Deadfall: Agent 21

by Ryan, Chris

  ‘Maybe,’ Gabs said. She didn’t sound massively convinced. ‘I still don’t think it’s a good idea to follow that trail precisely. There could be any number of traps set along its way. If we’re going into the jungle, I say we keep to one side of it. Just in case.’

  Raf and Zak nodded. ‘Agreed,’ they both said. Zak looked over at the aircraft where they’d spent the night, and where Malcolm was still sleeping. ‘If I thought we’d end up in the jungle, I’d never have suggested bringing him,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘We can’t change it,’ Gabs said briskly. ‘He’s our responsibility now. Anyway, you never know. He might still prove useful. Go wake him. This is difficult terrain. Neither of you have any jungle survival experience. There are a few things you need to know before we set off.’

  Zak nodded, then ran back towards the aircraft.

  Malcolm was just waking up. As he opened his eyes, he looked around suddenly, obviously unsure where he was. An expression of horror crossed his face, but he mastered it when he saw Zak standing by the plane.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ Zak said, gently but urgently. ‘We’ve got to get moving.’

  ‘Where to?’ Malcolm demanded.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  He led Malcolm back to where Raf and Gabs were sitting cross-legged on the ground. When Malcolm saw the trail leading into the jungle, he couldn’t help fear writing itself all over his face. They sat down too, then Zak looked expectantly at Gabs. Malcolm, as usual, avoided all eye contact with the grown-ups.

  Gabs gathered her thoughts for a moment, then cleared her throat. ‘We’re heading into the jungle,’ she said. ‘We don’t know how long we’ll be in there, and we don’t know what we’ll find. But the jungle is very unforgiving, and we can’t afford to let our guard drop for a moment. There’s an abundance of life in the rainforest. Most of it knows what its regular food is, and doesn’t like to change diet. But there are creatures in there which, if they’re surprised or frightened, will attack. You need to think before you do anything. Be careful where you’re putting your feet. If you’re thinking of sitting down on the floor, or on a log, or by a tree, check it first. And remember to look up as well as down.’

  ‘Snakes?’ Malcolm asked in a small, frightened voice, directing his questions to Zak even though it was Gabs speaking.

  ‘Possibly. But deadfall is a much bigger danger.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Dead wood falling from the treetops. It can kill you in a second, so watch out for it. We’ll walk in single file: Raf first, then Malcolm, then Zak, then me. It’s important never to let the person ahead out of your sight. On your own, you’ve got next to no chance of making it out alive – Raf and I will be able to find water for us all, and we know which plants are safe to eat, so you need to stick with us. Don’t eat anything unless we’ve told you it’s safe.’

  She paused for a moment, and allowed that to sink in, before continuing her lecture.

  ‘We’re going to keep several metres to the left of this path,’ she said. ‘My guess is that whatever vehicle made it will be following a ridge line, like an upside-down “V” through the jungle.’

  ‘Why?’ Zak asked.

  Gabs shrugged. ‘Otherwise they’d have to keep crossing ridge lines up and down, which would be almost impossible. Animals use these ridge lines too, but they’ll probably keep their distance from us.’

  ‘Probably?’ Malcolm asked, slapping at his face to kill a mosquito that was chewing his cheek.

  ‘Yes. Probably.’

  ‘I’m scared,’ he said.

  ‘Good. A little bit of fear keeps you sharp. But just do what Raf and I tell you and you’ll be OK.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Raf, standing up, ‘I like the jungle.’

  Malcolm looked at him as if he was insane.

  ‘Pitch black at night, nice and quiet. Best place in the world to get a decent night’s sleep.’ He winked at Malcolm as he stood up. ‘I think Gabs has just about covered everything,’ he said. ‘Shall we go?’

  Malcolm turned to Zak. ‘Was that a joke?’ he asked.

  Zak shook his head. ‘No, mate,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it was.’

  There were few preparations to make. They had very little gear – just Zak’s rucksack and Malcolm’s. No spare clothes. Nothing. But before they set out, Raf quietly took Zak over to Cruz’s aircraft. ‘We’ll need to keep a careful eye on Malcolm,’ he said. ‘He’s not really jungle material, if you know what I mean.’

  Zak wasn’t sure he was jungle material either, but he kept quiet.

  ‘I’m worried about that cut on his arm too. Wounds can get infected very quickly in the jungle. All that warmth and moisture. You’ll need to keep an eye on it. He responds better to you than to us.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Go search the corpses,’ Raf said. ‘I need some sort of water bottle. See what you can find.’

  Zak was about to say, ‘Why me?’ But he knew what kind of response he’d get. So, with one eye on the vultures in the trees, he ran towards the corpses.

  They were already beginning to smell, and clouds of flies buzzed around them. Thick clusters of mosquitoes had congregated along the bloody knife marks on the dead men’s faces. Zak shook the insects away from his own face as he bent down at the first corpse, doing his best not to look too closely at the catastrophic gunshot wound in the man’s head. He patted the body down, but found nothing but a wallet which he quickly discarded. He swallowed another mouthful of air, trying not to breathe through his nose, then moved on to the second body.

  Here, he had more luck. This man had a small hip-flask in his side pocket. Zak grabbed it and ran away from the stench of the rotting flesh before twisting the top open. Inside, the flask smelled of alcohol, but it was empty. Zak ran with it back towards Raf’s position.

  ‘Will this do?’ he asked.

  Raf nodded, and took the flask from Zak. ‘You got that big knife?’ he asked. Zak felt in his rucksack and handed it over. With a sudden yank, Raf jammed the knife into the body of Cruz’s aircraft, just below the wing. Zak was surprised by how easily the metal ruptured. A thin trickle of pale liquid started dribbling out of the hole.

  ‘Fuel,’ Raf said. ‘Easiest way to light a fire, and we’ll need one in the jungle.’ He carefully filled the flask up to the brim, then twisted the cap back on and slipped the whole thing in his pocket. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  Zak was sweating badly and the perspiration was soaking into his clothes, making them damp. When they joined the others – they were still standing between the track and the charred, smouldering remains of the plastic doll – he saw trickles of sweat pouring down Malcolm’s face and damp patches in Gabs’s hair. ‘We’re going to need water,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll find some as soon as we can, sweetie,’ Gabs said. ‘Let’s start walking.’

  The dawn chorus of insects had gone quiet. It was strangely silent all around. Zak, though, had the uncomfortable sensation of eyes peering out of the jungle towards them. It was as if they were always on the edge of his vision, and whenever he turned to see them, they receded back into the bush. It’s just your imagination, he told himself. But he noticed that Malcolm was looking around nervously in the same way.

  This was a creepy place. No question.

  They set off at a slow march in the order Gabs had instructed. Within ten paces, the jungle canopy was above them. It protected them from the rising sun, but the air was thickly humid – Zak couldn’t tell whether his skin was wet from sweat or from water vapour.

  For the first forty metres, the vegetation was only up to their waists. Zak took care to step in the path trampled down by Raf and then Malcolm, but he still laid each foot carefully on the ground – he wasn’t good with snakes either. And although he knew that the footsteps of this little group of humans would be like thunder to a jungle reptile, and would send them slithering out of their way, he still didn’t want to risk inadvertently treading on a thickly coi
led body. The very thought made him shiver.

  They’d been going for less than five minutes before Raf had to get his knife out again and start cutting through the vegetation that blocked their way. Thick, knotted vines and tree branches grew out at crazy angles, covered with moss and lichen. Every forty paces or so, Raf would hold up one hand to tell them all to stop. Then he would head to his right to check they were still following the path made by Cruz’s vehicle.

  Those were the worst moments. Standing still, peering into the dense jungle, wondering what was out there, watching and waiting . . .

  Zak’s senses were on high alert, and he felt almost at one with the rainforest. He noticed everything. The shaking of individual leaves. The dripping of moist condensation from a branch up above. The way Malcolm was nursing his bad arm, and wincing occasionally in pain.

  Then they would move on again, treading carefully, looking up for deadfall, always keeping one eye on the person in front, and trying to ignore the moisture that now poured out of them.

  They’d been going for an hour when Zak suddenly noticed a change in the air. The temperature had dropped suddenly and he found himself shivering. He stopped in his tracks and looked around. There was a new sound: the leaves in the canopy above were rustling together. It sounded ominous, but not as ominous as it looked. Zak gazed up: the whole canopy appeared to be moving, swaying back and forth with the wind that was picking up.

  He noticed that the others had stopped. Raf was looking up too.

  ‘We’re going to have rain,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Trust me. If we get up above the canopy we’ll see a weather front rolling in. We need to stop.’

  Zak gave him a confused look. ‘We can manage a bit of rain, can’t we?’

  Raf smiled grimly. ‘Not jungle rain,’ he said. ‘I think we can risk stepping up to Cruz’s trail for a moment. The ground’s a little higher there. Come on.’

  He cut a way at right angles through the thick bush. The others followed and within a couple of minutes they had reached the narrow path cut into the jungle just hours previously. A thought struck Zak: the jungle was so thick and knotted that whoever had driven this vehicle must surely have known where they were going in order to avoid tree roots and other obstacles. There was no doubt that they were now heading to an actual place, even if they didn’t know what it was.

  Zak was about to make that comment when the rains came.

  There was no warning. No tiny pitter-patter of rain spots. It was as if someone had simply turned on the tap. He had never known anything like it. Even under the canopy of the jungle it felt like a million showers were blasting down on top of him. The water steamed and sizzled all around him and he almost found it difficult to breathe without sucking in raindrops.

  He felt Gabs grab his hand. Raf had done the same to Malcolm, and now they were all moving towards a massive tree trunk where the canopy overhead was a little thicker. They huddled here where the rain was fractionally less intense. Rivers of rainwater gushed downhill – enough to knock them from their feet – and Zak understood why Raf had made them move to higher ground.

  ‘How long’s this going to last?’ he yelled. But his voice went unheard above the noise of the rainstorm. Instead, following his Guardian Angel’s lead, he opened his mouth up to the sky and drank what rainwater he could. That, at least, was refreshing. He could tell that he’d lost a good deal of water in the hour they’d been trekking.

  The rain lasted for ten minutes. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had started, as if the tap had been switched off again. All four of them were saturated and covered in splashes of mud.

  ‘We’ll dry off sooner than you think in this heat,’ Gabs said. ‘Let’s get off the path and keep on walking.’

  But Zak wasn’t going anywhere. He’d just seen something.

  ‘What is it, Zak?’ Raf asked quietly.

  Zak pointed at a tree trunk ten metres from their position. Something was pinned to it at head height. He found that he was holding his breath as he stepped towards it.

  He was a metre away when he understood what he was looking at.

  In some ways, it reminded him of a miniature scarecrow. The stuffed figure was twenty centimetres high and dressed in a straw-coloured dress. But it was not the dress that captured Zak’s attention. Nor was it the gruesome way in which a sturdy six-inch nail pinned the figure to the tree through its abdomen. It was the head: the tiny skull of a small animal, its intricate bones on display and its jaw fixed in a hideous grin.

  Zak shivered. Raf and Gabs were suddenly next to him.

  ‘There’s another one over there,’ Gabs said quietly. She was right. A second figure was nailed to a tree about ten metres away.

  ‘I’ve seen something like these before,’ Zak breathed. ‘In Mexico, at Cruz’s house. They called them La Catrina – statues of women with skulls for faces. A kind of Mexican tradition.’ He grimaced. ‘As traditions go, I think I prefer Morris dancing.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gabs said. ‘I think it’s a good sign.’

  Zak blinked in confusion. ‘Why? Surely it’s there just to scare people away.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘And that means we’re on the right track.’

  ‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.’ Zak continued to eye the figure with distaste.

  Gabs reached out one hand, ripped the figure from the tree and dropped it on the ground.

  ‘Let’s take the nails,’ Raf said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You never know.’ He wiggled the end of the nail and eased it out of the tree trunk. Then he walked over to the second doll, ripped it from the tree and removed the other nail.

  Zak found himself staring at the stuffed toys. The jaws of their gruesome skeleton heads had fallen open and they were staring up towards the jungle canopy.

  ‘They’re just dolls, sweetie,’ Gabs said quietly from behind him.

  Zak gave her a look. He wanted to say that the cocaine-stuffed baby they’d found at the landing strip was also just a doll. That didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous.

  But he kept quiet, and they continued their trek through the jungle.

  9

  ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL

  ‘What’s that?’

  They stopped still, and listened hard. There was a babbling noise, almost like a human laughing. It sounded like it came from the treetops, though not too close.

  ‘Chimpanzees, probably,’ said Gabs a moment later. ‘That’s what it sounds like. Hope we don’t bump into any. They can be a real nuisance.’

  ‘A nuisance how?’

  But Gabs didn’t answer.

  Morning had turned to afternoon. It was now three o’clock. Gabs had been right. The rainwater had soon evaporated from their clothes, but Zak still wasn’t dry as the sweat continued to pour from his body. He felt dirty. Greasy. And very thirsty.

  Every forty-five minutes or so, Raf would stop, having found a particular kind of vine in his path. ‘Fresh water vine,’ he explained to Zak the first time he located one. ‘In some parts of Africa they call it “tourist skin” because its skin peels away like tourists’ in the sun.’ Sure enough, the outer layer of the vine was coming away in sections, like damp wallpaper. Raf would cut strips of vine from the plant and hand them round. Zak soon learned the trick of throwing his head back and holding a cut end of the vine above his mouth, then letting the water trickle in. It didn’t totally relieve the burning thirst at the back of his parched throat, but it was better than nothing.

  At 16.00hrs, Raf raised his hand again. All four of them stopped. Raf inclined his head slightly. ‘I think I can hear water,’ he said.

  Zak listened very carefully. Sure enough, he could hear a distant trickle somewhere off to their left.

  They changed direction, but moved more slowly now. Each time he passed a tree, Raf carved a notch into the bark. Zak didn’t have to ask why. Each patch of rainforest looked identical to the next.
If they didn’t mark their path carefully, they’d never find their way back.

  After ten minutes of careful trekking, the water source came into sight. It was a stream about two metres wide, but fast flowing. A gap in the canopy above let beams of sunlight in, which reflected off the water like twinkling diamonds. It was beautiful and Zak couldn’t stop looking at it. The others were right by him, all three of them equally stunned.

  Then Zak heard a roar.

  It was a terrifying sound. Low, throaty and snarling. It shattered the stillness of the jungle and made him start violently. His brain screamed at him to run, but it was as if his muscles had turned to ice. His stomach was in his throat. He looked desperately around, trying to find out what animal had made that ferocious, angry sound. It had come from the opposite side of the stream, but at first Zak couldn’t see anything. Whatever beast had just snarled its warning at them, it was too well camouflaged . . .

  ‘Don’t move a muscle . . .’ Gabs hissed.

  Malcolm was either not listening or had decided to ignore her. He turned away from the stream and was obviously about to run.

  Gabs grabbed him and held him fast. ‘Do what I say.’

  And while this was going on, Zak’s eyes finally picked out the creature. He had only ever seen leopards in pictures. But he immediately recognized the shape of the head and the distinctive spots. It was crouching low, mostly covered by foliage, so that only its head and its lean, muscular shoulders were really visible about five metres from the far bank of the stream.

  Zak felt his eyes lock with the cat’s, and in that exact moment the leopard roared again, revealing a full set of adult teeth, like white daggers set in the pink hilt of its jaw. And again, Zak’s brain screamed at him to run.

  But Gabs was speaking again, her voice little more than a breath. She sounded like she was trying not to move her lips any more than necessary.

  ‘If we run,’ she whispered, ‘it will chase us. It’s a hunter. That’s what hunters do. Stay absolutely still. Don’t frighten it, or startle it. And don’t maintain eye contact – it will take that as a challenge.’