The Tribe: Black Force Shorts Book Three

by Rogers, Matt

  At least, he looked that way.

  But as he gulped down a quarter-gallon of water from the deep bowl, some kind of second-wind energy surged through him. The warm liquid flooded his throat, soothing his insides, bringing him life. He finished the bowl and handed it back, taking a deep breath to handle the sudden rush of intense emotions. He battled to mask them, trying to keep up the aura of a broken man.

  But he knew the water would keep him alive for at least the rest of the day.

  He could make it through the jungle, distance be damned.

  Anthony nodded as he took the empty bowl in his spindly fingers. ‘You should know that you’ve ruined our plans.’

  Rollins cocked his head. ‘How so?’

  ‘We’re not going to Huancayo anymore.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘We must unleash the concoction here and pray that the maninkari greet us in our home.’

  Rollins went pale. ‘Why?’

  ‘We are running on a limited amount of time.’

  ‘Anthony, what are you talking about?’

  ‘You killed Bradley Frisson before he could reveal the secrets of the maninkari. They must have instructed him to activate the capsule at a certain time. There is some kind of digital timer on the device. We think the spirits will be most powerful then. It was Frisson’s dying wish. And we will honour it.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Rollins croaked. ‘Anthony, it’s a fucking bomb!’

  But there was no pleading with the man. Either he and his fellow tribespeople had realised they were too deep into the lie to go back, or they truly did believe they were set to contact the invisible spirits permeating through reality. Rollins certainly understood — the lack of human contact would make them susceptible — but he wracked his brain for any way to get through to the translator.

  It was useless. As soon as Anthony heard Rollins’ outcry, he got to his feet with a thunderstruck expression on his face. He swung his foot back, and Rollins tensed up in anticipation. He’d spent the duration of the talk hunched over, so Anthony knew where to target. He swung through with a bare foot and it cracked like a whip against the skin just above Rollins’ broken rib.

  It hurt, but it didn’t cause any significant damage.

  But Rollins amplified his reaction tenfold.

  He seized up in apparent pain and rolled into the foetal position, screaming and gnashing his teeth together as he pretended to ride out a wave of pain. He heard Anthony chuckle, but he kept up the act. When he cracked one eyelid open twenty seconds later to assess what was happening, he found the hut empty, the door wedged resolutely shut.

  He stayed in position and hoped like all hell that they thought he was incapacitated.

  He only needed one lapse in their security.

  Then he would spring.

  19

  Rollins hadn’t considered how nerve-wracking the following hours would be.

  He grappled with the fact that somewhere in this village was a ticking time bomb, no doubt packed with all manner of dirty explosives. The consideration that they would fetch him before the device went off was the only thing keeping him from losing his mind. He expected a blinding flash of light and a blast of noise at any moment, and then the walls of the hut would implode and he would see and hear nothing.

  He closed his eyes, charged his energy reserves as best he could, and waited to die.

  But it never came.

  Whenever Frisson had set the bomb to go off, it must have accounted for the trek to Huancayo. Rollins imagined the Asháninca people wouldn’t have been able to reach the capital of the Junín Region in a hurry, so the distance had to be taken into consideration. At the same time he didn’t imagine Anthony would go to the trouble of keeping him alive just to supposedly contact the maninkari out of sight.

  He would want Rollins front and centre, to witness the act.

  Which meant Rollins would be sitting in the kill zone when the bomb went off.

  Great.

  He couldn’t keep playing along for a moment longer.

  He had to act the second they returned to fetch him.

  It would be brutal. There would be zero room for error, and he was almost guaranteed to perish along the way. But, despite Anthony’s hostility and the overall hatred directed toward him, he couldn’t help but pity the tribe. They had been exploited by a mastermind, and even though Bradley Frisson had crossed over to the great beyond, the effects of his manipulation remained behind. They were naive, but that didn’t mean they deserved to be blown to shreds.

  A plan formed in Rollins’ mind.

  It would be madness, but he would need to take a gargantuan risk to escape anyway.

  Fuck it.

  Might as well go for it.

  He remained curled up in a ball for the rest of the morning, ready to act as soon as someone came for him. He assumed it would be Anthony, and when the door to the hut groaned open and the enormous translator stepped into view, Rollins sensed relief flooding over him.

  Anthony had seen the agony he’d caused first-hand. He would assume Rollins was out for the count. Rollins played up the anguish by wincing and clutching his stomach, still lying on his side with his knees tucked and his head bowed.

  Anthony strode across the hut, reached down, and clamped his skinny fingers around the back of Rollins’ neck.

  ‘Almost time,’ the big man whispered. ‘And you’re getting a front row seat.’

  ‘Anthony, please…’

  ‘We will speak to the maninkari, and then we will kill you.’

  ‘Anthony,’ Rollins said, trying to inject as much sincerity into the single word as he could.

  He wanted the man to know, needed the man to know, that this was his last chance to avoid conflict.

  ‘Come on,’ Anthony said, hauling Rollins to his feet. ‘Five minutes until we ascend. I want you to see what you tried so hard to prevent.’

  ‘This is on you,’ Rollins muttered, and burst to his feet unimpeded.

  Anthony took a step back, recoiling in surprise as Rollins seemingly healed himself in an instant. In truth, although his ribs were searing with pain, the injury had never been debilitating. Now Rollins could force the agony from his mind, just as he’d done countless times before, and let loose with a flurry of looping haymakers to Anthony’s unprotected body.

  The translator was tall, long, and skinny, which left him open to a world of hurt if Rollins could effectively target his mid-section.

  He smashed a three-punch combination into the guy’s liver, ripping the body to the left, then the right, then the left.

  Bang-bang-bang.

  Like a trio of gunshots, Rollins pummelled Anthony’s ribcage. The blows carried such ferocity that Anthony was down before the man even realised what was happening. Rollins shoved him to the side and thundered a straight punch across his jaw, sending the gangly man sprawling into the side of the hut, all his defences stripped. The relentless stream of strikes had frozen him in his tracks. Anthony bounced off the wall and Rollins put him down on the floor with a twisting body kick to the same section of his ribcage that he’d thrown the punches to.

  Anthony collapsed.

  Go.

  Rollins saw the opening in the doorway, the light filtering through, delivering promises of escape and freedom. He didn’t instantly jump at the opportunity. Something made him hesitate — he stopped in his tracks to ponder what was about to happen. Even though his brain was racing at a million miles an hour, the dangers of what was about to transpire froze him up in much the same way Anthony had crumpled.

  His battle was mental, rather than physical.

  He knew that if he left the hut, the likelihood of death would be too great. There were dozens of the tribespeople in full view of the hut, and they would see him break free. They would descend on him and pummel him to death, unless Frisson’s bomb went off before they could take care of him. On top of that, Frisson almost certainly had additional reinforcements heading for the village in the event tha
t he fell out of contact — no master planner neglected to implement a backup plan.

  And Rollins was alone, and unarmed.

  But if he stayed in the hut, surrounded by murky darkness and Anthony’s pathetic, cowering form, he was guaranteed death.

  A chance, no matter how slim, was better than nothing.

  He took a deep breath — what might be the last breath of his life — and unleashed all his nervous energy through sheer motion.

  He smashed the hut’s door open and sprinted out into the clearing.

  20

  He’d been anticipating resistance, but nothing like what came.

  Adrenalin speared through his senses, allowing him to assess his surroundings in milliseconds. The tight semi-circle of huts at the base of the slope were arranged around the clearing itself, and from Rollins’ elevated position atop the wooden deck, he saw at least ten of the Asháninca villagers spread out across the flat ground. They were converging on a point in the centre of the clearing, where a temporary barrier of rocks had been erected around a steel circular capsule.

  The bomb.

  It was the first time Rollins’ had laid eyes on it.

  There was nothing remarkable or awe-inspiring about it, but Rollins had never imagined there would be. In truth it had the appearance of a piece of junk, coated in a thin layer of dust and riddled with pockmarks and scratches. A simple digital display the size of a man’s palm had been slotted into place in the side of the bomblet, with a handful of plastic-coated buttons devoid of any symbols or markings underneath.

  A crude, yet efficient setup.

  He imagined there was enough explosives packed into the capsule to level the entire hillside.

  As soon as he spotted the device, the tribe spotted him.

  Outcries of disbelief rose from a number of different directions at once — Rollins figured Anthony had exaggerated his condition. The fact that he was cohesive and functioning and seemingly uninjured had shocked the villagers into a moment of hesitation.

  Rollins used it.

  It was the only thing separating him from death.

  He had the frame of an athlete and he used it to full effect. He leapt off the wooden deck and pounded across the grass, almost turning his ankle on a jagged root in the process. He paled at the thought of destroying the ligaments in his foot, at which point he would be left to the mercy of the tribe. A couple of nearby villagers scowled and snatched at him — one of them almost dug their long fingers into the shoulder material of Rollins’ shirt. He zigzagged away from the man — whose eyes were wild and rabid with determination — and continued straight across the clearing.

  One of the larger men in the tribe dove for him.

  Rollins had met the man before — they had spent days together during his initial visitation period. The guy was well over six feet tall and sported an impressively muscular build for someone who had lived off the land his entire life. The guy had been positioned in front of one of the nearby huts, but he made a wild burst in Rollins’ direction and launched himself through the air, coming down with his beefy arms wrapped around Rollins’ feet.

  Rollins fell.

  He couldn’t help himself. One of his shins caught against the guy’s palm and it toppled him over. The ground rushed up to meet him and he slammed the side of his head against the earth, punching a wave of nausea through his insides. The impact sapped him of his processing abilities for a moment, and even as he rolled desperately to his feet the man made another snatch for him.

  Rollins tumbled head over heels and somehow made it back to his feet, a little woozy from the face-first impact. Something warm ran down the side of his face and he figured he must have cut himself open in the mad scramble, but there was no time to check.

  He turned on his heel and took off again, realising he was only a dozen feet away from the bomblet.

  There were two tribespeople between Rollins and the capsule. A woman, and a child no older than twelve.

  Rollins hesitated, slowing down for a vital moment, unwilling to charge straight through the pair.

  The last thing he wanted was to unintentionally cause grievous injuries to a kid.

  But as he slowed, he heard something whistling in the air to his right. He didn’t even have time to turn his head — he simply ducked out of instinct, a natural reaction to such a strange sound.

  The spear passed over the dead air a few inches above the base of his neck.

  21

  Rollins didn’t understand what had happened until he saw the wooden pole fly past on the other side. He twisted his neck to watch its trajectory and his heart rate amplified, understanding how close he had come to having his spinal cord severed.

  He didn’t know where the spear had come from. Things were unfolding too fast to properly comprehend where each member of the tribe was. But it added another layer to the conflict, and it brought with it a heightened state of awareness. Rollins increased his pace, shoving the woman aside in his haste to get the hell out of the clearing.

  He didn’t care that he had no food or water or supplies — the claustrophobic confines of the jungle would be preferable to being out on open ground. He reached down and scooped up the bomblet, and a war cry sounded behind him.

  He’d stolen their precious golden ticket.

  The capsule was heavy — at least fifty pounds. Rollins hefted it double-handed off the clearing floor and wheeled in a tight circle, searching for the fastest way out of the village. When he rotated back in the direction he’d come from, he saw at least five or six tribespeople sprinting toward him, their eyes wide and furious, their teeth bared. They had murderous intent in their stride.

  ‘Shit,’ Rollins muttered.

  He saw another spear hefted onto the shoulder of a man near the back of the procession, and he turned and ran with everything he had left in his system.

  The steel on the exterior of the bomblet was slippery, and it nearly fell from Rollins’ hands. He knew he wouldn’t have time to turn around and pick it up if he dropped the device, so he clenched his teeth in frustration and held on with all he had. Blood from the side of his head had run all the way down his shoulder, down the outside of his arm, down his hand. It coagulated with the dirt and rust on the exterior of the capsule and created a thin coating of muck that made the entire capsule slippery to the touch.

  His muscles strained with exertion. The lactic acid in his forearms screamed for relief, but he had to ignore it as he raced straight across the clearing with his back turned to the rest of the tribe.

  Now.

  He ducked, hunching over the bomblet in his arms, lowering his head out of the line of fire. Sure enough the next spear whistled past him a moment later — it wouldn’t have hit him regardless, but the proximity sent shivers down his spine.

  A couple of inches to the left, and his arm would have been taken off at the shoulder.

  He kept running.

  Sweating, panting, terrified, he made for the convoy of jeeps that Frisson and his men had used to reach the camp.

  Sure enough, the vehicles rested in the same place. Rollins couldn’t be sure whether the Asháninca people knew how to drive, or if they’d simply been distracted by the presence of the capsule. But Rollins breathed a sigh of relief as he realised he already had the layout of the three jeeps mapped out in his head. He knew the angle the first in the procession was parked at, so even in his groggy state it only took him a few bounding steps to cross fluidly to the driver’s seat and slot in through the open door.

  He dropped all fifty pounds of the steel bomblet on the passenger seat. The metal capsule thudded into place, gouging a dent in the leather. Rollins ignored it and twisted the keys in the ignition — they hadn’t been removed.

  He caught a fleeting glance in his peripheral vision of the bloody outlines on the clearing floor where Bradley Frisson and his men had died. Their bodies had been carted off to destinations unknown, presumably for an honourable burial.

  Rollins had no time to
consider that.

  He floored the jeep’s accelerator and its wheels spun uselessly on the wet dirt.

  The tribe closed in on his position.

  ‘Shit!’ Rollins roared.

  He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He met the eyes of the nearest villager and saw sheer hatred plastered across the guy’s face. The man sprinted barefoot for the jeep, hands outstretched. Rollins didn’t want to think what they would do if they got those hands on him. He could only fend off the swarming tribespeople for so long.

  In truth, it saddened him. He’d spent weeks with these people, and they were good at heart. But expert manipulators had the distinct ability to strip away any shred of moral values in the name of a greater cause, and Bradley Frisson had done that.

  Rollins wondered if the man had spent his whole life enacting control over others, or if he’d only become aware of his abilities recently.

  Whatever the case, he wouldn’t manipulate anyone again.

  Rollins had made sure of that.

  He checked the footwell underneath him and found a Heckler & Koch USP semi-automatic pistol. Flooded with relief, he bent down and snatched the weapon up. When he sat back up again, an explosion of noise and chaos sent him ducking straight back down into the footwell.

  What the hell?

  He pieced it together after a beat of total confusion. The windscreen had completely shattered, and glass pieces now cascaded down over him. He glanced across and paled at the sight of a thick wooden spear skewered through the passenger seat’s headrest.

  Wrong target, he thought.

  If the villager had better aim, Rollins would have sat up and caught a piercing blade through the forehead.

  It would have taken the top half of his head off in a grisly shower of gore.

  He forced that thought from his mind and maintained pressure on the accelerator.

  Finally, the tyres bit into the surface underneath and the jeep surged forward.