Insects: A Novel (13 page)

48

Duncan asked Suarez
to slow down, that the others were having difficulty keeping his pace despite having left most of their gear at the campsite. Suarez was impatient and inclined to disobey, but when he saw Professor Avezedo bring up the rear, he waited for everyone to catch up and then took the lead but made sure that he remained within sight of the group. For this reason, it took several hours to reach the area where the bugs had attacked Costa. Avezedo urged caution as they approached the field where the body lay.

“We don’t know anything about these insects,” Azevedo said, shaking his head. “Other than they are predators and they are organized in such a way that apparently thousands of them can be brought to bear quickly.”

“You make them sound like an army,” Boyd said.

“That’s a good analogy,” Azevedo agreed. “I think they are. I think they are more like ants than cockroaches in that regard.”

They paused at a clearing where the trail abruptly ended in the field of deep grass where Costa’s body lay. Suarez pointed at the tree he’d climbed. From the ground, they could not see the body nor an indication of where it was. Suarez regained his perch on the tree, and after a moment pointed toward a patch of disturbed grass that could only be seen from above.

“He’s there,” Suarez said. “Maybe twenty meters, thirty meters. Not far. Do you see?”

As hard as everyone tried to see where Suarez pointed, they couldn’t see, not from ground level. It all looked like an unbroken sea of tall grass undulating in a slight breeze. Lowering himself, Suarez took out his machete and started to cut a path through the grass, expecting the others to follow. Ten meters in, he paused and looked back. Nobody followed.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“What are we waiting for?” Boyd asked.

“You first,” Carlos Johnson responded, gesturing toward Suarez.

“Why don’t you finish cutting the path,” Duncan said. “We’ll just get in your way.”

“Chicken,” Boyd said as he started toward Suarez.

Duncan grabbed him by the shoulder.

“Let’s just wait until he finds the body,” he said.

Everyone seemed satisfied by this, and Duncan waved to Suarez to continue, which he did, stopping several times to look back at the tree to get his bearings. From the tree, he’d thought he had a clear view of where to go, but at ground level he was less certain. Nothing seemed to stand out. Where he could see a patch of disturbed grass from twenty feet, from the ground, it looked different.

Then the stench hit him, carried by the light breeze. He hadn’t expected this. But it came in waves, and he knew Costa was near. Several more swings of the machete and suddenly he stood over Costa’s body, sprawled face down, his clothes reduced to tatters and only skinny strands of flesh dangling from his nearly skeletonized corpse. He instinctively crossed himself and looked away. It was difficult to see his friend like this and, in a way, he didn’t want anyone else to see him like this either, concerned about his dignity. But he had no choice but to wave the others to join him.

Boyd led the way and nearly fell on top of the body, his foot catching on a root. Duncan grabbed him as he stumbled and pulled him back. Suarez didn’t like the way everyone crowded in to gawk at the body, which looked much like the body they found with the Labrador. Within moments, Boyd started documenting the scene, which upset Suarez, who put his hand in front of Boyd’s camera.

“No, no, no,” Suarez said. “You shouldn’t do this.”

Boyd looked at Duncan, who nodded. Boyd pocketed the camera, somewhat annoyed. Duncan asked Suarez what he wanted to do with the body. The young guide looked back toward the end of the path where the ground was relatively clear.

“We should move him back there. It will be easier to dig.”

At first, nobody did anything other than steal looks at the body. Then Duncan pulled out a poncho from his daypack and started stomping on the grass near the body. He laid the poncho alongside the body.

“We need something to grab it with,” he said. “Anybody got gloves with them?”

Glances were exchanged.

“How about a T-shirt?” Stephanie Rankin said, digging into her daypack. “We can tear it up and use that.”

Using his pocket knife, Boyd cut the shirt into wide strips, handing several to Duncan and Suarez and keeping two for himself. Together, the three of them surrounded the body and gingerly took hold of Costa’s arms and lower legs and, lifting it only slightly, slid it onto the poncho. The ground was covered with dead insects and damp where his blood had saturated the soil. Everyone skittishly moved out of the way or scurried ahead as the three of them carefully carried the body out of the field and back to the path where they set it down gently and set about digging a shallow grave.

Boyd and Duncan started the grave with their folding shovels while the others watched. Suarez moved away, struggling with his emotions, watching from the corner of his eye. Then it occurred to him that they would need to mark the grave, and he collected stones and piled them near where the grave was being dug.

While this was going on, Johnson, Rankin, and Azevedo sat on a large log that had fallen near the path.

“I can’t really believe what’s happening,” Rankin whispered.

“What can’t you believe?”

“This,” she said, pointing toward the deepening grave. “I mean, this was supposed to be an expedition, and now it’s turned into this, a cemetery and a crime scene or something. I mean, two
bodies
in two days. This is not what I expected.”

“Nobody expected this, miss,” Azevedo said.

“Yeah,” Johnson said. “There’s nothing we can do about it. Besides, we’ll be headed back tomorrow.”

“And what do we get out of this? We didn’t find the
blaberus
. This is not going to help me finish my M.S.”

“Did you collect any specimens?”

“Specimens?”

“Yeah, there were plenty on the ground back there. I thought you were going to collect specimens.”

Rankin grew quiet.

“You’re afraid, aren’t you,” Johnson said.

“I am not,” she protested.

“Yes you are,” he said quickly.

“I am not,” she said, rising from the log. She started toward the field but stopped abruptly.

Looking at Johnson, she smiled.

“Would you come with me?”

“What will you give me if I do?”

Listening to them bicker amused Azevedo, who stood up.

“I’ll go with you,” he said.

Rankin stuck her tongue out at Johnson and followed Azevedo into the field, pouting and glancing back at her fellow student.

49

After a brief
ceremony led by Suarez, Costa’s remains were covered with earth followed by the stones Suarez had gathered. He carefully arranged them into a mound at the head of the grave. Using his knife, he roughly carved Costa’s name and date of death into a chunk of wood that he’d picked up from the forest floor and sandwiched it into the stones so that it stood erect, extending four feet above the ground. He tied his red bandana near the top to make it easier to find, as he planned on retrieving the body for a Catholic burial.

Duncan watched from behind as the group gathered around the grave, heads bowed as Suarez spoke in a mixture of Portuguese and English, which made it difficult to understand what he was saying, though it was clear from his tears that he was hurting. Azevedo put his arm around the young man following the ceremony and whispered words of encouragement and solace.

Suarez was reluctant to leave the grave, and so they milled about until the first drops of rain filtered through the canopy. Then they hurriedly gathered their gear and followed in single file behind Duncan as he lead the way down the trail. As suddenly as the rain appeared, thunder and lightning followed, and within minutes those who had them slipped into ponchos. Although he’d used his poncho to move Costa’s body, Duncan pulled it out of his daypack and shook it out several times, holding it up to inspect it and then turning it inside out. He was concerned about wrapping himself in a garment that oozed with the remnants of Costa’s flesh. Seeing that Rankin lacked a poncho, Boyd offered his, which she hesitantly took.

“Won’t you get soaked?” she said as he handed it to her.

“That’s okay,” Boyd said, removing his T-shirt. “The rain’s warm. Anyway, we’ll probably all be soaked if this keeps up.”

As he helped her adjust the poncho, he unsnapped her daypack and dropped his camera inside.

“I’m just going to put my camera in your pack, okay? Don’t want it to get wet.”

It wasn’t long before water began to form pools and the path, covered mostly in trampled grass, became slippery. Where the grass was absent, the ground became muddy and the footing uncertain. Conditions slowed their progress to the extent that Duncan extended the time between breaks though that had to do with finding places to rest that were at least partially protected from the rain. There was no point in stopping if all they were going to do was to get wet, he felt. Suarez had lost some of his zest and was no longer taking the lead. Mostly, he walked alongside the professor. When they spoke, it was in Portuguese. Johnson and Boyd jockeyed as they both tried to pair up with Stephanie Rankin. Duncan was in the lead. Conversations were intermittent, muted and brief.

The rain was still falling when they reached the campsite, which consisted of two small tents, raindrops bouncing and then pouring off the flies, and a pile of backpacks and other gear that they’d left behind that morning. Duncan was disappointed that Peeples hadn’t done more to protect the gear from the rain but kept it to himself when he poked his head into her tent. Peeples, who was stretched out on top of her sleeping bag, greeted him enthusiastically.

“Boy, am I glad to see you. I thought you’d never get back. I thought you’d be back in a couple hours.”

“Well, the rain slowed us down, and it took a lot longer to get there than we figured.”

“It’s been raining all day,” she said. “We had just enough time to get our tents up before it started really coming down. We had to move once ‘cause water was running in. Any idea how long it’s gonna last?”

Duncan shook his head and then hurried to Cross and Hamel’s tent. They were playing gin rummy.

“Hey,” he said as he poked his head inside.

“Hey!” Cross said. “How’d it go?”

“It went. How are things?”

“Wet,” said Hamel. “Any wetter and we’d need swim suits.”

“Did you—did you find the body?” Cross asked.

“We did. We buried it, and Antonio marked it. Should be easy to find when he comes back.”

“He’s coming back here?” Hamel asked.

“That’s what he said. He wants a proper burial for his boss.”

“Did you see any of those bugs?” Cross asked.

“No,” Duncan replied. “We didn’t really have time to look for them, although Stephanie and Professor Azevedo collected specimens.”

“Dead, I hope,” Hamel interrupted.

“It’ll be interesting to see how they differ from the specimens Azevedo has in his collection.”

“You think they’re different?” Cross asked.

“They have to be. There has to be a physiological explanation. But I need to get going and get my tent up. See you later.”

50

Everyone who went
with Duncan was soaked, and the three left behind were dry. Grumbling was inevitable. While Hamel and Cross shared a tent, Rankin, though soaked from the hike, slipped into Peeples’ dry tent. Johnson and Boyd, Azevedo and Duncan, and Suarez set up their tents in the rain, which meant the inside of the tents were wet, as they couldn’t get the rainflies installed fast enough to keep the tents from getting soaked. Even when they had the flies installed, they had to gingerly lift the tents to move them to avoid areas in which water pooled, a pointless exercise in view of the fact that everything was soaked through, including sleeping bags. Although they had them, no one had bothered to install rain covers over their backpacks prior to the hike. Fortunately, there were enough nutrition bars and other food that they didn’t add hunger to their misery.

Once Rankin settled in, stripping to her underwear and sitting on top of her relatively dry sleeping bag, which rested on an air mattress—Peeples had placed Rankin’s gear in the tent before the rain started—Peeples grilled her about the hike. Rankin told her what the body looked like and how upset Suarez was.

“In the back of my mind the whole time,” Rankin said, “I kept thinking the bugs were watching and waiting.”

“Really!”

“Yeah. I don’t know what anyone else was thinking, nobody was talking much, it was kinda depressing, you know. I just had this feeling. I was worried about moving too far away from everybody, you know.”

“You thought they were stalking you?” Peeples asked.

“I guess. Something like that. I mean, I suppose, they could’ve just been there, and I could’ve walked into the middle of them, but, you know, I don’t know. I was just scared. I mean, how do you defend yourself against them?”

“Yeah, that’s what I wondered after I saw that video the guide made. You couldn’t see the bugs, but you could see the guy jumping and falling and going crazy in the grass.”

“Is that why you didn’t go?” Rankin asked.

“Yeah. I was afraid of what might happen. I mean, I’m not an adventurer like Cody. Shit, I’m not even like you. At least you had the guts to make the hike. I feel kinda rotten for chickening out. Is that what everybody thinks, that I chickened out?” Peeples asked cautiously.

“Don’t worry about it. We didn’t talk about you, much. And it didn’t occur to me until too late that there was nothing I could do if they attacked me. I’m sure if I’d thought about it before we left, I would’ve stayed behind too.”

Boyd and Johnson squeezed as much water out of their sleeping bags as they could, stripped to their underwear and sat on top of the wet bags listening to the rain bounce off the rainfly.

“I can’t believe this,” Johnson said, quietly.

“The rain?”

“No, the whole situation. This is like a made-for-TV movie.”

“You mean the bugs?”

“Yeah, and the bodies. Especially the bodies. I mean, yeah, we knew some guy died back at that cabin, but Duncan never said there’d be more.”

“Well, he didn’t know any more than the rest of us. I’m sure if he did, you and me wouldn’t even be here,” Boyd said.

“He woulda come, though, huh?” Johnson asked.

“In a minute. You know, I woulda come too. This is kinda exciting.”

“Yeah, tell that to the guy we buried.”

Boyd shrugged and slapped at mosquitoes flying around his face.

“Do you think Duncan knows what he’s doing?” Johnson said, at length.

“He’s got a rep as an entomologist,” Boyd said.

“I mean now, like on this expedition. Do you think he knows what he’s doing?”

Boyd gave Johnson a quizzical look.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, is he the type of guy who’s going to get us killed or is he the type of guy who’s gonna keep us safe?”

“What’re you worried about?”

“Something that Steph said.”

“C’mon, spit it out.”

“She said that Duncan is more interested in the bugs than he is in us.”

“Well, consider the source.”

“What does that mean?”

“Stephanie is a complainer. She complains about everything. She was in one of the lab classes I ran, and she didn’t like the way I ran it, so she complained to Duncan.”

“What did he do?”

“He told her to either do her lab work or drop the class. One thing I like about him, he doesn’t suffer fools.”

“But, do you think he could get us into trouble?”

“He’s not stupid. You may have noticed that he didn’t spend a minute looking for the bugs when we buried the guide. He’s got his priorities, but I don’t think one of them is to jeopardize our safety.”

“Well, the good news is we’ll be on our way back to civilization tomorrow,” Johnson said.

Azevedo and Duncan
laughed about how stupid they had been not to protect their gear from rain.

“That’s a rookie mistake,” Duncan said. “We saw lightning in the distance since we started. We had rain yesterday. A rookie mistake.”

Like Johnson and Boyd, they sat on wet sleeping bags stretched out on air mattresses. Azevedo was puzzled that Duncan wasn’t sharing a tent with Maggie Cross as he had previously though he was too polite to ask about it. The expedition had been more of a physical challenge than he’d expected. His knees hurt from spending the day on his feet, and he wanted something warm to eat but was afraid the heat from his tiny stove might melt the tent floor. He settled for one slightly soggy nutrition bar.

Growing philosophical, Duncan asked Azevedo what he thought of the expedition. Azevedo gave him a puzzled look.

“Well, I’m not sure what to make of it,” Duncan said as if the question were rhetorical. “Nothing has gone right since we left the cabin. We’ve got two dead people that we know of, two guards who are nowhere to be found, and we’ve learned nothing about
blaberus
. From a scientific point of view, we’d have been better off not to have gotten off the boat.”

Azevedo rubbed his chin and nodded.

“I think we’ve learned much,” he said quietly. “When we started, we thought we knew something about
reptilus blaberus
, but now we know it’s not the same creature we thought we knew. It has gone from barely being able to sustain its tiny population into a voracious predator that can kill a man in minutes.”

“Yes, yes,” Duncan agreed impatiently, “but what have we learned?”

“They are apparently well organized,” Azevedo said, “or else they wouldn’t be able to converge the way did on poor
senhor
Costa. You saw the video. Their attack was well-executed. You noticed that they waited until he was in the deep grass and that they attacked from all sides simultaneously. That’s something we would never have known had Antonio not filmed it. Whatever we do, as soon as possible we should get your assistant to make a copy of the video, so we have it to study.”

“You’re right, of course. It’s just that I had my sights on capturing live specimens, and now it seems I’ll be going back empty handed.”

“That would have been a breakthrough, no question, but what was our choice? After the burial, would you have gone after the insects instead of returning to camp?”

“I thought about it, but then I thought, ‘not with this group.’”

“I’m surprised. If you were alone, you would have pursued them, despite seeing what they did to Costa?”

Duncan considered his reply for a moment.

“I don’t know what I would have done. When I was younger, I would have chased them down and probably died trying. I understand how dangerous these insects are, but I wonder how they’re organized. Are they like bees? Like ants?”

“Or like wolves?”

“Yes, or a combination. Certainly they must have outliers or scouts that look for food sources and somehow signal the main colony when they find something. What I would like to do is find the scouts, collect some of them and then see if they can breed in captivity. No telling what we’d learn if we could do that.”

Azevedo smiled at the simplicity of Duncan’s proposal. To be in my forties again, he thought. If only this transformation of
blaberus
had happened thirty years ago, then he could get as energized about it as Duncan. But the years had dulled his ambition as well as weakened his body. He, too, had started the expedition with the goal of collecting living specimens but now, sitting on a damp sleeping bag while raindrops pummeled the tent, all he really wanted was a dry place to curl up and fall asleep.

George Hamel poured
two ounces of gin into Maggie Cross’s plastic cup, poured some for himself and raised his cup for a toast.

“Here’s to two people who made the right decision and thus get to spend the night dry and high.”

“You shouldn’t be so smug.”

“Why, because I failed to see a role for me?” Hamel said. “I didn’t see myself as a gravedigger, and I didn’t see myself as a pallbearer. I certainly wasn’t going to give a sermon. Why, exactly didn’t you go?”

Cross sniffed, grimacing slightly.

“I didn’t think he would care whether I went or not. So I chose not.”

“You weren’t afraid of the bugs?”

“Of course, I was. You know that. Besides, you were scared too; I’m sure,” she said, archly.

“You’ve bedded him, and now he won’t put out. Is that your problem?”

“I think he’s focusing on his work. That is why he’s here, need I remind you?”

“But you are soft on him,” Hamel teased, finishing his drink, the second of the night, third of the day.

“Really! Sometimes I wonder why I put up with you!”

“You put up with me because you like it when I say something that you’re too prissy to say yourself. But that’s the liquor talking. I have no opinion myself.”

Cross looked into her cup and sipped. The expedition was coming to an end, and she had nothing to show for it. One thing she learned about herself was that she didn’t have what it takes to hike through a rainforest with a forty-pound pack, much less what it takes to hike miles to bury a stranger and then hike back in torrential rain. She was rapidly losing her interest in entomology. She’d thought insects, in general, were harmless, aside from some of them spreading disease, but in light of recent events she had come to the conclusion that the risk-reward ratio had changed.

“George, the next time I suggest going on an expedition with a bunch of college students, slap me.”

Antonio Suarez lay
alone in the tent he had shared with his dead boss. Much of Costa’s gear was in the tent—Suarez had put it there along with his own. Everything was soaked, but it didn’t bother him after last night in the tree surrounded by countless carnivorous insects crawling on the ground. He’d gladly sleep in a bed of mud rather than go through it again. Until he was alone with his thoughts, he hadn’t felt the full force of his emotions as they rolled over him like a tide. He had watched his friend and mentor die in a horrible way and done nothing to help him though he understood that if he had tried, he too would be dead.

There was no escape from the terrible insects. But he couldn’t shake the screams from his memory, nor the terrible buzzing of the insects. Mentally, he apologized to Costa hundreds of times, praying silently that he had gone to heaven and was looking down with a smile on his face, free of life’s burdens. Faith was sometimes strong in him but so was his memory. The experience happens in a moment, but the memory is forever. How could he ever get rid of the images and the sounds of Costa being eaten alive? Every time he closed his eyes, the images returned, like waking nightmares. He wished he’d brought whiskey with him. He could use it now to wash away Costa’s screams.

He wanted to talk to someone in Portuguese, and only Azevedo spoke it well. Suarez’s English was fine, but it was what he’d picked up over the years, and his vocabulary wasn’t well enough developed to express his feelings. In Suarez’ mind, Fernando Azevedo was from a different class, educated, not someone he would ever meet on the street. Unlike Costa and himself, Suarez never heard the old man swear or use street language the way he did. He was refined where Suarez was rough. They lived in different worlds.

Laying on his back in the humid darkness of the small tent, his internal monolog ran loose, whispering as if he were talking to Costa, wondering if he was losing his mind. But he had to talk to someone, even if it was only his imagination. At first, he could think only of the good things about Costa, how he never failed to pay his help, how he was neither mean-spirited nor stingy. How he liked to share a beer with his men, how he encouraged Suarez to think about starting his own business though not in competition.

After a while, however, the negatives started to leak into his consciousness. How Costa kidded him about his clumsiness around a soccer ball, about his obsession to buy his own boat, even though he’d have to borrow half the money, how in his mid-twenties he had yet to marry, little things. Then, too, Costa always gave Suarez the most difficult jobs, especially if they involved manual labor. But he pushed the negative out of his mind to focus on what he’d learned from Costa about life, living in the forest and making a living guiding rich Americans. Costa predicted that Suarez would be a success if for no other reason than that he seemed to move comfortably among Americans and spoke their language. To Costa, his young protégé was fluent in English, though Suarez knew better. Yes, he could express himself in terms of his duties as a guide, but he knew little about syntax and could write English only phonetically. He could sometimes see in the puzzled faces of the Americans he spoke with that they could not understand him.

Boyd and Johnson
sat soaked in their tiny tent. There was enough headroom to sit upright near the center. Each had squeezed the water out of a pair of underwear and dried them using their tiny propane stove. They sat on air mattresses. The only dry clothes were their underwear. They’d hung socks, shorts and shirts using hooks and rope. But it would take forever to dry in the dense humidity.

“Maybe we could use the stove like we did with our underwear,” Johnson said.

Cody Boyd, running his tongue along his left cheek, shook his head.