Don't Look Back (28 page)

Sue gave a sigh that ended in a sob.

“How about
that
one?” Eve pointed to the last ATV in the row. “It’s an older model.”

He regarded her skeptically, then pulled himself around to it, bending down. The muscles of his back rippled with some hidden effort of the hand, and then he turned, holding a battery lead between his thumb and forefinger like a showcase diamond.

The loose and scattered laughter was humorless, more like vented relief. Neto alone held his focus elsewhere; he was turned one hundred eighty degrees from the others, staring at Lulu elevated on the picnic table, a royal corpse prepped for viewing.

Eve carry-dragged Will over to the still-open hood of the Jeep. He fussed for a moment beneath, then swung himself into the driver’s seat. He leaned back, panting at the roof, trying to get the pain under control again. Then he reached for the key. Paused.

He said, “There could still be a bomb.”

No one stepped away.

“Fingers crossed, then,” he said, and turned the key.

The engine sputtered to life.

The sound—so familiar, so ordinary—was a music of sorts, a roadway melody here among the birdsong and timpani rumble of the clouds. Eve’s breath caught, a hiccup of unadulterated joy.

They stepped aside, and Will eased the Jeep out of the stable into the open. He put it into park and opened his door. “You drive,” he said to Eve. “I can’t hold down the accelerator.”

Sue scrambled into the back first and had herself buckled in before the others could move.

Neto started toward Lulu over on the picnic table. Harry caught him by the arm. “Where are you going?”

“We have to bring her.”

“We’re not bringing her, Neto. When we get out of here, we can send someone back for her body. So you can … mourn. But we can’t fit her in the Jeep.”

Neto tugged his arm free. “No. That won’t work. We have to bring her with us.”

Sue leaned forward to peer out the open door, sweeping her hair back over an ear with her fingertips. “She is
not
coming in here with us.”

Fortunato said, “The roads will be
muy
bad. The river, too.”

“I don’t care,” Sue said. “Let’s go.”

“Make no mistake,” Harry said. “We’re going.”

Fortunato’s forehead furrowed as he strained for English. “I mean you need should bring the food. You do not know how much the time down the mountain.”

“He’s probably right,” Will said to Eve. “Who knows how long we’ll have to wait at the crossing for the water level to drop, or where the roads’ll be washed out, or how long we’ll—
you’ll
—need to hike if we have to leave the Jeep behind. Could be days. We should salvage any food we can.”

They looked at the food area by the grill. Emptied milk cartons, spilled cereal, heads of lettuce mashed into the mud.

Leaving the Jeep running, she helped Will as they crept across toward the food. The remaining ice was no more than thumbnails floating on the warm ground. Eve looked from the puddle to Will’s ankle, and he followed her eyes and shook his head with what seemed grudging respect for a man clever enough to deprive his shattered ankle of ice. He picked up a handful of protein bars from the dirt and assessed a half-stomped banana. Eve crouched before the miniature refrigerator. The door remained slightly ajar. No light shone within.

She reached out a finger, hooked it in the dark crack.

Will said, “Hang on.”

He hobbled over to her, and they leaned close, a bomb-squad team debating whether to cut the red wire. Behind them they could hear Neto and Harry still arguing about the body, with Sue and Claire chiming in.

Will nodded to Eve, and she inched the door open. He slithered his hand through the gap. His forearm tensed as he seized something. Then he said, “Holy crap.”

“What?”

“Open the door now. Slowly.
Very
slowly.”

She swung it the rest of the way. Clenched in his hand, a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, still tilted as it had been seconds ago leaning against the door. The bottle was partially filled with a milky substance, topped with foam. Dangling inches above the surface was a tea bag, the string secured by the screwed-tight cap. Will’s fingers had turned white around the green plastic.

“What is it?” Eve asked.

Will spoke without so much as moving his lips. “Incendiary bomb.”

“Put it down.”

“I
can’t
now.”

Painstakingly, he righted the bottle, the tea bag swinging above the fluid but not touching it.

“Hold the string,” he said. “And for God’s sake don’t let it slip.”

She pinned the tea-bag string with a fingernail.

Behind them Neto was yelling. “—not gonna leave her to the
ants and maggots
—”

Will unscrewed the cap, flicked it aside, and held the bottle with both hands. Millimeter by millimeter, Eve guided the tea bag out and free.

They exhaled together.

A sickly sweet scent rose from the open bottle. “Is that…?”

“Lavender,” Will said. “Glycerin from the soap-making center.” He sniffed the mouth of the bottle. “And sulfuric acid. Rust remover.”

Eve glanced at the oxidized patches on the aluminum cladding over the grill. She remembered Fortunato and Concepción scrubbing at them, working away flakes of rust. The scope of al-Gilani’s ingenuity overwhelmed her. How many other run-of-the-mill items could be weaponized and turned against them? More than anything else, the repurposed Mountain Dew bottle drove home how thoroughly outmatched they were.

Will tossed the soda bottle aside and took the tea bag from Eve’s hand. The top had been slit, and he upended it, granules spilling into his palm.

“I’m guessing this is potassium chlorate,” he said. “From the pesticide the workers were sprinkling around the camp. The door opens, the bottle tips, the bag drops into the liquid mixture, and we’ve got one less little Indian in the jungle.”

“Thank God for your engineering degree.”

“It’s not a master’s in bomb making from Terrorist U,” he said. “But right now I’ll take the B.A. from Puget Sound.”

He reached into the refrigerator and claimed their prize, several knots of quesillo Oaxaca, sealed in intact plastic bags. “Protein. And it’ll keep a day at least.” He armed a bowling-pin array of water bottles off the top ledge into Eve’s T-shirt, which she held out from her belly to form a pouch as she’d seen the
indígeno
mother do when the swarm of sweeper ants had arrived. She and Will turned back to the Jeep, which chuffed, exhaust making the air at the tailpipe waver.

“Hi?” Will called out. “We almost just blew up.”

But the argument had escalated, the others too embroiled to notice. Will leaned heavily on Eve as they started back. Fortunato met them and relieved Eve of some of the bottles. Will tossed the cheese and the protein bars into the cargo hold, then leaned against the side of the Jeep, breathing hard. Fortunato began unloading the rest of the water bottles from Eve’s shirt. She saw that he had furnished them with a few other items as well—canteens and flashlights.

“Neto,” Harry was saying. “It’s impossible to get Lulu into the—”

“Don’t
tell me
what is possible!” Neto craned up into Harry’s face, jacking a finger at his eyes. Harry leaned away, hands raised in a show of passivity. Neto said, “If it was Sue—
your
wife—would you leave her?”

“Funny,” Claire said, “I seem to remember you being on the
other
side of that argument earlier when it pertained to Jay. You were happy to leave
him.
And that was before we even knew he was dead.”

“You can protest all you want,” Neto said. “But it is
my
Jeep. Mine and Lulu’s. I will let you ride in it, but she is coming with us. Her father and mother deserve to have their daughter’s body buried properly.
Lulu
deserves it.”

Something shifted inside Harry. Stubble bristled around the firm line of his mouth. He said, “Like Theresa Hamilton did?”

Neto shoved him, knocking the older man into the side of the Jeep. Harry staggered a bit from the impact, lowered slightly onto one bent knee, the position underscoring his age and frailty. Flushed in the cheeks, he coughed, then straightened up.

Neto stormed across the clearing to the picnic table. He rested a hand on Lulu’s cheek, murmuring something to her, then crouched and slid his arms beneath her neck and the V of her knees. Muscles straining, he pulled her upright.

There was the distinct sound of something hollow falling, a tick, then a tock. A half-filled Mountain Dew bottle rolled out from where it had been lodged beneath Lulu’s body.

Eve felt a pulsing at her wrists, her blood lurching. She watched Neto’s head dip to track the bottle as it rolled off the edge of the table. Then he lifted his face to look across at them, his brow twisted in an expression of puzzlement.

In slow motion Eve saw the tea bag twirling inside, suspended, liquid whorling up the curved sides all around it.

The bottle struck the bench seat.

The flare was so intense that it seemed to scorch its image onto Eve’s retinas. She cringed away, her eyes squeezed shut, the yellow flash preserved on the backs of her lids. An instant later the shock wave lifted her hair. The force was gentle, a caress across her nape.

Then came the fist of the explosion.

Chapter 37

Neto sat on the ground facing away from them, his legs sticking out lock-kneed before him. Smoke wisped up over his shoulders. The back of his shirt was unscorched. From this angle he looked perfectly intact.

Kicked-up dirt typhooned in the clearing, adding grit to the black fumes. Harry crawled out from behind the Jeep, joggling his head like a dog trying to shake free a collar. Will was doubled over, hacking, his bandaged foot sticking out behind him, bouncing with each cough.

Eve took a cautious step to the side, trying for better perspective. Neto’s motionless and formal position suggested peacefulness or prayer. Lulu’s body had landed before him in the dirt, and he seemed to meditate over it. Another step brought him further into view.

His front side was hollowed out, a doll held over a flame.

Eve’s gorge lurched, shoving at the back of her throat. She waved her way through the smoke toward the Jeep, shouting,
“Let’s go, let’s go!”

She jumped in, the still-running engine vibrating the driver’s seat reassuringly. Doors opened and shut, and faces bobbed in the rearview. Will stumbled over and threw himself into the passenger seat, his door flapping open as she screeched in reverse, then slamming shut as she hit the brakes for a three-point. She stomped the gas pedal, the others pitching back in their seats as she peeled out.

Through the windshield the greenery streamed past, Eve bracing herself for the scarred face to appear among the fronds or a dark form to sweep past the hood. He was a ghost—everywhere and nowhere.

She wrenched the wheel, the Wrangler skidding toward the break in the trees leading to the road beyond. She could see it now, a span of mud flickering into sight between the trunks ahead.

Will was yelling. “Wait a minute! Wait—just wait!”

Eve braked hard, and they heaved forward collectively.
“What?”

Will was twisted around in his seat. “Where the hell is Claire?”

“She’s here,” Eve said. “She’s in the cargo hold. She
has
to—”

Fortunato looked over the seat back. “No. She is gone.”

“Gone,” Eve said. “
Gone?
She’s on
leg braces.
She can’t be gone.”

They pressed their faces frantically to the windows. Smoke billowed and undulated, clearing by degrees to show nothing and more nothing.

—
stay alive to see him blow out candles on his birthday cake and to show up for back-to-school night and
—

“No,” Eve said. “No, no, no.”

She rolled down her window, shouted Claire’s name. Will followed her lead. She screamed again and again, her throat going hoarse.

“This is insane,” Sue said. “We have to get out while we can.”

Eve’s lungs ached from the smoke and the shouting.

“She’s not here,” Harry said. “She’d hear us.”

“Come on!” Sue shouted. “We have a chance to save our lives, right now.”

—
stay alive for free-comic-book day and post-swim-meet pizza parties and
—

Will’s gaze was steady on the side of Eve’s face. “Eve.”

She dropped the gearshift into drive again. The dashboard grew blurry. She blinked, and the road ahead came into focus once more.

“We can’t,” Will said. “Eve. We
can’t.
”

—
be there when he needs shots at the doctor’s and for when he has nightmares and wakes me in the middle of the night and
—

She stomped the gas pedal. The Wrangler barreled through the break in the trees. Sue leaned back, shot a breath of relief. Fortunato bowed his head. Harry palmed sweat off his forehead. Behind them in the mirror, the lodge receded.

The oval of Will’s face remained in her peripheral vision, staring.

Eve was crying.

Another voice spoke in her head, welling up from somewhere deep within:
If you leave her there, to him, you will
never
forgive yourself.

They broke free, skidding onto the apron of dirt. The road ahead corkscrewed, weaving and diving down the mountain, vanishing and reemerging. It was potted, puddled, and strewn with fallen branches. But navigable.

She pictured Claire’s face in the bathroom. Recalled her own words:
We’re
not
gonna leave you behind.

Her body made the choice for her; she didn’t know she’d hit the brakes until the locked wheels were pushing up mud and the trees were slowing on either side.

“Fuck!”
she screamed. She battered the steering wheel.
“Fuck fuck fuck!”

She was sobbing, the blows stinging her hands, ringing up her arms. She kept on, punching at the wheel until Will reached across and locked down her arms, and then she collapsed forward, weeping.