Deadfall: Agent 21 (11 page)

There was no warning. No tiny pitter-patter of rain spots. It was as if someone had simply turned on the tap. He had never known anything like it. Even under the canopy of the jungle it felt like a million showers were blasting down on top of him. The water steamed and sizzled all around him and he almost found it difficult to breathe without sucking in raindrops.

He felt Gabs grab his hand. Raf had done the same to Malcolm, and now they were all moving towards a massive tree trunk where the canopy overhead was a little thicker. They huddled here where the rain was fractionally less intense. Rivers of rainwater gushed downhill – enough to knock them from their feet – and Zak understood why Raf had made them move to higher ground.

‘
How long’s this going to last?
’ he yelled. But his voice went unheard above the noise of the rainstorm. Instead, following his Guardian Angel’s lead, he opened his mouth up to the sky and drank what rainwater he could. That, at least, was refreshing. He could tell that he’d lost a good deal of water in the hour they’d been trekking.

The rain lasted for ten minutes. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had started, as if the tap had been switched off again. All four of them were saturated and covered in splashes of mud.

‘We’ll dry off sooner than you think in this heat,’ Gabs said. ‘Let’s get off the path and keep on walking.’

But Zak wasn’t going anywhere. He’d just seen something.

‘What is it, Zak?’ Raf asked quietly.

Zak pointed at a tree trunk ten metres from their position. Something was pinned to it at head height. He found that he was holding his breath as he stepped towards it.

He was a metre away when he understood what he was looking at.

In some ways, it reminded him of a miniature scarecrow. The stuffed figure was twenty centimetres high and dressed in a straw-coloured dress. But it was not the dress that captured Zak’s attention. Nor was it the gruesome way in which a sturdy six-inch nail pinned the figure to the tree through its abdomen. It was the head: the tiny skull of a small animal, its intricate bones on display and its jaw fixed in a hideous grin.

Zak shivered. Raf and Gabs were suddenly next to him.

‘There’s another one over there,’ Gabs said quietly. She was right. A second figure was nailed to a tree about ten metres away.

‘I’ve seen something like these before,’ Zak breathed. ‘In Mexico, at Cruz’s house. They called them
La Catrina
– statues of women with skulls for faces. A kind of Mexican tradition.’ He grimaced. ‘As traditions go, I think I prefer Morris dancing.’

‘I don’t know,’ Gabs said. ‘I think it’s a good sign.’

Zak blinked in confusion. ‘Why? Surely it’s there just to scare people away.’

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘And that means we’re on the right track.’

‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.’ Zak continued to eye the figure with distaste.

Gabs reached out one hand, ripped the figure from the tree and dropped it on the ground.

‘Let’s take the nails,’ Raf said.

‘What for?’

‘You never know.’ He wiggled the end of the nail and eased it out of the tree trunk. Then he walked over to the second doll, ripped it from the tree and removed the other nail.

Zak found himself staring at the stuffed toys. The jaws of their gruesome skeleton heads had fallen open and they were staring up towards the jungle canopy.

‘They’re just dolls, sweetie,’ Gabs said quietly from behind him.

Zak gave her a look. He wanted to say that the cocaine-stuffed baby they’d found at the landing strip was also just a doll. That didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous.

But he kept quiet, and they continued their trek through the jungle.

‘What’s that?’

They stopped still, and listened hard. There was a babbling noise, almost like a human laughing. It sounded like it came from the treetops, though not too close.

‘Chimpanzees, probably,’ said Gabs a moment later. ‘That’s what it sounds like. Hope we don’t bump into any. They can be a real nuisance.’

‘A nuisance how?’

But Gabs didn’t answer.

Morning had turned to afternoon. It was now three o’clock. Gabs had been right. The rainwater had soon evaporated from their clothes, but Zak still wasn’t dry as the sweat continued to pour from his body. He felt dirty. Greasy. And
very
thirsty.

Every forty-five minutes or so, Raf would stop, having found a particular kind of vine in his path. ‘Fresh water vine,’ he explained to Zak the first time he located one. ‘In some parts of Africa they call it “tourist skin” because its skin peels away like tourists’ in the sun.’ Sure enough, the outer layer of the vine was coming away in sections, like damp wallpaper. Raf would cut strips of vine from the plant and hand them round. Zak soon learned the trick of throwing his head back and holding a cut end of the vine above his mouth, then letting the water trickle in. It didn’t totally relieve the burning thirst at the back of his parched throat, but it was better than nothing.

At 16.00hrs, Raf raised his hand again. All four of them stopped. Raf inclined his head slightly. ‘I think I can hear water,’ he said.

Zak listened very carefully. Sure enough, he could hear a distant trickle somewhere off to their left.

They changed direction, but moved more slowly now. Each time he passed a tree, Raf carved a notch into the bark. Zak didn’t have to ask why. Each patch of rainforest looked identical to the next. If they didn’t mark their path carefully, they’d never find their way back.

After ten minutes of careful trekking, the water source came into sight. It was a stream about two
metres wide, but fast flowing. A gap in the canopy above let beams of sunlight in, which reflected off the water like twinkling diamonds. It was beautiful and Zak couldn’t stop looking at it. The others were right by him, all three of them equally stunned.

Then Zak heard a roar.

It was a terrifying sound. Low, throaty and snarling. It shattered the stillness of the jungle and made him start violently. His brain screamed at him to run, but it was as if his muscles had turned to ice. His stomach was in his throat. He looked desperately around, trying to find out what animal had made that ferocious, angry sound. It had come from the opposite side of the stream, but at first Zak couldn’t see anything. Whatever beast had just snarled its warning at them, it was too well camouflaged . . .

‘
Don’t move a muscle . . .
’ Gabs hissed.

Malcolm was either not listening or had decided to ignore her. He turned away from the stream and was obviously about to run.

Gabs grabbed him and held him fast. ‘
Do what I say.
’

And while this was going on, Zak’s eyes finally picked out the creature. He had only ever seen leopards in pictures. But he immediately recognized the shape of the head and the distinctive spots. It
was crouching low, mostly covered by foliage, so that only its head and its lean, muscular shoulders were really visible about five metres from the far bank of the stream.

Zak felt his eyes lock with the cat’s, and in that exact moment the leopard roared again, revealing a full set of adult teeth, like white daggers set in the pink hilt of its jaw. And again, Zak’s brain screamed at him to run.

But Gabs was speaking again, her voice little more than a breath. She sounded like she was trying not to move her lips any more than necessary.

‘If we run,’ she whispered, ‘it
will
chase us. It’s a hunter. That’s what hunters do. Stay
absolutely
still. Don’t frighten it, or startle it. And don’t maintain eye contact – it will take that as a challenge.’

Instantly, Zak ripped his gaze away from the leopard. He could still see it from the corner of his eye, though – a yellow and black blur nestled in the dark green foliage.

Seconds passed. They felt like hours. Zak forced himself to breathe, slowly and steadily, but he could feel the tremors as he inhaled.

The leopard stayed perfectly still. So did the humans.

The only noise was the rushing of the stream.

Movement.

Zak couldn’t help his eyes flickering towards the leopard. He saw the lithe, sinewy body turning 180 degrees as the big cat slunk away into the forest.

Nobody moved or even spoke for a good thirty seconds.

It was Raf who finally broke the silence. ‘We need to drink and wash, then get away from the water,’ he said very quietly. ‘It’s obviously a watering hole, and that leopard won’t be the only animal that uses it.’

‘What if it comes back?’ Malcolm had an edge of panic in his voice. His glasses were wonky on his face, and had steamed up slightly.

‘I don’t think it will. It doesn’t want a fight any more than we do. Don’t drink the water till I’ve checked a few metres upstream for dead animals.’

Raf started walking carefully towards the stream. Zak was reluctant to follow – the roar of the leopard was still echoing in his ears and he could still see those sharp teeth in his mind – but his throat was parched; he needed water. A minute later, when Raf had announced it safe, he was kneeling by the river bank, filling his cupped hands with cool water and glugging it back.

He had just swallowed his third mouthful of water when he felt a sharp pain in the side of his abdomen. ‘
Ouch!
’ he hissed. His fingers felt towards
the location of the pain. There was a bulge beneath his shirt, the size of a golf ball.

Gingerly, he lifted the shirt up.

It looked like a slug, only bigger. And it was clamped fast to his skin! As Zak lifted his shirt a bit higher, he realized that although it was the biggest, it wasn’t the only one. There were eight more of these slug-like creatures, each the size of his thumbnail, suckered onto his skin.

‘Er, Gabs,’ he said quietly. The other three were all bending down and drinking. ‘
Gabs!
’

She looked over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed and she stood up. ‘OK, sweetie,’ she said. ‘Try not to panic. They’re leeches. They probably attached themselves to you when you brushed past them in the bush.’

Malcolm was looking at Zak’s abdomen with wide eyes. He scrambled to raise his own shirt and a look of relief passed his face when he saw nothing, but then he frowned. Bending down, he rolled up his right trouser leg. Sure enough, four or five of the revolting little beasts had stuck themselves to his skin. He whimpered and tried to pull one of them off. It wouldn’t shift. ‘Get off!’ he shouted. ‘
Get them off me!’

‘Leave it,’ Gabs said sharply. ‘They’ll fall off by themselves when they’ve drunk enough blood.’

Malcolm turned white.

‘She’s right, mate,’ Raf added. ‘They’re not as bad as they look. I saw one in Borneo once, had eight big teeth and feeds off the mucus up your nose . . .’

‘
Raf!
’ Gabs said. ‘That’s
not
helpful. Seriously, Malcolm, we’ve probably all got them. They’ll have fallen off by nightfall.’ She pointed at the especially large leech on Zak’s side. ‘But that’s a bull leech. It’ll get three times bigger than that if we let it, and could hurt a lot. We need to deal with it.’

Zak felt a bit faint as he nodded and lowered his shirt over the bull leech. ‘How?’ he asked.

‘We’ll burn it off. But let’s find somewhere to make camp first. It’ll be dark in a couple of hours and it’ll take us that long to make a shelter.’ She turned to Raf. ‘We should get away from the water before feeding time.’

Raf nodded and, wordlessly, led them back up the way they’d come.

Zak felt as though his whole body was crawling with creatures as they navigated from tree notch to tree notch, and he could see that Malcolm, up ahead, was trembling. The patch of skin where the bull leech was sucking his blood throbbed painfully. He resisted touching it through his shirt to see how fat it was getting.

Keep your mind on the jungle
, he told himself as
they continued to trek.
Don’t let your concentration lapse
.

Twenty minutes passed before Raf stopped again. They found themselves in a small clearing, about five metres by five. The canopy overhead was still thick, but the ground was fairly clear. The trees all around were covered with large palm leaves. ‘Wait here,’ Raf said, before disappearing into the jungle again. He returned a couple of minutes later. ‘Cruz’s path is about thirty metres away,’ he said. ‘We’re still on the ridge line, so water can’t run down towards us.’ He bent over, scraped some leaves away from a patch of ground and touched the earth. ‘Dry,’ he said. ‘We’ll be OK here if there’s another rainstorm.’

Zak looked up. There were no dangerous-looking branches, no trees that seemed likely to come tumbling down on them. ‘No deadfall,’ he said.

Raf nodded his agreement. ‘How’s that leech?’ he asked.

Zak carefully lifted his shirt. He saw, to his horror, that the bull leech had almost doubled in size. So too had the smaller leeches. He couldn’t help wondering if he had any blood left.

‘Let’s get a fire going,’ Raf said. ‘Zak, Gabs, we need dry wood. Malcolm, stay with me. We’ll cut down some palm leaves to make a shelter.’

After the rainstorm they’d had, Zak didn’t much
fancy their chances of finding dry wood. But in fact, in this elevated position, it was plentiful. That didn’t make collecting it easy. ‘Just stick to the edge of the clearing, keeping us in view, and careful what you pick up,’ Gabs told him. ‘Snakes like to hide in the shade of log piles. Don’t pick up a puff adder by mistake.’

Zak gave her a sick look, then went about his business very cautiously.

Fifteen minutes later, each had collected an armful of wood and Raf had constructed the frame of a shelter. It was the shape of an A-frame tent, made from long, straight branches lashed together with natural cordage that he had stripped from a tree, and only just big enough for the four of them to lie under it. Raf and Malcolm had collected a pile of massive palm leaves, each of them almost Zak’s height. They were splitting them down the middle then laying them, fronds down, across the shelter, like tiles on a roof.

‘It’s not much,’ Raf said, ‘but it’ll keep the rain off us. Let’s get that fire going.’