by Newton, Nero
He let out a muffled honk, but still did not let go of her wrist.
Then came bubbling, and he started to cough explosively through his mouth and nose.
Small droplets, almost a mist, peppered Amy’s cheek and arm. The guard’s face was partly toward the headlights now, and she saw blood running down to his chin. He bubbled some more and used his free hand to swat the choking flow away from his nose.
Amy twisted her left arm again and this time the guard’s grip slipped. She lurched away from him.
Even as he struggled to breathe, Barrel Guard managed to swing a big palm down onto her head and clench hard, but the hand was slick from wiping blood off his face, and his grip on Amy’s hair slipped. She kept moving, and between the guard’s fingers nothing remained but a few dozen long strands of medium brown hair.
She threw herself toward the drop-off and began tumbling, sliding, crashing through thick undergrowth that spattered her with cool water. A knot on a fallen branch dug viciously into her back as she skimmed over it. It was a steep, uncontrolled descent of thirty feet or so, and Amy kept rolling hard, even after the ground beneath her leveled out. She got to her feet and tried to charge further into the darkness, but her head was spinning so badly that she couldn’t keep from slamming straight into an enormous tree trunk, though she saw it coming a good five feet before impact.
There were rifle shots, but no one followed her down that sharp drop. She stayed still, not giving the guards any clue where she was. Somewhere above her, Barrel Guard was still roaring away. The strap of the sunhat had somehow stayed hooked around Amy’s neck.
CHAPTER FIVE
Amy awoke in the cab of a parked truck and had no idea how she’d gotten there. The morning light seared her eyes. The first clear thought that made its way through the pain in her head was that she needed to get moving before anyone came up the road.
She got outside, stood painfully, and checked her pockets, which were now just little white sacks dangling against her bare quadriceps. The camera was in one sack, the floppy white sunhat stuffed into the other. At the moment she cared more about the hat, which she put on gratefully.
Seeing the scraps of denim tied to her feet, she began to remember the first part of the evening. Tearing up her jeans to make moccasins had taken half an hour and required teeth as well as hands. The seams, which served as ropes to lash a few layers of fabric to each foot, had made uncomfortable lumps under her soles, but that had still been better than walking in just her socks. She’d meant to have cutoff shorts left over, but in the darkness had accidentally made a diagonal tear all the way up through the seat of the pants. Instead of shorts, she now had loose shreds of fabric hanging from the waistband.
Then she remembered the worst part. The rainforest canopy was so dense in many places that at night there was effectively no light at all. In one of those spots, she’d been using her phone to light up the ground and keep her footing. Somehow she’d stumbled anyhow, and the phone had gone flying. It might have landed face down in some crevice or it might have broken; either way, she had once again been thrown into total darkness. She had spent half an hour searching for it before giving up.
About an hour after that, she’d found the road, and right away had come upon this logging truck stuck on the shoulder. Not the same truck that had blocked her way last night, but one she’d seen en route to the camp the previous afternoon. It had probably been there for days. The cab had seemed like the safest place to spend the night, since the mystery fever was supposedly spread by animals that roamed after dark.
Now, walking up the endlessly rising road, she wondered if there were a second camp nearby, because she could smell the most delectable cooking aromas. She couldn’t identify anything as eggs or bread or any particular dish, but the totality of the smells definitely comprised…breakfast. It lingered even after she’d gone at least a mile.
She recalled a dream in which a juvenile chimpanzee had been trying to get into the truck cab, slapping at the window next to her. In the dream, she’d tried to let the animal in, but couldn’t figure out how to unlock the door, and had just sat there tugging uselessly at the inside latch, making kiss-kiss noises at the little ape face.
She ran a fingertip across her right shoulder and felt five raised bumps, still sore as hell to the touch. The skin around them was rough with smears of dried blood.
Then she remembered what had happened sometime before the dream.
She’d awakened to find a long, furry appendage reaching into the truck through the slightly open passenger-side window. Something with claws rather than nails – therefore no chimpanzee – had been clutching her left shoulder, really digging into it. She’d cranked the window hard, making the edge of the glass bite into that grasping limb, and the thing had wailed and whimpered and squealed. When Amy eased back on the window crank, her assailant had slipped away, thumped onto the ground with a final, sad, “Oooh,” and scuffled off.
Then there had been a suffocating stink, heavy and rotten. She’d gagged, feeling panicked in the closed space and still air, wanting to be outside but afraid to open the door….
And then it had all vanished: the desperation, the pain in her shoulder, even the stench. The cab had suddenly smelled like a steamy shower, the very thing she’d been dreaming about ever since leaving the logging camp. It had smelled, in fact, just like the scented bath soap a friend back in California had given her, an elegant little cake in the shape of a scallop shell. She’d finally unwrapped that soap just a couple of days ago back in Dakar.
She was sure the rest of the night had been full of vivid dreams, but could only recall the one with the little chimp trying to get into the truck.
Now it was hot and she felt horrible, not just the wounds in her shoulder and the long gouge along her back from skidding down the slope, but a headache as tight and sharp as any she could remember. And she simply could not adjust to the day’s brightness.
She was hopelessly unfocused, too. Her mind kept wandering even as she told herself how badly she needed to stay alert, to be ready to charge back into the forest at the first sound of an engine.
Almost as soon as that thought struck her, a truck growled somewhere down the hill, and she barely got into the cover of vegetation before the vehicle came within sight. The vehicle came so slowly that, for a moment, she was afraid the driver had spotted her, but the truck kept rolling by.
The shade was exquisite. There were shrinking drops of two-day-old rain on many of the broad leaves, and Amy harvested them greedily. She wanted to stay out of the sun, but the going was too slow here in the undergrowth, and she needed to get out of this basin as fast as possible.
A few minutes after returning to the road, she realized something was moving in the greenery, just out of sight, staying roughly abreast of her. Something big.
It was making plenty of noise, apparently not aiming for stealth. It stopped and started, fell back ten or fifteen yards, then caught up with her again. A couple of times she heard wheezy, tired-sounding grunts.
She kept walking. There was no place to run if something charged her here, so she just plodded on steadily because there was nothing else to do. The movement in the foliage passed her up, and she hoped that the source of it had lost interest in her.
The chimpanzee that emerged from the vegetation fifteen feet ahead of her looked awful. This was no juvenile like the one in her dream, but a big female, its rear end bright pink and swollen in estrus. A large hand came listlessly up to shade its squinting eyes as it regarded her. The animal’s posture was droopy, the face, arms and neck badly lacerated, as though it had been in a fight. One scratch along its chest was puffed up, clearly infected, as Amy’s own wounds would be if they weren’t treated soon.
Her appetite had been raging only seconds before, but the sight of the sick animal made her queasy. Suddenly she wanted only to be safe, clean, smeared with antiseptic, and pumped full of antibiotics.
The animal was definitely focused on A
my, but didn’t seem aggressive. If it had been defending its territory, it would have screamed and shaken its arms at her. This one just stared.
Amy still didn’t feel safe so close to the creature. An adult chimp could kill a person with a few blows if it wanted to, and there was no guessing what this one wanted. She crossed the road like a kid avoiding a bully.
The animal also came lumbering across, knuckle-walking after her in no particular hurry.
Amy picked up the pace, making her sore legs and feet complain, and her head throb harder. When she looked back, she saw that the chimp was being followed by a second one, even bigger and just as bedraggled.
The first ape broke into a trot, caught up with Amy, and put its hand on her back. She stopped walking and just waited, hoping it would eventually get tired of whatever it was up to and go away. She felt its breath on her arm and hip.
It grasped the right side of her tank top and rubbed the fabric against its face, then moved lower, turning its attention to her shredded jeans.
Amy pulled the tank top to her own nose and sniffed, wondering what had attracted the ape. She couldn’t smell anything.
That wasn’t exactly true. The fabric had a distinctly clean scent. She sniffed the left side of the tank top and it smelled just like it ought to: a sweaty old shirt that she’d worn for a whole day and then slept in. So did the front. But the right side that had so captivated the chimp smelled as though it had just been laundered and dried in a garden breeze. She took another whiff and decided that it smelled more like a doctor’s office where every surface was frequently wiped down with alcohol.
The second chimp arrived and followed the first one’s lead, snuffling at Amy’s clothing.
Amy was nervous, but not acutely afraid. She wondered if this was happening because of some plant she’d brushed against, a spray of flowers rubbing perfume onto her when she had dashed off the road to avoid the truck.
Zoologists had long ago verified that chimps were attracted to certain plants when they were ill – various plants depending on the ailment. Different chimp populations had discovered different treatments. Maybe the ones in this isolated basin used a completely unique set of medicinal plants. Maybe Amy’s shirt had picked up enough of the right sap or pollen for whatever ailed these two, and they’d caught a whiff of it.
She eased the camera out of her pocket, put it in video mode, and tried to capture some of what was happening. It was hard to focus the lens on movements occurring so close to her.
That effort was cut short when she heard a chimp war cry, and turned to see a third ape, not slouching or shading its eyes from the sun, but bounding toward her at a furious clip. It was an enormous male, at least a hundred-fifty pounds. Every hair on its body stood out, giving it a round and monstrous look.
Before she could even imagine reacting, it arrived and knocked her seven feet through the air, and she kept sliding for another few yards after hitting the ground. Her left arm and side erupted in fiery pain as the skin was sanded off.
The intensity of the violence paralyzed her. No animal or person had ever struck her so hard. She’d been hit by a car once, and this was a lot like that. She lay still, every bit as afraid of this animal as she’d been of the two guards the night before.
The enraged chimp was above her, still screaming. Amy curled up and clutched her head an instant before its arms came down onto her side like clubs. They rose and hammered down twice more, and for many long seconds her forcibly emptied lungs refused to work.
Then the ape was moving away, its voice just as terrifyingly loud, but receding. Amy shifted her head and saw that it was herding the other two chimps back the way they had come. They hobbled and stumbled as though not built for the speed they were being forced to achieve.
Amy lay still for several minutes before standing and continuing up the road. She touched her left side and it stung, and when she pulled her palm away it was evenly coated with blood. She sort of remembered, from the car accident, what cracked ribs felt like, and guessed that none were broken now. Still hurt like a bastard, though.
Several minutes later she realized that the camera had stayed strapped to her wrist and was still recording. She played back her strange encounter. The lens hadn’t picked up her attacker, although the sound was there. She didn’t remember screaming, but apparently she had done a lot of it.
CHAPTER SIX
As he drove down the logging road toward the camp, Hugh Sanderson thought about the woman he’d just seen up in the blasted-out trough that served as a mountain pass. The vision of an obvious foreigner loping along, covered in mud, had been a strange welcome back to one of his least favorite countries in the whole world.
Nine days earlier, while waiting for a hotel limo to pick him up at Grand Turk airport in the Caribbean, Hugh had gotten a call from William, his boss and older brother. William was calling to talk about relief trucks and public relations. He wanted Hugh to return to Equateur for a photo shoot with the relief trucks at the beleaguered logging camp. “Get your picture taken with your sleeves rolled up. Act like you’re supervising when they pass out the food and pills.”
William was the chairman of Sanderson Tropical Timber. The company wasn’t really a family business anymore, but William and a few loyal friends still held a controlling share, and the family name remained.
Little brother Hugh had been kept on board as vice president in charge of keeping the logging rights open in the African theater of operations. He had an office in a colonial-era mansion outside of Prospérité, but lately his work had kept him traveling a lot, mostly in the First World. For the past eighteen months, Hugh’s camera-friendly, cheerful face – vaguely resembling Sting, but with the fleshy cheeks of young Luke Skywalker – had been the company’s principal PR resource while it strove to build an eco-friendly image.
“Drive out to a logging camp? Again?” Hugh had said. “C’mon, Will. It’s hardly been two years since my last trip to one of those places. Gimme some time to recover.”
William had laughed. “How about five days from now? That enough time?”
But a crackle of static had caused Hugh to hear “nine days,” and he’d accordingly marked the date in his planner.
“How come we need PR for that relief business?” Hugh had asked. “I thought we were keeping the whole outbreak thing pretty quiet.”
“World Health Organization already has a couple of people at the camp. Apparently someone gave them a call.”
“No way! I had my man at the Interior Ministry call over to Public Health and explain that this information was not for public consumption. Especially not foreign consumption.”
“Maybe someone at Public Health doesn’t like us very much. But it’s a done deal now. The word’s out.”
Hugh had closed his planner and buried his the phone in his luggage, resolving not to answer any more calls while he was in the islands.
After arriving back in Equateur last night, he’d scarcely glanced at the memos in his inbox, and still had no idea that the date for the PR photo shoot had already passed. The only message he recalled now was about a woman who had apparently forged his signature on a letter, then tried to use it to gain access to one of the camps. If that call had come from the very camp he was headed for now, then it could have been her he’d just spotted. In spite of the layer of mud that covered most of her body, and the filthy, mud-drenched hat that sagged over her head, he’d seen some light skin in places. Clearly not a local.
If yesterday’s gate crasher was American, as she had claimed, her appearance at the camp was probably eco-driven. Sanderson Tropical Timber was the only U.S.-owned logging company for a thousand-mile radius. A couple of years back, the greenies in the States had ganged up and tried to give Sanderson the same kind of lumps that the French and Italian companies in Africa were getting. They’d nearly succeeded.
To thwart that attempt, the company had thrown major resources into the green-image campaign, and Hugh had been cornered into being
its front man. His tall, athletic stature and oddly handsome features had put an attractive face on the company. He had played the role wonderfully, but had also hated every minute. Hated it so much that he’d begun spending hours a day trying to imagine some way to leave his brother’s company without going broke.
The embarrassing fact was that he didn’t have much in the way of assets. He had never been good at holding onto his salary and dividends, and his debts were mounting perilously. He was beginning to worry about that situation for the first time in his life. If he could just round up a few million more – not even ten million – he could leave Sanderson Tropical Timber and never look back. He was forty years old, and it was time to free himself.
In the meantime, if Mud Woman up there on the pass had come up with anything that could stink up the company’s image all over again, William and the rest of the crowd in New York would look to Hugh for damage control. They might even call for a mini repeat of the first phase of the green campaign.
That was a hellish thought. It would mean continuing to pose as the kind of person he’d despised since college, people with a religious devotion to crickets and buzzards and endangered swamp grass. People who dressed up in green makeup and leafy costumes for demonstrations, who held phony pagan ceremonies on campus or in front of downtown office buildings, pretending they were Iroquois healers, or Druid priests, or whatever daffy shit caught their fancy at the moment. It reminded him of a nightmare he’d had the previous year. In the dream, his father had been alive again, forcing him to marry the queen of the tree-worshipers in some kind of New Age ceremony on the steps of a Mayan pyramid.
