Derek took the camera back. “I don’t know. I don’t really care. I just kinda want to move on from here. If it’s poachers and they’re launching hippos into trees I don’t want to be here when they get back.”
Banga was walking into the water again, gun out in front. He waded in up to his knees and put his hand on the head of a dead hippo, rubbed the animal between the eyes, as if petting a family dog. With his gun, he poked it hard to make sure it wasn’t going to move. Then, he slipped his hand into the beast’s mouth and heaved it open to reveal a maw large enough to be classified as a studio apartment in some small Asian countries. He studied the hippo’s massive tongue and teeth. “It was not poachers.” He let the massive jaw fall closed with a baritone thud.
Jack stepped closer, his pen and pad out now. “How do you know?”
“The poachers take the teeth, sell them on the black market. Whoever did this was not interested in keeping trophies.”
“And is it me,” Derek said, “or do they all look a little…thinner?”
There was a sudden crack. From one of the tall trees across the river, a dead hippo fell from the branches, covered in the white strands, and crashed into the water, sending birds into frightful flight from nearby treetops.
No one answered Derek, mostly because no one had an answer as to why they’d be thinner. “How much farther till we find a way up the mountain,” Jack asked.
“We can go up right there,” Banga said, pointing a few yards down river.
“Really?” Derek said. “We’re still doing this? We still care about who’s in trouble? You still need this story that badly?”
Jack finally broke his gaze from the scene, scribbled something on his pad, and began walking. Without looking back he simply muttered: “Yup.”
***
The jungle began to open up a bit, the treetops separating enough to allow in a deluge of sunlight. Ground mist was eradicated under the golden rays. The deep blues of the ferns and bushes gave way to bleached tans and mint greens. Shumba followed his father and the other men into a clearing where tire tracks spoke of Jeeps and motorcycles, the favorite modes of transportation for the many militant factions operating in these parts. Which faction it was he could not be sure. There were so many these days. The civil wars continued to rage, and it was impossible to keep track of which militia was holding power and which was fighting for it. Shumba had been warned not to come into these open areas alone, for the gunmen would happily kill him or force him into a slave labor. Once the young men of the jungle tribes were stolen, they rarely, if ever, came home again.
It was uncommon to see tire tracks this high up in the jungle, but illegal mining and guerrilla fighting had blazed trails to this clearing. Most likely, these factions had come to this clearing to use it as a lookout point. A dangerous place to be, yes, but Shumba knew it was simple enough to run in to the dense trees where the vehicles could not go.
At the front of the formation, Musa stooped and looked at the tracks. He touched them to see if they were still wet, a sign that the bad men had been by recently. The look on his face worried Shumba. The MLC, the Mayi-Mayi, and all the rest would not give two thoughts about “arresting” the entire tribe of men right now. Shumba knew his people would put up a fight, but it was impossible to fight machine guns that shot bullets large enough to make your head explode.
The men choked up on their spears, gripped their machetes more tightly.
Musa waved them on again, out into the open, where they moved with a stealthy silence learned over centuries of hunting. Not a twig snapped under their sandaled feet. Any need to cough or sneeze, and certainly to speak, was suppressed. As they moved across the open patch of ground, the only sounds were the birds, the bees, and the daiku running through the overgrowth in the jungle below. It was, Shumba thought, very peaceful.
They were almost across the wide open patch of crisp grass and briars when they heard the first car engine behind them.
“Shumba!” Musa yelled. “Get beside me!”
Shumba raced forward, spear at the ready, and stood just behind his father as the first pickup truck came out of the treeline. It kicked up dirt and then skidded to a halt in front of the line of Pygmys. In the truck’s bed sat a half dozen men-—correction, kids—-wielding Kalashnikovs. The oldest boy looked in his early teens, while others were probably seven or eight. At the rear was a man wearing a green beret. He was watching the trees around the truck. An M60 machine gun had been attached to the roof of the truck’s cab, and this gun was manned by another man. He wore a red beret and smoked a hand-rolled cigarette.
The third man driving the truck leaned out and screamed something indecipherable. At this command all the boys in the back of the truck cocked their guns and aimed them at the frightened tribesmen. The driver yelled again and stepped from the truck with a pistol in his hand. Shumba hated that he could not see the man’s eyes behind his thick, black aviator sunglasses. Now the man spoke a mish mash of Pygmy that Shumba could almost follow.
“On the ground. I will kill you and eat your babies. On the ground now! You are trespassing on the land of the GRC! You are under arrest!”
GRC? Shumba had never heard of them, but it meant nothing. New groups formed every day.
With his eyes locked on the guns, Musa stepped forward and opened his arms, holding his weapons to the side. This was to show he was not a threat, but whether the militia man knew this was anyone’s guess. “We are not here to fight. We are minding our own business.”
“Do not move! Get on your face now, you monkey!” The man raised his pistol and aimed it at Musa. “I will burn your body and eat it with coffee. I will brand you like the animal you are and make you scream in pain all day long! On the ground now!”
Instantly, Shumba bit his lip, steeled himself to run at the man if his father were suddenly shot. If he could just get close enough to throw his spear he might be able to catch the man in the heart before the hail of bullets ended his life.
“Please, we just want to pass by without a fight,” Musa pleaded. His men were on high alert now, practically trembling, knowing just what those guns would do to them, but knowing even more what it would mean to be spared death by their bullets. The men who were not shot would be chained and beaten and thrown into mines to dig for minerals until they withered and died from starvation and exhaustion. Shumba had been hungry before in his day, and the sickness that accompanied hunger was miserable. To actually die from it seemed a cruelty beyond measure.
Bang! The man fired a shot into the air. All the tribesmen flinched at the sound; all the boys in the truck snickered.
Musa finally laid down his weapons and took a knee. He looked up at Shumba with eyes resigned to an inner peace. It was the look of a man prepared to die for his son, and his men. When you lived in the jungles of the Congo, which had been thinning over the years through war and corporate deforestation, you awaited this day. Shumba’s heart began to race so fast he could barely breathe. He lay down, and so did the others. Here was the moment they‘d feared, the moment where they would die like so many other Pygmys in the Congo, murdered in the deep jungles. What would become of their bodies he did not want to speculate. He’d heard stories of these gunmen defiling corpses in horrific ways, including wearing dead infants around their necks like medals and even eating their flesh.
No, he thought, this was not happening to them. He would at least give a final fight. Shumba saw that his father was even now slowly inching his hand back to his spear.
“You!” The man singled out Musa’s friend, Amuzati, an older tribesman with gray hair and scarred legs. “Stand up. Now!”
Amuzati rose, his hands up to convey submission. He looked to Musa for help but there was nothing that could be done right now.
“Come here. Move it.”
The aged Pygmy walked with fear toward the smoking gunman. He began to speak: “Please, I do not-–“
Crack! The gunman moved fast and without thought. The bullet went
into Amuzati’s right temple and exploded out the left side under the ear. His body fell in a ragged heap to the ground, bits of brain congealing on the grass under his face. The boys in the back of the truck laughed and then, as if they’d seen this show before, ignored the body and lit up cigarettes, taking long puffs.
Shumba felt tears forming in his eyes. He prayed for a way out of this, for something to come and save them. He did not want to end up like the boys in the back of the truck.
The gunman kicked Amuzati’s lifeless body away from him, spit on it like it was a disease. Then, taking a small knife from the sheath on his belt, he bent down and cut off Amuzati’s nose. He put it in his mouth and chewed for a few seconds, relishing the crunch of the cartilage, before spitting this into the grass. Again, the boys laughed. Blood ran freely from the hole in Amuzati’s dead face, joining the stew of brains under his body.
Slowly, Musa slipped his fingers around his spear. Shumba, watching through tears, knew his father was going to make his move. He would do the same, and hope the others in the tribe followed suit.
But there was no charge. Instead, the man on the M60 fired a round into the ground in front of Musa, causing him to roll over as dirt spit up into his eyes.
“You think we don’t watch you?” the man asked. “We see you reach for your little weapon.” He laughed and racked the slide on his gun. “Now, you, come here.”
Musa didn’t move. Nobody did.
“If you come here I will spare the little one.” The man aimed his gun at Shumba.
But Shumba did not want to be alive if it meant becoming a prisoner, for no doubt being spared meant becoming these men’s property. Worse, it likely meant the death of his father. “Don’t go.”
“You are my son. How do I not save you?”
“We die together. Please.”
They were both crying now, Shumba out of fear and Musa out of love. “You are already older than your years, my son. But—”
Crack! Another gunshot. This from one of the boys in the back of the truck. Several feet away, another tribesman, Muyamba, now lay dead with a hole in his head leaking blood onto the ground.
“The boy is next. Unless you come to me, you rodent.”
Finally, Musa stood, looked down at his son and told him he loved him. Shumba cried, pleaded for his father not to walk forward. He took two steps as the gunman raised and aimed his pistol.
And that’s when the trees and bushes exploded outward behind the truck. Demons, massive and black and full of legs and shining black eyes, leapt from the treeline and stuck to the truck, turning it over and spilling the Congo’s Lost Boys onto the ground. The gunman spun toward the commotion, found himself suddenly engulfed in the legs of a raging spider as it jumped from the jungle like a multi-winged fighter jet. It zipped back into the trees with the man wrapped in its legs, fangs already stabbing into the man’s lungs. Where’d he’d stood nothing remained but aviator glasses dotted with fresh blood.
All around Shumba and his tribe dozens of the massive beasts leapt and attacked. The man who’d been on the M60 screamed as two giant spiders each sank fangs into his abdomen, fighting for his insides. A handful of shots rang out from the young militia boys, trying in vain to fight the beasts. The boys were screaming and crying, regressing back to the children they were before they’d been kidnapped and brainwashed. One of the giant spiders was trying to drag the pickup truck back into the trees, tethered to a line of web that disappeared into the undergrowth. But it gave up and raced with lighting speed after a fleeing Pygmy who’d made for the trees back the way they’d come.
“Up, Shumba, let’s go.” It was Musa, grabbing his son and shoving him toward the trees, leading him in the direction of their destination. As Shumba ran, he looked back once to see another of his tribesmen ripped off his feet by a blur of black, hairy legs.
The last thing he saw was the man in the green beret climbing into the truck, miraculously now on its tires again, and driving back into the jungle.
Then Shumba and his father were looking ahead, running for their lives.
***
The man in the green beret hit the gas hard, jerked the wheel and headed for the small path in the woods. It had taken a great deal of careful maneuvering to get up to that particular lookout spot; nobody ever came up into these parts of the jungle besides foreign researchers or the tiny monkey men. He hadn’t even wanted to come on this damned trip, had wanted to stay at the camp and fuck that sixteen year old girl they’d brought in two days ago. He liked her a lot, had already left his mark on her the first time he took her. Her eyes were still swollen shut from his mighty fists and he liked that. If he’d had a chance to take her today, he would have split her lip and made her beg for mercy, which he would only have shown with his cock.
If he got back to the camp, the first thing he’d do before relaying this story to Magumba, his black-hearted leader, would be to ram his snake into every orifice the girl had until she stopped breathing and died under his strength. She was, after all, nothing but flesh for him to destroy.
He swung the truck past a copse of trees and found the two dirt tire tracks that acted as a path. He glanced in the rear view mirror and saw one of the giant black beasts come crashing into the jungle after him. It hit the ground in a cloud of dust, spun in a rapid circle, then saw the truck. With a lunge it cleared half the distance between itself and the truck.
The man in the green beret swerved to avoid a mud hill, then again to get around a collection of fallen branches covered in vines. Then he was back on the path, pressing the pedal to the floor. The truck gained speed, kicking up moist, jungle debris. Twenty kilometers per hour, thirty, thirty five… He was cruising now, surely enough to get out of harm’s way.
But the image in the rear view mirror said differently. The spider was giving chase, only this time it was not jumping, it was running. It zipped around trees, half up in the boughs and half on the ground; flowed over boulders and hills as if it were made of water; flattened itself under low branches. It was gaining, and the man in the green beret began to scream at it in hopes it would just go away.
He could see where the jungle sloped down now, heading to the lower montane level, and then out into the open fields where he’d be able to gun the motor and leave this thing in the dust.
Throwing caution to the wind, the man crashed through a series of vines, snapping them like brittle bones, and let the truck begin its nose dive through the trees, its tires barely touching the ground as it sped down the sharp grade. Tree trunks flashed by the windshield and he thought for sure he would hit one head on and go through the windshield like a rocket. But God was on his side, as He was for all of his people, the GRC, the rightful rulers of the Congo. God had chosen him to live.
The spider continued its chase, all eight legs stampeding with such fury it spit up dirt in its wake like a motorbike. It climbed through the thickets, legs wrapping around limbs, jumping from tree trunk to tree trunk, then running on the ground again as it followed the truck down the steep hill.
Now, finally, the inevitable: the truck hit a large root and slewed sideways, flipping over, throwing the man in the green beret into the air with a velocity that turned everything he saw into a blur. With a white flash behind his eyes, he hit an epiphyte-covered tree root and heard his own backbone snap, felt the vertebrae rip through the skin of his torso, felt his kneecap explode in tiny shards. The truck continued to crash into foliage, barrel-rolling farther into the deep blue hues of the Congo, but the man came to rest as a bloodied human pretzel up against a bush radiant with orange blossoms.
He looked up and waited for the giant spider to come and kill him, but it was nowhere to be seen. Had it gotten tangled in some vines? Had it lost sight of the truck as it spun out of control?
The man tried to move his legs, tried to stand, but it was no use. His back was nothing but a bag of gravel, and the pain nearly made him pass out. “At least, I beat you,” he said. “You cannot kill me, demon, for
I am the Snake Eater, and I am fear and death incarnate.”
He started to laugh, an action that sent waves of nausea and agony through his body. But he couldn’t help it; it was funny to have beaten such a beast.
He stopped laughing a moment later when he looked into the tree limbs twenty feet above him, and saw, crouched on the lowest limb, black eyes watching him with intense indifference, the eight-legged beast.
Seconds later, the Snake Eater’s screams echoed throughout the jungle.
***
A thousand feet below, Derek, Jack and Banga were working their way up the steep mountain side overlooking the river, using liana to haul themselves up, slipping every now and then on loose soil. The sunlight began to wane as the trees folded back in over them, shrouding them in the deep myrtle world of the rainforest’s midlevel canopy.
They all heard the gun shot at the same time and stood still.
Jack knuckled sweat from his upper lip. “Should we be scared of that?”
Ahead of him, Banga scanned the darkness of the inner jungle around them. “No. Not yet. Too far away.”
“It’s not the distance that scares me but who’s doing the shooting. Maybe poachers or whoever killed the hippos.”
“Could be whoever shot the flare,” Derek suggested. “Maybe a distress shot, or a warning of sorts. You said the gorillas attack people, Banga.”
Banga nodded. “Yes. But very rare.” He kept his eyes on the treetops, mulling something over.
Jack’s next thought was that it could be something more nefarious, perhaps one of the militant cadres that ran rampant in the Congo. Why they’d be in the deep jungle, he didn’t know, but it wasn’t exactly uncommon to hear of them skulking around the lower levels weeding out the Pygmy tribes for slave labor. Even though he knew foreigners were fairly safe, that avoiding trouble usually just involved the nuisance of forking over some euros or dollars, it didn’t change the fact such men had a bloodlust not seen in other parts of the world. If they wanted to kill Jack, it would happen no matter how much money he offered.
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