” Dad insisted.

  It was a power shower. Our clothes were soaked in seconds, clinging to our skin. Pedro had boasted about how light our jungle suits were, but once mine got wet it felt as heavy as a bear skin.

  We walked hunched up, squelching over ground that changed from mud to mush to swamp. Streams trickled past our boots. We kept slipping over, cursing and sliding. At one point Pan sank right up to her shoulders in a mud pit. I was laughing too hard to help, and then laughed even harder when Mum and Dad finally got her out and discovered she was covered in leeches. There were dozens of them on her neck and arms. She even had one on her eye!

  “That’s so gross!” I cried, now in hysterics. “It’s on your eyeball!”

  “Jake!” Mum snapped. “Pandora, just relax. The leech is only on your eyelid.”

  “GET IT OFF ME GET IT OFF ME GET IT OFF ME!”

  Pan was screaming now, and flapping around in panic. It took ages to get the little bloodsucker off. I’m not even sure how Mum managed it; I was laughing so hard my sides ached and I had to sit down.

  “That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” I gasped.

  “Jake,” Dad hissed. “Don’t move. You’ve got one on your lip.”

  “What? GET IT OFF ME GET IT OFF ME GET IT OFF ME!”

  It poured for hours. There was nowhere to shelter, and no time to stop, anyway. At times I couldn’t see the rest of my family through the downpour, as if the storm had swallowed them up. With no one to talk to, it was hard to stop my mind from wandering and thinking about Sami.

  Actually, it felt good to think about him. Jungle trekking was easily the hardest thing I’ve ever done, so it helped to remind myself why we were here and how important it was that we carried on, no matter how tough it got. Wondering if it might help the others too, I called out to Mum and Dad.

  “You’ve never told us how you met Sami,” I said.

  “It’s… It’s a long story,” Mum replied.

  “Well, we have a long time.”

  We trudged in silence for another few minutes. I think Dad was waiting for Mum to answer. She was always so cagey about their treasure-hunting past. I guessed she didn’t want me and Pan getting ideas. But I think Dad understood why I was asking.

  “We first met him in Baghdad in 1983,” he said, finally.

  Mum moved faster to catch up. “Nonsense. It was in Cairo, in 1981. We were searching for the tomb of an Egyptian princess. Other hunters were after it too, so we needed to find it first to save its treasures for a museum.”

  “Was he working for one of those other teams?” Pan asked.

  Mum laughed. “Sami? No. At that point he’d never been on a treasure hunt in his life. We visited him in his laboratory at Cairo University. We’d heard he was the best when it came to new technologies, and needed his help in finding the tomb. We wanted him to build us a robot to explore spaces in caves that we couldn’t reach. It was just one job, one invention.”

  Dad snorted. “Do you remember the noise he made when we told him what we did? I’ve never seen anyone so excited. He spent the next two hours showing us all sorts of ways he could help.”

  “Not just the robot,” Mum added, “but other inventions too. Early versions of utility belts, and grappling lines that he’d designed for the military. He’d grown sick of selling all his gadgets to armies. The idea of using them for treasure hunting thrilled him.”

  “We were pretty excited too, Jane. We knew straightaway that the technology would give us an edge over other hunters. I remember giggling, all three of us. It was like we’d found a final piece of a jigsaw. We just immediately slotted together.”

  “And the fact that he saved our lives a few minutes later,” Mum muttered.

  “What?” I asked. “How?”

  “Almost accidentally,” Mum explained. “He was showing us a thermal image camera he’d developed, and its display revealed the heat signature of a hunter on the laboratory roof. The hunter had followed us there and was just about to attack. I think he planned to catch us and torture us for information to the princess’s tomb. He was Swiss, I think.”

  “No,” Dad corrected. “It was Adrian Kosikowski. An American.”

  “No, dear, Kosikowski attacked us in Ethiopia. He fell into a crocodile pit, remember?”

  “Pretty sure the crocodile pit was in Zambia, darling.”

  “There have been several crocodile pits, dear. Anyway, there was a fight with whoever it was. Sami knocked one of them on the head with a dead fish – although why he had a dead fish in his laboratory I never did find out.”

  “So you won?” I asked. “The fight?”

  “Yes, of course,” Mum said. “After that, Sami just became part of our team. I can’t count the number of times he or his gadgets have saved our lives. We never went on a mission without him until…”

  Mum’s voice trailed off, but we all knew what she had stopped herself from saying.

  Until now.

  It was still raining hard, but I didn’t care. So what if this was tough? It was a treasure hunt; it was meant to be tough. I wasn’t going to complain about the jungle anymore – I just wanted to focus on the mission. I was more determined than ever to put things right. Find the Place of the Jaguar, find the markers, find the tomb and get the emerald tablet.

  Save our friend.

  17

  We kept walking and the rain kept falling. We fell into puddles and we climbed out. We slipped on rocks and we got back up. The ground grew so wet and we fell over so often that at times it felt more like walking over ice than mud.

  “Stay close together,” Dad called. “We must be near.”

  We had been hiking for almost eight hours, searching for a place where two rivers met in the jungle. I had begun to worry that we’d gone the wrong way, that there was nothing here other than rain and mud.

  Still we kept going, following Dad across a hillside, where rainwater ran in thick streams down the steep mud slope. Pan slipped again, and only just managed t
o cling on to a tree trunk to stop herself sliding down into the darkness with the rain. I tried to help her up, but she slapped my hand away in a strop and screamed in frustration at the sky.

  “Stop shrieking, Pandora,” Mum said.

  “I’m covered in mud, Mum.”

  “I know, but that shrieking is too much.”

  “That’s not me anymore! It’s Jake.”

  I turned, wiping mud and wet hair from my eyes. Something was shrieking, but it wasn’t me either. Dad rubbed mist from his glasses and looked around the slope. The sound was getting louder, like a police siren coming closer.

  “Everyone stop,” Dad ordered.

  We already had. We turned and squinted up the hill through the trees and rain. It was coming from up there.

  “Monkeys?” Mum suggested.

  “No,” Dad muttered. “Payassu pecari.”

  “What?” Pan asked.

  “Wild boars.”

  It sounded like a lot of wild boars. We couldn’t see them but they were definitely getting closer. Their high-pitched screams rang around the slope as if they were charging from everywhere at once.

  “Don’t panic,” Mum called. “They’re not especially dangerous.”

  “Especially?” I asked.

  “I see them!” Pan cried.

  A dozen squat pigs covered in wiry brown hair charged down the hill. They were coming straight for us, squealing in fright.

  “Don’t panic,” Mum said, although there was definitely panic in her voice. “If they think you’re a threat they might gore you. Stand still and let them pass.”

  “Gore us?” Pan yelled.

  Now I saw two short but sharp-looking tusks jutting from each boar’s snout. The pigs didn’t look like they were about to attack us, though. In fact, they looked and sounded as if they were under attack, like they were fleeing. Something bad was happening here, and it wasn’t the mad pigs.

  “We should move,” I said.

  “No,” Mum insisted. “Stay where you are. They’re just running.”

  “But, Mum, what are they running from?”

  We remained still, staring up the hill beyond the boars. Something was coming after them. It didn’t look like a creature, more like a wave – a dark wave, flooding the jungle as it swept down the slope.