Pray for Darkness: Terror in the Green Inferno

by James Michael Rice

  Janie is gone, replaced by a brutish and insensate substitute, a marionette made of flesh and bone. These thoughts come to Brooke in a mad flurry, and the anger gives her strength. She begins to thrash about, her booted feet kicking wildly at the air. Raising her elbow, she wedges it under Janie’s chin, just in time to keep the snapping jaws at bay. The clawed hands squeeze and squeeze. Sparks fly in front of Brooke’s eyes—white sparks, yellow sparks, black sparks. Tiny fireworks that explode in front of her face. Briefly, she welcomes the possibility that she might actually faint before Janie can bite her face off.

  Auggie has been watching this in horrified shock but now he abandons all thought and swings the butt of his spear at the side of Janie’s rotten skull. There is an audible click as Janie’s head snaps to the left, lolling at the end of her broken neck, and Auggie shouts in triumph. But the moment is short-lived. Barely registering the blow, there is a grotesque ratcheting sound as Janie straightens her head and returns her attention to Brooke, who is still dangling against the tree. Taking a few steps back, Auggie is working himself up for a second charge when two more inhumans appear to the side of him. As they close in on him, he jabs the spear in wild, swinging strokes, trying to keep them as far from him as possible. Heart racing, he already feels as though this battle has been going on for hours.

  In truth, less than a minute has passed since the first inhuman revealed itself.

  Thrashing, Brooke reaches out for something, anything, with which to fight. Rough against her fingertips, she feels the base of a small branch. Wrapping her fingers around the branch, she pulls herself up and back against the tree, loosening Janie’s grip around her throat. Now partially free, Brooke gasps as she sucks in the precious air. Then the branch breaks in her hand and she falls back into Janie’s grasp. Brooke can feel the claws digging in as Janie stretches her face toward her, her jaws seeming to distend, opening wider and wider. Brooke flails, unaware at first that she is still clutching the broken branch in her hand. Suddenly, a memory races through her mind: the fall into the swamp, the stick jutting out of Ben’s calf, the deep and penetrating hole. Squeezing the branch, she works her arm loose of Janie’s grip and plunges the stick deep into her left eye.

  Janie shrieks as Brooke twists the shard in deeper, working it back and forth like an awl. Hands flailing at the stick, Janie suddenly releases her death grip, and Brooke falls to the ground, gasping. Janie manages to grab the shard, but her hands are too clumsy, and she only succeeds in breaking it in half. With the stub of the stick still poking out of the socket, Janie’s remaining eye seems to bulge with rage as she locates Brooke. Raising her clawed hands, she slowly descends upon the fallen girl.

  Ben is running toward Brooke when another inhuman appears, blocking his path. Summoning all his strength, Ben rotates his hips, his elbow snapping forward and into the creature’s lower jaw. There is a hollow clack! as the metal plate in Ben’s elbow connects with the bone, and he watches in triumph as the mandible, already hanging by strings, is torn loose from the flesh. Kicking the wounded inhuman aside, Ben sprints across the clearing and slips his arm around Janie’s neck in a chokehold, pulling her away from Brooke. Janie stumbles and the two fall together in a tangled heap, Ben on his back and holding on tight as Janie’s claws tear at his forearm. Then Ernesto appears out of nowhere, dragging the machete’s blade across Janie’s throat. Her neck splits open in a bloodless smile, spilling a virulent black substance that instantly congeals in the poison air.

  Janie squeals, tossing about in violent, dying spasms. Dragging himself out from under the thrashing body, what Ben sees makes his heart stop. Several feet away, Oscar lies in a bloody heap. He looks as though he’s been through a wood chipper and this is what came out on the other side.

  While Cooper continues to struggle with the tribesman, Brooke crawls toward Auggie, who is sitting on the ground with his arms around his knees, rocking back and forth and muttering deliriously. On the opposite side of the clearing, blocking their path, three more inhumans advance upon them, their jaws clicking together in syncopated rhythm. Then all at once, the bigger one releases a shrill scream that is immediately taken up by the others.

  This is it, thinks Ben. That’s their war cry. They’re going to charge us all at once.

  But it doesn’t happen.

  Amazingly, the creatures back away, retreating into the brush. One of the wounded ones hobbles along after them, but the other three, including Janie, are either dead or dying. As the inhumans back away, Cooper sags to the ground with his hands on his stomach. Seeing this, Auggie scrambles to his feet and runs to his aid. Lifting Cooper’s shirt he sees that the lacerations are only superficial, but it’s the fear that concerns Auggie, the blind fear that makes Cooper thrash at him hysterically as Auggie tries to quell the bleeding.

  Brooke stares on and on at Janie’s body, seeing it, not seeing it, retreating somewhere deep within herself. Then someone is shaking her, calling to her. From some unfathomable distance, she hears the sound of her own name.

  “Brooke!” Ben’s voice rises in its concern. “Brooke, snap out of it! Can you hear me?”

  Momentarily, Ben’s voice pulls her back to the present, and there he is in front of her. Not a thousand miles away. Right there in front of her. Eyes wide, lips pressed firmly together, his face is tight with concern. She looks at him dazedly, her eyes unfocused, as though she has just awakened from sleep. Then she remembers the attack, her life-and-death struggle against Janie, everything. Flashing back to these things, the strength leaves her body and she collapses into his arms.

  “Brooke,” he pleads. Holding her close, he can feel her body shaking all over. “Brooke?”

  Past his shoulder, she notices something shining down through the trees, something that looks like a laser beam. All at once, the sun breaks through the clouds and morning arrives like a blessing, bringing warmth and precious light across the land.

  Praying softly, Ernesto is kneeling on the ground with his hand on Oscar’s unmoving chest. Littering the ground around him are the mangled bodies of the inhumans. Their skulls crack open with a soft hiss, releasing rills of black liquid that steam and sizzle in the early morning light.

  “I was wrong,” Brooke whispers. She begins to wail, her nails pressing deeper and deeper into his back. “I was wrong! Ben, I was wrong! I was so, so wrong!”

  He strokes her hair, trying to calm her, but she is shaking so badly he can hardly hold her still. “Shhh,” he says. “It’s going to be okay…”

  “You don’t understand…”

  “Shhhh…”

  The comfort of his arms around her, this sudden kindness amidst the horrors of death, causes the dam to break at last, and Brooke is overwhelmed by a torrent of emotion.

  From an abyss of despair, she raises her head toward the golden sky and weeps.

  Forty-seven

  “I was wrong,” Brooke repeated with a look of frightened culpability. More than half an hour had passed since the attack, and her voice was still shaky. It was late morning, and they had just stopped to rest in a sunlit clearing not far from the ambush spot. After tending to their wounds, they sat down by the river to collect themselves. Their backpacks, mostly empty now, lay scattered around them, along with several spears they had salvaged. Four pairs of eyes watched her, four pairs of bloodshot eyes with little hope left in them. “I should have recognized it before,” she continued. “Their eyes; the way they move their heads. They’re practically blind, I think. They find their way by smell. Did you see the way they reacted as soon as they saw the sun coming up? The way their blood burned up in the light? They were afraid, or as close to being afraid as they can get.” She stopped to gaze into the jungle, her hands planted firmly around the shaft of a newly sharpened spear, and though she knew an attack by daylight was improbable, she refused to let her guard down, not even for a moment.

  There was a heavy silence as the others processed this new information.

  When no one spoke up, s
he continued: “I’ve been thinking—about what these things might be.” She paused, rubbing her throat, which bore a dark bruise in the shape of Janie’s fingers and hand. “There is a fungus that grows in different rainforests around the world. I read about it online. It infects certain types of bugs, like ants and spiders. It gets into their brains and—and—it uses them. Like puppets.”

  “They used her,” Cooper said with disgust, unable to utter Janie’s name. “They used her as… as a decoy, in order to trap us. They knew that we’d see her and come running.”

  Ben turned to Ernesto, who was eyeing the jungle as though trying to translate a difficult text. “Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

  Ernesto had not said more than a few terse words since Oscar’s death. Now he turned to look at them wearily, shaking his head. “I have not heard of this ant. There are places in the jungle where no man has been, animals in the jungle no man has ever seen. If Brooke say it is possible, I believe her.”

  “I have,” interrupted Auggie. “They’re called ‘zombie ants’—”

  “Zombie ants!” barked Cooper. “You’re joking, right?”

  Auggie ignored him. “That’s probably not the scientific term, of course, but that’s the gist of it. There’s a kind of fungus that infects them. I don’t remember what it’s called. Anyway, this type of fungus, it works like a parasite. It uses insects and sometimes spiders as hosts in order to spread to different parts of the rainforest. It uses the ant as a carrier to help it spread. The ant wanders around, confused, as the infection fills its head. Then it clamps down on a leaf where it stays till it dies. Afterwards, the infection bursts out of its skull, spreading the spore at just the right time.”

  Ben snapped his head up suddenly. “Just like the monkeys,” he said. “That explains why they were hanging from the trees like that.”

  “Wait, wait, wait…” Cooper put his hands on top of his head and moaned. “I saw something like that, like what Auggie was talking about, when we first arrived at the camp trail. I dropped my sunglasses and when I looked down, there they were. Bullet ants, I think they were. They were just sort of sitting there, bumping into one another like they were drunk.”

  “I remember that,” Auggie said, his voice rising higher. “I was coming up behind you when you said it, but I thought you were joking…”

  “But these are insects we’re talking about, right? Not people.”

  Brooke looked at her hands, which were trembling, and then raised her head. “According to the article, the fungus uses the ants to spread its spore, so it can move to places it can’t normally reach. That’s how it survives. When you think about it, the function of any living organism is survival. Maybe the fungus, or the infection, or whatever it is, maybe it needed to spread farther than the ants could take it. That’s why it spread to the monkeys…and now people. Maybe it had to evolve to survive.”

  “Maybe it’s still evolving,” Auggie said, staring off at the jungle in a visionary way.

  “But why now?” Ben wanted to know. “How come no one’s ever seen these things before?”

  “I think we have,” Auggie said, and his eyes glittered darkly.

  The others fell silent. They looked at him questioningly and waited for him to continue.

  “This jungle,” Auggie went on, “has a long history of unexplained disappearances. Some people believe there was once a massive, thriving civilization here, but no one knows who they were or what happened to them. Some of the world’s greatest explorers came here, never to be seen again.”

  “What are you saying? That these things were responsible?”

  Auggie licked his lips. “What I’m saying is that this thing, this infection, could have been around for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. All around the world we have these different cultures, right? Every culture has its own mythology of monsters or demons or the dead coming back to life, but they’re all variations of the same theme, and the message is always the same: you go out at night, and the bad things will get you—”

  Cooper was shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Auggie. I just don’t see what—”

  Auggie raised his hand to silence him. “Just bear with me, Coop. Imagine that there’s even a tiny kernel of truth in all these legends and myths. How is it that all these different cultures, who lived thousands of miles apart, all end up believing in the same thing? Not just that, but why bother building pyramids and temples that take decades to finish? The reason? To be closer to their God…”

  “The sun,” Brooke whispered.

  Auggie smiled at her. “Exactly. I think this thing has been around for a long time. Mankind just forgot about it, somehow. And it’s been watching us throughout the ages, waiting to return.”

  “The Interoceanic Highway,” Brooke said breathlessly. “They’ve been cutting down hundreds of miles of forest. Maybe they disturbed something they shouldn’t have.”

  “Maybe they just pissed it off,” Ben said firmly.

  “Well, that would explain what happened to Felipe,” Auggie said in a reasoning voice. “He probably turned first, which means he was the first one exposed. But in Felix the infection took longer… you remember how his arm looked when he came back?”

  “But why didn’t they turn at the same time?” Cooper wanted to know.

  Brooke shrugged. “Let’s imagine that it’s just like any other type of infection. Meningitis, for instance, or Triple E. Just like a cold or the flu, it affects everyone differently. Depending on how strong your immune system is, some people die from it right away while others become carriers, spreading the infection before they even realize that they’re sick.”

  Carriers, Ben thought grimly. What was it that Brooke had said that afternoon at the research center? The jungle contains the disease and the cure? But what was the cure for this particular disease? And just like that, it hit him. He, and Brooke and all the others… they were the cure. Deforestation. Mining. Poaching. Pollution. Humans came to the jungle and destroyed it, and now the jungle was using the humans to destroy each other. Because humans were more than just the disease—they were also the cure. If he and the others survived their ordeal in the jungle, they would bring the infection back to civilization where it would spread like a plague. The inhumans were using them as carriers in order to cure the planet of its greatest affliction: mankind. On the tail of that came another, even more horrific thought: Later on, when people talk about how the apocalypse started, they won’t be talking about North Korea or the Middle East. They’ll be talking about right here. They’ll be talking about us…

  But then another voice cut in, one that was equally rational but far more selfish: Maybe you’re infected, maybe not. But one thing’s for sure… if you don’t go back, you’ll die, and that means everyone, including Brooke, will die right along with you… Yes, it’s risky, but you’ve got to go back…

  In the end, he decided it was a risk he was willing to take. For them. For her.

  “We have to get back to the research center,” Cooper said. “We have to warn people about this.”

  Auggie picked up a pebble and hurled it across the clearing. “How?”

  “I don’t know,” Cooper said, irritated. “But we have to, right?”

  Auggie shrugged. Scooping up another pebble, he hurled it across the clearing where it landed against a tree with a hollow tick.

  Ben looked at the tree for a few seconds, thinking. Then his eyes lit up, and he turned to Ernesto, hardly able to conceal his excitement. “You told us before that you used to build rafts with your father. You said you used Balsa wood from the jungle.”

  Ernesto’s eyes began to brighten. “Yes…”

  “So what if we make a raft? It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just something big enough for us to lie down flat and hold onto. Then we can float our way back to the research center, or who knows, maybe someone will even spot us sooner.”

  Ernesto nodded. “Is very dangerous, but we have no choice now. We must hurry be
fore the sun goes down again.”

  Clutching her spear, Brooke rose to her feet. Towering over them like a warrior, her face hardened into a look of raw determination. “Let’s get to it, then. We’ve already wasted too much time.”

  Forty-eight

  Following the elevated riverbank, nearly two hours passed before they were able to locate the elusive Balsa, and even then they were able to find only two mature trees of a sufficient height and width to support their weight in the water. Taking turns with the machete, Ben and Ernesto chopped the trees into four six-foot sections while the others carted them down to the water’s edge to lay out the frame of their raft.

  “We need more trees,” Ben said.

  Ernesto placed a confident hand on Ben’s shoulder. “We will find.”

  Showing Brooke how to use his knife to cut vines into thin strips, Ernesto explained how the logs should be lashed together. Leaving Brooke, Auggie, and Cooper to their work, Ben and Ernesto headed back into the jungle on a quest to find more wood. The work was painstakingly slow. By late afternoon the temperature had topped out just over 100 degrees in the shade, and their lungs labored in the humid air; it was like trying to breathe through a wet towel.

  They returned more than an hour later, carrying a single log on their shoulders. Brooke, Auggie, and Cooper heard them coming and jumped to their feet with their spears held ready.

  “It’s okay,” Ben called out. “It’s just us.”

  The three by the water exhaled a collective sigh of relief, though the tension returned when they saw the lone tree that was unceremoniously dropped at their feet.

  “All we could find…” Ben said, panting in the heat.

  Brooke walked over to him and hugged him. “The leg still holding up?”

  “Yeah…” He lifted her small hands, turning them over to inspect both sides. Her knuckles were bleeding; her palms callused. He remembered how she had painted her nails on their last night at the research center; the pretty red lacquer had long since worn away, and the tips of her nails were chipped and broken to the quick. “What happened to your hands?” he asked, rubbing them.