by Andy Lucas
Cosmos boomed a laugh so unexpectedly loud in his earpiece that Pace startled, twisted an ankle sharply and ended up sprawling face down and wrist-deep into red, stinking mud. Seconds later a strong hand reached down and effortlessly yanked him back onto his feet. His eyes were so accustomed to the gloom that he could make out Cosmos’s features quite well; he was smiling.
‘I ran for hours and hours, maybe through fear but I knew in my heart that I would succeed, don’t ask me how.’ He motioned for Pace to move again, which he did, slicking the worst of the mud from his tracksuit with his downwards sweeps of his hands as he hurried to rediscover a numbing rhythm.
‘Our man here ran the entire twenty-nine miles without stopping,’ Hammond chose to pipe up from the front. ‘Saved those people and got himself noted by the local authorities. There was even a small article in one of America’s national papers, I believe. The hospital was mainly American Red Cross you see,’ he added, by way of explanation.
‘You’ve done your reading,’ said Cosmos, mildly surprised. ‘A little publicity and suddenly I was offered the chance to train in Spain, at a special boarding school for foreign sporting hopefuls. When I was seventeen, I ran in my first marathon; in your homeland, James. I remember the cold and the rain to this day, how it soaked into my very bones on the day.’
‘So you feel right at home here then?’ chuckled Attia’s disembodied voice. ‘Rain, rain and more rain, perfect.’
‘He won, if you haven’t guessed, and after that there was no stopping the man.’ Hammond spoke again. Pace heard him draw in a sharp breath but whatever he was going to say died in his throat. The entire procession stopped in its tracks so suddenly that Pace barely stopped himself crashing into Cosmos. He opened his mouth to speak but stopped as Hammond’s voice stammered softly in his ears. ‘Nobody move, not even a twitch.’ The words were frozen with tangible fear.
At that moment, Cosmos swayed slightly to his left a few inches, revealing what was going on up the line. Ruby and Attia had stepped about the same distance off of the track, but to the right, giving Pace a clear view of Hammond, who was slowly inching his way backwards. Pace backed up a little himself, giving the retreating figure somewhere to go. All eyes were glued ahead.
It was after the accountant had moved backwards perhaps two feet that the snake itself became visible. And it wasn’t a baby either; it was huge, perhaps eight or nine feet in length and as thick as a man’s arm. It looked angry too, a flash of tongue flicked in and out madly, perhaps deciding whether to kill the human or not. Hammond had already wisely dropped the beam of his torch away from the snake’s bobbing head, not wanting to provoke a panicky strike.
The snake’s body was kept in the edges of the beam; visible but only just. Pace noticed a few darker stripes but the poor light made accurate study impossible. At least one of his team had no trouble with the identification.
‘Damn.’ Ruby was close enough for him to hear her words with his own ears. ‘Pit viper, shit.’ Pace caught the fear just before her words sparked an explosion of action that he barely managed to follow.
Attia, the normally mild-mannered doctor lunged at Hammond. He spun him around bodily and started hauling him back up the track the way they’d just come. He screamed to all as he did so. ‘Run!’
Pace’s mind shrieked at him that you were meant to stand still when confronted by a dangerous snake (wasn’t it supposed to be more afraid of him than he was of it?) but everyone just made a headlong dash for safety. Confused, but bright enough not to be the only one left within biting range, he turned on his heels and headed off after them. Attia didn’t stop until they had left the serpent over one hundred feet behind.
Hammond was livid. As soon as everyone stopped, he grabbed his torch and flashed right it in Attia’s face, almost touching his nose with the glass. ‘You stupid fool!’ he raged. ‘I could have been killed! What the hell were you doing, pulling a stunt like that?’
‘Easy my friend,’ soothed Cosmos, edging between the two men and gently pushing the accusing torch aside. Hammond was seething; Pace could see the veins knotting in his neck but he didn’t take on the giant Kenyan. Pace was pleased for he had no idea of how such a match would turn out.
‘Instead of being foul-mouthed,’ suggested Ruby sharply, ‘how about thanking the doctor for saving your hide!’
‘What are you talking about?’ Hammond wheeled quickly to face her. The anger hadn’t died in him and the way the torch beam flashed all around them made him seem momentarily deranged. ‘I had it all under control. By making those sudden movements, that bastard thing might have stuck its fangs into me, or someone else,’ he snarled.
‘This snake was different,’ continued Ruby, her own tone calm. ‘This wasn’t your ordinary, everyday deadly jungle snake. It was a pit viper.
‘To be more precise,’ Attia explained, ‘out here that means the fer-de-lance, sometimes confused with a bushmaster but in reality a little smaller. Deadly venom, very fast and that one was about eight feet long, give or take a few inches. That’s as big as they get.’
‘And?’ Hammond was looking slightly bemused now, the anger fading away as the heat of fear subsided.
‘A pit viper is a special kind of snake; the fer-de-lance being a wonderful example of the family of vipers. Its real name is Bothrops Asper, and it is one of the few snakes in the world which genuinely enjoys a high bite-to-fatality rate in human beings.’ The doctor definitely knew his snakes. He looked completely unruffled by Hammond’s outburst and lectured so calmly that he might as well have been giving a presentation to a medical board in oak-panelled luxury.
‘It comes from a family of snakes found all across the globe. They’re known as lance-heads locally. They pack a lethal bite, some more than others of course, but the venom is more potent in the older snakes.’ He cast a look back up the trail as if expecting the slithering movement of pursuit to appear at any moment. ‘They all also possess the family trait that makes all of them so dangerous.’
‘Fangs?’ said Hammond sarcastically. ‘Yeah, I saw those up real close.’
‘Not fangs.’ Attia tutted. ‘Radar.’
‘Radar? What on earth are you going on about?’
‘To be more precise, it possesses a heat-seeking ability that makes standing still a total waste of time with this type of snake. It just gives it more time to find somewhere nice and juicy to strike.’
Hammond looked uncertain. ‘Heat-seeking snakes?’
‘The joke would have been on you, my fiery friend,’ Attia remarked easily, leaning in and patting Hammond lightly on the shoulder. ‘Look, this sort of snake can sense body heat. It doesn’t just react to sudden air movement and strike towards it like other snakes. Heat is how they hunt, you see. First, they strike the prey and inject venom. The prey is usually fairly fleet of foot but a pit viper doesn’t have to worry about giving chase. After the bite, all it has to do is wait for the poor creature to collapse and die before locating the meal by its waning body heat.’
Feeling ashamed and stupid, Hammond immediately apologised.
The team headed back up the trail again after a couple of minutes, when the adrenaline had passed out of their bloodstreams. They cautiously approached the point on the trail previously occupied by the reptile but there was no sign of the snake, to everybody’s relief, and they pressed ahead, a little more alert to the danger of snakes now.
Rain was their constant companion for the night. The first few hours were okay but the trail soon dissolved into some lower ground that was completely flooded.
They had no choice but to wade through the swamp, which was hellish. As time-keeper, he calculated they spent over four hours on that dismal roller-coaster, first rising up to find the trail before dropping down back into tepid water that rose to chest height at times.
Whenever they went wading there came a fear of attack from more deadly snakes, black caymans or even the dreaded giant anaconda. It was a blessed relief whenever they finally clawed their way up a muddy ri
se for a brief respite on drier ground.
Each time they dipped back down into deep water, Pace wondered if piranha might not be lurking around nearby. Sloshing through the darkness, still with only two torches fending off a pervading sense of evil, he tripped on sunken roots more times than he could count and gradually grew used to swallowing mouthfuls of rancid river water with each unexpected dunking.
Thankfully, the torches were fully waterproof.
The tiny return trail cut back onto the road barely five miles further on from where they had left it. With the oppression of close jungle lifted by the comparative openness of the thirty-foot wide roadway, Pace’s numb legs collapsed beneath him and he lay on the compacted mud and broken stone surface, face to the heavens, wheezing in great gasps of damp air.
After ten minutes, his chest slowed to a more regular rhythm and he seemed to come out of his stupor, dragging himself upright with some difficulty. Attia lay flat out a few feet from him, face down while Ruby sat huddled, knees drawn up to her chin, massaging her calves through her running suit. She looked pale and drawn, coated from head to toe with a healthy layer of river slime.
A sorrier bunch it would have been hard to find.
‘Time to get some hot food inside our stomachs.’ Hammond was the only one standing. He looked quite together as he pulled the pack from his wiry shoulders and set it down lightly on the highway. Strangely, there was no sign that his ankle had been injured. ‘No time for resting, not just yet.’
It was time for their second sleep session and Pace received a round of applause when he told them. Having been living off cold rations since the start, the thought of cooking a hot meal made everyone’s mouth water.
Finding a section of unbroken road, Hammond set about inflating their shelter to the ominous rumblings of distant thunder. Cosmos strode over to help him. ‘While you start the home fires,’ decided Ruby, ‘it’s time for us to strip off again.’
‘What do you have in mind?’ groaned Pace, wishing to be left alone with his aching body for a few moments longer.
Without being crude,’ she breezed, ‘we’ve been wading in slime for hours and, well….I...er...think I feel things on my skin. All over, if you get my meaning.’
As she said it, he noticed the strangest sensation of mild itching all over his own body; of areas of light pressure. All at once it hit him and he sprang to his feet with a new-found lease of life.
That was how, only a few minutes later, five human beings stood communally naked once again, in the middle of the road. There were no pleasant jungle showers to be had this time, instead they went through the humiliating but necessary process of de-leeching each other.
They even had a special tool for the job, produced from Attia’s bag. It resembled a cigarette end, which Pace knew people used to burn away leeches in the past without them taking a chunk of flesh with them, but it was made mainly of plastic and battery powered. It had a metal tip similar to a standard car cigarette lighter and worked in the same way.
Modesty went out of the window during this process because the leeches were everywhere, on all of them. The group took it in turns to scour one person at a time, from head to toe and in every nook and crack, literally.
Cosmos wandered naked into the jungle and returned a few moments later with a huge armful of wet, spongy green leaves, which they used to wipe themselves down afterwards before each donned a clean running suit from their pack and slipped back on their waterproof ponchos in readiness for the coming downpour.
‘I’ll cook dinner if nobody minds,’ Pace offered. ‘And if we eat fast, then we can get some real sleep.’ Another round of applause. ‘Let’s get going.’
Dinner was freeze-dried chicken stew and dumplings, finished with chocolate biscuits and instant coffee; all of which he prepared in an ingeniously-designed aluminium saucepan.
The pan was ultra-lightweight and had to be assembled first, coming as it did, in flat-packed form from his own backpack. Once rigged, it held five pints of water. The clouds spilled rain down just as he finished assembling the gadget and the others retreated inside Lester, leaving him huddled outside alone; dry beneath his poncho.
He didn’t mind the sudden solitude, in fact he would have walked over hot coals for a cooked meal. He allowed the pan to fill with fresh rainwater so as not to deplete any of their bottled stocks, which didn’t take long because the shower quickly deteriorated into a full-blown thunderstorm with rain lashing down hard.
The cooking unit was an amazing piece of kit. It was a sealed, circular unit, which sat on retractable metal legs that raised it just six inches off of the ground. The saucepan sat firmly on top of the unit, held snugly within guide runners. A tiny gas flame, shielded from the rain but ventilated via tiny air holes in the unit’s circumference, was provided by a small gas bottle built neatly into the bottom of the unit. The flame was tiny but the whole thing had been designed for maximum efficiency.
No heat was wasted, all of it was channelled directly against the base of the saucepan. The saucepan even came with a handy lid, which kept any more rain out and retained almost all the heat energy inside.
Pace couldn’t help but think it was a camper’s dream as he placed five plastic ration bags into the soon bubbling water. He slid on the lid and smugly proclaimed victory.
The rig boiled its five pints in as many minutes and they were all ravenously tucking into their first hot dinner barely fifteen minutes afterwards, eating straight from the bags using the small wooden spoon taped to the outside of each bag. Although the shelter was up and inviting, the smell of the food drew everyone back out into the storm. Using their packs as seats, they formed into a tight huddle around the tiny cooker.
Pace burned his tongue straight away as the glorious taste of chicken and gravy filled his mouth but he couldn’t help himself. They lost about two pints of water in the cooking process – there was no simmer control so it continually boiled away. The remaining three pints inside the saucepan was still enough to make fresh coffee for everyone. Nothing was wasted.
For him, and he heard similar groans of ecstasy between delicious mouthfuls, it was the best meal of his life. Not just because of the heat and the familiar tastes on his burned tongue, but more the emotional strength it lent him; revitalising his spirit from the feet upwards.
The taste of black coffee at the end of the meal literally blew his mind. He revelled in the sensory overload of taste and a welcome fix of energizing caffeine.
After dinner, while the others gratefully turned in, Pace took a few minutes to dismantle the cooker and saucepan. The food bags were bio-degradable, as were the wooden spoons, so he buried them in the mud at the roadside.
Setting his watch, he squeezed inside the shelter, awaking it seemed before he even closed his eyes to the sound of the alarm. Sadly, four hours had passed and they had to start moving again.
They all pitched in to break camp. As Hammond and Cosmos took the shelter down, he did a little more filming, managing to drop the camera onto the hard road surface in the process. He was relieved when the sturdy casing stayed intact. A quick check told him everything still worked but he put it away in his belt for the time being. All in all, it was a manic scene, played out in a rainstorm that had not yet passed. It was nearly eleven o’clock by the time they set off.
The conversation bantered freely around and even the odd joke put in an appearance. As the morning wore on, clouds finally lifted to reveal a gorgeous strip of blue sky above the man-made valley of the road, with its steep sides of forest giants.
The sun slid into view, bathing the forest with a golden hue and burning off more surface water than sheer humidity. The normal wisps of ever-present water vapour quickly thickened around them and rose from the forest on either side like a ghostly sea mist. With the chatter of hidden wildlife, the Amazon truly echoed a sense of pre-history.
Frighteningly, as the evening drew near again and they’d just completed a running phase, he was caught by a sudden, vicio
us stab of pain in his chest; so ferocious that it snatched his breath away and persisted for about fifteen minutes before finally fading. It was an ominous warning and he was very glad they were slowing down at the time. He said nothing.
United, they walked, jogged and ran, in the planned pattern, ever deeper into the Amazon and deeper into a terrifying nightmare none could foresee. Completely oblivious to events conspiring against them, each was geared totally to the schedule and their personal struggle against protesting muscles and sinew.
Yet one of them would soon be dead, and Pace’s life would never be the same.
18
There was no ceremony as they reached the cycling point just as darkness fell; Pace made it a little after six pm. The road was straight and they spotted the distinct orange marker flag even in the failing light, hanging limply against its small steel pole.
Two separate sets of bikes were there, one for their team and one for the team following in their wake, all neatly set up in a row in the centre of the road; linked by a chain and padlocked. Ruby already carried the key to unlock them. Bolted to the top of the flagpole, keeping it well above any water level, sat the fire-truck red, automated checkpoint.
The checkpoint consisted of a small, allegedly indestructible transmitter box not too dissimilar from the black box of a commercial airliner in terms of durability. All the box did was allow each team member to punch in a personal four-digit code, which in turn activated a small touch screen no larger than a watch face. The competitor pressed both of their thumbs, in turn, against the screen, which then scanned the prints and checked them against a record stored in its memory. Once satisfied, it would beep quietly and the information went digitally, via satellite link, back to the computer at race headquarters.
Pace’s concern for the past three hours had been the state of the road. Near constant rain had virtually destroyed any quality in the surface and it was getting worse the deeper they went into the Amazon basin. It was no longer mainly passable, boggy and with a few dangerous pot-holes, instead being little more than a broken track now. It wasn’t paved and only the very centre seemed solid and compact. Riding at any speed across such a treacherous surface, with countless puddles littering even the centre to a depth of several inches, was going to be dangerous.