Whoever had killed his man and ruined his truck would pay for it. Only this time he wouldn’t rip the guilty party’s ribs out; he would cut the man’s face off and remove his skull piece by piece.
***
An hour later, Derek, Jack and Banga were nearing the top of the mountain, flashlights now in hand as the sky faded to the shade of a deep bruise. The chirping of crickets and buzzing of tree beetles became almost deafening. Despite copious amounts of mosquito repellent, all three men were constantly swatting the bloodsuckers from around their ears.
“I’m starting to wonder if all the Malaria pills are gonna have any effect,” Jack said. “I grew up in the New Hampshire woods and I know mosquitoes, but this is ri-goddamn-diculous.”
Derek stopped walking, waved his flashlight around. “Yeah, I’m done. Let’s set up the tents. Banga, how’s this place look for a bivouac?”
“You mean to sleep?”
“Yeah, to sleep. I’m getting eaten alive.”
Banga swept his gaze around, pointed uphill. “We are almost there. Few more minutes.”
“Well, let’s hurry this show up.”
Jack took his phone out of his pocket again. “Hang on, we’re pretty high up now, lemme see if this works.” He held the phone up and checked the bars. With a sigh he put it back in his pocket. “You know, you’d think the phone companies would have enough towers set up around the world to avoid this problem. We’re in the two thousands, right?”
The three men resumed their hike, moving with grunts as their bodies finally succumbed to the day’s fatigue. Jack hoped they’d find at least something at the top of the mountain that would justify this excursion. He was pretty sure Derek would rip him a new asshole if they’d come all the way up here for nothing.
Again, he thought of the flare they’d seen, thought of the gunshots they’d heard, thought of the strange phenomena with the hippos in the trees. If they didn’t find anything at the top then one thing was for sure, the Congo was the most mysterious place on earth. Maybe there was a story in that at least?
“Mushrooms,” he muttered.
“What’s that?” Derek asked. The photographer’s breathing was gruff.
“Nothing. Complaining. So tell me, Derek, how’d you get started in photography?”
“A fortune cookie told me to buy a camera. Figured I’d better not tempt fate.”
“Hardy har. But really”
“How do you think I got started? Same way you did. I got an itch. No offense, man, but I don’t feel like getting into a boring conversation right now. My fucking heart feels like it’s going to explode and I could use a cigarette.”
“Just trying to kill time.”
“Well if you happen to find a weapon to kill it with, do me a favor and kill me first.”
“Sirs?” Banga said.
Jack and Derek stopped, watched as the guide stepped beyond a wall of bushes and disappeared.
“Well, follow him,” Jack said. He ushered Derek through the bushes, and they both emerged into a small clearing. What they saw stopped them short, flashlights lighting up the scene. An overturned Jeep lay a few yards in front of them, its tires bent and flat. Beyond it, a series of troop and bunk house tents lay flat on the ground, supports ripped from their casings. Only one remained half erect. A wealth of supplies was tossed about on the ground as if a burglar had been looking for something important. Two semi-automatic machine guns were among the debris. Backpacks, coils of rope, hardhats, shovels, pickaxes, lanterns, stores of food and clothing were everywhere, as if a bomb had exploded. And speaking of explosions, Jack finally swung his light around and saw a crack in a large rock wall jutting from the ground. Charges and wiring ran from the hole, trailing back into the mess. Boulders still lay in small heaps on the ground in front of it.
A mining camp.
“Where the hell is everyone?” Derek asked. He moved around the Jeep and started kicking the damaged supplies with his foot. “There’s tons of food here, some first aid kits, guns…” He bent down and picked up one of the machine guns, smelled the barrel. “This thing has been fired.”
Jack and Banga joined him now, trying to make sense of the mess in the dark. Jack’s light played over hundreds of spent bullet casings. “Some kind of gunfight.”
“There is blood, sirs,” said Banga, focusing his own flashlight on the side of the Jeep. A broad sweep of crimson stained the olive green door.
“Oh shit. Look at this.” Derek pointed his light high into the emergents above.
Jack followed the beam, felt his skin flush. Things were getting strange. “Same white ropy shit that was around the hippos.”
“Yeah. Can I officially say I don’t like this?”
“I think you can.”
“Good. I don’t fucking like this, man. What the hell do dead hippos in trees and a ransacked mining camp have in common?”
“Illegal mining camp is my guess,” Jack added. He bent down and picked up the other machine gun, slid out the clip and checked for bullets. It was empty, every round spent. He slid the clip home again and leaned the gun against the Jeep. He very much wanted to take it but without ammunition it was useless. “Sanctioned miners don’t use heavy artillery like this. Someone was up here without the proper permits. Someone who was either interested in keeping workers in line or protecting their find from another company. Probably a little of both.”
“Lemme guess, you smell a story?”
“I smelled it hours ago, that’s why we’re here. But it’s certainly getting weirder.”
With a tentative gait, Banga moved toward one of the trees and touched the sticky strand of white rope hanging down. He smelled it and recoiled at the stench, let it go with confusion and walked to the hole in the rock face. “The mining. My people have been forced to mine these mountains for decades and do you see what it does? I do not know what happened to them, but I know they would be killed at some point anyway. If not with guns, then from the work itself.” He pointed into the darkness of the cave. “Inside of here is the jungle’s life and blood. It is the cause for all of this you see.”
“You think this was a rival mining faction?” Jack asked.
Banga did not answer. His face was stony and lost in thought.
“Still doesn’t add up,” Derek said. “It’s one thing to come up here to steal a claim, but why kill hippos? It’s not like the hippos work in the damn mines. You ask me, something else is going on here.” He took his camera out of his bag and began snapping photos.
While Derek documented the scene, Jack bent down and picked up a wrist watch that’s band had been snapped. It was a typical military-style watch, waterproof with a tiny compass and glow-in-the-dark hands. Most of the face was coated in blood. “Look, it’s getting late. We have no choice but to make camp, and I know what you’re gonna say but fuck it…let’s spend the night here and get a fresh start in the morning.”
“No way, man. Too much bad juju here. I’m not waiting for whatever band of psychos did this to return.”
Jack put the watch down, picked up the leather wallet lying next to it. He opened it and read over the Welsh driver’s license inside. Richard Guy Lipski, age thirty-eight. He flipped through the contents and pulled out a wad of foreign currency, counted it. It was roughly five hundred euros, about seven hundred dollars at current conversion rates, maybe more. He racked his brain to convert it to Congolese Francs but couldn’t do the math. Had to be somewhere around six-hundred thousand, a fortune for most of the impoverished people in these parts, including the guerrillas. “They won’t return. If there was anything here they wanted they would have taken it, including this.” He tossed the wallet to Derek. The photographer leafed through the money and whistled.“They certainly took whoever was working here, though,” he continued.“My guess is it was a kidnapping for a labor camp. Because if they were so concerned about what’s inside that rock they’d have stationed someone here to watch.”
“That means they kidnapped foreigne
rs. Did you look at this guy’s license?”
“I did. Scares me.”
Derek tossed the wallet back, money and all. “Scares me too. What if they’re coming back in the morning with more men? Doesn’t sound very enticing. Unless they’re bringing big mushrooms and a scrim, dude, I say staying here is a dumb idea.”
Jack walked over to Banga and handed him the wallet. “Here take this. I know you can use it.”
The guide opened it, looked at the money, offered it back. “I do not want it.”
“That’s a lot of money. Hell, it’s a lot even for me.”
“Then you keep.”
“But you can use it.”
“It will cause problems, sir. You do not understand how it is here. If I am found with this much, I will have to answer for it.”
“Then just take a little.”
Banga shook his head. “No. I take my pay from my job, and that is it.”
Seems a waste, Jack thought, but he took the wallet anyway and threw it back on the dark ground. “Ok, I hear you. Fuck it. Leave it. I still think we’re safe here. Banga, what do you think?”
Almost imperceptibly, Banga glanced at the wallet, then back to the half-erected troop tent. “They will probably be back, but not until afternoon. They will not want to be in the jungle at night or early morning. Not this high. There are too many risks in the dark.”
“Oh, that’s great, man,” Derek said. “We’re up here in the dark.”
“Yeah, but we have Banga,” Jack said with a wide grin. “C’mon, let fix the other side of that tent and get some sleep.”
“People were shot here, you know. That doesn’t give you the heebie jeebies? You’re just gonna pass out in all this shit?”
“Yeah. I’m tired and the bugs are in love with me. I’ll set my watch alarm for six. We’ll be up at first light and maybe check out the inside of that cave, see if we can get more answers. Someone shot that flare and if they’re still alive somewhere, we should find out where that is and help.”
“You’re right, you should have gone to Berlin.” With that, Derek grabbed a fallen tent pole and started jamming it into the canvas by his feet. “Fucking writers.”
***
Janet was on her belly now, commando crawling like some kind of Marine. She, Gellis, and Moyo had crossed the large chamber without incident, but found the only exit was a knee-high vent that sloped down over jagged stones. At least the downward grade was a good thing, as it would pull them closer to the river below, but she was beginning to hate the tightness of the space and her knees were certainly bleeding. She just kept reminding herself what the other option was: to go back where they’d come from and face those monsters. No thank you.
“I think it’s opening up again,” she said.
“Good, ma’am, I think we may be half way down the mountain by now.”
“My thoughts exactly. Which raises the question of why we haven’t run into the river that falls out of this thing.”
“I think we dropped below it when we climbed down the pit.”
“Perfect.” She’d already assumed that was the case, but she’d been hoping for some better news. The one good thing was that the water running through this mountain came out in a few different places, and one of them was at the river below; they could still follow the water to freedom, if they could pick up its trail.
Finally, she stuck her head out from the vent and found herself in yet another large room, this one rich with some kind of pungent smell that she couldn’t place. She pulled herself out and got to her feet, looked above her. This chamber stretched up into blackness. Nothing new there, but she could see her light was getting dimmer now. She took her head light off and whacked it a few times. It flickered and got brighter for a moment. Good enough. She put it back on and scanned the area before her. The walls and floor were white, almost shimmering.
“What is that? Calcite…feldspar…?”
Laid out not far before her were hundreds of waist-high boulders. Great, she thought, more rocks to whack my legs on. Thankfully they were not so big she couldn’t climb over them if need be.
Gellis and Moyo emerged behind her, the former yanking the latter out and helping him stand. They caught their breath, then Gellis said, “At least it is prettier in here. Like silver, but different. Is there a way out?”
“I’m so fucking turned around I have no idea which way to go.”
“I suggest we just keep heading down, follow the slope of the floor.”
“Way ahead of you.” Janet stepped across the room and felt something tug at her foot. She froze in a panic, lifted her leg up, stifling a scream. It felt like someone was trying to pull her foot back down.
“Ma’am,” Gellis said, “hold still.”
She looked down and saw his headlight lamp illuminating her shoe. It was covered in white, sticky silk stretching off the floor. She looked around again at the white walls, floor and ceiling. “It isn’t a mineral,” she said. “It’s a web.”
Gellis inched carefully up beside her, kicking his feet up as he went to free himself from the sticky floor. “Some kind of web coating, yes,” he said. “It is very strong. If it gets any thicker we may have to think twice about crossing here.”
Janet yanked herself free, took another step. Her foot came up with more webbing attached to it. “Something about it is weird. Outside and in the pit their webs were like cables. This is…more of a padding…” And then it hit her, and she felt her stomach roll over. “Oh my God, it’s a nest.”
Instantly, Gellis directed his light at the small boulders. They were gray and fuzzy, like giant balls of cotton. “Ma’am, I think those are eggs.”
Moyo whimpered, said something unintelligible.
Janet counted to five, tried to let her heart rate slow down. “Okay, okay, we can deal with this. We can’t go back, that’ll just put us back up higher and we already know that the pit is crawling with those things. We have to keep going and find a place to hide till we can rethink things.”
“You are right. This way at least slopes down. We must cross and continue and I think we should go fast before something comes to check on these cocoons.”
Janet took another step, and another, fighting against the grip of the web floor. Gellis followed, still helping Moyo walk. It was slow moving, but perhaps that was best, as it kept them all from making any noise, Janet hoped. The eggs grew denser now, blocking their way to the left side of the room where a large opening yawned at them. “We have to walk between them. Whatever you do don’t bump them.”
Gellis translated this to Moyo. The wounded man nodded eagerly.
She pushed into the collection of eggs, each one wrapped in silk threads from the floor, staring down at them as if they were touchy explosives. Past one, then two, then three and four, now surrounded on all sides, and only a quarter of the way into this field of baby monsters. She realized she was shaking, desperately trying not to fall over as she continued to work her feet free from the floor’s adhesive webbing.
“It is a bad smell,” Gellis said.
“I don’t know if it’s the eggs. There’s something inside this mountain that shouldn’t be here. Some kind of…I don’t know…chemical that seems out of place. Almost sulfuric, and moldy. I’ve been in thousands of mountains like this and I’ve never smelled this before.”
“Have you been in the mountains here before? In the Congo, where life began? Where life suffers as a result of our rich deposits.”
She had, but she felt it unwise to bring it up to the man. Though she was getting a bit more comfortable with him, enough to trust him to a degree, she still felt it best to be on guard around him. The way he’d looked at her the last few days had not gone unnoticed. He was an angry man, and she was a white woman in power. She’d been warned about his kind. “Not out here, no.”
“Then perhaps this is normal for these parts. Who is to say.”
“Giant spiders aren’t normal, Antoine. Nothing that’s happened since this
morning is normal.”
They were halfway across the room now, engulfed in the maze of eggs. She looked back and saw Moyo reach out and touch one of them, withdraw his had fast as it rocked.
“Touch one of them again, and I’ll throw you to the next spider we see,” she warned.
Moyo nodded. Even if he didn’t understand English he’d understood her tone. In front of him, Gellis bent down and looked closer at one of the eggs. His headlight showed through the thin silken sac, and inside they all saw a collection of legs kick about as the baby spider turned itself to study the light.
Gellis stood upright, sweating.
“Goes for you too, Antoine.”
“I wanted to see how big, in case we need to fight. That one was maybe like a dog. I can handle it at that size.”
“Yeah, but can you handle a hundred of them?”
“Certainly not.”
“Then don’t push it.”
They kept moving, slowly, sticking to the ground. Janet stumbled sideways at one point, about to fall right into an egg, but Gellis grabbed her and steadied her. She wanted to thank him, but opted for silence instead. It was just safer that way.
Now, the walls trembled, and vibrations ran through the ground under their feet.
“Something is coming,” Gellis said.
Janet frantically scanned the room, looking back toward where they’d emerged, finding nothing, then looking toward where they were going, and finding nothing there as well. “Where’s it coming from?”
All three of them looked around in a panic, wan beams chasing each other over the rock walls. Finally Moyo grabbed Gellis’ shoulder and directed his gaze up toward the top of the chamber. There were various holes in the rock that acted as tiny windows. And in what appeared to be some kind of spiral tunnel running along the inside of the walls were two huge spiders racing their way down. As fast as a car. Janet followed the holes, tracing the route of the spiral, and realized it emptied out from underneath a low overhang, like a vertical pipe. The pipe’s mouth, being almost horizontal, had easily been hidden from their earlier vantage point.
She looked at their destination, the tunnel beyond the rest of the eggs. Maybe a hundred feet. The spiders were zooming down, the walls shaking, tiny shards of shale from above raining down onto the eggs. In response, the eggs began to shake. She could see all those thousands of legs inside pressing up against the sacs. If the spiral tunnel was uniform, the spiders were only two revolutions away from dropping out into the nest.
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