“What if you need to protect yourself?”
Her chin went up. She refused to look away, holding her gaze steady on his. “I’m not a shrinking violet, Jubal. If I need to defend my life, I’ll do it vigorously. And no one is going to harm my mother, not if I can help it. Will you lend me a gun?”
Jubal frowned and pulled a pistol from inside his light jacket. “Tell me what this is.”
She knew he thought she’d lied to him about knowing how to fire a gun. She sent him a sweet smile. “You’re holding a Glock 30 SF, 45 auto, a powerful, excellent weapon. My godfather gave one to me on my sixteenth birthday. It has a smaller grip, and I have small hands so it suits me quite well.”
Jubal sighed. “Whatever is up there, Riley, this isn’t going to stop it.”
“It will stop anyone traveling with us from trying to kill my mother.”
Jubal handed her the Glock. Her hand closed around the grip, taking it slowly. She checked the magazine to make certain it was full. He handed her a second magazine, which she slipped into her pocket and zipped the flap closed.
“Riley!”
Riley spun around to see her mother rushing toward her. Annabel’s face was white, her eyes wide with terror. Behind her, the ground had come to life—large, almost dinner-plate-sized tarantulas scuttling in the vegetation, coming down from the trees and looking very focused as they shuffled relentlessly forward.
Riley rushed to intercept Annabel before she could flee into the rain forest. “A tarantula bite isn’t fatal, Mom. Calm down. Irritation from their hair is sometimes worse than the bite.”
“They’re chasing me,” Annabel gasped, gripping Riley hard. She lowered her voice, hissing between her teeth, her eyes wild, hair disheveled. She looked nearly demonic. “They’re chasing me, Riley, can’t you see that? They want to kill me.”
Riley didn’t know what multiple bites from the large tarantulas could actually do, nor did she want to take any chances. She caught her mother’s wrist and pulled her toward Gary Sanders, who was closest to the small ribbon of a stream. Surely the spiders wouldn’t follow them into the water.
Annabel choked back a sob. “I can’t do this anymore, Riley. You have to go on without me. I just can’t . . .”
“Stop it,” Riley snapped as she pulled her mother over a series of stones and ferns to get to the stream. “We can do anything we have to do. You were the one who taught me that.”
She glanced behind her. Jubal, Gary and Ben formed a line of defense against the crawling spiders. She stopped her mother’s forward momentum before she could step into the stream.
“Let me take a look, Mom,” she cautioned. Piranha wouldn’t be in that tiny stream, but with all the strange attacks from insects and animals, she didn’t want to chance missing anything. “We’ll step in only if they get past everyone.”
Gary pulled a hose over his shoulder and stepped forward. The moment a spout of fire gushed from the flamethrower, the rest of the camp became aware something was wrong. Heads turned, one by one. Riley was glad she and Annabel were in the shadow of the trees. It looked as if the three men were being attacked, not the women. They were a good distance away. She added to the illusion by sitting on a rock beside the stream and drawing her mother down to sit beside her as if they’d been resting there in the shade.
Weston and Shelton predictably made a huge fuss, Weston actually running away from the spiders. Not only were they not close to him, but the migration was moving away from him. It didn’t matter. He berated the guides.
“You chose a rest stop right in the middle of killer spider territory. Are you trying to do us all in? I’m reporting you, and you’ll never get another guide job again,” he snapped.
Riley rolled her eyes. The guides ignored him, rushing to help the three men. The porters grouped together in a tight circle, watching. The archaeologist and his students stared at one another with shocked, almost comical expressions, as if they couldn’t quite understand what was happening. The three just stood there, openmouthed, while the ground came to life with large hairy spiders crawling through the vegetation. Her idea of archaeologists admittedly had been formed by the action-hero Indiana Jones movies, but Dr. Patton and his students were fast putting that fantasy to rest.
She could actually hear the spiders scuttling through the debris as they advanced, but the smell and sound of Gary’s flamethrower began to quickly drown out every other noise. Annabel covered her face with her hands and rocked back and forth. Riley put her arm around her mother to comfort her.
Annabel moaned softly. “It’s so late, Riley. In a couple of hours the sun will go down.”
“We’ll leave in a few minutes,” she assured. “The guides will take us up the mountain and this will be over. We’re so close now.”
Annabel continued to rock back and forth, Riley’s arm around her shoulders for comfort, but all the while, Riley studied the members of their traveling group, trying to discern who she might be able to count on if things went wrong. The shivering in the ground told her bad things were bound to happen. All three guides had rushed to help the three men with the spiders. They didn’t appear to be afraid of them at all. In fact, they picked some of them up very gently and turned them around.
She found the way the three natives handled the tarantulas fascinating. They clearly wanted to save them, not destroy them. The tarantulas seemed confused, turning in circles, avoiding the hot flames. Gary switched off the very efficient flamethrower and, like Riley, watched the guides gently managing the spiders away from everyone and back into the rain forest.
Not one of the porters had helped, Riley noted. They huddled close together, whispering. Her heart sank. They would need a couple of porters going up the mountain and at least two would accompany Gary and Jubal with their guide.
“Come on, Mom,” she said. “We’re heading out again. Drama’s over. The guides dealt with the spiders, and we’re back on track.”
The ground shivered again. “We have to hurry,” Annabel whispered. “Hurry, Riley.” She glanced up toward the sky. The sun would be down in a short time.
Riley positioned herself directly behind her mother on the narrow trail the guides had chosen to make the last miles to the base of the mountain. She would argue with her guide later to keep going up the mountain. Right now, it was imperative that they just get moving. Annabel’s agitation grew with every passing minute.
Ben and Jubal went in front of Annabel, and Gary chose to bring up the rear behind the last porter. Riley was grateful she was a good distance from Weston and Shelton with several people between them. Once they actually got started, the guides and porters hacking out the dense trail, Annabel ceased muttering and just walked, her gaze on the back of Jubal’s shirt.
The whispers in their head started up an hour before the sun set. The sun had faded, bringing shadows into the rain forest, changing the appearance of plants to monstrous shapes. Riley could see the effects of the incessant buzzing in everyone’s head. For her, the sound was faded and far into the background, but even her mother began to mumble a protest.
Perhaps because of the danger to someone she loved, Riley’s senses seemed to increase with every step she took, along with awareness of her surroundings. She found herself seeing things she’d never noticed before. Individual leaves. The way the moss and fern grew and the flowers wound their way up trunks to the skies. For the first time in her life, she was wholly fascinated by the growth of the plants. She could hear the life force of the earth, a pounding beat that nearly drove out those soft meaningless whispers trying to invade her mind. For a few moments, as darkness began to drop its shroud, the surrounding plant life had seemed frightening; now it was exquisitely beautiful and even comforting.
The colors in the rain forest seemed far more vivid, even as night began to fall, flowers creeping up trunks a
nd bursting across the ground. Moisture dripped, the sound musical rather than annoying. Riley felt as if the land she walked on recognized her for the very first time and was signaling acceptance of her presence. The hostility she felt was from an outside source, some subtle force she couldn’t yet identify, but felt weaving through the forest like a disease.
Behind her, the porter Capa muttered in his own language under his breath, hacking at the tangle of vines and flowers springing up as Annabel walked. Riley was careful to step close to her mother, covering her tracks, so the porter couldn’t tell the plants pushing through the thick vegetation hadn’t already been there.
Her mother glanced over her shoulder, back at Riley, looking exhausted. She sent her daughter a small smile and mouthed, “I love you.”
Riley felt a flood of love for her mother, streaming strong. She blew her a kiss.
Overhead, monkeys suddenly shrieked, so that the rain forest erupted into a cacophony of noise. The monkeys followed their every movement, running along the tree branches overhead throwing twigs and leaves. Some brandished branches threateningly and displayed teeth—another new phenomenon for Riley. In her experience, the monkeys and wildlife kept their distance.
Without warning, something landed on her back, driving her straight to the ground. Sharp claws gripped her shoulders, raking at her pack. She was hit again and again as more monkeys sprang from the trees, their combined weight knocking her backward. She heard Annabel scream and Jubal curse. The sound of Capa’s chanting grew loud above the shrieking of the monkeys.
“Hän kalma, emni hän ku köd alte. Tappatak naman. Tappatak naman.”
Frantic, screaming for Gary and Jubal, Riley fought to throw off the monkeys and pull out the Glock at the same time.
5
Riley twisted out from beneath the pile of woolly monkeys, coming up on one knee, using a two-fisted grip to steady the gun. She couldn’t see anything. There were dozens of gray and olive, red-brown and black monkeys between her and Annabel. The ones leaping on her mother had driven her back into the dense brush, and all Riley could see were the furry bodies in some kind of shrieking frenzy. She didn’t dare shoot at them for fear of hitting Annabel.
Her mother screamed again, the sound terrified, reverberating through Riley’s head. She scrambled to her feet, only to have another wave of primates slam her back to the ground. Each woolly monkey weighed close to seventeen pounds, and they dropped hard from the branches overhead, using their weight and sheer numbers to crush the humans under them.
The buzzing in her head, that awful chant, swelled in volume—in command. Hän kalma, emni hän ku köd alte. Tappatak naman. Tappatak naman.
She could hear the words echoing through her mind, over and over, a guttural, deep-throated chant, almost like the monks she’d heard in Tibet when throat-chanting. The sound disturbed on the most elemental level, raising the hair on her body, making her skull ache, flashing through her nervous system until she wanted to shriek like the monkeys.
Riley tried to roll away from the attacking creatures, but they stuck like glue, attaching themselves to her hair and clothing and pack, holding on as if their lives depended on it. As a rule, woolly monkeys lived in the higher elevations, farther up in the cloud forest, and they weren’t threatening to anyone. They lived in social groups of up to forty, but the numbers dropping from the trees and attacking all members in their party were far more than forty.
Sobbing, Riley threw monkeys off of her, uncaring that they were using teeth and claws to drive her to the earth, and every time she hurled one away, they shredded skin. She rose to her feet fast, whirling in a circle trying to orient herself. The woolly monkeys were everywhere, an army of them, and the men were trying to fight them off, just as she was.
She kicked at them, and one sank his teeth into her leg, trying to drag her down just as she spotted the dense foliage where her mother fought off the crazed primates. The entire scene was surreal, unreal, a nightmare of violence and blood and screams. A gun barked behind her, and somewhere in front of her, another answered. She ran forward, kicking and swearing, sweeping a path clear to get to her mother. Twice she shot one of the monkeys in midair as they flung themselves at her face.
She ran toward the spot where she was certain her mother had been dragged. Annabel’s screams were loud and shocked and horrible, an animal in pain, pierced through with utter terror. Riley couldn’t see her through the screen of bodies. She had no idea where the porter, Capa, or Gary was, so there was no way to fire into the thrashing bodies of the primates safely even though every cell in her body commanded her to do so.
Woolly monkeys arrived in masses, far more than one troop of forty, dropping through the trees faster than the humans could get on their feet. The battle was something out of a horror movie, vicious and unreal. Her mother’s screams abruptly stopped. Riley’s heart jumped and more adrenaline flooded her body. The lack of sound was far worse.
Cursing, sobbing, Riley fought her way through the solid barriers of maddened primates to get to the place where Annabel had been driven off the trail. There was blood everywhere, dark pools of it. As she kicked away an aggressive monkey, a crimson arch sprayed into the air, splashing across the leaves of nearby brush, across tree trunks and the monkeys. For a moment she thought the monkeys were bleeding, but then she saw him. The porter. Not Raul, but his brother, Capa, chopping down over and over with a bloody machete.
Her heart stopped. She couldn’t see if it was her mother or the monkeys he was attacking, but there was so much blood. Far too much. With another vicious kick, she sent another monkey sprawling on the ground, giving her a glimpse of her mother’s body. She squeezed the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine into Capa, running forward as she shot him, knowing it was already too late. She slapped the second magazine into place.
Simultaneously, Gary shot, his bullets entering the porter from the side, spinning him around. Uncaring that she was running into a blaze of gunfire, Riley rushed forward, kicking and punching and even shooting the monkeys to get to her mother. Capa went down hard, the machete flying from his hand. Gary continued to shoot the primates surrounding her mother.
Riley pushed aside the brush and stopped abruptly, her mouth wide open, an agonized scream nearly shredding her vocal cords. She stared into the brush with absolute horror and shock filling her. She wasn’t even certain what she was seeing, comprehension impossible. For one moment, it looked as if she’d stumbled on a massacre. Her mind tried to tell her that everything soaking into the ground and brush was from monkeys, but her body had gone into some kind of shock, almost numb, frozen and somewhere deep inside she knew, she just couldn’t accept the truth. There was so much blood. She couldn’t see flesh, only strips of cloth and hair. She forced her body to move forward, bile rising.
“No, Riley.” Arms came around her, preventing her from moving. Hands covered hers, removing the Glock. “Come away from here. There’s nothing you can do and there’s no need to see this.” Gary’s voice was extremely gentle, coming from a long distance away.
The world faded in and out. Her stomach lurched and she tried to turn her head, to look away from the mangled body, but it was impossible. The blood was so dark. Curly hair lay on the ground, strands and tufts across fronds of fern, matted and muddy red. She saw fingers and part of a hand. Strips of clothing covered in blood. There wasn’t a place in a five-foot radius that wasn’t soaked red. It was impossible to tell what lay in that dark dense foliage.
She was aware of the sudden silence in the rain forest. No sound at all. No drone of insects. No gunfire. No shouting. The buzzing in her head was gone, to be replaced by her silent screams of protest. The world around her receded and then sharply focused, only to recede again.
“Riley,” Gary spoke in her ear, his voice calm and firm. “You have to come with me now. Looking at her isn’t going to help.”
His hands urged her frozen body to move, to take steps, but she had no control, the shaking, the anger, the grief welling up like a volcano, from deep beneath the shivering ground, straight through her body, until her heart wanted to stop beating and her lungs refused to work.
She tried to tell Gary she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t draw in air. The scent of blood was too heavy, permeating the entire area. He simply lifted her off her feet and began to stride away. She caught a glimpse of Capa, the porter, lying in his own pool of blood, the machete a few inches from his hand. His body was intact, although all life had run out of him onto the ground.
A sob escaped and she gripped Gary’s arm hard, her only reality in a world gone mad. Annabel murdered in such a savage way was unthinkable. Her mind just refused to process, but her body was wholly aware and reacting with shutting down. She wasn’t certain she could have stood on her own if her life depended on it. Gary allowed her to sink into the carpet of vegetation, a short distance away from the site of her mother’s murder.
She was aware of her traveling companions on some level, actors in a play. Their slow reactions. Turning heads. Mouths open with shock. The bodies of dead monkeys were scattered like litter across the ground, adding to the macabre scene. Everything around her blurred, and it took a moment to realize her eyes were swimming with tears.
The monkeys that hadn’t suddenly taken to the trees appeared as confused as she felt, wandering in circles, as if they’d lost all direction. On the edge of her vision, she saw the three guides picking themselves off the ground, all disheveled and streaked with blood from the attacks of the woolly monkeys. The three brothers ignored the scattered primates and looked uneasily toward the rain forest and the two bodies that lay just out of their sight. They whispered to one another in low, hushed voices, before making up their minds to see what had transpired.
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