But if this were the case, Ernesto had not arrived at the same conclusion, for he was still staring at the jungle with rapt attention.
“What is it?” Auggie blurted at last. Now the others took notice and they too looked across at Ernesto for an answer, but the quiet Peruvian evaded the question for several seconds. Then, without turning, he said to them, “Someone is coming.”
Something about the way he said this put them all on high alert. Tension spread instantly throughout the group. It had a heat all of its own, as palpable as the fire around which they were seated. All eyes were now focused on the path, a yawning black hole filled with shadows that recoiled from the dancing flames.
Ben switched on his headlamp and swept the beam back and forth across the area, but the bright LEDs only created a dizzying effect as branches and tree trunks leapt in and out of view and the shadows retreated deeper into the darkness. He clicked off the light and they sat in silence, waiting. After maybe thirty seconds, Cooper and Janie began to whisper to one another. Then someone made a joke, and laughter, loud and nervous, filled the clearing. Ultimately, they decided that it was better to be noisy and foolish than silent and frightened. Soon the somber mood lifted and their voices grew bolder until they began to overcompensate by talking louder than was needed. All the while, Ernesto kept his eyes on the path, responding not in words but subtle movements: the nod of his head; the shrug of a shoulder; the now familiar waving of his hand in the so-so gesture.
In the seconds that followed, a sense of normalcy returned… and then fled just as quickly.
The sound of heavy footsteps along the path shocked them into stillness.
Just beyond their circle of light, something was moving toward them. There was the blur of movement as something staggered toward them, swaying drunkenly, feet scuffing the fallen leaves.
Clicking on his flashlight, Ernesto stood up and directed the beam on the path.
Felix materialized from the gloom, his eyes scrunched up against the bright LEDs.
“It’s Felix!” Cooper exclaimed happily. “Hola, Felix!”
The announcement brought a general air of relief to the camp.
Felix stopped, swaying slightly on his feet. In the light they saw how his face was beaded with sweat and how his eyes flickered in their sockets.
Their eyes found the bizarre-looking wound at roughly the same time.
The purple-black lesion covered the length of his forearm and seemed to be advancing toward the elbow. At the center of the sore, a golf ball-sized volcano of flesh had risen to the point of rupture, oozing blood and pus from a notch in its crater.
Felix managed one more step before he tripped over a root and dropped forward with his arms hanging limply by his side, and the others could only watch in horror as his face met the ground with such force that the earth seemed to tremble beneath their feet.
***
He was alone in the void. He could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. So this must be what death is, Felix realized. Death was the stripping away of all the senses, leaving only the mind intact—that last vestige of the human condition. So being dead was not the religious experience he had always hoped it would be. But it wasn’t scary either. Darkness surrounded him and he embraced it. There was no pain, no pain at all, just an overwhelming sense of comfort, of weightlessness, of total bliss. Death, he decided, was actually rather pleasant—like returning to the womb.
Then, somewhere in the darkness, he felt a tug. Or a push. Something moved. He could not see it or hear it, but he sensed it, the vague impression of something stealthy, something that
(lurked?)
(slithered?)
lingered just beyond his awareness. Felix gathered up his thoughts and directed them at the presence. Who are you? he demanded. The intruder did not answer him. Instead, it only tried to burrow deeper into his mind, as if to escape his awareness. Whatever it was, Felix knew this presence did not belong here with him. The feeling of bliss was gone, replaced by one of helpless dread. A single word suddenly bubbled forth from the vastness of his mind, and that word was parásito.
A parasite.
An intruder.
A thief.
An organism that survived by stealing what it needed from other creatures. As the presence burrowed deeper into his mind, Felix felt some fundamental part of him changing. His memories, for instance. When he tried to conjure up the faces of his loved ones, he could no longer see them. There was something else, too. When he tried to picture himself as a boy, his mother and father, his brothers—the memories would not come. In fact, he wasn’t even entirely certain that he’d ever had a brother, or brothers. Nor could he remember his parents’ names.
Then, from somewhere, nowhere, everywhere, Felix heard a voice. Or voices. From somewhere beyond the void. A sound that carried forth across the great abyss, from the world of the living to the world of the dead.
“Felix?”
Felix?
This word means something.
“Felix?”
What was it? So familiar…
“FELIX!”
Yes, of course…
A name.
His name.
Someone was calling out to him. But what about that thing? What does it want from me? With each passing moment, he found it increasingly difficult to form a lucid thought. Perhaps even more terrifying, he now felt strangely euphoric, as though he were pleasantly drunk. Felix couldn’t be sure, but he had the dim impression that whatever was in there with him was intentionally trying to anesthetize him… but to what end? The answer occurred to him as through a thick fog. Though the presence did not seem to be intelligent (at least, not by human measures), it was certainly aware. It had a plan, and its plan was simple: it wanted to survive, and it would do so at all costs. The parásito would use its host as long as possible before discarding it for a new one.
***
“Felix? Felix!”
A cool sensation, not entirely unpleasant, as his senses began to return. There was a sucking sound as he began to slide out of the void. The sound became a white roar, as though someone had turned up the volume on a radio tuned to static. Then… light. The black sky. Faces. Looking down at him.
As his senses sharpened, Felix looked up to see a crowd of faces looking down at him. To Felix, it felt as though he were looking out from the bottom of a very deep hole. They were leaning over him, studying him as though he were some unusual insect they had trapped inside a net. As the presence retreated to some other place inside his head, Felix found he was able to think, to concentrate again. It occurred to him he must be lying down for them to be hovering over him in such a manner. He tried to move his legs and felt only a cold, not entirely unpleasant tingling sensation from the waist down. Blinking up at them, Felix moaned in fear and pleasure. Something tickled his forehead, rolling slowly down the side of his face. Several seconds passed before he realized that his face and hair were wet. Someone must have splashed water on him, trying to bring him around. The last thing he remembered was fishing, and then something had cut his arm, perhaps one of his hooks. He could not remember. He thought it might have been a spider. He recalled seeing a rather large spider in its web when he was securing the peki-peki to a tree. No, that was wrong, too. It was Felipe who had seen the spider. And then… the rest was a blur.
“Are you okay?” Ernesto asked.
“Dónde está Felipe?” Oscar hovered over the fallen riverboat driver. His one good eye was round with fear while the other stared off at some faraway place in the distance.
Felix tried to respond but his jaws were locked shut and he could not command them to open. With no small effort, he pulled Ernesto nearer and whispered in his ear. Ernesto’s forehead wrinkled in doubt and then he looked to the others for assistance.
Felix watched as the muscular americano stepped forward and helped Ernesto lift him off the ground. They half-carried him to the lean-to, where they sat him on the platform. After a brief discussion,
the tall girl brought him a jug of water and held it to his lips. She did not seem to understand that he was unable to open his mouth, and she apologized—lo siento, lo siento— as the water cascaded down his chin and onto his shirt. Felix felt an overwhelming sense of dread. Something was wrong. He was no longer himself. Some fundamental part of him had changed, but in a way he could not articulate, let alone comprehend. After they had tended to his wounds, he gestured to them that he wanted to lie down. He was still feeling a bit dizzy, and he thought some rest would do him good. They helped him into his tent and he fell asleep almost instantly, still thinking that something was wrong, terribly wrong, but not knowing the reason for this feeling.
After, the five Americans waited morosely by the fire while Oscar paced around the clearing, occasionally talking to himself in Spanish and several times returning to the tent to check on Felix.
Ernesto had ventured off some time ago to find Felipe. He had not wanted to leave the Americans alone, but he had decided it was safer for them if they stayed together at the camp, and so he had left Oscar to take care of the turistas... and to keep an eye on Felix. Nearly a full hour had passed, and there was still no sign of either Ernesto or Felipe.
“Any ideas about what happened?” Ben asked solemnly.
Brooke shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. Something’s not right. Why wasn’t Felipe with him?”
“Maybe they got into a fight or something,” suggested Janie.
“A fight?” Auggie asked in a startled voice. “Over what?”
“I don’t know,” Janie replied thoughtfully. “Whatever guys fight over. I was only guessing.”
“Maybe there was an accident or something,” Cooper suggested. “You guys saw the bite mark.”
This was the first time that someone had referred to the wound as a bite, and it opened the door to all sorts of new possibilities that none of them wanted to consider.
“Something bit him,” Ben said, blinking in surprise at his own admission. “But what could do something like that?”
Brooke and Janie looked at one another. “A spider?” asked Janie.
Brooke shook her head. “I don’t think it’s a spider bite.”
Janie shrugged a shoulder. “What about a snake?”
“It’s possible,” Brooke said, nodding. “But there weren’t any puncture wounds visible.”
“Then what?”
Brooke shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Look,” Auggie said, blushing, “I know you guys will think this is crazy, but ever since we got here I’ve had this, I don’t know, this feeling, like…”
“Like what?” Ben asked.
Just then, a light appeared on the path. Ernesto appeared with his headlamp. He was carrying a backpack over one shoulder. Oscar stopped pacing and rushed over to him. Ernesto handed the backpack to him, placing it gently in his hands, as though it was some kind of precious keepsake that deserved to be treated with respect. Oscar stared at it with a grave expression. There was a brief exchange in Spanish. When they were finished, Oscar plodded away with the backpack and slumped against a tree with his head bowed.
Ben looked at Janie. “Did you understand any of that?”
Janie’s eyes were wide as she looked at the group. “Yes,” she whispered. “And it’s not good.”
Brooke took Janie by the hand. “What is it?”
Janie turned to her slowly. “Felipe’s gone…”
They looked at one another as they tried to comprehend the meaning of this new information.
“…and he took the boat…”
“Well, what does that mean?” Auggie demanded. “How are we supposed to get out of here?”
Janie’s eyes flashed in the firelight. “I don’t know.”
Twenty-five
The low grunts of an animal drew them from their tents, and one by one they gathered in the clearing, shining their lights on each another while taking a silent head-count.
Cooper swayed sleepily as he wiped the grit from his eyes. “What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure,” Janie said, hugging herself. “It sounds like an animal got into the camp.”
“Ugh!” Auggie covered his mouth, gagging. “What’s that smell?”
Brooke, who had one hand over her mouth and the other on her stomach, could only shake her head.
“Where’s Ernesto?” Ben’s voice had an urgency none of them had heard before. “And Oscar?”
“We are here.”
Spinning their flashlights around, they saw Ernesto strapping the knife to his belt while Oscar stood beside him, shifting back and forth on his feet like a nervous ape.
“What’s that sound?” Auggie whispered. When Ben had first awakened him, he was certain that this was all part of some elaborate practical joke. He would go outside and Cooper would pop up from behind a bush and scare the shit out of him, and they would all share a good laugh at his expense. Now, wide awake and with a rising sense of dread, he only wished this were so.
They looked in the direction of the sound and followed it to Felix’s dome tent. A jagged hole had been torn along one side and the two pieces of the nylon wall flapped open like a wound.
Janie’s voice trembled. “C-cómo estás, Felix?”
At the sound of the girl’s voice, something within the tent began to thrash about as though unable to escape. A terrible realization filtered through the group: something had gotten inside while Felix was sleeping. Whatever it was, it was still inside. Ernesto walked over to the lean-to and aimed his flashlight along the shredded seam. As the beam found the hole, they could perceive a single silhouette inside. An elongated head; two shoulders; a trim torso. Long and lean, it was clearly a human shape. There was only one person whose imposing physique could cast such a shadow.
Oscar took a tentative step forward, his voice rising hopefully. “Felipe?”
The thrashing stopped, and the shadow-head jerked in the direction of the light.
“What the hell—” Ben made as if to look inside the gap, but Ernesto’s free hand shot out in front of his chest, blocking him. It was the first show of force by their native guide, and it took Ben by surprise. Stopping short, Ben jerked his head around and fired a questioning look at the diminutive Peruvian.
Ernesto was wearing an odd expression, lips slightly parted, head tilted uncertainly. Although he did not look afraid, his eyes were wider than usual, and the sharpness of his gaze told Ben that whatever was happening inside the tent, it was miles away from good.
With Ben close behind him, Ernesto crept in cautiously, angling the flashlight beam inside the tent. Something shifted inside, moving away from the light. The torn flaps of the tent wall fluttered in the breeze and the hole yawned wider. Both men saw it at precisely same time: Felix’s blood-spattered face staring up at the tent ceiling with wide, unblinking eyes. His throat had been torn out, and the blood continued to dribble from the severed cords. Whatever had killed him was still inside. And judging by the terrible ripping sounds, it was still gorging itself on the flesh and bones of the portly peki-peki driver.
Ernesto’s juddering light found a dark shape crouching in the back of the tent. From the other side of the nylon wall came a low growl. Then the tent exploded and the thing that used to be Felipe leapt out of the hole and into the clearing.
One of the girls shrieked. Ben cursed and stumbled backwards, losing his balance as the creature bounded past him. Underneath it all, Cooper kept repeating the same phrase over and over, turning it into a kind of chant: “Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit!”
In the dim firelight, Felipe squatted on the ground like a gargoyle and glowered at them, his face barely recognizable behind a mask of blood. His jaw had been broken, and his mouth drooped open with a look of perpetual surprise revealing broken, bloodstained teeth. And his eyes—
Ernesto yelled something in Spanish. It was the first time anyone in the group had heard him raise his voice, and the suddenness of it made them jump. Even Felipe se
emed surprised; slowly he rose up from his squat and stood motionless, glaring at Ernesto from across the open space of the clearing. For several seconds nothing happened. There was a very long pause, a moment frozen in time in which the world and everything in it seemed to slow to the point of absolute stillness. Then, with an animalistic roar, Felipe leapt with ease across the clearing and came crashing down on top of Ernesto.
But Ernesto was ready for him. In a flash he drew his knife from its sheath and plunged it into Felipe’s chest just as the larger man knocked him to the ground. If Felipe felt the knife at all, he did not show it. Pressing closer, his shattered teeth clicked together as they sought to tear the flesh from Ernesto’s face.
Janie was the first to react.
Without thinking, she reached down and grabbed the first thing that caught her eye—a tapered log that was poking up from the ashes of the fire pit. Dashing across the clearing, she raised the log and smashed it over Felipe’s head. The log broke open, releasing a shower of sparks that fluttered through the air like fireflies. With a startled cry, she dropped the smoldering stub of wood and fell to her knees in pain, clutching her charred hand against her chest.
Ben’s eyes darted back and forth across the camp in search of a weapon, but he saw none.
“OhmyGod!” someone cried out shrilly. “Somebody help him!”
Fuck it, Ben thought. Hands balled into tight fists, he started toward the two men.
Cooper and Auggie were both inching closer to the fray, each waiting for the other to make a move. Cooper grabbed at Felipe’s shirt and pulled, but the shirt ripped apart at the collar, sending Cooper tumbling backwards as Felipe twisted his head around and snarled at him.
At that moment, Oscar emerged from the shadows from behind Felipe. Speaking in a soft, inquisitive voice, he reached out one trembling hand and touched his brother’s shoulder. Felipe’s arm shot out with blinding speed and seized Oscar by the forearm, snapping the bones with a violent twist. Howling in agony, Oscar stumbled backwards, struggling to make sense of the unnatural angle at which his arm was now bent.
Pray for Darkness: Terror in the Green Inferno Page 14