Titanoboa (18 page)

31

Something was different about the camp. Riki could feel it. The men were more subdued, whispering in quiet corners. Everyone was on edge, and when Riki went to the mess hall for something light for dinner, it was empty. No one was working, and no food was out.

She
returned to her tent to wait to sneak into the administrative tent again late at night. This time, she would snap photos and forward emails to record what was going on. Maybe she could even find some files they didn’t want her to find.

As she entered the tent, she noticed those men again
, the ones standing a few tents away and glaring at her. The same four from the previous night. This time they said something in another language. The man that said it grabbed himself, and the other three men grinned like vultures. She stepped inside the tent and zipped up the flap. Her gaze never left it as she backed away. There was no doubt in her mind now; no one was here to help her. Not the company, not Steven, and even Mark was gone. She was alone. And these men didn’t care about laws or the police, because no one even knew they were here.

That left two choices
. She could sit here and hope nothing happened, or she could try to find that gun she wanted.

With every bit of courage, she opened the flap of the tent and stepped outside. The men were still there
, and now they appeared curious—not curious enough to follow her, she hoped. She turned quickly away from them, and when she heard a conversation in English, she immediately stepped into the group and said, “Hi, you guys Americans?”

They
spoke, the mundane chitchat of people too exhausted to do anything else. She answered when she was supposed to and asked questions when appropriate, but her attention was on the four men near her tent. They were smoking and eyeing her as if no one else was even there.

After a few minutes, she slipped away from the group and continued through the camp.
A few tents held supplies for the men. They received a certain number of vouchers to spend at those supply tents, buying candy bars, chips, and other snacks. Riki hadn’t been to one of the tents, and she wondered if they had weapons, too.

She was about to ask someone where the supply tents were when she noticed
a man walking toward her, or in her general direction anyway. The man from last night, the one that had caught her in the administration tent. Two other men flanked him. When they saw her, they quickened their pace.

Riki
instinctively knew to get away. She took a few paces back then turned and hurriedly walked in the other direction. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the man rushing to catch up to her. Whatever they needed, she could tell from their faces she wanted no part of it.

As she passed her tent, unsure exactly where she
would go, she felt a hand on her arm. One of the four men, which she had completely forgotten about in her panic to get away from the others following behind her, had grabbed her.

“Where you going?” he said in a thick Eastern European accent.

“Let go of me.”

“Maybe you come to our tent,” he said with a sly smile. “We have beer.”

“I said let go.”

“Let her go,” someone said behind her. It was the man from last night.

The worker looked at the man and lost his smile. He didn’t let go of her arm for a moment then slipped his hand away. Neither of the men said anything to each other, and the man behind her turned his attention to Riki.

“You’ll need to come with me
, Ms. Howard.”

“For what?”

“Because you’re under arrest. Now come with me, please.”

“Under arrest for what? What is this about?”

“Ma’am, if you don’t come with me, I am authorized to use force to bring you in.” He stepped to the side, motioning with his arm for her to walk in front of him. “Please, come with us.”

Riki
weighed her options. Nothing sounded appealing, but going with the men who at least had some semblance of civilization left was the safest choice. She stepped through them and strolled casually through camp as though nothing were wrong, the men circling her as they headed wherever they were taking her.

32

Mark hadn’t passed out, but he wished he had. The pain was so intense he
rolled to his side just in time to spew out whatever he’d consumed that day. He couldn’t remember exactly what he had eaten, and it worried him. He raised his hand to his forehead. It didn’t come away with blood. The blood had dried. He had been lying there for a while. The events of the past few hours returned to him, and he remembered Steven and his rifle.

He had no weapons, no night-vision goggles, and nothing to eat. He had to get moving before his energy left him or Steven found him.

Mark tried to force himself up but nearly collapsed from the pain. Everything hurt, from his toes to his head. He rolled to the side and lifted himself up on both elbows. Then his palms, then his knees. He let out a groan so loud he felt like a ninety-year-old man. Though the pain was ever-present, he could get into a kneeling position, which meant nothing major was broken.

A quick evaluation of the pain told him he had at least
torn something in his right shoulder and possibly fractured a rib. But his legs were largely all right. When he felt he wouldn’t do further damage, he rose to his feet with a grunt of pain.

As he was about to turn, he heard a noise behind him.

He had no energy left to fight. He was hollow and empty, and if Steven was there, he had won because Mark could do nothing to fight him off. Slowly, Mark turned his head. A figure strolled up to him. There was nowhere else to run.

The figure was wearing shorts.

“You all right?” Millard said.

“I thought you were dead.
”

“
Bastard shot at me, but I took off. What the hell is going on?”

Mark grimaced
from a throbbing fire that shot up his leg into his lower back. His sciatic nerve. “I think you and I have been duped, Professor.”

Millard place
d Mark’s arm over his neck and helped him stumble through the jungle. After a few minutes, when the blood had returned to his legs, Mark walked on his own. The pain had gone from intense burning to a powerful soreness. Mark couldn’t tell which hurt worse.

N
either of them had any gear to cut through the thick shrubbery. Most of the vegetation tugged at Mark’s clothing and skin, leaving scrapes and bloody punctures.

As
they pushed through a thicket of trees, they came to a small path. Almost like the trail they had walked with Steven but narrower. Meant to be walked single file.

“They’ll be on the trails,” Mark said.

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t fight through a jungle all night.”

Mark thought a moment the
n nodded. “Okay. Just keep your eyes open.”

The
ir pace wasn’t much faster than the lazy stroll of a cat. Inch by grueling inch, Mark fought to keep stride with Millard, who frequently stopped to let him catch up. The heat was less intense now, but it was a wet heat that sucked all the moisture out and left Mark like a bag of dry sand.

The clouds had moved on
, fully exposing the moon. The light was enough for them to get by on the trail but nothing else. Mark wouldn’t have been able to navigate anywhere except a ready-made path.

“Your phone working?” Mark asked.

“No service. Yours?”

“
Lemme check… No.”

“If we can make it back to camp, they’ll—”

“We’re not going back to camp, Craig.”

“Why not?”

“Steven wasn’t acting alone. This was planned. This is what VN wanted. Or at least implicitly consented to. Steven wanted me dead, and now you’re a witness to it. There’s no way they’re letting us out of that camp alive.”

Millard thought a moment. “Shit. Shit!” he shouted. “Fuck me. I did not sign up for this!”

The statement was so ridiculous Mark would’ve chuckled if it hadn’t hurt so much. “We don’t need camp. We can make it out on our own. The cities and villages are all on the shores. We just have to keep walking in one direction, and we’ll eventually hit a beach.”

Millard nodded, his hands on his hips as he looked up to the moon. “Do you know I haven’t even
got tenure yet? That was my goal for like ten years, and I’m gonna die without doing it.”

“Well
, let’s just keep walking, all right?”

“Yeah, all right,” he said, like a child accepting a chore they didn’t want to do.

As they walked, Mark’s pain increased but not in a debilitating way. The important thing was to keep moving, and his legs did just that. A dull, radiating pain throbbed from his thighs and lower back though, and he worried he had injured his spine.

The trail led deeper into the jungle, not away
from it and to the shore. Right now, they had no other options, nowhere else to hike.

Mark kept up as best he could
, but occasionally Millard pulled so far ahead, lost in thought, that Mark wasn’t able to see him anymore. A small panic gnawed at him. Not that Millard could do anything to protect Mark, but just the thought of someone else there, someone else’s presence, was enough to comfort him in this hell, and he marveled that he even cared. He hadn’t known that about himself, how much he really needed other people.

They walked for what Mark guessed was a couple of hours. The jungle
grew denser and hotter. Finally, Mark couldn’t move his legs anymore. He had to drag each step out of himself until he stopped.

“I can’t go anymore,” he said
, out of breath.

Millard turned
. He was exhausted as well, as evidenced by the deep, nearly frantic breaths he was drawing. “This is as good a place as any to rest, I guess.”

Mark co
llapsed. He sat down so fast the impact against the ground hurt his tailbone. He leaned back on his arms, but that hurt too much so he slouched forward. The thought of lying directly on his back on the jungle floor didn’t sound appealing.

Millard sat down next to him
, and they were quiet for a moment, listening to the jungle sounds. The monkeys were loud in this area, and for some reason that comforted Mark. He remembered the silence of the other night, the deathly silence that preceded one of their men disappearing without a trace.

“Are snakes smart?” Mark said.

Millard shook his head, staring at the ground. “No. One of the smallest brains for body size in the animal kingdom. Why?”

“A man disappeared from my team last night.”

“Yeah, I heard about that.”

“If it was a snake last night that took that man,
it sure as hell acted like it was smart. He distracted us and then struck when our attention was on something else.”

“Impossible. That’s higher brain function. They just don’t have it. Snakes are
opportunists. They lie in wait, hit a target, and if they get it they get it. If they don’t, they move on to another target. They can’t reason the way you’re suggesting. I think this particular genus would have to be smarter to survive as long as it did undetected, but not that smart.”

Mark
focused on drawing in as much breath as he could. The mugginess made it harder to breathe, as though he were sucking air through a straw. “You really believe what’s out here is a prehistoric snake?”

“I do. The coelacanth is a sixty
-million-year-old fish. We thought it was extinct, until we found out that some fishermen in South Africa had been catching them for decades. And this is a big fish, up to six feet long, and we had no idea it existed. There are still plenty of things in the world we don’t know about.”

“But why here?”

“This is the perfect environment for them. They want cover, which they have in the jungle, abundant prey, which again they have, and heat. The hotter the better. They’ve got all that here. And the fact is we don’t know why they went extinct. There was no cataclysmic event like with the dinosaurs. There’s no reason they shouldn’t still be alive.”

“How big you think they can get?”

Millard stretched his legs out in front of him. He sighed and looked up to the sky before answering. “It depends. They’ll grow until they die, so theoretically, they can get huge. I’ve seen anacondas over thirty feet. An explorer I admire, Percy Faucett, said he saw one over sixty feet when he was exploring the Amazon basin. He wasn’t the type of guy to exaggerate, so I would take his account as truth.”

After that, they didn’t speak again for a long time. Mark slumped
over and closed his eyes. He was worried that sleep would overtake him so fast he would just topple over, but the opposite was true. Sleep never came. Every inch of him screamed for sleep, but his mind wouldn’t allow it. As if it knew the dangers and had decided it wouldn’t follow Mark’s conscious direction anymore.

“Should we get moving again?” Millard said.

Mark nodded and slowly climbed to his feet.