Amelia Earhart: Lady Lindy (5 page)

Go away!
Felix thought, trying mental telepathy again.
Go away!

But the gorilla did just the opposite. He took several bounding steps forward, and came to a stop just three feet from Maisie and Felix.

“Cool,” Maisie said as soft as an exhalation of breath.

The gorilla reached forward and touched Maisie's hair with one long, gray finger.

Felix wondered if he might actually faint for the first time in his life.

The gorilla wrapped a wavy strand of Maisie's hair in his finger. He paused. Then he pulled it, hard.

“Ouch!” Maisie said and, without thinking, she slapped his hand away.

He stepped back, startled.

For an instant, Felix thought the gorilla might walk away. The silverback shook his head and started off in the direction of the jungle.

“I can't believe a gorilla pulled your hair,” Felix whispered, his voice full of fear.

“I can't believe a gorilla pulled my hair, either,” Maisie said, her voice full of wonder.

Felix looked out of the corner of his eyes. Relieved, he did not see the gorilla.

“That was awesome,” Maisie said. “Wait until I tell Hadley.”

Hadley!
That was what was needling at Felix's brain.
The Ziff twins!

Maisie and Felix seemed to remember them at the same time. They looked at each other.

“Uh-oh,” Maisie said.

The sound of footsteps pounding toward them from behind echoed through the air.

Felix started to turn to see what it was, but before he could make sense of the blur that was the silverback, the gorilla was right at Maisie's back. He made a fist and punched Maisie right between the shoulder blades, hard.

Felix heard himself yell his sister's name as she flew through the air and landed face-first on the jungle floor.

Felix ran toward her, but the gorilla ran faster. Felix watched as the silverback picked up Maisie in his mighty, hairy arms, held her tight, and ran.

LAME DEMON

F
oolishly, futilely, Felix shouted at the gorilla's hairy back: “Put her down!”

There was nothing to do except run after them. Slipping and sliding down the embankment, Felix made his awkward way in the direction the silverback ran. Hanging on to vines and branches, Felix took slow steps, glancing up every now and then to be sure he still had the gorilla—and Maisie—in his sights.

Eventually, the ground flattened out enough for him to move faster. But then he found himself in large muddy puddles, and he began to slip and slide in the muck. The puddles were strange shapes, flat and wide with funny scraped marks at the top. Staring down as he lifted one foot after the other through the deep mud, Felix paused.

These weren't puddles.

He bent and studied the shape.

They were footprints.

Hippo footprints.

Maisie knew she should be scared. A gorilla had punched her in the back, sent her flying through the air, then picked her up from the jungle floor and was at this very minute running away with her. Even one of these things should be enough to scare the heck out of her. But somehow, Maisie felt calm.

The gorilla stunk. Worse than the monkey house at the zoo. Worse than almost anything she'd smelled. Like a million skunks spraying, plus a million gym socks, plus a million classrooms of sweaty kids. Her father always told her to breathe through her mouth when something around her smelled bad, so Maisie did that, opening her mouth and breathing in and out, in and out. The gorilla had slowed down. But he did not loosen his grip on Maisie.

“Where are you taking me?” Maisie asked him.

He glanced down at her, gave her a smug look, then just kept walking.

As he made his way along the hippo tracks, Felix kept the gorilla in his sights. It seemed like he had been walking forever. His legs ached from gripping the slippery ground so hard for so long. He was sweatier than he'd ever been in his whole life. And he wanted nothing more than a big glass of cold water back in the kitchen at Elm Medona.

Ahead on the path, Felix saw a big branch blocking his way.

Great,
he thought miserably.
Just great
.

Now he was going to have to lug that thing into the brush, and maybe lose Maisie and the silverback.

With a sigh, he bent to try and pick it up. And just as he did, the branch moved.

Felix gaped at the thing.

It wasn't moving really. It was . . . slithering.

Felix took a step backward.

He was inches away from an enormous snake! So enormous that he couldn't even see its head, just what seemed in that moment like miles and miles of snake, slithering across the path.

His mind began to list all the kinds of snakes he knew lived in Africa: black mambas and boomslangs and wasn't there something called a puff adder that was the most poisonous snake in the world? Back in third grade, Maisie had written a report on deadly snakes and she'd given him nightmares by describing just how venomous certain ones were. Her favorite one was the boomslang, whose venom affected your blood's ability to clot. It could take hours for the symptoms to appear, and then you bled to death from every orifice. Felix shivered despite the heat.

The snake in front of him was the color of the ground, spotted tan and white. He closed his eyes and forced himself to concentrate on the pictures in Maisie's report. The boomslang, he remembered with relief, was green. Bright green. But his relief disappeared when he remembered that black mambas weren't actually black. Felix took several more steps backward. If a black mamba encountered prey, Felix knew it would strike as many as twelve times. He could almost hear Maisie telling him how each bite delivered enough cardio- and neurotoxic venom to kill a dozen men within one hour.
Isn't that cool?
she'd told him before shutting off the light and going to sleep, leaving Felix alone in the dark to contemplate all the terrible snakes out in the world. Like the one right in front of him. Without antivenom, he thought, the mortality rate for a black mamba's bite was 100 percent.

There were all kinds of vipers, too, he suddenly recalled with a sickening feeling. And cobras. And puff adders, he reminded himself. They could kill a grown man with just one bite. And Felix wasn't a grown man; he was just a twelve-year-old kid. How fast would a puff adder's venom kill a twelve-year-old kid?

Felix squinted at the snake. It was hard to make out against the ground because it blended in so well. The puff adder had such good camouflage, Felix knew, that people often stepped on it. The picture from Maisie's report popped into his mind. Felix took a deep breath and then another, trying to calm himself. Because he was certain that snake in front of him was indeed a puff adder. By now, it was almost all the way across the path. But wouldn't it hide in the brush there and get him when he passed by? Some of the snakes were aggressive, and others only bit when provoked. Felix was too scared to sort out their personalities right now. Besides, how did he know what provoked a snake? Why, he could be provoking it just by staring at it.

He watched as the last of the snake disappeared. But even with it off the path, he was too scared to continue. Instead, he stood paralyzed in the hippo tracks. When he looked away from where the snake had been, Felix realized that Maisie and the silverback were nowhere in sight.

With surprising gentleness, the gorilla put Maisie down and walked away.

Maisie sighed. In no time, Felix would get here and the two of them would figure out what to do next. They would find the Ziff twins and Dr. Livingstone and maybe even Amy Pickworth. They would give the map of the Nile to Dr. Livingstone and explain themselves to Amy Pickworth and then they would go home, safe and sound, just like they always did. Until then, she just had to wait.

She would sit on that big boulder over there and do just that, she decided. She would wait and not worry because somehow things always worked out. The boulder was covered with a fine red dust. When Maisie swept her hand across the rock to brush it off, the dust took off in every direction. She jerked her hand back and peered at the tiny red dots spreading across the boulder.

Fire ants!

“Yuck!” Maisie said, shaking her hand in case even one tiny ant was still on it.

Well, she decided, she would just stand up and wait for Felix then. She fixed her eyes in the direction from which she'd come, expecting to glimpse him at any minute.

Maisie waited and waited, but no Felix.

She tried not to think about him getting eaten by a lion, bitten by a snake, or charged by a hippopotamus.

At one point, she even called his name, extra loud. But she didn't even hear her own echo in response.

A watched pot never boils,
her mother had told Maisie too many times. But maybe she was right. If Maisie looked away, Felix would most definitely show up. After all, she thought as she swung her gaze in the opposite direction, she'd been down that same path and hadn't seen any lions or snakes or hippos or anything dangerous. He was just being his usual slowpoke self.

Even though the gorilla had carried her far, the jungle here looked exactly like where they'd been. Trees thick with foliage that formed a canopy of leaves above her. Branches and vines everywhere. Some dark shapes in the distance, probably even more trees.

Maisie stared harder.

Those dark shapes were moving.

Toward her.

These dark shapes were also gorillas, she realized, recognizing their distinctive swaying arms and purposeful strides. At least a dozen gorillas. And they were walking right toward her, the silverback in the lead.

Felix waited until he thought ten minutes had gone by, then he waited for what he thought was another ten minutes, then another ten, before he finally ran down the path. When he reached the place where the snake had been, he held his breath, ready for those giant fangs to dig into his leg at any second. He was well past that spot before he finally exhaled and slowed down.

But there was no time to relax. As soon as he realized he hadn't been bitten by a poisonous puff adder, he immediately began to worry over how he would ever find Maisie. If that gorilla had gone in a straight line, there was some hope. But if he turned left or right . . . well, then he could be anywhere, and so could Maisie. Even if they did move in this direction, Felix had no way of knowing if the gorilla had hurt Maisie. He could have crushed her or thrown her down or just about anything. Felix realized he was holding his breath again, and he forced himself to breathe out and then in, nice and slow, the way his mother always told him to do when he was frightened.

It felt to Felix like he'd walked forever when he finally saw fourteen gorillas up ahead standing in circle.

Felix stopped.

Now what should he do?

The gorillas looked busy. They chattered and pushed at one another, from enormous ones to three babies, all of them focused on something in the middle.

Two of the bigger gorillas stepped back from the circle, and Felix saw clearly what they were so interested in: Maisie.

He opened his mouth to shout, but then thought better of it. What would happen if he startled so many gorillas?

Most of the gorillas were just watching Maisie, their faces filled with curiosity. But two of them were poking her with their gnarly gorilla fingers, and sniffing her. Maisie stood perfectly still.

Suddenly, one of the biggest gorillas screamed and pounded his chest and ran, fast. The others paused only briefly. They lifted their faces and inhaled. Felix watched as they went from gentle curiosity to fear. In an instant, they all screamed and pounded their chests and scattered.

Maisie's shoulders slumped with relief.

“Maisie!” Felix called, running as fast as he could toward her. “I'm here!”

When Maisie saw Felix, she burst into tears, letting herself get folded into his skinny-armed hug.

Maisie and Felix stayed like that, hugging and crying—Felix had started, too—for quite a while, the two of them sticky with sweat and tears and oppressive heat.