by Roland Smith
I’m not walking forward, I’m falling forward.
They picked him up for the millionth time and shoved him on, only for him to fall down again three steps later. But this time he jerked away from them.
“Enough! I’m tired! I’m thirsty! I’m done!”
The silhouettes of a club and two blowpipes appeared instantly.
“Go ahead and kill me,” Luther declared. “Eat me right here. I don’t care. I’m not taking another step until you give me a drink of water and untie my hands.”
This is it, he thought resignedly.
He hoped they would use the darts instead of the club. But they did neither. The blowpipes and club were lowered. They talked among themselves for a second, then one of them stepped up to him and said, “Okay.”
“You speak English?” Luther shouted.
“A little. You hurt our ears.”
“Sorry.”
“If I untie, you no run.”
“Run where? I don’t know where I am.”
The man started to untie the knot, but was having a hard time of it.
“There’s a knife in my pack,” Luther said. “There’s also a headlamp.”
The man opened the pack, found the knife, cut the vine shackles, then handed him his headlamp.
Luther rubbed his wrists. His hands were numb. When he got some feeling back into them, he slipped the headlamp over his forehead and turned it on.
One of the other men handed him a plant.
“What’s this for?”
“Water.”
It was a bromeliad of some kind with stiff prickly leaves, but there was water trapped in it. Luther put his head back and emptied the contents into his parched mouth. It was great until something solid hit the back of his throat and he started gagging. It took him several seconds to dislodge whatever it was and spit it out on the ground. It was a tiny colorful frog. It hopped away. The three nearly naked kidnappers found this hilariously funny. Two of them were rolling on the ground laughing. The third had his hands on his knees trying to catch his breath. At first Luther was mad, but after thinking about it for a minute, he had to admit that gagging on a frog was pretty funny.
“Look before you drink,” the knee man said.
“Poisonous?” Luther asked.
Knee man shook his head. Luther wasn’t sure he believed him.
“There’s bottled water in my pack. How about giving me one?”
Knee man handed him a bottle of water. Luther couldn’t get it open quickly enough. He drank it straight down. By the time he finished, the other two men were back on their feet looking like they hadn’t laughed in ten years.
Luther handed the empty water bottle to knee man, and it occurred to him that knee man, at least, was not uncontacted.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“I am called Ziti.”
“You’re named after my favorite Italian dish,” Luther said.
“No understand.”
“Not important. Why did you kidnap me? Where are you taking me?”
“We go now,” Ziti said.
“I guess that means you’re not going to answer me.”
“Yes,” Ziti said.
“You mean no.”
“Not understand.”
“Story of my life. At least tell me how far we’re going.”
“Not far.”
“Thanks.”
Ziti took the lead. The other two followed behind Luther. He was pretty sure now that he wasn’t on the dinner menu and that his head was going to remain on his neck and stay the regular size. But this still didn’t explain why they had grabbed him.
They trudged along for another hour, then came to a stop. The men talked among themselves for a minute, then one of them took off running.
“What’s going on?”
“Almost there,” Ziti said. “Must warn so they no kill.”
Luther took this to mean that wherever they were going had armed sentries, and they had sent the third man ahead to tell them not to turn them into pincushions.
“How about that other bottle of water in my pack?” Luther wasn’t particularly thirsty. He was using the water to keep the conversation going. He figured if he could keep Ziti talking, he’d be less likely to turn Luther into ziti.
Ziti gave him the bottle. Luther took a sip. “Where did you learn to speak English?”
“From my creator,” Ziti answered.
Ziti’s English was not as good as Luther had first thought. He’d read there were a lot of missionary groups working in the Amazon basin. By creator, Ziti probably meant a missionary or a preacher.
“So you went to a missionary school?”
Ziti shook his head. “What happened to hair?”
Luther had completely forgotten about his shaved head. He ran his hand across his head and felt a mat of fuzz growing back in.
“I cut it off. It’s growing back in. But back to your English and the guy who taught it to you.”
“My creator,” Ziti said.
“Right. That guy. Where did you —”
The runner returned and said something to Ziti.
“We go now. Quiet. People sleep.”
They started off again. It wasn’t long before Luther saw firelight flickering through the trees in the distance. They wove their way toward the light, passing several stone-faced sentries armed with blowpipes and clubs. Luther nodded and smiled at all of them as they walked by. His greeting was not returned.
They stepped out of the trees into a small clearing. There were three crude structures made out of branches and leaves. Two of them were long and had open walls. Inside the long huts Luther could make out people sleeping in hammocks. Even if he hadn’t seen them, he would have known the structures were bunkhouses because several of the people hanging inside were snoring. All the cuts on the bunkhouses looked fresh, which either meant that this was a temporary camp or they hadn’t been here very long. In between the bunkhouses was a small, round hut with brush sides and a door made out of woven sticks, which was flanked by two grim guards with clubs. It was pretty clear where Luther was going to be spending the rest of the night, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.
There were several small cooking fires around the edges of the camp and one large fire in the center. The cooking fires were smoking more than they were burning. No doubt to keep the millions of buzzing insects away.
Ziti walked over to a large tree near the central fire and hung Luther’s backpack on a broken branch. Luther was about to make a plea for not being thrown into the fire and cooked when he saw something hanging next to his pack that stopped him in his tracks. It was a leg, or part of a leg. On the end was a size fifteen hiking boot. Luther knew only one person with a boot that size.
Wolfe.
Apparently, Ziti didn’t notice Luther’s surprise … or else he didn’t care. He pushed Luther over to the round hut. One of the guards pulled the stick door open while the other guard stood close by with his club raised.
“In,” Ziti said.
Luther stepped inside. Wolfe was sitting on the ground leaning against the far wall, about six feet away from the door. He squinted as Luther’s headlamp shined in his eyes.
“Sorry.” Luther flipped the lens up toward the ceiling.
“Luther?”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s with you?”
“Nobody.” Luther sat down across from Wolfe, happy to get off his sore feet, and explained what had happened.
When he finished, Wolfe thought a minute, then said, “Let me get this straight. Doc and Laurel are missing in action. Jake and Flanna are out looking for them. Presumably, Grace, Ana, and Buck are out looking for you. You and I are here. And Ted, Marty, Dylan, and the FBI guy are headed upriver to an empty camp.” He looked at his watch, his face reddening. “If they aren’t already there.”
Luther had never seen Wolfe get really mad, but it looked like he was about to. The temperature inside the hut seemed to have instantly
risen about ten degrees. Normally, when Luther saw an adult begin to go ballistic, he took the nearest exit. In this case, there wasn’t one.
“What about Raul?” Luther said, trying to lighten things up.
“He led me to the guys that kidnapped me,” Wolfe said.
“Oh.”
“You didn’t see him out there?”
Luther shook his head.
“What about my leg?”
“It’s hanging on a tree,” Luther said. “The boot’s still on it.”
Wolfe glared at him.
“Kind of a weird conversation we’re having,” Luther said.
Wolfe continued to glare, then his features softened and broke into a grin. A second later he started laughing loud enough to wake the entire camp. Luther joined him. He couldn’t help himself. The door whipped open and the two guards looked in. They were not laughing. One of them raised his club. The other put his blowpipe to his lips and pointed it at Wolfe.
Wolfe stared them down. “Give it your best shot, sport.”
Luther wasn’t sure that was the best thing to say, even if they didn’t understand him. The guy with the blowpipe took in a deep breath.
“Go ahead,” Wolfe taunted. “Exhale.”
Luther was closest to the pipe and was ready to knock it away, knowing he’d probably get clubbed in the process, when Raul and Ziti pushed past the two guards.
“You must be quiet,” Raul said.
“I don’t have to do anything,” Wolfe said defiantly.
“They will kill you,” Raul said.
Wolfe shrugged. “So be it.”
Luther hoped Raul and Wolfe were both bluffing.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” Wolfe said.
“No deals,” Raul said. “You are prisoner.”
“There’s always a deal,” Wolfe said. “You bring me my leg, some water, and some food. In exchange, I’ll be quiet until sunrise. If you don’t, I’ll shout my head off, and Luther and I will take this hut apart stick by stick.”
We will? Luther thought.
“They will kill you both,” Raul said.
“Bring it on!” Wolfe roared.
Huh? Luther didn’t like how this was going.
Raul looked at Luther with pleading eyes, as if he wanted him to say or do something to calm Wolfe down before they were slaughtered.
“We want our backpacks, too,” Luther said, surprising himself. His voice was a little high-pitched and not nearly as forceful as Wolfe’s. Raul backed out of the hut and slammed the stick door.
“Nice one,” Wolfe said.
“No biggy,” Luther said. “We’ll be dead in a few minutes anyway.”
“I don’t think so,” Wolfe said.
Luther could hear voices outside the hut. “What do you think they’re saying?”
“I have no idea.”
“So Raul’s a traitor.”
“I think it’s more complicated than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“He may not have had a choice. They could have taken him out, or us, anytime they wanted. Did you notice how they moved through the woods on the way here?”
“Yeah, like snakes.”
Wolfe smiled. “More like ghosts.”
“That can see in the dark,” Luther added.
“I noticed that, too. Strange. My point is, they didn’t bring us all this way to kill us.”
“What about shrinking our heads?”
“That would entail killing us first.”
“Oh yeah,” Luther said, a little embarrassed.
“I think they’re waiting for something, or someone. Did they hurry you along here?”
“Yeah, except when I stopped and told them I needed water and choked on a frog.”
“What?” Wolfe looked very confused.
“They have a good sense of humor.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Wolfe said, looking even more confused and a little irritated.
“It’s not important,” Luther said. “You’re right, the guys with me were in a big hurry. What’s that have to do with anything?”
“It seems to me that they were on some kind of schedule. This was all planned.”
Luther thought about this for a second, then shook his head. “They might have had a plan with you, but I don’t think they did with me. There’s no way they could have known I was going to take off by myself and do some exploring. I didn’t know it myself until I did it.”
“Why did you go off by yourself?”
“Probably wasn’t the smartest move,” Luther admitted. “But I didn’t think I’d get kidnapped.”
Wolfe stared at him silently. Luther thought it best to change the subject. “When I got here, I heard a bunch of people snoring in those sheds or whatever they are. How many do you think there are?”
“I’ve been watching them since I got here.” Wolfe pulled himself over to where Luther was sitting, which was a little uncomfortable for Luther to watch. He parted some branches over Luther’s right shoulder. “Take a look.”
Luther twisted around and peeked out the opening. One of the guards was still near the door with a club and blowpipe in hand, which seemed ridiculous with Wolfe only able to crawl around. The others had moved to the fire pit at the center of camp and were talking quietly among themselves.
“You notice anything about them?” Wolfe asked quietly.
“There are seven of them standing around the fire,” Luther said.
“I’m not asking what they’re doing,” Wolfe said, a little impatiently. “Describe them.”
Luther was beginning to wonder if Wolfe had gone a little nuts during his short captivity. “Uh … they’re all about four feet eight except for Raul. He’s a couple of inches taller. And of course he’s dressed in western clothes and the other guys are kind of naked.”
“They’re triplets,” Wolfe said.
“What?”
“Two sets of triplets,” Wolfe clarified.
Luther stared at the group around the fire, but they were too far away for him to tell if Wolfe was right. He hadn’t paid much attention to the faces of the guys who had grabbed him. He’d been more interested their clubs and blowpipes.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive,” Wolfe said. “There are at least a dozen people in camp. And they all appear to belong to sets of triplets.”
“Except for Raul,” Luther said.
Wolfe nodded.
“What are the chances of that?”
“Just about zero.”
“Any girl triplets?”
Wolfe shook his head. “Not here. This is obviously a temporary camp. By the look of it, I don’t think it’s been here more than a few days. My guess is that they have a more permanent camp elsewhere. That must be where the women and children are.”
Luther looked back through the opening. “They’re coming this way.”
Wolfe scooted to the other side of the hut. Luther continued looking through the opening. He wanted to see if Wolfe was right. He couldn’t tell if the three guys in the lead were the same guys who had taken him, but they sure looked like triplets. Luther pulled himself away and sat down next to Wolfe.
“Are you really going to holler and tear this place apart if they don’t give you your leg back?”
Wolfe nodded. “I want the packs and water, too. Are you with me?”
Luther didn’t think he had much choice in the matter. If they killed Wolfe, they would probably kill him, too. “I’m with you,” he said reluctantly.
The door opened. Raul stuck his head inside.
“They have gone through your packs and taken out anything that might harm them.” He tossed the packs through the door. The next thing through was Wolfe’s leg. Luther caught it before it hit the ground. Raul closed the door.
“Nice catch,” Wolfe said. “Did you notice how Raul said they?”
Luther shook his head.
“It may mean he’s not a hundred percent with them.”
Wolfe began to strap on his prosthetic leg. “Now we wait.”
“I think this is it,” Grace said.
They had been on the jungle trail for about half an hour and were standing next to a huge tree with a rope ladder dangling down from the upper branches. Marty tipped his head back and looked up. The light from his headlamp disappeared into the canopy above; the top of the ladder remained invisible.
“We should go up one at a time,” Grace said.
“You go up first,” Marty said. “When you get up top, throw a line down. I’ll tie our gear to it, and we’ll haul it up after us.”
“Dylan should go up first,” Grace said. “He’s stronger. He can start pulling the gear up right away.”
“See you upstairs,” Dylan said, and started up the ladder.
Marty pulled his Gizmo out and looked at the screen. Yvonne was still at the helm of the Anjo, moving upriver.
“They’re ten miles out.”
“What about Ted?” Grace asked.
Marty flew the dragonspy out of the wheelhouse and headed it downriver. He hoped to find the Rivlan barreling upriver at two hundred miles an hour. What he found instead was the boat dead in the water at the exact same spot where it had broken down.
“He’s not going to be much help,” Marty said, showing her the screen.
Crow was on his knees in front of a hatch holding a handful of tools. Ted poked his head up through the hatch. His face was covered in grease. He looked at the dragonspy, smiled, and looked at Crow. Marty turned the volume up.
“We’ve got company,” Ted said, nodding at the dragonspy.
Crow turned his head and looked startled. “I didn’t even hear it,” he said. “That thing creeps me out.”
Ted laughed, which made Marty think that things were going well and they’d be on their way soon. He was wrong.
“Major problems here,” Ted said. “And I’m not sure I can fix them. We might have to hitch a ride upriver. I’m not sure how long that’s going to take.” He paused and looked at the dragonspy. “Can you hear me?”
Marty flew the dragonspy up and down.
