by Alex Archer
“Roux.”
“Thought you sounded French,” Moons said.
Roux asked to be shown to D’jok’s hut, where he was relieved to find that the tribesman there could speak some English.
“I worry for Annja Creed,” D’jok said. “One day gone and Annja Creed has not come back. More than one day gone now. But I think she will come back for this.” He pointed to her duffel.
“Do you know why she left?” The “why” would help him pinpoint the “where.” Roux felt the connection to her, but it didn’t work as precisely as a homing beacon. He folded himself onto a woven mat. It was cool inside the hut, and it smelled pleasantly of cooking spices.
“Annja Creed left because she searches for something in the forest that she could not find in her dream.” D’jok paused and fixed Roux with an unblinking stare. “Or maybe she finishes what the dream started. The dreams can be powerful. You can wait with my family, or—”
Roux thought about doing that. This was the largest rainforest in the world, and it would be very easy to get lost in it. Looking for Annja in the forest would be difficult, but there was the thread, and he still felt it. Maybe he could follow it, and they would find each other. He should wait right here.
But on the boat ride he’d told himself that he should have waited in Belém, or better yet remained in France. Annja always managed to take care of herself.
“I’m going to look for her,” Roux told the old man.
“Then I will come as well. The forest is the world, and to find one woman in it could be unlikely.”
“I know,” Roux admitted. “But it is better than just sitting here.”
“Yes,” D’jok said. “And in the searching maybe I will not have time to worry so much about Annja Creed.”
“Great, we’ll join you,” Moons chimed in. She’d poked her head inside the hut to eavesdrop.
Roux shook his head. “I think not, young woman.” Before they headed out, he dug through his suitcase for a stash of food he’d bought in the hotel gift shop...bags of peanuts, granola bars, pretzels and candy. He put on a light cargo jacket and stuffed the food in the pockets. He was more than capable of roughing it. But he also knew to take precautions.
* * *
D’JOK SELECTED A tribeswoman to join them, the finest tracker in the village. They took the path created by the previous trips to the pharma camp. Roux didn’t consider it much of a trail, but it was a little less overgrown than the surrounding ground.
“Are you the grandfather of Annja Creed?” D’jok asked after they’d traveled in silence for more than an hour.
“I am a friend.”
“Then Annja Creed chooses her friends well.”
Roux acknowledged that “choice” had nothing to do with it.
They reached the perimeter of the Dillon Pharmaceuticals camp by late afternoon, and Roux noticed two armed sentries patrolling just inside the barrier.
“Why does a pharmaceuticals company need guns?” he asked.
D’jok shrugged, held him back, and motioned that they should remain hidden. There was not another soul moving around, which Roux found unusual given the number of tents that indicated a good number of people must be about. Strange.
The tribeswoman skirted the camp to the north, Roux and D’jok in her wake.
“The men cannot see us here,” D’jok said. “The forest is thick. I have not met those men, but I do not think I like them. Moons says they are bad. She says all of Dillon’s men are bad.”
The ground cover near the clearing was so thick Roux couldn’t see what the tribeswoman was following. He knew the basics of tracking. As he was one of Joan of Arc’s knights, the skills had come in handy centuries ago when pursuing the enemy and hunting game. He’d not had much cause to use those skills in the past few decades. He watched her intently. She was methodical, seeing things he couldn’t, and was definitely following something. She talked softly in a pretty language he couldn’t fathom.
He knew why Annja remained involved with Chasing History’s Monsters, the tracker and this forest all part of it. She was an explorer at her heart, drinking in all the experiences and cultures the world spread before her. He envied her appetite. He’d lost that sense of wonder a very long time ago.
D’jok translated. “Annja Creed came this way, stopped here, then there.” He moved aside the spreading leaves of a fern. Underneath was a camera bag. “Does this belong to Annja Creed?”
“I don’t know.” Roux plucked it out and swung it over his shoulder. “Just keep searching.”
The afternoon stretched to twilight, when even Roux found tracks amid a spotty carpet of fungus. There had been considerable rain, but the weave of branches had kept the signs from washing away. There were two sets of heavy boot prints, and a set of thinner, smaller ones that he assumed were Annja’s, a woman’s in any event. A few yards away he saw blood on a patch of moss, more on a flowery plant, and evidence a body had lain there.
“Annja is all right,” Roux said, kneeling. “This wasn’t her.” He wouldn’t still feel the thread if it were, and it felt like that thread tugged him in the direction the tracker continued to go.
“No, it was not Annja Creed.” D’jok looked grim as he held up a shell casing in one hand and a broken blowgun in the other. He let both drop. An hour later D’jok signaled an end to the day.
By midmorning of the following day, the tracker found Annja.
* * *
ROUX STARED. “She’s blue.”
Annja stared back and crouched defensively.
“Annja Creed dreamed,” D’jok said. It took Roux a moment to realize that was an explanation for her skin color.
He still couldn’t stop himself from staring. She looked...wrong, alien-like, as if she’d stepped off the set of a science fiction movie. Her expression was wrong, too. Roux had seen Annja during good and calamitous times and thought he knew all of her expressions. This was new and disturbing. “Annja, I’ve—”
She set her back to a tree; her gaze shifted right then left before settling on him. At first he thought she was frightened, but studying her eyes he realized she had a predator’s look.
“Annja?”
“My name is Orellana,” she said. “And I don’t know you.”
“That is not part of the dreaming,” D’jok offered. “Dreaming makes you aware.”
Roux said softly, “Annja and I will find our way back to your village. You can leave.”
D’jok nodded and motioned for the tracker woman to follow him. “Annja Creed chose her friend well,” he said.
“Annja,” Roux tried one more time.
She was defiant. “Orellana. And I say again that I don’t know you.”
Roux guessed that this was going to be a very long, and potentially very bad day.
Chapter 25
“I have never seen you before, old man.” She folded her arms in front of her chest and blew out a breath, the air fluttering the strands of hair that had fallen into her eyes. But she had caught a glimpse of him in her dream. “And you should not be here. You are too old to be here. This forest is not a place for the old. You will die and be eaten in this forest.”
“Thanks for that.” The man sat cross-legged on a patch of fungus and rested his hands on his knees. A canvas and leather bag was next to him. She thought she’d seen the bag before, but couldn’t be sure. “I feel old today, Annja. And you’re making me feel even older, every one of the centuries that I’ll admit to.”
“Stop calling me that.” She pushed her hair behind her ears and stuck her hands in her pockets, her thumbs rubbing over the stitching. The name wasn’t familiar, but the more she looked at him...the more familiar he seemed. So she’d seen him before, other than in the dream. But where? “I am Orellana.”
She could run, an old man l
ike that—even though he looked fit—would not be able to keep up with her. She could lose him in this forest, lose herself, too. Let the big cats or the frogs get him. Had he been with the foul men, Hammond and the others? Probably not, he was too old and not dressed like them. His clothes, though casual, looked new, as if they’d just come from a store.
She remembered stores, and she remembered that she liked shopping.
“My name is Orellana.” Or perhaps Amanda, or Marsha, as those names fluttered through her thoughts. But she liked the sound of Orellana, a little exotic. She was blue, after all, and exotic, too.
“Orellana was the name of the boat you rented, Annja.” He brushed a large bug off his pants, and then waved away a cloud of gnats. “Don’t you remember? You told me you rented a boat named The Dependable, but it wasn’t so dependable and you settled for Orellana’s Gift or something like that. No, Orellana’s Prize. Then you mentioned the little biting insects. You were right about the insects. In all my centuries, I’ve not seen so many in one spot.”
“My name is Orellana.” She remained defiant, didn’t want the old stranger to confuse her more than she already was. She wanted to ask him how she came to be out in the forest, but that would be showing uncertainty and weakness, and she refused to show him either of those traits. “My name is Orellana!”
“Fine.” He let out a long breath and swatted at more insects. “Orellana, my name is Roux.”
“As in rue the day you came to my forest?”
“Your forest?” He raised an eyebrow.
“My forest, and I rue the day you came here to bother me, old man.”
“Something has disturbed your mind, muddled things for you. Qu’est-ce qui vous est arrivé, Annja?”
“My name is Orellana.” And she didn’t know what happened to her. Head pounding, thoughts still foggy, she could run away from this old, confusing man. But he wasn’t a threat.
“Qué demonios le ha pasado a usted, Annja?”
He spoke a different language now, asking her the same question.
“Quid inferorum accidit tibi, Annja?”
And an ancient, dead language. Same question.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t know what happened. But my name is Orellana.”
He cupped his face with his hands and muttered something softly in a language she didn’t understand. Neither spoke for quite a while. She remained standing; the muscles in her legs began to cramp from not moving. Still insolent, she didn’t budge. Her hands formed fists inside her pockets. She was angry, but it was unfocused, not angry at any one thing...just angry.
Three fast bangs blared from the forest.
The old man jumped to his feet with a speed that surprised her. He looked around and appeared to reach reflexively at his side for a gun, but she saw he didn’t have one.
“No one is shooting,” she told him. “It is seed pods from a possumwood tree.” Someone told her the name of the tree and had showed her the pods, she remembered that. The face of that speaker was wrapped in fog. Her head pounded harder.
She saw the old man try to relax, but the muscles in his face remained tense.
“Can you call your sword...Orellana?”
“I don’t have a sword.” The moment she said it, she pictured one. But it didn’t belong to her. Instead, she saw a girl on horseback holding it high and leading an army. The image was from centuries past, and her mind framed it in a picture on a wall in some museum. She wanted to ask him if he knew how she came to this forest and where she was from...and what her name was, since he insisted that he knew her. Orellana was only a word she liked the sound of. “I am losing my mind.”
She slid down against the tree trunk and tears she fought against spilled down her cheeks.
“Then let me help you find it, Annja.” The man knelt in front of her and his face filled her vision. He’d pulled over the canvas and leather bag and unzipped it, reached inside. “This is yours, right?”
“No.” But it looked familiar. She focused on it so she would not have to look at the man. It smelled of leather and a perfume that didn’t suit her. Was the man her father? Grandfather? It had a familial feel, but she didn’t have a family, did she? She remembered that she didn’t have a mother or a father...though everyone has those, right? But she didn’t. “I lived in an orphanage.”
“That’s right.” The man sagged back and futilely waved away more insects, smacked at some on his neck and apparently gave up. “In New Orleans.”
“A long way from here.” Finally, she asked, “How did I get here? To the Amazon?”
“On a boat named Orellana’s Prize. But a plane before that.”
“And here is? Where in the Amazon?”
He laughed. She liked the sound of his laughter. “I don’t know.”
“Then how did you get here?”
“Whatever happened to you, Annja? Who did this to you?”
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER she was asking the same questions, though more images and names were drifting through her consciousness. It felt as if someone was inside her head with a chisel, trying to break out. The throbbing and hammering filled her ears. It was a dull, constant pain that made it difficult to breathe. She’d asked the old man to leave her, but he refused.
“The camera,” Roux pressed. “Please, at least look at it. Today. Look at it today.”
She relented and flipped the viewer on the camera and played with the buttons, thinking that she should know how to work the device. After several attempts, and after nearly tossing the camera at a tree, the viewer came to life.
“Possumwood,” she said, as she watched tiny figures on the viewer parade through the green of the forest. She turned on the volume, all the way up to be heard over a bunch of monkeys that arrived and hooted. “That’s me...without the blue.” She watched it all, and then watched it again, running the camera out of its charge. There were images of her blue, and one of her setting her hand against the camera.
“Now do you remember?”
“Only pieces,” she said. “And not enough of them. And I certainly don’t remember you.”
“Great.” He got to his feet and stretched, watched the monkeys. One of them had a big piece of fruit, and he pointed at it. “Is there something to eat around here?” They’d eaten everything he’d brought with him, even the candy. “I’m famished. And I can hear your stomach growling.”
She smiled at that. “There’s fruit. Quite a lot of it, and it’s quite good. Better than the junk food you shared.” She knew to call it junk food. And she also knew she’d just lied. The fruit was good, but the junk food...it had certainly tasted better.
“What I wouldn’t give for lamb with ginger crust and a side of root vegetables at L’Astrance,” he mused. “We ate there once, in Paris. Before you went off traipsing through the underground looking at ancient bones.”
“I don’t remember that either.” But she was finally starting to trust him. She didn’t think that he was lying, and she thought that he honestly did know her from somewhere. Annja, she tried the name on her lips.
Annja.
Someone had called her Annja Creed.
It niggled at her memory. She still liked the sound of Orellana better, but Annja sounded hard, almost unbreakable.
While he ate, she paced, replaying in her mind the video she’d just watched. Then other segments from films came to mind, ones that featured her. Vampiric goat-creatures in Mexico, mummies in Egypt, forgotten tombs in Thailand, ancient swords in Paris, and a pyramid at the bottom of a lake in Wisconsin. How was the latter possible? There were no pyramids in Wisconsin.
Fortunately he let her be and hadn’t spoken to her for what she guessed was probably an hour. She caught him watching her once in a while, the look of a professor or a librarian, something scholarly.
“I was on a motorcycle,” she said. “It was raining and a car was chasing me. It was in May, but I don’t remember where I was going and why people were after me.”
“People are often after you,” he whispered. He picked up another piece of fruit, turning it over and over before taking a bite.
“I was on a different motorcycle, a passenger this time. There were kangaroos. It wasn’t May.”
He wiped at the juice dribbling on his chin, and then swatted away a swarm of gnats.
Another memory came. “I met Charlemagne.”
He snorted, a sound like he was trying to swallow a chuckle. “I doubt that very much.”
“No. I met Charlemagne. The king. I really met him. He was dead. He was as near to me as you are standing, but he said he was dead. He said that he had lived long enough and that he liked roast venison, and that he had saved just enough of France or something like that. I remember him clearly. We walked in the forest and talked about swords.”
She watched the man’s eyes widen. “You have a sword, Annja.”
“No I don’t.”
Clearly, he looked exasperated.
“But Charlemagne and I talked about swords, and then he went away and a girl arrived. She was young and beautiful and wore clothes for a Renaissance fair. And talked about swords, too, me and her. Joan. Her name was Joan and she was French like you.”
“Quelqu’un a complètement foiré avec votre tête, Annja.”
“It’s not like I can’t understand you.” She paced faster, wearing a muddy path through the fungus. “I know perfectly well what you are saying.”
When he finished eating, they walked. Like a gentleman, he carried the camera bag. “I think I can find my way back to the little village. Maybe if we go there, that will help jog your memory.”
It was getting dark.
Dark.
“I remember that traveling in the forest at night isn’t the smartest idea. And I don’t want to go back to the village.” She didn’t. While she didn’t remember the village—she’d watched it on the camera’s video screen—she didn’t want to go there. “That’s not going to help me remember anything. I know it won’t help. I know!” She pounded at her head with an open palm, and the man grabbed her wrist.