Don't Look Back (36 page)

He would go into the jungle now and he would seek her and find her. He would dress first—for humility and for protection against the elements. He strode into his bedroom and pulled on his shirt. Instantly, his skin seemed to catch fire. He gave off a pained growl as the fabric scraped across his flesh. In a fit, he tore the shirt off. Ripped it straight off his body from the collar down.

The inside of the cotton, lined with
mala mujer.
The burning leaves stuck there as if Velcroed.

He looked at his arms and chest. Red patches. They would rise further. This would be an inconvenience.

He grabbed another shirt from the drawer. Checked it first. Pulled it on.

Find her. He would find her. She had left the key in the ignition of the Jeep. He would take the vehicle and circle the canyon. See a trace. Leap out. Run her down. In a short sprint, he would overtake her. Like a lion. Like a bear.

He moved swiftly to the Jeep. Wind fluttered the machete incision he’d made in the soft-top.

He opened the door again. Leaned behind the wheel. Reached for the ignition.

No key.

He felt again. Bent to look. An empty slot.

Breath hissed through his teeth. She had circled back. Destroyed his food. Taken his water. Poisoned his clothes. And now disabled his vehicle.

He pulled himself out. Slammed the door. The noise echoed off the canyon walls. Scratching at his rising welts, he stared up the slope toward the plateau. Suddenly it looked a long way off.

Up until now the tourist party had been manageable. Warm clay in his hands. He had controlled them. Guided them. He had shown them what to think and what to feel, and they had obeyed. But this one was different.

This one
learned.

Chapter 48

Eve scouted the boulders and dips downstream from where the loose zip line flailed in the water. Once the river had her, her ability to steer herself would be negligible, but she wanted to know the twists and turns just in case. She returned to where the zip line was tied off around the tree. Shooting glances over her shoulder at the dark jungle, she squatted at the base of the trunk and wrapped her hands in fronds again, tucking in the ends to form makeshift gloves. Not wanting fear to gain a foothold, she didn’t allow herself to stop and consider.

Grabbing the cable, she half waded, half rappelled into the river. A few steps in, the current blew her legs out from under her. She clung to the wobbling zip line, trying to hold herself in place, her body skipping across the surface as if she were wakeboarding. As planned, she’d swung out toward the middle of the river in a semicontrolled fashion, but that was as far as the lifeline was going to get her.

Water crashed over her. She fought her head to the surface, gulped in air, trying to mentally piece together the lay of the river from her little scouting expedition. Downstream and well out of sight, the gnarled root of a guanacaste tree protruded from the opposite bank, twisting briefly over the water. If she hooked it, she would live. The bank looked far away. Her hands were weakening, the frond wraps stripping away. If she held on much longer, she’d drown.

She let go.

She shot backward so fast it felt like falling, though her movement was horizontal. Straightening her legs and turning onto her side, she knifed past the first boulder, which whipped by her cheek so close she swore she could feel the cold of the stone. She flipped over, sticking her feet up as Will had cautioned, the glowing water seeming to rush backward at her, into her face, even as she tumbled down two white-water runs.

If she went around the next bend, she’d shatter herself on the boulders, and there it was already, the turn flying at her. She’d rocketed a hundred yards in the seconds since her release. The current sloshed her wide, carrying her around the turn. In a second the gnarled root would zip overhead, her last chance before rock and ruin.

She flipped and pulled hard in a sloppy freestyle, her arms straining in their sockets. Her effort had virtually no effect, but she kept at it, kept at it, kicking violently. Her face was in the water; she couldn’t gauge her proximity to the far bank.

The root would be passing at any second. She turned and threw her hands up, hoping to catch the root under her arms so she’d have a prayer of holding on. A bump in the current lofted her upward, and she saw a flash of dark sky before something struck her across the chest so hard that her breath left her in a grunt.

The root.

Slippery with moss and moisture. She clung to it, her mouth fighting for air but finding none. The river ripped at her legs, her hips, and she had to get clear soon or it would tear her away. She didn’t have the luxury to wait until she could breathe again.

Hauling herself arm over arm toward shore, she lost her grip but caught herself painfully in the fork of her armpits. She resumed, still with no air coming in, managing to drag her body out of the water. Lying on the bank, she contorted, her head bobbing forward, mouth clutching. Her vision clouded. Would she really die here, like this? Suffocating with air all around?

At last her chest released, and she screeched in a breath and then another, curling fetally, bent hands pressed beneath her chin. When she could, she tested her ribs. The left ones were tender, but from the feel of them she hadn’t broken any. In a way she’d been lucky to hit the root so brutally and squarely, her entire torso absorbing and dispersing the shock.

When she was able to sit up, she checked the hemp bag and made sure the items remained inside. She wanted nothing more than to lie back down and dissolve into the bank, but if she didn’t get up, Will and Claire would die in that grotto.

She got up.

Swaying, she kept her feet. She had the key to the Jeep in her pocket, so al-Gilani couldn’t use it. But she couldn’t either. What, then, was the plan? She had to keep close to known terrain. One wrong turn in the jungle and she would get lost, die of exposure. The river was the obvious plan, a drawback but perhaps the only option. She’d follow it to the coast, to the authorities in Huatulco, and she’d send help back for Claire and Will.

Eve would have to get there on foot. With al-Gilani pursuing. And she’d need to figure out food and fresh water along the way. In the best scenario, it would take days.

Claire and Will might not have days.

Downriver, the bank all but disappeared into a wall of rock. Any headway would have to be made through the foliage parallel to the river, which was fine, since al-Gilani would likely search the banks at first light. Clouds muffled the moon; once she cut beneath the canopy, she struggled to see. Mosquitoes swirled around her bare arms, and she shook no-see-ums from her legs. Pausing, she took out al-Gilani’s doctored cooking oil and doused her limbs and the back of her neck as she’d learned at Santo Domingo Tocolochutla, the eucalyptus making her skin tingle. The insects stopped at once, a tiny victory that seemed, right now, a triumph.

She reached a wall of thick bushes that forced her farther east, away from the river, and she skidded down a brief slope into a stretch of majestic banyan trees. Mist settled low over the prop roots, cutting visibility. As she edged between them, she became aware of a different energy in the air. She halted. Reaching her nose, a faint animal tang. It was a sharp, acrid smell, one she could taste on the roof of her mouth. Her throat tightened.

Urine. And musk.

A few yards ahead, the fog swirled, then reshaped itself into something living.

A jaguar crept forward, mist rolling off her muscle-sleek shoulders as if she were shedding a robe. Her coat was jet-black, save faint leopard spots glowing along the crown of her head. Her upper lip bunched, whiskers bristling. The fearsome mouth bared. The hiss issuing from the throat was packed with malice.

A mother protecting her young.

In place of fear, Eve felt fascination.

But which way were her cubs? Eve took a cautious half step to the right, and the jaguar tensed, lowering herself for a charge, the hiss now less air and more war cry.

Eve said, “I understand.”

She lifted her foot, set it down to her left. The jaguar neither charged nor uncoiled.

Eve took another step to the left. Gleaming green eyes tracked her. The wrinkled upper lip lowered a notch, leaving the tips of the fangs exposed.

Another step distanced Eve farther yet. Steadily, she kept moving away. The jaguar straightened herself regally and watched, tail flicking, until enough fog had gathered between them to erase her from view.

Invigorated, Eve crouched and breathed the lush air, reliving how the jaguar’s muscles had rippled beneath that jet-black coat. The animal could have torn her to shreds, and yet she’d been allowed to pass unharmed. The mist condensed on the fronds and on her skin, beading, turning her into a part of the jungle itself. She felt blessed.

The detour had forced her farther inland from the river, but, in deference to the jaguar’s terrain and an impenetrable run of sugarcane, she took a circuitous route back. Slogging through the thickening underbrush was at first exasperating, then grueling. Her stomach flipped with hunger. The wet sneakers chafed her heels. Her ribs ached from the lifesaving blow dealt by the gnarled root over the river. Exhaustion pulled at her eyelids. High-stepping through a bramble, her legs simply gave out. She pulled herself to the base of a tree and sat against it.

Given how much energy she was burning, she had to keep fueling her body or it would cease functioning. Her arms felt heavy as she tugged off the hemp backpack and sorted through it. The Ziploc holding the cheese had torn open. Greedily, she ate the last lump, two mouthfuls that only served to stoke her hunger. She had five water bottles left, which was good, but she was down to her last half of a protein bar. She unwrapped it, smelled it, held it to her lips. And then she ate it. She couldn’t help herself.

Next she checked the satphone. The Ziploc seal had held, the phone sliding into her hand dry and intact. When she thumbed it on, the signal icon rotated, searching, and the low-battery emblem blinked, two competing electronic drives. After a few seconds of this, she thumbed the phone off, saving the last bit of charge for another hour, another altitude.

Leaning her head against the shaggy bark, she closed her eyes, wavering between sleep and waking.

A crackling sound snapped her head forward. Low at first, but growing louder. She felt the noise as the prickle of tiny feet up her spine, her nape.

“No,” she said. “Uh-uh.”

She pulled the hemp bag onto her back. Somewhere in the darkness ahead, birds erupted from ground roosts. The underbrush started shaking, as if hit by a small-scale earthquake. She didn’t know how she got her legs beneath her, but she was standing.

The black wave emerged from the foliage, creeping across the jungle floor.

Sweeper ants.

She couldn’t outrun them, not now. They poured forward. A lizard shot from a log before her but was instantly ensnared. It stiffened, lurching, then disappeared beneath the black, crawling mass. When the sea parted, only a jumble of bones remained.

The living stripe flowed toward her. She remembered how the
indígenos
had calmly lunge-stepped over the ants up at Santo Domingo Tocolochutla, but this wave was broader, beyond Eve’s jumping ability, even if she were rested and nourished.

They swept toward her feet. She leapt up the trunk, hugging it, holding herself up though the bark cut into her cheek and the tender insides of her arms. Terrified, she peered down over the bulge of her shoulder. The ants pooled around the trunk, the mass seeming to sniff upward.

Then the collective brain spoke and the ants surged up the tree.

The wide ribbon of black pulled toward the trunk as if sucked into a vacuum hose. Her sneakers were maybe three feet off the ground. The distance was breached instantly. She drew her legs up under her and shoved off.

A brief, weightless moment of flight. The ground beneath crawling, alive. She’d picked the spot where the black flecks had thinned. Hitting the ground on her side, she rolled over her shoulder and up, leaping to clear the squirming carpet.

Gasping, she slapped at her legs, her sides, batted at her hair. A pinch bit into her neck, one at her inner thigh. She danced and whirled, knocking the ants off. On her forearm one insect head remained floating, knocked free of the body, the mandibles still sunk into flesh. She pinched it free like a tick.

The ants slid back down the trunk, rejoining the wider band of their colony. They swept on, away from her. She watched until the grass stopped shaking, until no more birds spooked. The crackling, she knew, had faded from the air, but she still heard it, still felt it across her skin.

Adrenaline kept her upright. She had to find food. She couldn’t remain this weak out here and hope to survive. Shoving through the foliage, keeping the river sounds on her right, she hiked for ten minutes, then ten more, looking for she knew not what.

She arrived at a gorge and halted abruptly. Down below in the darkness, nestled into a spray of trees, was a blocky shadow with straight, man-made lines. A clear trail of broken plants and tire tracks described its course into the gorge.

She blinked a few times, realizing what it was, then hiked down.

The Wrangler’s grille was crumpled around a tree trunk, the windshield pebbled across the seams of the upthrust hood. Black forms sagged the branches overhead. One hop-fluttered to a lower perch, and she caught a glimpse of the distinctive bloodred head, ducked on a vulture neck.

Using handholds, she lowered herself to the crash site. Behind the wheel Harry’s body remained seat-belted in, his face and arms covered with hundreds of red spots.

Ant bites.

He was twisted sideways, an arm hooked over the seat back.

Beside him Sue was tilted to the passenger window, the skin of her lips broken into white dehydrated squares, her wan face spotted with welts. In the end the two must have proved too large or unpalatable for the ants to manage, but the swarm had certainly given it the college try.