by Jeff Strand
Roger took over. No luck for him, either.
We kept trading back and forth. We didn’t know if this was just a tiny loose key, or a key in a treasure chest, and we didn’t know if it was buried or if the pirate had simply tossed it into the pond. We didn’t know if somebody else had found it long ago. We didn’t know if a fish ate it. We didn’t know if it had disintegrated into rust particles. We didn’t know if the whole treasure map was complete bullshit.
I had no idea when we’d give up. I suspected that the answer was that Roger and I would be expected to continue searching until the effort literally killed us. I didn’t try to verify this with Steve, because I honestly didn’t want to know the answer.
I’m not sure how many dives I’d done—somewhere in the high double digits—before I dug out a few handfuls of sludge and my fingers scraped against something hard. I swam back to the surface, took a breath, and returned to the bottom. Couldn’t find it again. Swam back up and repeated the process. There it was.
I dug around it some more. It seemed to be a rectangle, about the size of a laptop computer, although that’s not how the pirate Erik Bestard would have described it. I tried to tug it free. Couldn’t. Kept trying until I had to catch my breath again.
I was getting too tired to safely dive down there again, but I really did not want to lose the spot. I waved Roger over. “Down here!” I said, before going under.
I tugged on whatever it was. It wouldn’t come loose. This wasn’t a good time to utter an expletive so I simply thought one instead.
Roger joined me down there, accidentally punching me in the head as he dove. I grabbed his hand and guided it to the rectangle, and together we tried to pull it free.
It popped free.
We swam to the surface, then over to the closest chunk of ruins. As I lifted my prize out of the water, I saw that it was a metal box...and that the bottom had come off when we pulled it out of the bottom of the pond, so there was nothing inside.
I didn’t weep with frustration, but I might have if Steve hadn’t been watching from the shore.
Roger swam back to where we’d found the box and went under. I took a minute to catch my breath, then swam out to join him.
“Got it!” said Roger, holding up a key.
It was a large silver key, in that old-fashioned style like something that would unlock a door in a haunted mansion. We swam back to the ruins. Though the key didn’t look shiny-new, the metal box had protected it pretty damn well for something from the nineteenth century.
I was suddenly very, very excited. Because throughout this journey, I’d always been fairly dubious about the actual existence of the treasure. I was here because the base pay was generous, and while a treasure would’ve been nice, I’d never quite allowed myself to believe that I’d come home with anything.
But if the key was real, the treasure had to be real, right? That didn’t mean it was still there or that we’d be able to find it even if it was, but the map was legitimate! We weren’t wasting our time!
I’m not saying that I suddenly had gold fever or anything like that, but my entire perspective on the situation changed. We could do this. We could get rich.
Well, of course there was the issue that Steve was going to murder us after we found it. That was a pretty big stumbling block.
He had the gun, but thanks to the grisly and extended deaths of Jasper, Connor, and Ernest, we outnumbered him three to one. Even if you didn’t count Henrietta, we outnumbered him two to one, but I thought we could count Henrietta even with her injured leg.
There had to be a way to get rid of that guy.
Roger and I swam back to shore. “We found it,” I said, holding up the key.
“About damn time,” said Steve. Then he grinned. “No, I’m kidding. That’s great. You guys are awesome and I appreciate all of your hard work.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or sarcastic. I honestly thought he might have been sincere, but I didn’t want to give him too much credit since he was praising us at gunpoint.
He snatched the key out of my hand.
“You can rest for ten minutes,” he said.
“I need to look at Henrietta’s leg and change the bandages.”
Steve shrugged. “That’s like resting. The ten minutes starts now.”
I crouched down next to Henrietta and gently removed the bandage. The wound looked okay. I mean, it was a bloody hole in her leg from a bullet, so it didn’t look appealing, but considering that it could’ve been an infected, pus-leaking, gangrenous nightmare, I took solace in the fact that I didn’t think we’d need to amputate it with a machete.
“Play along,” I whispered to her.
She nodded.
“Jesus Christ!” I shouted, recoiling from her leg.
“What?” Steve asked.
“Didn’t you see it?”
“See what? I wasn’t looking.”
“Something protruded from her wound! It was like an insect leg!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about an insect leg protruding from her bullet wound! What did you think I was talking about?”
Steve walked over and peered at her leg. “I don’t see anything.”
“Then you’re lucky,” I informed him. “I’m not saying that she’s transforming into an insect creature. I’m saying that some kind of insect dug its way into the wound while we were asleep.”
Steve crouched down and peered closer.
“Does it hurt?” I asked Henrietta.
“Agony,” she said. “It feels like something is burrowing around under there.”
“Oh, God.” I scooted away and tried to make myself throw up. Alas, I do not have the ability to regurgitate on cue, but I hoped my dry heaving sounded convincing.
“Do we need to dig it out?” asked Steve.
“We should just wait,” I said. “It looks like it was trying to get out on its own.”
Steve tapped the wound with his index finger. Henrietta winced.
“The clock is still ticking,” Steve said, standing up and stepping away.
“Roger, can you clean out the wound for me?” I asked. “If that spiny leg pops out again I’ll lose it, I swear.”
“Yeah, sure.”
I’m not sure if Roger knew we were making up the whole insect leg thing, but I gave him a very subtle look to encourage him to keep up the ruse. The nice thing about having been friends for so long is that it took very little facial work to send the message “Pretend that she has a scary insect squirming inside of her bullet wound.” That level of communication doesn’t happen overnight.
Roger tore open the antiseptic wipe, then slapped his hand over his mouth to muffle a scream. “Fuck!” he said as he scrambled away from her. “I thought it was a small insect leg! How did she not feel that thing digging its way in there?”
Steve crouched down by Henrietta again. “I guess we’ll just have to get a knife and—”
Henrietta kneed him in the face.
Got him right in the chin. Something small and pink fell onto Henrietta’s leg. He’d bitten off the end of his tongue.
As he cried out in pain, both Roger and I tackled him, trying to get his gun. I focused on punching him in the face as hard as I could while Roger focused on trying to wrench the gun out of his hand. He wasn’t going to let it go without a vicious fight.
As we struggled, I noticed that the gun was now pointed at me.
Then it was pointed at Steve. Much better.
Then me. Shit.
Then Steve.
Then it went off.
There was a lot of blood and other assorted components as the bullet struck Steve in the forehead. His face was frozen in an expression of confusion, as if he were trying to figure out why it was so difficult to think about anything, and then he flopped forward on top of Henrietta.
“Please get him off me,” she said.
Roger and I rolled Steve’s corpse off of her. Then we rolled him anoth
er ten feet away because it was not a pleasant sight.
“You had no choice,” Henrietta said. “He would’ve killed us all. You did the right thing.”
“Oh, we’re not having a moral quandary,” I assured her. “We’re very glad he’s dead.”
“Okay, good.”
“So now what?” Roger asked. “The bad guys are all dead. I guess we can just head back to their boat and get back to civilization.”
“Yep,” I said.
“Is that what you want to do?”
“Is that what you want to do?”
“I think we should behave responsibly.”
“I agree. We’re finally safe.”
“So let’s head back to the boat,” said Roger.
“That’s definitely what we should do.”
“And we will.”
“Yes.” I was silent for a moment. “But, in terms of keeping our options open, we should at least discuss the fact that we’re holding a silver key to a treasure that could be worth twenty million dollars.”
“With only three of us left to claim shares,” said Henrietta.
“It’s definitely something to discuss,” said Roger. “I mean, we found the key, so why shouldn’t we be able to find the treasure? The hard part is pretty much over, right?”
“Seems that way,” I said. “I don’t want to be dumb about this, but if we’re this close, I feel like we should at least take a stroll in that general direction.”
“That’s reasonable,” said Roger. “But, y’know, we should also maybe think about getting Henrietta to a doctor.”
Henrietta shook her head. “I’ll be fine. If I lose my leg, seven million dollars will buy me a bionic one. I’d slow you down way too much, so I’m willing to stay behind. I believe that you aren’t the kind of men who would go off to get the treasure and then just leave me here to die.”
“No, we’d come back to get you,” I said. “I’ll even give you a piggyback ride to the boat.”
“I can’t promise I won’t hump your back.”
“Roger can carry you, then.”
“Even better.”
“Let’s do this.”
Chapter Twenty
“Was there another clue on the back of the map?” I asked Henrietta.
“No. Sorry.”
“Well, that’s good, right? Doesn’t that mean it should be easier to find? If somebody feels like they need to give you a hint to accomplish one task but not the other, the one without the hint is probably less difficult.”
“Maybe,” said Henrietta. “Or he wanted the treasure to be harder to find than the key.”
“That’s also possible,” I admitted. “But I like my optimistic line of reasoning better, so we’re going to stick with that for now.”
We went through the contents of the backpacks. Lots of bottled water. Insect repellent. Pistols. Extra ammunition. (Note that the backpack I was personally carrying did not have pistols or extra ammunition in it. That would have been silly of them.) Very small shovels for digging up buried treasure. Cell phones with passcodes on them, though if we could get to a signal, we might be able to still make an emergency call with them. We gave Henrietta some of the water and all of the bandages and antiseptic wipes, plus one of the guns, just in case.
Then I completed the unpleasant task of searching Steve’s corpse for the keys to the boat. Fortunately, I picked the right pocket on the first try.
Henrietta and I compared our memories of the map and agreed upon the direction to travel. West, according to the compass. After she wished us luck and made an even lewder than usual comment about Roger, we went off to seek our fortune.
I took the lead, enjoying that the machete was being used against vegetation instead of flesh.
“This is a lot nicer when nobody is threatening to kill us,” I noted.
“I know, right? I don’t have to worry that if I trip and fall I’ll get shot in the head.”
“I’m not saying that this is something I’d do for fun. I’m not going to take the triplets out to the South American rainforest for vacation when they get old enough. In fact, it still kind of sucks. But the level of suck has gone way, way down.”
“It also helps that if we find the treasure, we’ll get to keep it, instead of being killed immediately afterward,” said Roger.
“Oh, yeah, that’s a definite bonus.”
“What do you think the treasure is?”
“I think we’ll learn that the real treasure is the friends we made along the way.”
“If that’s carved on a big block of gold, I’m good with it.”
“I hope it’s something that’s easy to carry,” I said. “A twenty million dollar ring would be nice.”
“Yeah, I didn’t even think about the possibility that it might be a great big statue. If this all works out, what are you going to do with the money?”
“Five college educations. If there’s anything left over, a large order of Buffalo wings. What about you?”
Roger thought about it for a moment. “Buy a small house. Pay off my car. Give a lot to charity. Get the ad-free versions of some of my phone apps.”
“We’re very responsible.”
“Can you imagine how we would’ve spent the money in college?”
“We’d both be broke and at least one of us would be dead.”
We walked without talking for quite a while. We were making pretty good time, considering that we were mentally and physically exhausted and had to keep alternating who was on machete duty.
We were assuming that this would lead us to something large like the pond. I couldn’t see any way a pirate could’ve used that map to get back to his treasure if it was just “Look by this tree.” Thanks to our successful acquisition of the key, I now also had a better concept of the scale of the map, and so I’d at least have some idea of when we’d gone too far.
The rainforest was peaceful.
Almost too peaceful.
I didn’t say, “The rainforest is peaceful...almost too peaceful” out loud, but apparently thinking it was enough. Some bushes rustled and I caught a glimpse of something with a yellowish coat of fur and many black spots.
Probably my imagination.
I caught another glimpse of it. It was about thirty feet away.
Probably not my imagination. It was out here in its natural habitat, not under my child’s bed.
“Don’t panic,” I told Roger, looking back at him.
Roger’s eyes went wide with panic. “Did you see what that was?”
“I think it was a leopard.”
As I know now, it was not a leopard, but instead of calling attention to our ignorance and possibly confusing you, I’m going to correctly refer to it as a jaguar.
A jaguar is not as large as a lion or a tiger, but in this particular moment I was not thinking, “Whew, I’m so relieved that it’s not a lion or a tiger!” And in fact, a jaguar’s bite is more powerful than that of a lion or a tiger. Their bite force is fifteen hundred pounds per square inch, which essentially means that if one bit your head, it could break open your skull. Granted, if a lion or a tiger is gnawing on your head, you’re still pretty well screwed even if it can’t get to your tender brain, but would you rather be gnawed upon by a giant cat that can chomp through your skull, or one that can’t? Though it falls short of the biting force of the mighty hippopotamus, it’s more than a grizzly bear, and nobody wants to get bit by a grizzly.
So a jaguar, which is an apex predator, was wandering unnervingly close to Roger and I, who are not apex predators.
“It may be time to get the guns out of the backpack,” I said.
Roger took off his backpack and unzipped it. More bushes rustled, on the other side of us, and I realized that we had a jaguar on each side. Two jaguars, for those keeping count. A combined total of three thousand pounds of bite force per square inch, which is not how it works, but nevertheless we were currently in a position where jaguars could chomp through both of our skulls simulta
neously.
“Please be faster about getting out the guns,” I said.
Jaguars are solitary beasts that rarely hang out with each other unless it’s time to mate. So we were up against horny jaguars. Or at least jaguars that were seeking out a post-fornication snack.
If you’re up on your jaguar facts, you may know that they rarely attack humans. That is true. What is also true is that Roger and I did not know this particular jaguar fact (and, as noted, we thought they were leopards). Even if we had, let’s say hypothetically that you were wandering around in the rainforest and you had a jaguar on each side of you. You know from Wikipedia that a jaguar is only likely to attack you if it’s cornered or wounded. How much better do you truly feel in this particular moment? Do you just stroll merrily on your way, confident that these jaguars are representative of their species and will behave the way jaguars are supposed to behave, or do you say “Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! I’m surrounded by jaguars!”?
We went with the latter, and I feel no shame for that.
One of the jaguars growled. I don’t speak jaguar, but he certainly wasn’t growling to assure me that jaguars rarely attack humans.
Roger finally got the gun out of the backpack. He fired into the air.
The jaguars immediately ran away.
So, yes, our jaguar problem was quickly and easily resolved, but still, I don’t care how many homicidal psychopaths you’ve battled, being surrounded by jaguars is a scary experience.
We resumed walking. The rainforest didn’t feel quite as peaceful anymore.
We were sweating like crazy and had to stop a couple of times to blast ourselves with more insect repellent. I didn’t want to start ripping at my bug bites with a fork, but the itching ranged from “a mild nagging discomfort” to “one step from succumbing to the dark pit of madness.”
After quite a while, I started to feel like we might have missed our destination.
After a while longer, I was reasonably confident that, yes, we’d missed it.
The problem, as noted before, was that this was a crudely drawn map and we couldn’t trust any kind of “one inch equals 1.37 miles” consistency. So we had to go with our gut instinct about what a nineteenth century pirate might have intended.
