“Oh, just the usual,” she said. “You have to spend at least four days in the jungle to get them to look like this. Then you have to spend a whole day cutting vines and strips of bark to build a raft. Not to mention digging the occasional latrine. I call it the Amazon Manicure. Do you think it will catch on?”
Ben gave her a playful smile. “Let’s hope so. Maybe you’ll get rich, and then we can go on a real vacation. Somewhere tropical.”
“I would love that,” she said, her smile faltering a little. “You don’t know how much I would love that.”
Ben kissed her on the forehead. It felt so natural that he did it without thinking. Nuzzling up against him, Brooke’s lips pressed together in a slantwise smile. Standing on her toes, she kissed him softly on the lips. Like two souls cut from the same cloth, he thought.
“Come on,” she said, leading him back to where the others were gathered around the raft. She and Auggie had found several large water vines growing nearby, and with a prodigious effort, they were able to use Ernesto’s knife to cut the vines in half. They did this several times until they were able to fill each of their Nalgene bottles with the precious liquid. Now she held one of the bottles up to his lips. “Here, drink.”
Over the course of the last few days, the water vines had become increasingly more difficult to find, especially during their nighttime crossings, and Ben’s eyes widened comically at the bounty now presented to him. He did not stop drinking until the bottle was almost empty. After, he grinned almost drunkenly, feeling more alive and content than he had in days. “Thanks!”
“You must be super dehydrated,” Brooke followed with a look of concern. “You do look a little pale.”
“We will rest for little while,” Ernesto called out softly from the water’s edge.
“Okay,” Ben replied, and when he glanced down, he saw that Brooke was watching him uneasily.
She put her palm against his chest. “I can feel your heart racing,” she murmured. “Seriously, are you feeling okay?”
Ben laughed a little. “I’m fine. I was just dehydrated—that’s all.”
“Sit down. I’m going to check your bandage before you go.” The tone of her voice made it perfectly clear that this was not a request.
“Okay,” Ben agreed, “but first let me see if I can find one of my hydration tabs.” Kneeling, he began to rummage through the haphazard pile of gear. “Hey, Auggie-dog, have you seen the hydration tablets?”
Sitting at the water’s edge, Auggie jerked his head up. “No!” he shouted. “I’m all out!”
Muttering to himself, Ben turned his backpack upside down and dumped its contents on the ground. There was the rain poncho—ripped-up, balled-up mess that it was; about six feet of paracord, which he immediately set aside in case they needed it for the raft; the yellow waterproof bag that contained his video camera, which he’d completely forgotten about these past few days; Auggie’s other hiking sock, which he’d kept as an emergency bandage; the tube of DEET (he gave this a hopeful squeeze, but nary a drop came out); his headlamp (the batteries all but dead); his wristwatch; not much else. Wait a minute, Ben thought, what’s that doing in here?
Picking up the wristwatch, he saw that it was still keeping time. Surprising, considering the abuse it had taken. Ben shook his head in disbelief. The damned thing had almost gotten them killed the other night when the alarm went off, betraying their hiding place to the inhumans. “Hey!” he bellowed over his shoulder. He took one last look at the watch and flung it into the woods with a look of contempt. “I thought you got rid of this fucking thing!”
Auggie looked up from the log where he was sitting, honing the tip of a spear with Ernesto’s knife. “Did you say something?”
Stuffing the length of paracord into his front pocket, Ben put the other items back where he’d found them. Though his body craved the salts and electrolytes, he had all but given up on the hydration tablets when, almost as an afterthought, he decided to check Auggie’s pack, just on the off chance that Auggie had misplaced them.
“Come on,” Brooke said impatiently. “I need to take a look at that bandage.”
“Just a sec.”
Unzipping Auggie’s backpack, Ben reached his hand past the balled-up poncho, which was still damp from the previous night’s downpour, past a few stinky articles of clothing, all the way down to the bottom of the pack. He had about given up hope when his fingers brushed the hard plastic tube for which he had been searching. Pulling the tube out from the bottom of the pack, he stared at it and frowned. Looking up, he saw Auggie approaching him with long strides from the other side of the clearing. In seconds, he had made it from one end of the camp to the other.
“What the fuck is this?” Ben asked in a near-shout, and the angry tone of his voice startled everyone to attention.
“Why are you snooping through my stuff?” Auggie demanded, snatching his pack from Ben’s hands.
“I asked you a question!” Ben roared.
Now the others were pressing around them, looking at one another in their confusion.
“What’s going on?”
“Is everything okay?”
“No,” Ben said, shaking the container of pills he was holding in his hand. “Everything is not okay.” He tossed the container to Brooke, who snatched it from the air, turning it round and round in her callused hands.
“Malarone?” she said, reading the label aloud. She looked at them through a cloud of confusion. “But I thought this was lost in the swamp.”
“Yeah,” Ben muttered. “So did I.”
Ben retrieved the container from Brooke and shook it in front of Auggie’s face. “What the fuck is this?” he demanded. “You told me they were ruined in the swamp.”
Auggie clutched the backpack against his chest but said nothing; there was something cold and furtive in his expression. His lips, twitching, settled into a lopsided sneer. Before, Auggie had always had trouble maintaining eye contact, even when he was speaking on a topic that truly interested him and in which he was particularly knowledgeable. Now his gaze was cool and unwavering as he looked at Ben with a newfound confidence.
Ben wanted to punch him, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Auggie flinched as Ben stepped toward him, ripping the backpack out of his filthy, mosquito-bitten arms. Saying nothing, Auggie watched in impotent rage as Ben turned the backpack upside down, spilling all its secrets onto the soggy ground for everyone to see. The poncho, several articles of clothing, an unopened package of AAA batteries, a headlamp, a small bottle of Excedrin, a blister pack of iodine tablets, a Bic lighter, and three protein bars littered the ground.
The truth blindsided Ben like a sucker punch, and there was nothing he could do to parry the blow. Now he saw how a rift had formed between him and Auggie, a fearsome black chasm almost too deep to comprehend. Auggie had changed the moment he first stepped foot in the jungle. Ben recalled how, at the research center, the once-timid boy would often venture off to be alone in the forest, spending more and more time in a self-imposed isolation. There were little things too, like the fact that he would dare to go to the bathroom by himself at night and how he always managed to pop up when you least expected it. This led Ben to another thought: had Auggie been spying on him and Brooke? Had he, like the inhumans, been stalking them all along from the green encroachments of the jungle? Ben thought it was possible. There was that time when he and Brooke had been alone on the steps of the research center, just about to share their first kiss, when Auggie interrupted, acting as though he had just happened along by chance. Now the terrible truth came to Ben; he tried to close his mind to it, but it was already too late. The pills. The wristwatch. The batteries. The missing food. It was all deliberate, all coldly calculated, all part of some twisted plan.
“Tell me why,” Ben said, eyeing him coldly.
Silence. Auggie’s upper lip twitched again, but he made no effort to respond.
“Auggie?” Brooke asked in a frightened voice.
“Cooper could have died!” Ben screamed into his face. “You could’ve gotten us all killed!”
Auggie glowered at them defiantly. “You think you’re prepared. You think you’ve done everything you’re supposed to, study hard, work hard, keep yourself out of trouble, and then—whoosh! Something arrives out of the blue that you never saw coming. Something you never even imagined. Something that’ll knock your little world off its axis. Something that’ll either change your life for the better or end it forever. Chaos—that’s what life is. Just total fucking chaos.”
Cooper began to buckle under the tension. “What are you assholes talking about?” he asked, laughing a little. “This is crazy.”
“Crazy is right,” Ben snarled between his teeth. He angled his chin toward Auggie. “Go ahead. Tell him. I want to hear you say it.”
Control, control! thought Auggie. Don’t cry. Don’t you dare fucking cry right now. He cleared his throat, knowing that doing so caused a contraction of muscles that could help a person stop himself from crying. Swallowing hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, he pressed his lips firmly together and cleared his throat again. But it was too late. His emotional dam had broken, and now the tears spilled down his face. “Fuck you!” he bawled. “Some fucking friend you are, you know that?”
“Me?” Ben asked, his voice rising in indignation. “What the hell did I do?”
“What did you do?” Auggie barked a bitter laugh that seemed to lodge somewhere inside his throat. He threw his arms up in the air in frustration. “What did you do? What do you always do, Ben? Everyone loves you! You just set your mind to anything or anyone you want, and you always get it, don’t you? Like that night at the lodge. You knew I liked her, but you went after her anyway. Then you guys all paired off—oh, what cute little fucking couples you all made. Of course, no one stopped to think where that left me: the fifth wheel, as always. Glad to see it all worked out so fucking perfect.”
“Stop it!” Brooke screamed. “Just stop it! We can’t waste time arguing. Those things will come back for us. We need to finish the raft so we can all go home.”
Though the two boys were within striking distance of one another, they could not have been farther apart. Ben searched Auggie’s face—his thin lips, his sunken cheeks, his beady eyes—but nothing he saw looked familiar anymore. Auggie glowered back at him with an expression that bordered on hatred, and the young man Ben saw now was an absolute stranger.
Though he’d known Auggie for the better part of his life, the terrible thought crept in; the thought that he didn’t really know his friend.
In fact, Ben was pretty sure he didn’t know his friend at all.
***
As the day wore on, it became hauntingly clear that the raft would not be ready in time. Little more than a collection of six logs joined together to form something the size of a kitchen table, it would not support the weight of two people, never mind five.
It did not help that Auggie had abandoned his duties. Isolating himself by the water’s edge, he spent the remainder of the day sulking, tossing pebbles into the current and watching them disappear. As the sun began its slow descent, Ernesto and Ben returned from the forest with one last log, which they left on the ground beside the unfinished raft. There was no time left to even trim it down to size.
“Mmm, I have an idea,” Ernesto announced. “It is dangerous, this idea, but it is an idea that will help us through the night, I think.”
Ben, Cooper, and Brooke listened with interest as he laid out his plan.
***
Using Auggie’s secret stash, they replaced the dying batteries in Ben’s headlamp. Gathering their belongings, they waded out to a nearby sandbar that protruded from the water like a capsized boat.
And that was where they spent the night, spears in hand with the newly sharpened points directed toward the tree line. The moon was full and bright, but still their eyes could see a distance of perhaps only twenty feet. Several times they heard splashes in the gloom, and Ben flashed his light back and forth across the river, seeing nothing. Immediately their thoughts turned to Big Boy and the many other fearsome creatures that haunted the water, but Ernesto dismissed these things knowledgeably as the sound of fish breaking the surface. Several yards apart from the group, Auggie sat in utter silence with his knees drawn to his chest and his spear at his feet. Though Brooke and Ernesto had tried to engage him in small talk, he had not spoken a word since his blowout with Ben.
At some point in the night, they heard rustling by the raft. Holding the headlamp in his hand, Ben leveled it at the bank and was about to press the ON button when Ernesto grabbed his hand. Ben turned to him in the moonlight, and Ernesto shook his head, holding a finger to his lips to show that they did not want to reveal their hiding place.
On the sandbar, the humans readied their spears, all except Auggie, who continued to stare into the jungle as though he welcomed the end. The rustling continued for a few more minutes and then went away. But before it did, Ben thought he saw the shapes of several shadows—one of them the alpha—lingering just inside the canopy, though at this distance it was impossible to tell for sure.
Even after the rustling stopped, they remained on high alert for the next hour or more, afraid that the apparent abandonment of the shoreline was nothing but a well-planned ruse. But when the inhumans did not make an appearance after all that time, they began to relax. Setting his spear down in the sand, Ben reached over and held Brooke’s hand. Eyes glittering in the moonlight, he could see the curve of her smile, the high cheekbones, the slight dimple in her chin.
We’ll finish the raft in the morning, Ben told himself. A few more trees and we’ll be done.
As the moon and stars slid across the sky, they watched and waited.
Forty-nine
It was Brooke who made the grim discovery.
Auggie was gone.
Sometime during the night, after the others had succumbed to the day’s hard labor, Auggie had sneaked away under cover of darkness, taking his backpack and his spear with him. Waking the others, Brooke showed them the trail of his footprints, just visible in the moonlight. Footprints that ended at the water, leading off in the direction of the unfinished raft.
Now Ben was standing at the river’s edge, trying to decide his next move. His internal clock told him it was sometime after midnight though he had no idea if this was actually true. The moon was still full in the sky, and the darkness showed no sign of the approaching day. “We have to go find him,” he concluded aloud.
“Where would he go?” asked Brooke.
“Who knows?” Cooper said mournfully. “He’s lost it. He could be up there in the woods, tearing apart our raft, for all we know.”
“Ben?” Ernesto said, shining his light. “Your backpack…”
Ben hurried across the sandbar, and when he reached his backpack he saw it was unzipped, the pouch left wide open. Rummaging through it, he began to take inventory of its contents.
“Is anything missing?”
“I don’t think so,” Ben said, and when he lifted his hand, he was holding the three protein bars he had discovered in Auggie’s pack the day before.
“See?” Cooper said, pointing. “Auggie must’ve put those in there. I told you he was crazy.”
Dropping the protein bars back inside his pack, Ben raced down to the water’s edge.
“We have to wait until the sun comes up,” Brooke said, following him.
Ben looked from the dark shore to the purple sky and back again. “I can’t wait,” he said, his jaw flexing with a look of determination. He turned and saw his friends gathered behind them, eyes full of concern. Pressing the button on his headlamp, the bright LEDs cut through the darkness like a sword. Reaching down, he grabbed his spear from the sand. Before anyone could stop him, he took three long strides and dove into the moonlit river.
“Ben!” Brooke screamed, but he was already gone.
Dog-paddling through the water with the spear grasped i
n his hand, Ben kicked hard against the current. Soon he arrived at the clutch of reeds, and he stood, shivering and dripping, with his weapon held before him. Wading through the grassy shallows, he started up the muddy acclivity and into the clearing.
Brooke grabbed her spear. “I’m going after him,” she said.
Cooper was looking at her with an odd expression, mouth clamped shut, chin working back and forth as he ground his teeth against each other. He nodded his head.
“Brooke,” Ernesto pleaded quietly. “Don’t go.”
She looked at the two men and smiled sadly. “I have to.”
With that, she waded into the murky water and began to swim.
***
As Ben raced up the embankment, his headlamp found the impression of Auggie’s hiking boots in the mud. There was a vertical scrape where the boy must have slipped, a handprint where he had steadied himself, and then the prints continued up and over the rise. Rushing into the clearing, Ben wondered if he would find Auggie there, dismantling the raft as Cooper had predicted. But the raft was as they had left it, and Auggie was nowhere to be seen. Flicking the light back and forth across the jungle, Ben felt the fear of a lifetime welling up inside his chest. His friend was gone.
Shivering from the cold water, Brooke arrived a moment later, soon followed by Ernesto and Cooper.
“We have to go find him!” Ben urged.
“We don’t even know where to look,” Brooke said in a gentle, reasoning tone.
“He left us,” Cooper spat indignantly, and tossed his spear to the ground. “He abandoned us.”
Ben looked at him with disgust. “This is Auggie we’re talking about here. We’ve known him since we were kids. He’s our friend, remember? The three of us… Now tell me you’ll go with me, Coop.”
Cooper bowed his head and said nothing, overwhelmed by a sorrow too deep for words.
“Coop?”
Ben took several determined steps toward Cooper, and for a moment Brooke was sure that Ben was going to strike him. Ben stopped suddenly, as if he too realized what he was about to do. Breathing heavily, he whispered, “Say something, Coop.” There was an obvious edge to Ben’s voice, as though he were posing a dare—one that carried dire consequences.
Pray for Darkness: Terror in the Green Inferno Page 24