by C.G. Banks
Chapter 14: Back in the Jungle
During the same morning and afternoon that Lincoln and William sat thinking over the problems that afflicted them, and the nurse, Rebecca Jaritson, contemplated her nervous hatred for the accursed woman on her ward, the Colombian drug runners made their way to the downed Cherokee amid drizzling rain and blood-thirsty mosquitoes. They were all heavily armed and cursed beneath their breaths at their ill fortune for not downing the plane in a more hospitable location.
When the sweating group finally broke onto the ragged path the Cherokee had broken into the jungle, they proceeded steadily closer to the broken fuselage. They came together there, clutching their rifles tighter. All of them, that is, except Santo who walked on confidently as if actually enjoying this outing. His rifle was slung over his back and his pistol bounced ostentatiously against his thigh as he made his way forward.
The plane was a wet shadow huddled against two gigantic, scarred trees in the bleak light, and as they approached, something hunched and black-coated lit out with amazing agility, disappearing in a rush of torn foliage. Santo's finger flicked out, motioning half his men to fan out to one side while he and the rest continued to investigate the one closest to them.
The crash site had an air of unreality with the thick fog condensing on the mangled hull. Thick rivulets of dew ran down every seam and crack in what had been a sleek, expensive, American-designed twin engine. Now it was nothing more than a rodents' sanctuary.
The party scanned the perimeter carefully, mindful of the scattered wreckage, but saw nothing of any real value laying strewn by the wayside. Once the perimeter was exhausted the search continued inward, more carefully and slowly now, with drawn weapons, through the massive fissure in the fuselage to the pressing darkness within. They found the cocaine that Frederick had left behind, and with a little more investigation they saw the hand, and climbing nearer, the rigor-mortised, and picked-at body of Paul stiffened and chewed by ants or perhaps the black form that'd torn away at their approach.
It was then, too, that the ants came on. Instantaneously every man began jumping around, slapping themselves, flailing at the demons that were suddenly attacking. The ones inside managed to barrel out through the crack, only to find the others similarly compromised, and fought their way back until they were a good fifty feet from the broken wreak, still slapping at their clothes and exposed skin. They retreated farther yet amid the onslaught. Only then did they begin to understand the immensity of their tiny enemy, and their own precarious position.
The limbs overhead were thick with a multitude of ticking bodies. Everywhere the sun glinted off pinprick movement, throwing a reddish glare about the entire area. The trampled grass they’d come through breathed with the steady crawling of the thousands; even now they covered the fuselage as the men stared wide-eyed and wondered how they’d overlooked them in the first place. Some prayed for their souls, crossing themselves as they gathered around Santo.
But he, seemingly, remained unconcerned. They resumed their sweep, more cautious this time, making sure the rest of the cocaine was not somehow miraculously within reach. Ants or not, money was money. And they desperately needed to find it. But they didn’t and knew the ants would eat them alive if they went back inside.
Santo held up a finger equal to the stature of his long, thin body and paused a moment as if to calculate their position. He knew the men wanted to get as far away from the airplane as possible, however… He turned his finger to each of them so they could be sure. "Ono," he said. Three of the men had seen Paul's body, stiffening in the chair, but there had been no one else. Just the fucking ants. The ants that had seemed to appear out of the air itself.
Santo motioned for the cocaine they had found and Pita handed it over. Santo examined the cut in the packaging carefully, seemingly oblivious to the swarming ants venturing ever closer as the nervous Colombian's bounced about from foot to foot. It was suddenly all very clear: at least two of the bastards had been alive after the plane went down, and it seemed that at least one of them had been in good enough condition to pack up and leave with half a key. He thought about going back to the plane, but the constant, almost imperceptible crunching that surrounded them was impossible to ignore. The army ants were in a frenzy and it would take an act of God Himself to remove them from the plane. And fire was out of the question.
Santo made the only decision he thought valid. He waved his hand over his head in a signal to move out, pointing in a direction well clear of the ravaged path of the ants. Then he stalked off without uttering another word.
They'd taken all they could from the plane.
What moved now beneath the jungle canopy could hardly be considered human. It did look human, but that was the only comparison left between it and the living. When Samuel Franklin died, after that awful moment when the plane dove into the trees and his hands had ripped holes the size of baseballs in the pilot chair's backing, the old magic had taken over.
Something had come fully into being that had been engraved in his tortured soul by his mother, fawned over darkly on those endless, rainy days when the Old Man had been away at the warehouse with little Willy in toe. Because you see, Samuel had always been the Mamma's boy, and from years back the Mamma had nursed a deeply black penchant for sorcery. And in that she was not alone. Her great aunt, nine generations removed, had been burned at the stake in the late 1600s for pickling children in vinegar in the depths of her cellar. And she was not the only one.
Sarah Franklin had insisted the boys be brought up Catholic because she'd liked the idea of the oldest Christian religion pitted against the depths of her own black soul. When Samuel had taken her own strange Eucharist, alone one afternoon in training pants, the silver chalice had contained blood, purposefully that from a swine she’d carefully squeezed out of a pork roast the day before. Other times it had been hers or occasionally his, drawn neatly with a filed-down knitting needle amid endless incantations. In the evenings she'd sometimes ducked the strange looks from her husband and the questions of the band-aides, but he'd never taken it further. Had dared not.
The ants had been about their work on Samuel’s eyes, chewing crusty holes into the depths of his head. Even now a resilient few worked deeper into the rotting mass of the thing’s brain, as if searching for some mysterious essence only they could fathom.
The monster’s gait was heavy but relentless. A shoe had become stuck underneath a root several miles back, had been thoughtlessly wrenched free, the laces still tied tightly around the swollen flesh as the shoe peeled back with a sickening ease, spilling chunks of matted blood upon the ground in long, stringing trails.
There was a mechanical method about the figure. Out of the pores beneath the filthy clothing (still thick with wads of ants which clung, tenaciously chewing) welled thick, clotted droplets of filth and blood which ran slowly in the dense humidity. Some of it ranged down the exposed arms, around which tattered sleeves dangled, and congealed there in rivulets of stinking death. The jaw of the monster hung loose, the mouth crammed with a lolling tongue, swollen and black. The cheek bones were cut like glass into the slack face.
A python less than four hundred feet behind the slow-moving monstrosity had opened its reptilian eyes a short time before and played out its tongue to the surroundings. It had not eaten in two months and had made its slow, laborious way into the lower branches of the deciduous tree, coiling its massive thirty foot length loosely around a branch while waiting for the next hapless passer-by. It had become aware of the moving figure in the underbrush, and had shivered along its length in anticipation of the kill. But as its prey got closer the smell had dissuaded it. A rotten, fetid, sticky smell that held no appetite for such a behemoth. And when the figure passed directly underneath it, no more than an eight foot drop to the ground, the python had hung silently and flicked its tongue. It took a long while for the anticipatory shivers to subside.
Other grounded animals steered well away from the Walker. It moved jerki
ly, flailing at unseen objects in its path, sometimes farting huge gouts of gas that lingered behind for minutes after the unholy thing had passed out of sight in the heavy growth. The skin was soon puffed up, stretched to the point of bursting; the pants like sausage skins. But still it continued on.
Frederick splashed through a deep depression, clawing at the mosquitoes clustered at his exposed neck. The sun pressed down like a huge hand. The crystal in his water resistant Pulsar had completely fogged over despite it being rated as a 100 meter dive watch, and the hands were virtually invisible. Maybe it had a minute crack somewhere on the face; he couldn't tell. Each step for the last quarter mile had been an exercise in sucking murk; his feet sinking easily and then having to be ponderously wrenched free, causing excruciating wear on his muscles. The compass was useless as he could find his direction just as easily from the sun. A degree off here or there in this vast wilderness meant next to nothing; the highway he searched out stretched for hundreds of miles and would be virtually impossible to miss. That is, if he could ever find the fucking thing in the first place.
He paused, almost knee-deep in mud, and brushed his shirt sleeve along his brow. The mosquitoes were endless devils. "Motherfuckers," he muttered. Even in 'Nam he'd usually been around others who were just as miserable as he; now there was nothing except the nightmare landscape and the goddamn mosquitoes to battle alone.
He figured it to be around two-thirty--the hottest part of the day. Evidently the tropical storm had drifted out of range during the night because not a drop of rain had fallen all day. Now he was left to bake in the blossoming humidity.
Thick foliage shrouded any ray of sunlight lucky enough to break through the tight canopy, shattering it into minute prisms of shafted light that hung suspended in the air. He trudged on with sucking steps, squinting his eyes in the mediaeval, fixed twilight in search of sound footing.
Just ahead two monstrous trees rose out of the mucky ground, anchored by roots that must have stretched to the very pits of Hell. They were warty and twisted, submerged, as if wresting too with the mud that plagued Frederick, sucking over the tops of his boots and caking between his toes. Alive with parasites. He plodded on.
He slipped on a steep incline and luckily caught hold of a branch that kept him from going face down in two feet of scummy water. He fought with the mud until it grudgingly gave back his boots. The backpack felt full of stones. Grunting, he managed to situate himself on a moderately firm spot and went down in exhaustion against the base of an ancient tree. He breathed in deeply for several moments, feeling the thick air cotton his lungs like a blanket and rasp out through his nose like hot steam escaping a pipe. Finally, he managed to work the backpack from his shoulders. It was damp and muddy from the trek but thankfully everything inside was dry. He was suddenly very glad he'd spent the extra forty bucks for the water-resistant material.
Goddammit! Where were the fucking cigarettes! He began tearing violently through the pack, disregarding the cocaine for the time being. No time to compound his problems. Yet, at least...yes, there. His hand closed around the pack, wrapped safely in the cellophane. Moist cigarettes would have been the final fucking straw. He pulled them free, digging for the lighter in his breast pocket with his other hand. It was only after his first trembling drag of the blessed tobacco that he realized he was crawling with leeches.
A short distance away from the ruined plane, Santo rounded up his men and took stock of their provisions. After carefully questioning the scratching, disgruntled men he sat down and thought about the men he was after. Whether they were injured, wandered off and died, or were still making tracks, he didn’t know, but he was certain that at least one of them had been well enough to make off with a half-key. After a time he nodded and called out two from his party to go back to the helicopter with the cocaine they did have. Manuelo Poince would be waiting at the airstrip, but going back was not an option for himself. Two men and a shitload of cocaine were still unaccounted for. And what galled him the most, that smiling fuck, Manuelo, would be at home tonight. Again. Well, it couldn’t be helped. Shit runs downhill in every language.
A short time later, as the men wound their way through the jungle, Santo ducked his head and cursed silently, the truth of his cur-dog status oh too obvious in his mind; he was only allowed to bark and growl as far as the Master's chain extended, and he knew it. He bit into this thought savagely and barked out his own orders loudly.
As if taking special pains to light the cigarette he held in his callused hand, Santo dragged deeply. He hawked up a wad of phlegm before he began laying out directions.
They would break up into four units positioned throughout the jungle by set compass degrees describing a fan shape, as this was the best he could fashion with such a small coterie. Santo was in a foul mood and didn’t have to elaborate much to his less-than-eager party. He started off first, shouting out which frequency to use on the walkie-talkies so that they could come together at nightfall to make camp. He figured they could probably hike no more than a mile or two before the onset of night (the shadows were already beginning their slide) forced them to a halt, although the chances they had of finding the missing drug-runners was close to nil. They’d botched the helicopter incident and now they were committed to this northerly direction because Santo felt assured if anybody had managed to escape with his life or senses, they would break for civilization--the closest being Bogota. The Pan American Highway ran parallel to the direction of their general pursuit angle. Of course, it was still no more than a crapshoot, but Maneulo was involved here; a thorough search was compulsory.
They scaled out, hacking their way into the densely-packed jungle, and while Santo walked, hunched over and pummeling obstacles in his path, he thought about the coming night and the many dangers inherent in their situation.
However, there were also two things that he didn't know and could have in no way foretold; one being they were no more than three miles south of the Walker, and five miles southeast of Frederick Paol; and two, they were less than a mile from a silent band of Cholo warriors out on a hunting expedition.
Strangely, Frederick actually felt the leeches before he saw any. As he brought a hand up to light the cigarette clenched tightly between his teeth, he noticed an odd pulling sensation underneath his shirt sleeve, pressing weirdly against his skin. He didn't stop lighting the cigarette, he only leaned his head into the flame while his mind ran back through the years to the moist, steaming jungles of Vietnam. He closed his eyes and drew heavily on the tobacco, flipped the burnt match into the churned muck in front of him. Then he slowly rolled up his sleeve and held his forearm out so he could get a better look. The curling smoke cascading off the cigarette did little to dispel the adrenaline rush at the sight that greeted him. His exposed forearm was black with shining slugs--all the way from his wrist to his elbow.
"Goddamn," he whispered. He pulled the cigarette from his mouth and began burning the glistening leeches from his arm; he counted five, huge and pulsing on his right forearm. He looked on disgustedly as they tried to curl away from the heat before falling off altogether with small plopping sounds into the mud at his feet. His arm was pock-marked with the y-shaped marks of their narcotic bites, soothed from the anticoagulation agents that flowed through their bodies.
He stuffed the dirty cigarette into a corner of his mouth and rolled back the other sleeve. There were three more smaller and slightly more green-tinted leeches anchored there. He swiftly burned these away as he pushed himself farther out of the mud, scrabbling with his feet to put distance between the infested, stagnated pool he'd just dredged through.
Exasperated, he glanced around for a dry spot. Just over a ridge of knobby roots there was a higher elevation, appearing free (as far as he could tell) of standing water. He shouldered the pack again and made his way over, all the while fighting the feeling of nausea growing in his stomach. With an uncommon stroke of luck he’d no longer come to expect, he found the elevation was much drier here,
and he threw the pack down before he began stripping. First his shirt, then his pants and underwear.
He didn’t look down until he stood completely naked on the hill with his clothes in a pile on a nearby rock. Then he started his inspection. There were none on his chest or back, but he found over twenty on his legs, and even one on his ass, tucked well back under his balls. He burned them off piteously, and chain-smoked while he went about it, the smoke biting at his eyes as he meticulously pressed the burning tip of his cigarette into their soft, moist, pointed heads.
An old memory of George Geary surfaced as he went about the business, and he felt the bile rise in his throat. The guy had been a dumb, backwoods fuck in Frederick's first platoon, and the agony the man had gone through after crossing a teeming pond filled with leeches had never left Frederick's mind. One had worked its way inside the man's penis and lodged there. When the commanding officer had finally ordered him Medevaced out, his dick had been roughly the size and shape of a grapefruit. The leeches, he had been told, had mouths like fishhooks once they really got wedged in. God only knows what had happened to that poor fuck.
But, thankfully, there had only been one on his ass, Frederick tried to remind himself, attempting to shake off the last of the revulsion. Perhaps the tight-fitting underwear had saved him, only time would tell…or the next piss. He breathed out hard, standing naked in the approaching gloom as he lit another cigarette.
The one called Quimlicu bent carefully in the knee-deep murk, his thick, olive skin gleaming in the few wispy rays of sunlight that were still left. His body was naked save for a grassy thong that hung around his waist. His head had been shaved close to the skull the previous night by one of his women using a sharpened jawbone from a monkey they'd killed years before on any incredibly successful hunt. There were eight more hunters in Quimlicu's party (each dressed and shaved the same out of tradition and respect to the god's of the hunt), and all imbued the creepy silence like that of disease, poised like cattle birds with darting eyes.
The chirping Kokoa frogs were nearby, nestled down among the roots of the ground cover. Their mating time was close, soon to seemingly boil the water when the moon rose along its dark, celestial track. They were hunted because the poisons which could be leeched from their 1 1/4 inch bodies could bring about partial or full paralysis, wild convulsions, and choking death within minutes to anyone or anything unlucky enough to be injected. But the Cholo Indians had been harvesting these essential poisons for hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years and had become provincially immune to the tiny frog's threat by extreme prudence. Just the poison from one of the black, brilliantly yellow-striped frogs could produce enough toxins to coat the tips of fifty or more arrows.
Quimlicu squatted closer to the black water, seeming to test the air with his fingertips, and then in studied contemplation, he put his fingers to his cheek and vibrated them in emulation of the frog’s call. A bizarre 'chee-chee-chee' issued expertly from his lips, and then he was silent once more, alert. From the growing shadows came an answer. He reached over and plucked a nearby leaf. Twirled it expertly into a funnel, snaking his hand into the scummy water and drawing out a small dab of mud to plug the bottom end. Then, with a primal lunge, Quimlicu leaped five feet to his left and wrenched the Kokoa frog from its perch a scant inch over the surface of the depressed wallow. In seconds he had a grassy string (pulled from his waist-strap) wrapped around the open end and the deadly frog was safely imprisoned. Quimlicu walked over to the hollowed stump close by and deposited the invaluable bundle with the other eleven already stashed there.
As he turned, he heard a familiar violent splash and the accompanying triumphant grunt from the young Kitcho as the younger warrior made his catch. Quimlicu did not look at his son, but swelled with pride out of sight of the other hunters. He knew the boy would prove a great hunter when his day came.
Quimlicu stood up to his five foot height and clicked his tongue sharply. Fifteen eyes looked over expectantly (Asnop had been struck blind in one eye as a child during a childish war game, but it had done nothing to diminish his skills as a hunter, in fact, seeming to give him an odd inner sense in the process), and he circled his hands quickly for the warriors to gather up their goods so they could move on.
They needed to get the fire burning quickly.