The Butterfly Forest (Mystery/Thriller) (34 page)

 “This way,” Billie said, as he ducked under a huge moss-covered tree that must have fallen years ago from high winds in a hurricane.  I followed him, the blood again seeping out from my crude bandages.

We sprinted through an ankle-deep slough and around huge cypress trees.  Moonlight reflected off the dark water.  The smell of moss and muck erupted as the swamp gripped our shoes and made sucking sounds each time we lifted our feet.  Then we hit dry land.

I could hear the men gaining on us, breathing and snorting equivalent to horses racing, shouting to each other.  A reckless abandonment on their part of a stealth attack took over their small gang as the taste of blood blossomed in their mouths.  They tore through limbs, vines, anything that stood in their way.  It was beyond a posse.  It was a pack of wolves running down injured prey.  I looked back in the distance, under the light of the moon.

 They were coming fast.  The alpha wolf, Frank Soto, led the gang, eyes wide with fervor of a kill.  “O’Brien’s mine!” he shouted.

“I’m taking a scalp!”  I heard one of the bikers boast.  “Payback for Custer!” 

Billie seemed to pay no attention to their taunts.  I wasn’t sure he even noticed a large white sign with black lettering.  It was big, but unremarkable in the dark.   However, its warning was anything but ordinary.

It was frightening. 

It was a forewarning.  

Any second I expected we’d hit a deep ditch.  Maybe we’d run smack into a cinderblock wall, the kind that came with towers, gun turrets and men who had the first paragraph of the Patriot Act tattooed on their strapping forearms.  We might be stopped by a soaring chain-link fence with razor wire in the top half dozen strands.  Or we’d be hit in the face with powerful searchlights, and either be gunned down by Special Forces guards, or we’d be shot to death by our advancing lynch mob.

    I was growing more light-headed by the second.  I wondered if I was simply hallucinating from blood loss.  THINK.  I blinked hard, worked my lower jaw, and applied pressure to the wound I could reach.  I felt like we were running in slow motion.

Then I heard Soto barking orders.  He cursed and laughed at the same time.

My lungs ached.  “Can’t go much farther,” I said to Billie.  He stopped and turned toward me.  A machine gun discharge exploded the leaves and sand in front of him.  One bullet tore through his upper arm.  He went down.

I positioned myself behind a pine tree and leveled my Glock, firing one shot at the open machine gunner to the far right.  I saw him fall.  I fired three more shots at the silhouettes stooping behind trees under the moonlight.  Adrenaline burst through my system.  “You okay?” I asked Billie, lifting him to his feet.

“I’ll live.”

“Damn straight!” I said.  “One down, six to go.”

I knew we’d just run into a Navy bombing range.

In the distance, I could hear the fighter jet circling back toward us.    

EIGHTY-FIVE

The moon was straight above us.  It created an illusion of a surreal world, a place right out of a war zone with bombed tanks, broken buildings, and the smell of C-4 and burnt gunpowder in the night air.  One rusted Abrams tank was flipped over on its side resembling a great leviathan with a bent snout.  The main gun barrel bowed upward, the turret unscrewed as if someone had twisted the lid off a jar.  There were fractured cinderblock buildings set among retired, broken airplanes and a helicopter missing its tail rotor.

I looked across the field, scarred and barren of plants.  There were gaping holes left from the concussions of dropped bombs.  It felt as if we had been dropped into a large painting of the lunar surface.  A stark, lonely canvas textured in shades of black and white, of abject desolation, a still-life picture of rehearsed war.

Billie and I stood under a small lean-to and listened for our pursuers.  We heard a whippoorwill in an oak and frogs by a pond.  Water bugs skidded over the moon’s face reflecting from the dark water.  There was a visible quiet in an isolated land full of moving shadows, potholed fields, and the pond bouncing moonlight back up into halos of gnats.

“Maybe we can take refuge in one of those block buildings,” I said.  “If the buildings are still standing in the middle of a training field for Navy bombers, maybe they’ll withstand machine gun bullets.  Joe, you’re going to have to use the shotgun.  Just point and shoot.”

He nodded and said, “We may not have another option.  Let’s do it.”

“How’s your arm?”

“I need medicine on it, and on you, too, on that wound of yours.”

“Where are we going to get medicine out here?”

“Many places.”

I saw the glow of flashlights bouncing between trees on the northeast side of the property.  “They’re coming,” I said.  “Let’s go.”  We crisscrossed between bombed-out artillery until we came to a concrete block structure no larger than a small garage.  It had no door, only open windows.  No glass.  Stacks of sandbags, at least four feet high, lined the exterior walls.

I walked over rubble and grit, spider webs clinging to my face as I stepped through the window into the dark of the building.  Billie followed.  A bat fluttered around our heads, its wing grazing across my hair.  I saw it fly out the window.  The single room reeked of bat shit and mold.  I looked out a hole in the wall and saw a line of men approaching us.

“Here,” I handed the shotgun to Billie.  “You’ll have to wait until they’re about eighty feet from us.  At the rate they’re coming, shouldn’t be too long.”  I ignored the pain in my chest, the numbness in my arm, and watched the men come closer.  “They must have night scopes to have seen us come in here.  Let’s wait for—”

A burst of machine gun fire hammered the block structure.  Concrete turning to gravel, bullets plowing deep into the solid walls.  “You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

Billie held the shotgun with both hands, the ruddy bloodstain now the size of a pie plate on his shirt.  “They’re coming,” he said in a whisper.

Under the moonlight I could see them, each man separated at least fifteen feet from the next.  I had no idea which one was Soto.  I felt my mind drift, as if it was separating from my body.  NO!  Not now.  I blinked hard, fighting back vertigo from loss of blood, shaking away illusions that wouldn’t retreat.  I looked out the hole and saw Iraqi troops approaching.  I felt the muscles knot across my chest, my palm sweaty as I readied my Glock.    

I could hear the quick orders, commands to kill.  I could see the stealth flanking as men raised machine guns to charge us.  I knew they would try to fire a barrage of lead in such force that we couldn’t return fire.  And then one of them could make his way in from the side and empty his M4 into the window Billie and I had crawled through. 

The F/A 18 Hornet fighter jet gave no advance warning.  The Navy pilot’s computer had calculated the strike down to within a few meters of the target.  I could see the exterior lights from the fighter more than a mile away in the eastern horizon.  I didn’t know if he was circling toward us to practice night bombings.  And, if so, was the target our bunker or something else?  Right now I simply wasn’t sure if what I saw was real or an illusionist’s prop, a morbid one-act play from a theater of war I still fought during night sweats.  I turned to Billie.  “Listen!  Tell me, do you see lights from a fighter jet banking and coming our way?”

“Yes, and coming damn fast.”

He scarcely said the words when we both peered through the hole like two rabbits looking out to see if the fox was coming.

It was.  The Navy Hornet was coming fast and low—three hundred yards out.  Two hundred feet above the ground. 

Three seconds away.

The bomb exploded maybe eighty yards from us.  Not far in front of the advancing men.  The shock wave hit our bunker with the force of an off-center strike, a wrecking ball.  Not hard enough for damage, but hard enough to shake the walls and kick up dried bat shit off the floor.  I couldn’t tell if any of the enemy had been killed.  The fire was a roaring hellhole.  “Let’s get out of here!” I yelled to Billie.  The sound from the jet caught up with its awesome destruction.

We crawled back out the window and ran for the darkest section of the bombing range.  I felt the fire and heat penetrate the back of my neck, and smelled the odor of burning flesh and hair.  I didn’t want to look over my shoulder.  I didn’t want to see if the nightmare could catch me.      

EIGHTY-SIX

We slowed to a fast walk, vines slapping our faces, mosquitoes whining in our ears.  From the lower position of the moon, I thought it had been at least a half hour since the bombs hit our pursuers.  We heard no one following, only the sound of cicadas and frogs in the night.  I said, “We’re both going to bleed out.  We’ve got to stop.  I don’t know if any of those men survived the bombs.  But, I doubt we’re being tracked.”

Billie pointed through some trees.  “Look, under the moonlight, I can see a spring.  If we’re lucky, we might find a plant that grows on the spring’s shoulders.  It’s part of what I need to make the medicine to keep us alive.”

“Where’s the other part?”

“In here.”  Billie took off his small backpack, rummaged inside it and removed three Ziploc bags.  Each one filled with a different shade of what looked like dirt and leaves.

“What’s that?”

“Herbs.  Roots.  The key is in knowing which one to mix and how much to mix.”

“Mix it with what?”

“Water.  Do you still have a water bottle in your bag?”

“It’s almost empty.”

“Okay then, we will sip from the earth.”  He started walking toward the reflection of moonlight off the surface of the spring.

“The herbs and stuff… do you always pack that?”

“No.”

“Why’d you do it this time?”

“Well, Sean, sometimes you feel the storm before you see the dark clouds.  I felt a storm would overtake us on this little journey through hell.”  He turned and walked in the direction of the iridescent water. 

 Under the clear moonlight, the spring looked alive, its surface waters shimmering in a luminescent greenish-blue boil.  From another angle, it resembled a turquoise diamond.  Framed with green ferns and old oaks holding hand towels of Spanish moss, the spring drew you in as if it was a watering hole for the soul.

Billie said, “This water flows between the fingers of the Breath-maker.  It is a healing spring.”

I sat on a fallen log as Billie hunted through the ferns and water plants.  He pulled up two handfuls of a dark green plant.  I couldn’t tell if it was a water lily.  I didn’t care.  He said, “Give me the bottle.”

I reach in the backpack and found the bottle.  There was less than a half inch of water in the bottom.  Billie poured it out and stepped to the spring.  He filled the bottle about two thirds full, holding it up to the moon to see what he was doing.  He sat on the log, held the bottle between his knees and squeezed white liquid from the water plants into the mouth of the bottle.  Then he carefully poured about a thimble of his mixture from each plastic bag.  He replaced the cap on the bottle, shook it and unscrewed the cap.  “Drink two mouthfuls of this,” he said, handing the bottle to me.

“What’s it supposed to do?”

“It will help stop the fever, the infection.”

“I don’t have a fever.”

“Trust me here, old friend.  Yes, you do.  The fire grows in you.  You just don’t know how hot it will get.”

He removed the blood soaked bandages from my shoulder.  “Drink, Sean, or you will die.”

“Joe, what’s—”

“Drink it!  If you don’t, you’ll be dead by morning.”

He walked around the spring, a silhouette against water that looked like it was lit from somewhere deep inside its source.  I drank.  The mixture tasted like tar, dirt and pine resin.  Two mouthfuls down.  Fighting back vomit, I set the bottle on the log.

Billie returned with a dark mud cupped in his hands.  He said nothing as he smoothed it over and into my open wound.  I could feel the drink burning in my gut.  My   stomach began to constrict, twist, and my head felt light.  Billie turned up the bottle and drank the remaining liquid.  He walked back to the spring and applied mud to his wound.  Then he built a small fire, the pine and oak popping.  He placed dried plants on the fire, inhaled smoke and fanned it toward my face.  I watched the yellow flames dancing in front of the lavender spring, which caught and held moonlight in its secret rainbow waters.

I felt numb.  Not just my arms or hands, my entire body was ectoplasm.  Whatever Billie had given me was working, or I was
dying.
  I didn’t care.  I knew he’d given me something more powerful than the morphine I’d been administered in the first Gulf War after catching shrapnel in the gut.  I saw him take a burning stick from the fire and hold it to my wound, bloody tissue cauterizing in a hiss and puff of white smoke.  I smelled my burning, charred flesh, my conscious mind seeming to rise from my body for a moment.  Then my mind switched to the men who’d been chasing us, thought I saw them vaporize under the white heat of explosions.