Blood Forest (Suspense thriller) (19 page)

Then something reflected the light back to him. He stepped closer, bending to inspect the ground. A pair of broken glasses flashed and, not far away, he spotted a hooked prosthesis. He spun around, searching for more clues. An empty sandal lay on its side against a sprig. It was Sam’s.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled for Sam, disregarding stealth and his own safety. The silence ate at his nerves.

And then, far in the distance, he heard a scream: “Brandon!”

He yelled again, but this time heard no response. In a frenzied state, he headed off in that direction.

Temba’s feet weaved between puddles and patches of mud. A Bantu or a European would have slipped by now. But the forest was Temba’s home, despite his time spent in Bantu villages. He didn’t fear the darkness, and he knew just where to place his feet so that he didn’t have to slow his pursuit.

Kitu had gotten ahead of him and Temba couldn’t be sure if he was headed in the right direction. But he still ran. Anger burned in his heart. It fueled his limbs even as it blurred his reasoning. Why would they do this? Since when did BaMbuti hunt people?

He heard the distant gunshots and knew that they came from the mercenaries. Although he disliked those men and knew that they were firing at other Mbuti, he couldn’t help but feel that these particular pygmies had gotten what they’d asked for.

Let them learn their lesson, he thought bitterly. Kitu had almost killed Brandon, something completely unreasonable. Temba could see no purpose for it. They were acting like the militias he hated.

Temba slowed his pace, suddenly realizing he had lost Kitu. Instead he listened carefully to the forest, hoping that Mbogo’s cousin would slip up and give himself away.

Temba . . .

He froze in mid-step. His foot hovered just above the ground, every muscle rigid. Something had just whispered his name. He listened hard for any other sign. But none came. A small breeze stirred the trees.

Temba . . .

Temba blinked and wiped his forehead. He let his foot settle in the mud. He spun slowly taking in the forest, sure someone was nearby.

“This is nonsense,” he said aloud in his own tongue. “The forest is talking to me?”

He felt a vibration deep within. His thoughts flowed from his mind into the air and others flowed in just as easily. As if his mind merged with the forest. The strange sensation put him on edge.

“Sam?” The cry echoed through the forest. It originated from the top of the hill.

And then the reply: “Brandon!”

This voice was closer—and in the wrong direction. Temba spun toward the sound. Why was Sam moving away from the river? And why did she sound so terrified? Maybe she fled in that direction foolishly. Or maybe Mbogo’s family had her.

But why? He knew that some wanted revenge for what the militias had done to their elders and women. Maybe they meant to take out that revenge. But on Sam? Not her. Temba’s fists clenched. Surely they knew that Sam wasn’t like the militias. She would never hurt an Mbuti.

I have to stop this.

Stop this . . .

“Yes,” he agreed.

Temba ran in the direction of Sam’s voice. He hoped he wasn’t too late.

A vine whipped Brandon’s face. He batted it away. The flashlight beam bounced before him, flashing on green, brown, and black. Although he started heading in the direction of Sam’s voice, he lost all sense of it as he ran through the forest. He had to weave between trees and without even the stars overhead to guide him, he became less and less sure he knew where he was going.

He had started going down a hill and now he felt like the ground was sloping up. But had he turned around or simply reached the other side of the depression? He called for Sam a few more times, but as he got deeper and deeper into the forest, his confidence waned. The sounds of the forest animals returned and soon every cough, hoot, or howl sounded like it came from around the next tree.

The forest closed in on him.

A root coiled around his ankle, and he fell forward. He caught himself in the mud.

Goddamn jungle!

As he rose to his feet, the nearby shadows leered at him with sinister faces. The ghosts felt nearby, although he saw nothing. He tried to control that feeling of paranoia as it crept into his consciousness. Most of what he heard and saw was his imagination, but it became increasingly difficult to tell what was and what wasn’t.

Every direction looked the same. Which direction had he just been running in? His flashlight scanned the nearby ground, searching for any clue to overcome his disorientation. Hopeless, he picked a direction and walked that way. He didn’t run any longer. The chances of running into Sam had just dropped to nothing. And now, he didn’t know which direction danger lay in. Why run from one imagined threat only to stumble right into a very real one?

He continued onward, certain that a pack of demonic baboons stalked behind him. After a few panicked minutes, he saw light up ahead. A white glow shone through the foliage. Although he couldn’t tell its source, the light was a welcome sight. He rushed forward. Too bright to be a fire, it had to be artificial. A flashlight or something. It didn’t matter to him.

The undergrowth grew dense. Branches pulled at his shirt. Leaves pressed into his face. He hurried faster, fighting against the enclosing vegetation. The foliage got so thick he had to push with all his strength just to break through. Thorns sliced his exposed skin, and he felt hot blood on his neck.

The light stretched out in front of him. It moved like a mist, but as its own source of light. The cloud spread, bright white, incorporeal. It flickered and danced a short distance away. The mist formed a ghostly shape, distantly human but unmistakable. Giant black eyes stared at him, a bulbous head. Long arms moved more like tentacles, twisting on the breeze.

Get out of the forest.

It spoke in his own voice, inside his own head. In that moment, Brandon wanted nothing more than to obey the specter’s wishes. Damn his plane. Damn the stupid flower. Find Sam and get out.

His ears detected another sound. Water trickled nearby, just ahead.

I’m at the river.

Brandon forced his eyes to focus. He recognized black ripples, glistening white in the moonlight. The ghost was nothing more than the moon’s reflection on trickling water. He slumped to his knees, defeated. Somehow he had turned himself around and had walked in a giant circle straight back to the river. The campsite was likely downstream from where he stood.

For the time being, he was alone in the forest, armed with only his flashlight. He had no weapons and no supplies. He could only pray to find the original campsite and hope that the gunshots he heard earlier had not resulted in their deaths.

Something cackled nearby. He remembered the crocodile, lying still like a log. The baboons. The okapi. Every creature was his enemy.

I won’t survive the night.

Bwana La Msitu

(Master of the Forest)

“I point out to you the stars, yet all you see is my fingertip.”
—African proverb

18

T
he gray pygmies slipped through the trees in near silence. Occasionally, they whispered to one another in their own language or spoke grave warnings to their captives.

Sam feared they might wrench her arms from their sockets. One gripped both of her wrists, another gripped her ankles, and she felt the strain in her shoulders and thighs. She had earned such a position when one, at first, tried to carry her over his shoulder. She had kicked and flailed in an attempt to escape.

Gray ash covered her wrists and face wherever their skin touched hers. Although mixed with some wet substance, it wiped off their skin quite easily.

The position proved uncomfortable, and Sam squirmed. Thickly muscled and much stronger than her, the pygmy holding her legs resisted and she only succeeded in kicking off her remaining sandal. It fell to the mud, out of view.

“Where are you taking us?” Sam demanded.

“I don’t believe they speak English.”

“Alfred?

She twisted her head to her left. Alfred marched, head hung low, with a pygmy on either side of him. His arm ended in a stub, his prosthesis missing, and he looked strange without his glasses.

He was bruised about the face, and Sam remembered her own bloody nose. It still stung, her face hot and puffy. Her hair hung in her face, stuck by moisture and blood.

“What do they want with us?”

“I don’t know,” Alfred admitted. “But I think we should keep our conversation to a minimum.” Even as he said those words, one of the closest pygmies stuck a threatening finger in his face.

Sam looked up at the pygmy holding her wrists. He glanced down, his eyes scanning her briefly. She sensed something in them that surprised her.

Guilt.

“Please, my arms hurt,” she pleaded. “I’ll walk. I won’t run away.”

He didn’t seem to understand.

“
Je marcherai,
” she tried. “
S’il vous plait?
”

Two of the men exchanged glances and a short conversation ensued. They spoke in quiet tones, so unlike the BaMbuti Sam met in Raoul’s village. The one holding her feet released them gently. Sam’s lower half dropped to the mud, and she climbed to her feet. One stood on either side of her each holding an arm. The pygmy who had held her wrists warned her in lilting French not to run.

“
Naturellement pas.
” Of course not.

They let her lift a hand to her face, but when she wiped at the blood the contact stung too much and she pulled her hand away.

Sam tried asking her previous question in French, but apparently their fluency was very limited. The lead pygmy looked very tall and muscular for the BaMbuti, nearly reaching Sam’s height. He turned toward her, a finger over his lips.

They marched until fatigue caught up to Sam, made worse by her injuries, and her throat got dry and sticky. Alfred let out an occasional groan. Sam wondered where they were being taken.

An eerie bellow cut through the night. It arose from nearby and somewhere ahead, but it sounded animalistic and inhuman. The pygmies didn’t startle at the noise as she expected, but instead began to sing. Each one knew the song and they started as one and continued to harmonize.

The bellow became a caw, as if the animal had shifted into another type entirely. But by then she had caught on.

This was the
molimo
song.

The caw became an elephant’s trumpet, this time so close that she jumped back. The pygmy to her right caught her with his gritty arms, and she saw a flash of white teeth when he grinned.

Sam looked into the forest, searching for the source of the noise. Alfred looked as frightened and exhausted as she felt. If she had heard these songs on a radio she might have thought them beautiful, but here in the dark forest, surrounded by her mysterious captors, it sounded eerie. Near perfect animal calls, but somehow hollow and warped.

Soon the forest canopy opened above them. She stared up at the starlit sky, grateful to see it after so long under the trees. Dark lines passed overhead, running parallel to each other. Something she wouldn’t expect to see in the middle of the Ituri forest. They looked like power lines.

Another root sliced into the bottom of her bare foot. She couldn’t even feel it anymore, so numb with pain and sore from walking. The stars began to fade overhead, drowned out by a coming light too distant to be seen. Dawn approached and still they hadn’t stopped to rest.

They reached the river. The small path twisted alongside and carried them west. Sam wondered if they’d reach the pond or had passed it already. She could no longer see the power lines in the canopy.

Alfred groaned and nearly collapsed, but the two men on either side of him made sure he stayed on his feet and kept walking. Sam felt in danger of collapsing as well. Dehydrated and exhausted, her head swam.

Strangely, she felt a sense of peace. For the first time, she no longer cared what dangers the jungle shadows held. She convinced herself that the forest was only that. No strange cries rose in the darkness, just a chorus of insects and birds. The madness seemed to have left for the time being.

Maybe the forest’s blood lust had been sated.

The pygmies grew more cheerful with each step. And then the forest fell away from the river. A small dirt field sat on the edge, free of trees except for the tallest branches. Morning rays lit a series of huts, BaMbuti in design, and a few sturdy buildings of firm timber but lacking foundations. A few pygmies gathered in the center of the village by a blazing fire pit.

Massive sun-bleached bones lay half-submerged in the dirt, the remains of some great animal. But the skeleton was too cracked and worn for Sam to identify it.

Her captors pushed her forward, and they soon left the corpse behind. A set of power lines streaked down from the treetops toward the only building made of stone and mortar. Then she heard the thrumming. Something beat inside that structure like the heart of a beast. A generator of some kind, she guessed.

Odd.

A bone tip against her back reminded her of her status as a prisoner. Alfred was similarly prodded.

The BaMbuti greeted each other. A few of the pygmies moved toward Sam.

“Sam,” Alfred called as the pygmies guided him away. “Don’t let them take your watch. Hide it.”

She furrowed her brow. Why was her watch so important? She glanced down at the analog face on her wrist.

They pulled Alfred away, leading him to a separate part of the village.

One grabbed her from behind, gripping both of her wrists tightly. He wrenched them behind her back and slipped a leather thong around them, tying them fast. The fabric sliced into her skin painfully. Then he grabbed her by the shoulder and tugged her past the stone building.

She tried to catch a quick glance as she passed. Vines twisted between the gaps in the stone as if this building alone had sat there for decades. A tiny hole served as a window on one side. He led her to a wooden structure on the other side, an open
baraza
at the front. And hanging over that
baraza
was a sight that unnerved her. A skull, larger than her body, rested like a trophy on a mantel piece. Giant eye sockets and the largest nasal cavity Sam had ever seen glared down at her. An elephant, she realized. Probably matching the bones she had seen earlier.

The BaMbuti led her up to the doorway, the dead elephant looming over her. Only then did Sam remember Alfred’s warning. She twisted her wrist discreetly, fighting against the leather cord. Her fingers stretched at a difficult angle until she felt the band of her watch. She fought to unclasp it, working the tiny metal prod out of the little holes. The band snapped free and the watch fell. She caught it deftly in her palm and balled up her fist.

With her fist closed, she felt something in her hand far more valuable than a watch.

Surely, if the Mbuti meant to steal her watch they’d swipe her diamond ring as well. As they led her inside the building, only one room with almost no decoration aside from a few mats on the floor, she twisted the ring until it slipped off her finger into her palm with the watch.

Two beams supported the roof and the Mbuti led her right up to one of the posts. He held her roughly as he untwisted the cord, pulled her against the beam, and then tied her wrists around it so her arms hugged the wood. She felt a sweaty hand slip over her wrist, checking for a watch. Alfred was right after all. She just hoped he wouldn’t notice the objects balled in her fist.

His hand slid into her pocket next and she cringed from the feeling of his fingers squirming against her hip. He checked the opposite pocket and found her wallet and cell phone there. He yanked them out and slid his hand back inside to check for more. His hands moved to her back pockets with little respect to her privacy, fingers pressing along her buttocks.

Finding the pockets empty, the pygmy turned away, satisfied. He told her to wait there in his lilting French and then he and the others turned and left. They stepped out into the night, chattering.

Exhausted, defeated, and thirsty, she slumped to the floor to relieve the strain on her feet. She wiggled her bloodstained toes.

Lavender beams stretched along the knotted planks of the floor. Sam watched their slow movements impatiently. With both arms, she hugged the post, the wood damp and warped from constant humidity. Shards of reflected light, cut by half-closed blinds on the windows, curled across her scratched and beaten feet.

The tie around her wrists refused to loosen. She had given up trying to wriggle out when a pair of pygmies took up positions on the porch. They conversed quietly, but glanced in her direction often enough to let her know they were watching. Their spears rested against their sides.

The coming morning seemed to take forever. Sam had thought hours had passed, until she glanced at her watch and saw she’d been sitting there for only a few minutes. She now understood why Alfred had told her to hide her watch. They weren’t taking it for its monetary value. They wanted time to stretch for her, creating a form of torture to soften her up.

The waiting felt unbearable, but at least with her watch she could keep a rational eye on things.

This would be a psychological war, she realized. For what purpose, she didn’t know. She wouldn’t let it get to her. She would give her captors nothing.

That only lasted for an hour.

The sky outside brightened into daylight and her thirst and hunger became too much. The exhaustion weakened her will until she wanted to cry. It got harder to breathe.

Finally, she cracked. Anything was better than the waiting.

“Hello?” she called. The rasp in her voice surprised her. Maybe the dehydration was worse than she thought. That would explain the headache, that and the blows to the face.

The Mbuti guards on the porch turned to look at her, but said nothing. A moment later, they returned to their conversation.

“Please,” she cried. “Can I have some food? Or some water?”

When they didn’t respond, she tried the same in French. Still nothing.

Sam slumped. She wanted to cry, but didn’t have any tears. Instead she leaned her head against the post and, in an instant, exhaustion took hold.

She realized she’d fallen asleep when a knock on wood woke her. Her head came up and she opened groggy eyes. A dark silhouette stood in the open doorway surrounded by bright morning light. The masculine form rested a hand on the doorframe. Behind him, the porch was empty, the pygmies gone.

“How was your nap?” a throaty voice asked. The accent sounded French.

She squinted against the bright light. A loose white shirt hung untucked over a pair of dirty white slacks. Tousled blonde hair dropped to his temples and blue eyes peered out from a sun-beaten face. He was definitely white. European, she guessed. French or Belgian.

Sam’s eyes drifted to a rifle, leaning against the inside of the doorframe.

“I suppose you’d like some food and water, wouldn’t you?” the man asked. He studied her, head tilted to one side.

At that moment, Sam decided not to be cooperative. With the waiting apparently over, her resolve and patience returned to her. She could go much longer without food or water, she decided. She would show as much resistance as she could rather than play into his sympathies.

“Tell me your name?”

She stared at the floor, resilient.

“Hm. You refuse to answer my questions.”

He walked forward, leaving the rifle at the door, and crouched in front of her, hands folded across his knees. His shirt opened as he stooped so she could see his finely-chiseled chest muscles. His eyes looked right into her as much as she tried to look away. She was too curious. She couldn’t help but look back.

“Your silence is pointless,” he assured her. “I already have the answers to my questions. I was only being polite. Your name is Samantha Summers. You’re twenty-six years old and you live in San Diego, California, in the United States. Am I right so far?”

For a moment, his knowledge caught her by surprise. Then she remembered her stolen wallet and set her jaw firm.

“I also know you’re married. To the tall man with the curly hair,” he continued. “Now I wonder what happened to your lovely wedding ring. You wouldn’t be hiding that, now would you, Samantha?”

Sam cringed reflexively. She caught it a moment later and wiped the expression from her face, hoping he hadn’t seen it.

“Hold out your hands for me, Samantha.”

The word “Samantha” grated her nerves. No one called her that. It was on her driver’s license and birth certificate. Nowhere else.

“Hold out your hands,” he repeated.

When she still didn’t respond, he reached out and pulled her fingers toward him with surprising gentleness. She didn’t resist, not seeing the point. He turned her palms over and studied both sides.

“They really did a number on you, didn’t they? Where is the beautiful woman I saw in those photographs?” He brushed her cheek with his fingers. She turned away reflexively, but he collected some of her dried blood on his fingertips.

“You’re strong willed.” He grinned wide, his teeth white. “And educated. Very attractive qualities. Your husband is a lucky man, Samantha. What is his name?”

His hands fell to her sides and groped her hips. For several moments, he prodded and squeezed, until one hand settled on her right pocket. She felt her ring and watch press into her flesh from the pressure. He felt it to, because he slipped his fingers inside and pulled the items out.

He shook his head in disgust. “They didn’t even check your pockets?” He held ring and watch out in either hand and studied them appraisingly. Then he slipped them into his own pockets. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. No one will find you out here.”

He stood up slowly, bringing her eye-level with his dirt-stained knees. “You’re still feeling uncooperative. I am disappointed, Samantha. I’ll come back later.”

With that, he turned as if to leave. Sam felt the sudden dread of being alone. Her patience and resilience slipped. “What do you want with me?” she asked.

He spun back around with a wide grin and crouched in front of her again, his elation obvious. “That’s much better. What I want from you is simple. I want you to observe. You already know much about what is going on here, I’m sure. Wouldn’t you like to know why?”