Untouchable

by Stephanie Doyle

  What a sucker he was.

  Chapter 7

  T ogether Lilith and Tarak made their way back to the village. The fires had either burned themselves out or had been put out by villagers. The monks had come down from the monastery to help, but it was too late. The destruction was almost complete. Smoke still filled the air, heavy and thick, as did the glow of the ashes. It almost looked like dawn even though it was still the middle of the night.

  Lilith found Sister Joseph saying a prayer over Sister Peter’s body, now covered with a blanket. But the blanket didn’t cover the red stream that continued to seep out of her body and into the earth.

  “I must leave, Sister. I will find her and she will pay. I promise.”

  Sister Joseph wiped a tear from her eye and shook her head. “The Lord said, vengeance is Mine.”

  “Don’t worry. There will be enough left over for Him,” Tarak said as he came to stand by Lilith. “We’ll move out in a few hours just before dawn breaks.”

  “We can move now,” Lilith said.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me before. Through the jungle…in the middle of night…equals danger.”

  “Torches will be enough to keep the animals at bay.”

  He lifted his eyebrows high on his head. “You’re not the nervous sort, are you? All right. But I’ll need to go back to the monastery to get some…supplies. You’ll need sturdy clothes and shoes.”

  Lilith nodded. She knew what she would need. “I am sorry I cannot stay with you during this time. I believe that Sister Peter’s essence remains with us for a while longer. That we can talk to her and remind her of what she was to us so that her last thoughts before rebirth are good ones.”

  Sister Joseph nodded. “Our beliefs our different, but I, too, believe that if we speak to her somehow she will hear us. And you can think those good thoughts wherever you are, can’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then do that,” Sister Joseph told her. “I don’t understand what happened. I don’t know who that woman was or why she came to our village. Why she destroyed so much with so little reason. And I don’t understand why you can’t let her go. But I have lived long enough to recognize evil. I know that it comes in many forms. When you find it you must confront it. I suppose I can’t fault you for wanting to chase her down and see that she doesn’t commit more harm.”

  “Thank you.”

  “God bless you, child. And you,” the sister said, pointing at Tarak. “You keep her safe.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  It took only minutes for Lilith to round up the supplies she needed. For nourishment and to save them from having to hunt, she took a bag of dried meat and an animal skin full of water. For clothes she tucked up the silk material between her legs and secured it at her waist to give her freedom of movement. Her sandals weren’t the sturdiest shoes, but they were all she had and she’d managed well enough in them for years.

  Her gloves as always were a necessity.

  Waiting for Tarak frustrated her even though she knew there was no point in the emotion as she would not leave without him. It was almost a half an hour before Tarak found her in the center of the village. Returning from the monastery, he looked very different than he had earlier that night. Like Echo, his clothes reflected a new purpose. He wore black pants, a black shirt, heavy boots and a vest covered with many pockets. One she assumed held the knife, the others she suspected were for extra ammunition. Under each arm he’d holstered a gun. On his right arm he carried a backpack that looked stuffed to capacity. He removed one item from it then slung it back on his shoulder as if it weighed nothing.

  For his strength, she thought. This was why she needed him. But more than that, a man of violence would understand a woman of violence. Echo was certainly that.

  When he saw her efforts at preparation for their march into the jungle he frowned. “I tell you sturdy and you’re in sandals and gloves. We’re not going to a ball, you know.”

  Lilith looked at her covered hands. “The gloves are for your protection.”

  “My protection?”

  Lilith needed to do this quickly, before they left. She would not risk losing him in the jungle because he’d made the stupid mistake of touching her.

  “Come.” She made Tarak follow her to where the body of the man who had touched her still lay. She pulled back the blanket that had been placed over him to show Tarak. “He touched me and died.”

  “I guessed as much. You hit him? Stabbed him?”

  “No. One touch of my skin. That was all. It is…poisonous. I do not have time to explain. You must trust me. The woman that we are chasing is special, too. We are experiments. Tampered with genetically. Creatures of misplaced science. I do not know how and I do not care at this point. I need you to know that if you touch me you will die. Do you understand? I am untouchable.”

  Tarak thought back to that day when he’d stumbled upon her during her bath. The fear that he’d seen in her eyes. Not of being raped but of what might happen to him if he touched her. And that night when she’d come to his room when he was sick. She’d been summoned for a reason. He remembered the way his whole body had gone numb after a few drops of water on his lips. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before.

  “That night. When I had the fever. You touched the water.”

  “Yes,” she said. “A small dose can numb the body. I am called to help when we have to do amputations. To stop the pain. But direct contact will kill.”

  “I almost grabbed you several times out there in the jungle.”

  “I would not have let you. I am very skillful in avoiding people’s touch. But now we must travel together. Sleep close. You must know to take precautions.”

  Tarak nodded. He wasn’t certain he understood what the hell genetic tampering meant or how a woman came to have poisonous skin, but like Sister Joseph he’d seen enough in this world to know that stranger things were possible. Then there was the fact that his shot should have taken down the woman with the gun and it hadn’t. He hit what he aimed at, always.

  But what sealed his belief was that he had a gut-deep hunch that Lilith wouldn’t lie. Certainly not about something that might hurt him. There was a purity about her soul that made him wonder if she even knew how to be deceitful. However, it was clear to him that with her purity apparently came an iron will.

  Lilith was standing on the edge of the jungle armed with nothing more than silk gloves and a fire torch. “We must go. Each minute that passes they get farther away.”

  “All right. First let’s see where we’re going.” Tarak used the receiver in his hand and punched in a code.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a GPS receiver. If the helicopter has a tracker, which most do now, I should be able to locate its direction. You didn’t honestly think I was going to wander around in the jungle looking for a wrecked helicopter?”

  “They would have headed south. It’s where the nearest cities are.”

  “I can do better than south.”

  Once he located the blip, easy to find as it was the only one on his screen, he punched a few buttons and let the receiver return a location to him. “I’ve got them. Let’s have at it then.”

  Tarak took a second torch and followed behind her. A few feet into the heavy foliage and he could no longer see the lingering fires of the village behind him. A few more and he could no longer hear the civilization they had left.

  It was officially just the two of them against four armed thugs, a genetically altered woman and the jungle.

  Tarak wasn’t sure he liked their odds.

  It didn’t rain. It didn’t pour. It deluged. Hour after hour of some of the hardest rain Tarak could imagine. Yet in front of him Lilith continued to walk without a stumble or a complaint. It appeared that Lilith was right. The chopper had been heading south. Bomdila was the nearest city where one might find transport out of the province. It’s where the thugs must have rented the helicopter in the first pace.

  H
owever, there was no way to know how far the chopper would take them as it continued to lose gas. Tarak and Lilith’s only choice was to follow the dot and hope that eventually they could catch up with it. But even with the GPS, Tarak thought the odds of finding the helicopter were slim. It was the nature of the jungle to camouflage its denizens. Heavy foliage, fallen trees. They might be within a few kilometers of the Merry Murderer and her men and never find them.

  Lilith wouldn’t listen to him.

  Hour after hour she forged ahead. Through the dark, over uneven terrain. With the sounds of animal calls closer than he would have liked dogging at their heels. She didn’t stop when the sun came up. She didn’t hesitate when the rain started to fall.

  He wondered how far she might go before he put a stop to it. His bet was that she would go until her legs collapsed under her.

  “Lilith, we must stop. We have to find shelter.”

  She turned around and shook her head. “We need to find higher ground. To see if we can see the remains of a wreck. You said we are getting closer.”

  The helicopter had stopped moving. He knew that much. “In this rain we could be standing over the damn thing and you still wouldn’t see it.”

  “We must try.”

  “My leg, Lilith. I don’t know how much farther I can go on my leg.” It was a lie. He’d made it out of a Colombian jungle with a bullet still in it, but instinct told him the lie would work.

  She stopped and turned around. He could see the concern in her eyes as her gaze fell to his leg.

  “Of course. We will find shelter. Let me climb to get a vantage point.”

  He knew it. A soft touch. What in the hell was she doing out in the jungle searching for a killer? Better yet what was he doing here with her?

  He watched as she made her way up a banyan tree, climbing it like a native to the forest. Considering the village where she lived, he imagined she was.

  It was odd. Even with his eyes pinned to her as he watched her ascent, it was as if she became part of the landscape. Something about the nature of her skin seem to blend with her surroundings in a way that made him sure that if he took his eyes off her for a second, he would lose her amongst the flora. Staring at her, he could really only see the damn gloves.

  “Tarak! Tarak! I see something. A curl of smoke to the east.”

  She shimmied down the tree and he couldn’t help but linger on the sight of the wet silk sliding up her bare leg. Instantly an image of her without the bolt of silk reappeared in his mind.

  All right. So it wasn’t totally inconceivable that he followed this woman into the jungle—a poisonous woman no less—because he had the hots for her. Pathetic, but not inconceivable.

  Lilith jumped the remaining few feet to the ground and raced to where Tarak stood. He glanced down at his receiver.

  “It’s only another kilometer, two at most. You can wait here to rest your leg and I’ll go…”

  He agreed with her assessment. From where they were now it was only a kilometer and a half to the east. Unbelievably lucky. Or unbelievably unlucky. He wasn’t sure. “You’ll stay behind me.”

  “But…”

  Tarak pulled his left gun out of its holster. “You’ll stay behind me. I need to assess the situation before charging in. Do you understand?”

  “Then give me the other gun.”

  “You want a gun?” he asked, incredulous. “Do you know how to shoot it?”

  Lilith bristled at his tone. For most of last night and all of today he’d been trying to convince her that they would never find the crash site. Now that she had, he seemed ready to take over. She knew she had asked for his help, but she also knew that this was her mission. It was her responsibility to stop her sister. She would not be left behind.

  He was speaking to her as if she were a simpleton. “I imagine you point it at the person you want to harm and you pull the trigger.”

  “I’ll keep the guns. You concentrate on staying out of sight. If someone comes at you then I suppose you can…touch them.”

  Again Lilith wanted to argue, but again she reminded herself that she’d asked him to come along. She only hoped that the monks were right, that he was a warrior, because that was who she needed on this mission.

  She thought back to the bullet that had bounced off Echo’s shield. It would have been a direct hit. She needed to trust that he was good at what he did, to believe in what she’d already seen.

  Besides, it wasn’t in her nature to confront. After so long being controlled by her father, then her curse, she was a being of tolerance and humbleness. She worked hard. She helped the sick. She tried to do no harm.

  Why this man’s attitude toward her should bother her she couldn’t say. But it did.

  “Did you make a face at me?”

  Had she? “It was not intentional.”

  “Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful when you’re annoyed?”

  Startled, it took a second before she could admit, “No.”

  “They should have.”

  He turned his back to her then and headed off in the direction she’d told him. She watched his leg, initially fearful of how painful the next kilometer might be for him and the setback it would cause toward his healing. Then she saw how he walked without any restriction of movement, not favoring the leg or showing any indication of pain at all and she suspected that he’d lied. Lied to get her to slow down even though she said she hadn’t wanted to.

  Lilith was sure that if he turned to look at her now, he would most definitely see another face.

  As they neared their destination, Lilith pointed to the trail of smoke that was visible over the tree line. They could only be meters away from the crash site. Slowly Tarak covered his lips with his fingers to indicate silence from this point forward. Like an inhabitant of the jungle he slunk into the rhododendron bushes, barely shuffling them.

  Lilith continued behind him, trying to mimic his grace, but she could hear the ruffle of flora trembling as she moved even over the torrential rain. Working harder to follow his model, she crouched low and stopped.

  Through a break in the trees she could see the fallen helicopter tilted on its side. One of the blades was broken and the windshield appeared to be cracked.

  But it wasn’t empty. A figure sat in the pilot’s seat. Maybe waiting for help to return?

  Before Lilith could think to motion to Tarak in warning, she could see him slinking out of a thicket of green, moving along the ground like a snake waiting to jump up and attack the belly of the machine.

  With a lightning-fast strike, he pulled open the pilot-side door, his gun already at the man’s head. Lilith gasped, prepared for retaliation, but Tarak remained still. After a second he reached inside the helicopter and pulled the man out of the wreckage.

  Lilith didn’t have to see the large gash across the man’s face to know he was dead. His open, unblinking eyes told their own story.

  Sensing there was no threat, she moved from her hiding place and joined Tarak over the body.

  “She left him.”

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “Maybe he was already dead. Maybe he wasn’t. I don’t see that it would matter much to her.”

  “They took everything with them?”

  Tarak leaned into the chopper and Lilith had the urge to sneak a peek over his shoulder, even though she knew such close contact was forbidden. The idea that Echo might have lost the necklace was less than improbable.

  “It seems. Without the radio we know they couldn’t have called for a pick up. That’s good news.”

  “Why?”

  “Because now there are only three goons left plus your friend.”

  “She’s not my friend.”

  “I just meant…”

  “She is my sister. Echo,” Lilith explained. She couldn’t say why she felt the need to tell him or how it impacted their mission. She only knew that withholding that information seemed wrong, especially when he’d already come so far for no other reason than that she had
asked him.

  “Really? This story should make for excellent entertainment over the campfire tonight.”

  “But we must be close. If we keep going…”

  “We’re not going anywhere until dawn. Don’t you get it? They’re on foot now, too. They’re human—well, almost, I suppose. The rain will slow them like it has us. Plus, there are more of them, so they will move slower. We’ll stay here, use the helicopter for shelter and then start out before first light.” He paused. “You know I’m right.”

  She did. And she couldn’t imagine why that irritated her so much.

  “Good. We sit tight for a while. You have water and jerky that should get us through tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll hunt for snakes.”

  “You have to know which snakes are edible. Some that are venomous are not fit to eat.”

  “Are you suggesting I don’t know how to handle dangerous snakes?”

  Lilith shrugged. She’d never been one to tell anyone anything, but she found herself snapping back, “I am telling you I know more about poison than you ever will.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Come on, we’ve got to get this body away from the crash site before it attracts some visitors we would rather not meet up with.”

  Lilith nodded. Working together, they pulled the heavy body as far away as Tarak thought reasonable and then covered it with brush and twigs. It wouldn’t save the man from being dinner for some lucky animal, but at least some effort had been made to respect the dead.

  When they returned to the chopper Tarak waited until Lilith crawled into the passenger’s seat and then carefully maneuvered himself into the pilot’s seat. He could see the blood smeared on the windshield and dismissed it. He was too happy to be out of the rain for it to matter. As a man who had spent more time in the elements than he had in luxury surroundings he was surprised he even noticed the rain. But he had.

  A sure sign he was getting soft.

  Next to him, Lilith curled up into a small ball conscious, no doubt, of the size of their shelter. The space inside the chopper was tight. He could hear her breathing. Only he couldn’t touch her. At all.