Titanoboa (20 page)

36

Other than lack of conversation, the administrative tent wasn’t the worst place Riki had been forced to spend time. Once, while on assignment in North Korea—an assignment she’d only taken because she was young and stupid enough to believe her government would actually do anything if she were caught and arrested—the police had detained her.

They figured out she was a reporter when she had been asking a
nearly blind man a series of questions. The medical facilities in North Korea were non-existent, a fact that Kim Jong Il had blamed on the West, using propaganda to inform his people the West had blockaded North Korea and was not letting in medical supplies. An accusation whose opposite was actually true. The United States tried desperately to donate medical supplies and medicines, which Kim Jong Il refused.

The nearly blind man had had surgery recently. A British doctor had been allowed into the country to perform several glaucoma and other eye surgeries. At his own expense
, of course.

The operation restored t
he man’s vision, and when Riki asked him how he felt about the British doctor who had risked his life and spent his own money to help him, the man replied that he hoped the doctor had been arrested and put on trial for being a Western spy. Then he praised his leader and thanked him for the marvelous gift bestowed upon him.

Riki
had never seen that kind of blind devotion, and it frightened her to her core. Everything human about the man, his compassion, his reason and independence, had been taken away from him. He was a slave. A man that had submitted to a slavery machine very willingly and accepted his lot.

Her
questions prompted the man’s wife to call the police. They arrested Riki and held her in detention for nearly a week. They gave her a room of bare cement walls with bars and nothing else. Not even a toilet or sink. They brought food to her, all stale or rotten of course, and allowed her to use a rank bathroom once every other day. At night, she heard the screams of other women held in the facility as they were raped or beaten.

When
they finally released her, due more to the efforts of the
Los Angeles Times
than the United States government, she took a hiatus from her career. She wasn’t certain she was willing to endure the horrible things journalists went through for a story. One journalist she knew had been gang raped by nearly two hundred men in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. They were shouting that she was a Jew and she deserved it. She only survived because a non-profit group that had been there to attempt to reduce the number of sexual assaults used flamethrowers on her attackers to get them to back down.

Riki
did not believe that any story could possibly be worth that risk, and since then, she had gone to freelance and investigative journalism, rather than covering anything to do with geopolitics or war, the two fields in which most reporters liked to specialize.

Given all that, her circumstances here at the camp were not that bad, and she was at least grateful for that. Though whether she was going to survive or not still hadn’t been determined.

By evening, she was thoroughly bored. They’d brought her food once, but other than the two guards stationed inside the tent with her, they left her alone.

“Could I at least get a deck of cards to play solitaire or something?”

The men glanced to each other but didn’t respond, and she realized they didn’t speak English. Riki sighed and sat down in a chair, leaning her head back. At least Mark and Steven would be back in a few hours, and that would—

“Hello,
Riki.”

Steven stepped inside the tent.
Dirt covered him, with stains on his neck and face. He set down on a desk the rifle he was holding before he took off his canvas vest and slung it over a chair. He sat down as he exhaled loudly and closed his eyes.

“Boy I tell
ya, if you’re on your feet all day, nothing feels quite as good as just sitting your ass down in a chair for a minute.”

“Where’s Mark?”

“Well, here’s the thing, Mark got some crazy ideas in his head. I don’t know what exactly, something about us being an evil corporation and violating laws or something. Damn fool just ran off into the jungle.”

Riki
swallowed. “Is he dead, Steven?”

“I just told you he ran off into the jungle. You got shit in your ears or something?”

“Where in the jungle? Is he alive?”

“I doubt it. You see, these snakes, they’re getting more active. Have been the past few weeks. Think it might have something to do with the blasts
we’re doing in the center of the island. The damn snakes have been coming closer and closer to camp. We even had a few people taken right outta their tents, though I hid that up pretty well. So I don’t think lover boy’s chances of surviving out there without any weapons are very good.”

She shook her head. “Why? Why are
you doing this?”

He slipped out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He lit one
, inhaled, and let the smoke billow out of his nose. “Because I’m paid to protect certain people and certain things. Protection doesn’t just involve physical protection; it involves protecting information, too. Information that you want to take.”

“I don’t want anything from you. I just want to go home.”

He exhaled another puff. “See, now that’s where we have a problem. I know you know something, but the only way to ensure you tell me is to get it out of you.”

“What’re you talking about? I don
’t know anything. I told what’s-his-name last night everything I knew.”

He took out a hunting knife from his boot and placed it on the desk before leaning back in the seat. “
Lemme finish this cigarette, and I guess we’ll find out.”

37

Evening fell quickly over the jungle. Mark and Millard hadn’t really spoken. Small talk about jobs or where they’d grown up seemed ridiculous, so they remained quiet and watched the workers.

The labor was backbreaking. Mark couldn’t imagine working like that day in and day out. The men seemed to take it stoically, barely stopping even to take a drink of water. Mark watched them until
he grew bored, then he closed his eyes and lay back in the dirt. He stared at the sky as it changed from blue, to gray, to black. When night had nearly fallen, he heard a whistle and the work stopped.

Mark got to his feet. Millard was snoring loudly
, and Mark lightly kicked at him. “Let’s go. Quitting time.”

They trudged down a hill, careful to go down the farthest side to avoid
being seen. Once they were near the pit, they simply melded in with the crowd and followed them out to a loading zone where large trucks allowed them to climb into the beds. Mark climbed into one and helped Millard up. They sat on the side in silence, neither one with the strength left even to speak. Mark felt like he was dying a slow death from exhaustion and knew he could’ve fallen asleep right there. It took everything he had to fight that urge.

Mark hadn’t seen
the road they traversed. It was smooth, not paved over but almost like the dirt had been flattened to allow for easier travel. The road led straight through the jungle but never narrowed and was never bumpy. It had taken some time and effort to clear out this path.

As the jungle canopy
enveloped them, Mark simply couldn’t fight anymore. He was about to ask Millard to help him stay awake, but the professor’s mouth was open, and he was snoring again.

Mark closed his eyes and was gone.

38

Steven finished his cigarette in silence
, and Riki realized it was packed with marijuana. The pungent smoke filled the tent, giving everything a gray haze. She knew the smell well from college, but she had forgotten about it. A scent buried deep in her mind somewhere that brought up memories of running to classes she was always late for and awkward fumblings with boys in her dorm room.

When
he finished the cigarette, he put it out then stood up and stretched from side to side. He picked up the knife and let it dangle in his fingers. He had changed. He’d seemed friendly before, almost kind. Now his eyes held something completely different. Something akin to a hungry animal staring at food.

“You don’t need to do this,”
Riki said. “I’ve already told you everything.”

He nodded but still took a step forward.

“Steven, stop. Stop it, you’re scaring me.”

He grinned, his eyes bloodshot
and glassy. He stood over her, the knife at his side. The blade reflected the lights in the tent and glimmered brightly. Riki couldn’t take her eyes off it. No matter how much she tried to look up at the red-rimmed eyes, to reason with them, to buy herself more time, she couldn’t do it. Her gaze refused to move from the knife.

“Steven…”

“You know, I killed only one woman before. In the Sudan, back there ’bout five years ago. She was giving us a helluva time, ’cause we’d killed her husband. She even slapped me. Right there in front of my men.” He chuckled. “Ten of us standing there armed to the teeth, and she thought she could get away with it. Anyway, I shot her in the face. Point blank, closer than you are to me now. I saw that light go out of her eyes and her body crumpled, kinda like puppets do when the puppeteer leaves. I tell you, girl, killin’ a woman is a lot different than killin’ a man. No matter what they tell you.” He held up the blade. “But you’re the first I’m gonna be real up close and personal with.”

He took a step forward, and
Riki’s heart dropped into her stomach.

Before he could make a move, a
scream tore through the air. It was coming from outside. Steven turned around, staring out the flap of the tent. He hesitated a moment then walked over.

In a flash,
Riki was on her feet. She grabbed the rifle he’d laid down on the desk and swung it at him like a baseball bat. The butt of the rifle slammed into the back of his head. He flew forward, collapsing against the entrance flap. Half his body lay outside and half in. She hadn’t knocked him unconscious, but he was disoriented. Riki jumped over him. He reached up, his right hand catching her calf. She kicked him in the face. His grip loosened, and she pulled away then ran.

The camp was in chaos
, men running with no method to what they were doing. No dash for an exit. Everyone was just sprinting, and it didn’t seem to matter which direction.

She raced past the tents so quickly she fell.
She caught herself, and gravel stung as it cut into her palms. As she stood up, she wiped her palms on her pants and ran again. Some of the tents looked familiar, and she realized she was running by her own tent. She didn’t know what was happening. The chaos was such that no one would’ve told her anyway. Panic had taken hold, like a herd of cattle in a stampede.

Riki
ran into her tent and zipped up the flap. She backed away from the entrance and nearly stumbled onto her back. She stood quietly and listened to the cacophony of shouting, screaming, and gunshots. Her hands were trembling so badly she gripped one with the other and tried to steady them.

A tearing sound filled her tent. The zipper on the flap was opening,
and someone stepped through. One of the men that had stood near her tent and stared at her. Behind him were two of the others. They zipped up the tent behind them.

Riki
backed away. She turned to run somewhere, anywhere, but there was nowhere to go. Two of the men grabbed her and forced her to the ground. She kicked and scratched, but they pinned her arms down while the other held her legs. The man that had stepped in first stared down at her, a smile exposing yellowed teeth. He slowly unfastened his belt and released his zipper.

The flaps to the tents opened with hardly a whisper.
The men focused completely on Riki, but she spotted the movement and turned her attention toward the flaps.

The serpent’s head was massive, the width of a
couch. Its tongue whipped out of its mouth silently only once before it discovered what it was looking for. Its body followed through the entrance and seemed to never end. Black with red speckles, it shimmered in the light of the tent’s single lamp.

The man pulled down his pants just as the serpent slithered across the floor like water, wavy and flowing quietly. The head
, close to the floor, shifted beneath the man then spun around as though made of clay. The mouth opened, and it jolted forward like lightning.

F
angs sank into the man’s stomach and genitals. The man’s face contorted into an expression of pure pain and terror. He tried to pull away and screamed as blood spewed from the corners of the snake’s mouth. The more he struggled, the more flesh tore away from him.

The snake lifted him up and flipped over, the man upside down, the
fangs embedded between his legs. He screamed such a guttural, desperate cry that Riki wanted to cover her ears.

The serpent’s
full body slid into the tent, filling the entire space. The tail end wrapped around the man’s chest and head, muffling his screams at first then stopping them completely as a series of loud crunches emanated from within the writhing mess of flesh.

The body flopped on the ground,
and the man’s head turned completely around, staring up blankly at the roof of the tent while his stomach lay against the ground. The serpent coiled around and opened its prodigious mouth. The lower portion took in the man’s head, and it slowly worked down the body.

The two men holding her down froze in place. They had all watched the bloody carnage unfold in front of them and hadn’t moved. It seemed to
take place in slow motion, but really the entire incident lasted no more than a few seconds. The serpent killed with such efficiency, its movements appeared smooth and planned, as though the entire kill had been foreordained and the serpent merely executed nature’s will.

The men jumped up and sprinted out of the ten, leaving
Riki on the ground by herself. She crawled backward, as far from the snake as she could get. When she felt the back of the tent, she slowly got to her knees then her feet. At a snail’s pace, she eased out of the tent, past the gargantuan animal in front of her.

The sounds it was making as it swallowed the body
were something out of nightmares. Wet, hissing, sucking noise. Some sort of slime covered the body as it entered the throat, and the snake’s eyes were staring forward, ignoring her completely. She sneaked past it.

Down the path to the administration tent, she saw one of the men that had held her down. A snake had torn his head off with a single bite and was swallowing the headless corpse. But another man ran by
, and for some reason, he diverted the snake’s attention. It regurgitated the corpse and slithered after the man that had run past it with a speed that shocked Riki. The snake moved as though it were swimming, an effortless wave over the ground that curved its body into an
S
.

The coils wrapped around the man and lifted him into th
e air, crushing him to a pulpy mess. The snake would have no trouble swallowing him, as he was now little more than a liquefied sack of meat. Riki sprinted away. She was numb, her mind a blurry mess of sensations and impressions but no thoughts, as if her reasoning mind had shut off and the only thing left was a blubbering mess of instinct.

She ran in a sea of darkness speckled with
only the occasional lamp light. It reminded her of running through neighborhoods as a kid. She’d run through darkened streets, and then streetlights would light everything up for about twenty feet before fading to darkness again. Direction wasn’t something she possessed right now, no sense of which way she was going. Occasionally she passed crowds of men, and at other times, she was by herself, running past empty tents like a city of ghosts.

She rounded a corner and saw with horror that the
Jeeps usually lined up as transportation for anyone who needed it were gone. The last one’s taillights were just barely visible as it sped up the road then disappeared.

The wind was blowing
, and she stared at the spot where the Jeep had been, her hair whipping her face. A heavy feeling started at her head and worked its way down into her chest and guts, past her hips and into her legs. The feeling was resignation, a deep resignation that told her she was going to die here.

But she decided she wasn’t just going to lie down and let it take her. She scanned the area around her, found the closest path into the jungle, and dashed toward it, disappearing into the trees without looking back.