For a moment she had a pang of fear. She wasn't familiar with the nesting habits of wild pigs or sun bears. For all she knew this might be the doorstep of some napping beast.
The jungle floor was now a yard above her head. A simple pull-up away, no different than hauling herself out of the ocean over the gunwale of a sailboat, something she'd done a hundred times. Except here there was nothing to grip but creeper vines, and she knew from past experience that they were not the most securely anchored vegetation.
But what the hell. She blew out a breath, reached out, took hold of one of the large, hairy creepers, and began to hoist herself up the steep embankment. Grunting hard, she dragged her chin to ground level and reached out with her right hand for the base of a small tree, and had to stretch another inch, then another, raking the bark with her fingernails, still a few inches out of range.
She took a deep breath and lunged upward and made a swipe at the sapling, and grabbed hold. Then, as she was dragging herself up and over the edge of the ravine, the sapling broke in half, and Allison lost her balance and slid back down the gully wall, thumping her elbows and knees, bruising her ribs on a protruding root.
Breathing hard, she lay on her back on the muddy floor of the ravine and listened to the men's voices calling out from very close by. She didn't recognize the words at first, thought for a moment the men were speaking Chinese, Malay, some dialect she'd never heard. But it must have been the interference of her own jangling heart, for a second later she heard someone speak in very distinct American English.
"To your right, up there, on that big branch. No, to your right, asshole. Yeah, yeah, there you go."
Then she heard the hard, metallic ratchet of a rifle being cocked, and less than a second later the deafening boom.
From high in the canopy the mother ape bellowed, a soul-shaking noise. Allison saw a hundred birds burst into flight, and lifted her eyes to watch the orangutan pitch forward from its roost, take a final swipe at a limb for balance, but miss it, then tumble forward, her young son gripping her around the neck as the big ape dropped, face forward, flailing its arms like Allison had seen sky divers do, trying to keep their bellies into the wind. The wounded orangutan was still alive, still with enough dim hope for her race to do what she could to shield her son from the crash.
Allison turned her eyes away, but heard the whack and crash of great limbs breaking, and then a long trumpeting scream, the ape's death wail. And a half second later the unbearable concussion. For a few moments the jungle was silent, then came a man's war whoop and other voices cheering and joking as they jogged toward their kill.
CHAPTER 3
Allison had dealt with animals in every ghastly condition imaginable: sickness, deprivation, gross physical abuse. She'd seen the emptiness of their movements after years of gruesome medical experimentation, the lightless eyes, the ghostly gaze of severely tortured creatures. By now she considered herself tough, even a little calloused to the suffering of animals.
But at that moment, as the mother ape and her child crashed to the jungle floor, she could barely breathe, immobilized with sudden grief and disgust. Feeling a murderous rage as well, a great heave of strength swelling in her. She wanted to scream, and felt the first rumbles of it coming up from her bowels, but she set her teeth, and ground her head back against the muddy walls of the ravine and strangled the shriek. Tears blinded her. She wasn't sure how much time passed before she raised her head and sat up.
It was eerily quiet. A single cicada made its electric buzz off to the north, but that was the only sound in the immense silence of the jungle. Then with cold horror, Allison heard one of the motorized gadgets on Winslow's camera engage. An automatic rewind. The loud mechanical whir and clatter lasted nearly half a minute. Afterward the jungle was even quieter than before.
A moment later she heard someone rustling in her direction. Allison came to her feet. There was a shout, and the sound of men's voices, and the clamor of several people barging through the underbrush. Winslow's outraged wail: "No!"
Allison raced back to the vine-matted wall, jumped up, took hold of a vine, and writhed upward. She reached the brim in seconds, pulled her head over the edge. She held herself there, chin on the ground, feeling the tremors in her muscles, her grip slowly giving way. She took a breath and heaved up an inch or two, brought her breast even with the level of the ground, tried to lever herself onto the jungle floor. Just a few yards in front of her, below the web of fronds and limbs, she saw three sets of shoes and cuffs shuffling side by side. Twenty yards away she could make out her daughter's pink sneakers.
"Leave her alone!" Allison cried out. "Leave her the hell alone! You bastards."
But at that moment her hands failed and Allison skidded back down the embankment to the floor of the ravine, her leg catching on a jutting rock, twisting violently. She felt the fiery jolt in her ankle, then sensation drained from it, numbness from her shin down. She groaned, lay back against the muddy ground. For a moment she heard only the whisper of a feverish breeze through the tatter of fronds and thick underbrush. Then Winslow's scream.
"Mother!" she called. "Moth—"
Two almost simultaneous rifle blasts cut her daughter's shout in half. The explosions echoed through the forest, swept like icy winds down the dark canyons of Allison's heart. She couldn't breathe, was able to summon only a single image out of the fog of her shock. Winslow sprawled on the ground, her last word spoken, her final breath. Jesus, God.
Lying on her side in the mire, Allison heard a man's voice from somewhere nearby. For a moment she didn't register the words he was yelling. But then her body tensed and she felt a clammy hand rise up inside her, grip and twist.
He was calling out a single word, drawing it out, taunting.
"All-iii-son, All-iii-son. Come out, come out, wherever you are. All-iii-son. We know you're there, Allison. Come on, pretty lady. I got something here. A little present for you, Allison. Come to Papa."
She shrank into a corner of the ravine. Pressed her back hard against the side. Above her was the snap of limbs and rustle of their approach. She pulled herself up into the hollowed recess in the wall, dragged her aching leg inside. She rolled deep into the warm darkness of the burrow.
"All-iii-son. Might as well come out. We know it's you, All-iii-son. We know you're here." The singsongy rhythms of a kid's hide-and-seek game.
She heard the slide of steel against steel, then the snap of the cartridge locking into the chamber. She tucked her body deep into the stuffy recess, a fetal curl. Seeing, through the curtain of vines, movement on the gully's ledge.
She faintly recognized the voice, felt sure it was a man she'd encountered through her work. But she couldn't place it. He might be any of a hundred different people. She'd made at least that many enemies in the last seven years, had accumulated dozens of death threats from animal smugglers, corrupt foreign officials, zookeepers, medical researchers. The list was long.
"All-iii-son! Allison Farleigh. We're going to find you." Singing it out, jeering. "We're going to find you, Allison. And when we do, we're going to fuck you uuuu-up."
"Yeah, just like we did your little girl."
"Only much much much much much worse. All-iii-son. Come out, come out, wherever the fuck you are. Allie, Allie, in come free."
Allison closed her eyes, felt a sob growing in her chest like a great hot blister. Felt it swell, strangling her, but she fought it, choked it back, the howl of despair.
She heard them on the ledge above her. A handful of pebbles and twigs tumbled into the ravine. She pressed backward, moving farther in, her back nudging against something slick and cool. She held still. Didn't breathe. Cold, sleek, with a rubbery strength, shifting behind her, nestling closer, like Harry used to do, spooning her in his sleep. She reached behind her and touched the dry oiliness of scales.
"I don't know," the man said from somewhere very nearby. "Maybe she ran off already. Went to get the authorities. They got 911 in this fucking country?"
"She's still around here. Don't worry. We'll find her."
"Another hour it gets dark, man. I don't want to be out in this fucking place then. No telling what kind of shit drops out of the trees around here at night."
"Come on, you idiot. Let's find her. She's here. I know she is." Then the same voice singing out, "All-iii-son, come out, come out. We got a nice piece of candy for you, Allison."
She felt the creature stir again. Part of it moving, part of it staying still, as though it were snuggling closer to her. Slowly she turned her head to get a look. In the dim light she could make out its brown and gray camouflage markings, but couldn't tell its size. Some of them, she knew, grew to thirty feet, three hundred pounds of coiling sinew. Nonpoisonous. Crushed their prey. Beyond that, she knew nothing about pythons.
The snake's head began to pry between her ankles. Allison jammed them closed, but it was no use. The python was far stronger. It was already beginning a slow spiral up her body.
She heard the men nearby, and through the curtain of vines she glimpsed three pairs of jeans, hiking boots. They were standing on the opposite bank, facing her.
"Yeah, yeah. I see it."
"If I hadn't pointed it out, you wouldn't've."
"Jesus Christ, man. All right, you get three brownie points for spotting the fucking cave. Is that good enough for you? Ten more points, you win a free dishwasher."
"I just want a little credit, is all. You never give me any goddamn credit for anything."
The python was burrowing beneath her waist, starting its third loop around her. Allison the barber pole. The snake was surprisingly gentle, felt like warm water rising around her. For an instant everything became exquisitely vivid. The smell of the damp cave, the velvety embrace of the snake, the rasp of its body against her flesh, her slow breath entering and leaving her body, the screams and songs of birds. Even the men outside, their footsteps, their voices.
The python coiled around her almost tenderly, as if it were half asleep, as if this were love it was making, nurturing her. Bringing Allison slowly and completely into its own world.
She strained against its constrictions, twisted deeper into the cave as if she might be able to beat the snake at its own game, oozing free like a watermelon seed from its slippery grasp. She wriggled headfirst into a blur of cobwebs, the mess sticking to her hair, turning it to cotton candy. But her approach was working, she was keeping her chest above the snake's coiling grasp, staying one curl ahead. Protecting her lungs, her heart. But there wasn't enough room in the cave. Five feet, six at most. Eventually the python would trap her against the far wall, cram her head against the stone, continue its methodical encircling.
While, outside, the men on the opposite bank called out her name, and she heard the metallic clack of a rifle being cocked.
"We see you moving around in there, Allison. We seeeee you."
She stiffened. And the python glided onward, coiling higher, pressing the air from her chest. Splashing bright pink lights against the backs of her eyes. She felt it harden around her like concrete setting up, heard the crackle and tick of her joints and tendons beginning to give way.
In the same instant that she heard the rifle blast, a clod of dirt blew into her face. Abruptly the python halted its caress. Allison managed a shallow breath. Then, faster than it seemed possible, the snake unwrapped itself from her and poured out of the entrance of the cave; thick as her calf it flowed across her body, a bloody gash in the flesh behind its head. The snake rushed into the fading daylight to confront who or what had attacked it.
"You fucking idiot," one of the men yelled. "Jesus, shit, look what the hell you stirred up now."
"I thought it was her. You did, too, man. You did."
There was another rifle shot. Then she listened to the men hustle away into the dense brush shouting at each other, and in the distance Allison heard them laughing like jackals.
She waited in the cave. After a short while she heard them approaching again, listened to the scrabbling of men through underbrush, their voices. She pressed herself against the contours of the grotto, in the fetid dark. Every nerve awake, hearing each second as it passed, as the men roamed nearby, and then once again moved away.
For over an hour Allison waited. Listening to each sigh and twitch of the jungle, every scrape of twig and scream of bird. The light dimmed, heat slacked off, and the voices gradually moved out of earshot. Still she waited. Waited until the blackness settled, the night noises began, the flutters and clicks and shrieks of the nocturnal animals.
Allison dragged herself out of the cave. She fully expected to meet the python guarding its lair, was prepared to fight it hand to hand, scratch, gouge, whatever it took. But it had disappeared. And she writhed across the ground to the embankment, took hold of one of the vines and pulled herself up.
Bumping her swollen ankle sent white jolts through her, wrenched the breath from her lungs. At each stab she gasped, but kept on with her climb. She wriggled across the crest, and on her hands and knees went scrambling through the dark snarl of limbs and fronds until she found the clearing where Winslow lay.
In the gloomy moonlight she made out the blood covering her daughter's face, pressed a fingertip to the slender puncture driven into the bridge of her daughter's nose. The ground was saturated with gore.
Both of Winslow's cameras had been taken, her film bag too.
In a numb trance, Allison held back the sobs, drew off her poncho, and draped it over Winslow's body. She fanned the flying insects away from the blood. She lay down beside her, brought her mouth close to Winslow's ear, and spoke her name. Then said the words that she had not spoken often enough in life, the words not a single person had uttered to Allison in years. She repeated them, and repeated them again, like a chant in her beautiful daughter's ear.
When finally Allison allowed herself to weep, the tears came from her quietly. And she felt a vast ache in some part of her that no longer existed, a helpless agony like the phantom pain of a severed limb. The flesh gone, torn away, but still tormenting her beyond the limits of endurance.
All night she battled the ants and flies. Threw sticks and pebbles at large rats or possums that wandered close by. And every second of the night Allison prepared herself for the cool muscularity of the python against her back again. She would fend it off this time, kill it if she had to, cut it in half as she had done with the leech.
But the python didn't return. And an hour after first light, as she was fighting to stay awake, she heard a couple of the park rangers yelling for her. Then she heard Sean's voice singing out her name. Singing it out over and over.
Allison had enough strength left to call back just once.
***
The ape with the silver swatch of hair was stunned but alive. His mother was dead. Falling from such a great height, even the deep bed of ferns she'd landed in was not enough to save her. The son had lost his breath after the fall, but in a moment or two he revived. He stood beside his mother's body and began to pick leaves and bits of broken branches from her fur.
When the men arrived, one of them scooped him up. The young ape was still groggy from his fall and didn't resist. There was blood on his lower lip, and several fingers on his right hand were broken.
The hunter tied up the silver-haired orangutan with ropes around his ankles and wrists, then attached the rope around the ape's ankles to the man's belt. Upside down, the young ape swung back and forth against the man's hip as he walked.
On the other side of the man another orangutan was lashed up the same way. This orangutan was sick, or very sleepy. The newly captured orangutan poked his fingers at the sick one, but the sick one did not poke back. The young male orangutan had never seen another ape besides his mother.
While he swung from the man's belt, he was able to grab for flakes of bark or leaves as they passed through the jungle. Once or twice as he was reaching out the man halted, took a grip on the orangutan's throat, and rapped him hard on the back of t
he head with his knuckles.
The ape with the silver streak stopped reaching for things. He contented himself with staring down at the man's shoes as they moved along the path, nipping once or twice at the man's shoelaces.
As darkness fell the men came out of the jungle and stood in a clearing beside a river. They talked and drank from their canteens. There were two more orangutans attached to the other man's belt. Those apes were very quiet. The men drank more water, and joked with each other. Then one of them pulled two cameras out of his knapsack and opened the backs, exposing the film. One after the other the man hurled the cameras far out into the river.
Then two of the men got into a motorized canoe with their orangutans. The other man got into a faster boat without any orangutans. They motored away in different directions, the two men went downriver, the other man sped north.
CHAPTER 4
Friday night they were the only customers in the Gunga Din Bar, one of Singapore's oldest drinking establishments. Rayon and Orlon White, plus the bartender, Harvey Trumbo. Orlon had started calling him Sir Harvey, Your Royal Highness. Pronouncing it hine ass. Needling the guy for the pure, brainless fun of it.
The Gunga Din Bar had dark mahogany walls, a crimson rug, a tiger's head on one wall, the heads of a gazelle and a rhino on another. Green leather elbow rests on the bar. Like the smoking room of some big-time Ernie Hemingway safari hunter. Tables scattered around, the lights low. Paintings of the jungle and mountains, each painting with its own dim overhead light. But the main attraction of the Gunga Din was the long metal cage mounted above the shelves of liquor bottles. The cage ran the length of the wall, maybe fifty feet.
Inside it a single gibbon roamed from one end to the other and back again. He would stop to swing on his trapeze for a second, then squawk, make a few spooky hoots, and climb up the side of the cage watching the three humans, then start his boring journey again back and forth along the upper wall of the bar. It was a siamang gibbon, with short black fur all over it except for his face, which was hairless and white, little tufts coming off each side of his head like a punk rocker. Cute little guy, strange too. Only a few thousand of them left in the jungle. Which was the reason some people were willing to pay upward of ten thousand dollars for one of them.
Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4) Page 3
