BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

by Fernando Gamboa

  “If at least we had some wood,” I complained out loud as I looked up at the tops of the trees, “we could make a fire to keep the alligators at bay.”

  “We could burn our clothes and part of the equipment,” the professor suggested. He patted the bag he was sitting on. “A lot of these things would burn very well.”

  “Only too well,” Cassie said. “We’d burn everything in a short time and then we’d be back to where we are now.”

  While they were talking, I opened the box where we kept the things we needed to protect from the damp. I took out three headlamps and handed them to the others.

  “It’s obvious that going into the water is nothing less than suicide,” the professor said. “We have no choice but to make a stand here. We’ll just have to start a fire with whatever we can find.”

  “I agree,” I said as I adjusted the light on my forehead. “But instead of making a camp fire with all our clothes, how about making some torches and lighting them one after the other? That way they’d last longer. What do you think?”

  “I don’t see how,” Cassandra said reluctantly. But she opened her backpack and took out one of the aluminum rods that made up the frame. She rolled one end of a cotton shirt and poured some alcohol on it from the medicine kit.

  The professor and I imitated her step by step, so that in a moment the three of us had rudimentary torches in our hands all ready to be lit.

  As she did so we were suddenly overtaken by complete darkness. Clouds now obscured the comforting light of a waning quarter moon that had barely had a chance to come out.

  “La gran chucha,” Cassie whispered, shivering. “How dark it’s gotten all of a sudden.”

  In a moment, the only light we had was that of our headlamps, and we kept these at the lowest setting to save on batteries and also to avoid dazzling each other. Anxious to see more than just a couple of feet further, I adjusted the beam to make a sweep around the sandbar.

  I pointed the beam toward the river and my first reaction was of surprise as I could not identify what I was seeing.

  A myriad bright amber spheres seemed to be floating all around us just at water level.

  I strained my eyes as I stared at the closest ones, trying to guess their origin. I did not understand what they were until a pair of them turned off for an instant, then turned on again.

  A blink.

  That multitude of small yellow globes was no less than a mass of eyes.

  There were dozens of them in the water. They were watching us, studying us, and stealthily getting closer under cover of the night.

  14

  “Quick! Light the torches!” I shouted.

  Cassandra and the professor had seen what I had, but it took them a little while to react.

  “It’s the alligators!” the professor said in terror. “They’re right here!”

  “They’re surrounding us!” Cassie said with a mixture of surprise and horror as she pointed at the darkness. “Those bastards are surrounding us!”

  Meanwhile I had taken the lighter out of my pocket and was trying to light the shirt-ball which was my torch.

  The alcohol finally lit, and a small blue flame appeared at the tip of the aluminum rod. To my dismay, though, it gave little more light than a simple candle.

  “Shit!” I muttered.

  Setting out to intimidate a horde of hungry alligators with that ridiculous fire was like confronting a pack of lions wielding thumbtacks.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Cassie whispered in dismay as she looked at her own torch with frustration.

  “We have to try!” I encouraged them. “We have to hold them off any way we can!”

  Suddenly a huge alligator appeared out of what seemed like nowhere and hurled itself onto the sand just a couple of yards from us.

  I swore under my breath and jumped back. As I did so I bumped into Cassandra who was behind me. Immediately another alligator, and yet another behind it, came out of the water and advanced toward us with their terrible mouths wide open.

  We waved the torches desperately in front of the enormous reptiles as we shouted insults and obscenities at them which had no effect.

  Then Cassie took a bold step forward and thrust her torch just an inch away from the eyes of the closest alligator. To our surprise—Cassie’s too—the beast turned abruptly and went back to the safety of the water as swiftly as it had appeared.

  “That’s it!” she said triumphantly. “The eyes! Hold the torches up to their eyes!”

  Without hesitation the professor and I followed her example. Between us we managed to make the other two alligators back up.

  “We did it! We did it!” the professor yelled with pride. “We drove them away!”

  We were exhilarated, unable to believe we had regained our tiny patch of territory.

  “Humans one!” the professor said raising a finger. “Reptiles zero!”

  “Ándele!” Cassie shouted into the dark, punching the air with her fist in renewed bravery. “Come on now, you bastards! What’s the matter with you, baby lizards? Afraid of a little fire?”

  Just then, as fair punishment for our bravado, Mother Nature let forth a fearful crash of thunder in the dark. It was followed by large drops of rain, which in a matter of seconds became a tropical deluge.

  I watched as my torch went out in the rain. “Oh, come on!” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  In a moment we were in complete darkness again, but now we were also drenched by a curtain of rain that reflected the light of our headlamps in tiny glints on the raindrops. Now we could not see more than four or five yards away, which was more or less the width of our little island. We knew the alligators were still there and that it was only a matter of time before they charged again.

  We were soaking wet, unarmed and almost unable to see anything. Plainly the situation was beginning to be critical.

  “If anybody has an idea, now’s the time to share it,” I said as I peered into the shadows with the useless torch still in my hand.

  “There they are!” Cassandra shouted. “They’re coming back!”

  With my heart in my mouth I turned to where Cassie was looking, and there it was. A huge beast was dragging its body over the sand out of the darkness, followed by others that surged forth from the dark water like so many hungry monsters from hell.

  The biggest one, a leviathan more than sixteen feet long was approaching us ahead of the others. It watched us with lifeless yellow eyes and no air of impatience. It knew we had no way to escape.

  The three of us began to retreat in terrified silence, crowding at the very center of the islet while we were slowly but relentlessly surrounded.

  “Ulysses, I…” Cassandra said in a shaky whisper right behind me.

  I turned to her and saw, or wanted to see, something in her eyes that I had not seen in a long time.

  “I know,” I whispered back.

  Then the closest alligator climbed onto one of the backpacks on the ground and opened its mouth ready to jump on me.

  In the midst of despair I remembered something I had seen in a movie. I took off my belt and buckled it into an improvised noose.

  “What on earth do you think you’re doing?” the professor asked.

  “To be honest,” I replied without turning around, “I’m not quite sure.”

  Then I unsheathed the small diving knife I always carry strapped to my ankle. Wielding it in one hand and the belt in the other, I waited for the alligator to attack. I had the absurd idea that I could dodge it, immobilize its jaws with the belt, and then try to stab it in the eyes, which were the only part of its anatomy that was not armor-plated. With the wisdom of hindsight, it was the stupidest of plans.

  The giant reptile advanced heavily to the point where I could have touched it with my outstretched hand. It raised itself on its front legs and lifted its head ready for the final attack.

  With the thick rain streaming down my face, I flexed my legs and prepared to jump.


  The alligator lifted its head even higher and turned it so as not to lose sight of me—its prey—and with unexpected speed for its size, hurled itself forward with the strength of nearly a ton of pure muscle.

  I leapt to one side, dodging it by less than an inch.

  And then I heard a hiss.

  For a second the alligator seemed to be suspended in midair. Then it dropped at my feet like a felled giant.

  Making the most of it, I readied myself to jump on its exposed head. I grasped the knife firmly, but at that moment something odd caught my attention.

  A long thin wooden rod with white feathers on the end jutted out of the hard skull of the beast which had fallen, inert, on the mud.

  I stared at the reptile, still not understanding why I was alive when it looked so definitely dead. There came a second hiss. Another alligator which had scrambled up onto the first one fell, struck dead by another long thin arrow that entered through the back of its neck and came out of its jaw.

  “They’ve come…” Cassie muttered in disbelief. She was looking at a group of silhouetted figures, armed with long bows, which were moving over the water toward us. “It’s the Menkragnoti…”

  15

  There were three narrow canoes. On each of them two men were paddling with the current, one at the bow and the other at the stern. In each canoe there was an archer standing in the middle with a six-foot bow, shooting one arrow after another with amazing accuracy at the alligators that poked their heads above water. In a few seconds a dozen or so of those giant beasts lay dead on the sand with their hard skulls pierced cleanly by arrows.

  We were still recovering from our initial shock when the three canoes landed on the islet. The archers stood around us, forming a defensive circle with their arrows aiming at the retreating alligators. Others dropped their paddles, grabbed us by the arm, and pushed us into the canoes. Each of us was placed in a different one.

  “Wait a minute!” the professor protested. “At least let me grab the case with the phone!”

  The natives did not pay the slightest attention to his complaints, which in any case they could hardly have understood. He was made to sit in the canoe and stay put.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, raising my voice as I was shoved into another canoe. “We’ll come back for our gear later. For now, the alligators will make sure nobody steals it.”

  I saw Cassandra being pushed into another canoe, which disappeared into the darkness. Closely following it went the one with Professor Castillo in it.

  As for me, I had just sat down on the bottom of the canoe—thirty feet or so long and carved out of a single tree trunk—when the archer jumped on board and motioned me to turn my headlamp off. Without wasting a single moment we turned into the current and lost ourselves in the night, driven by the strength of the oarsmen.

  We moved on in the pouring rain, its rapid beating keeping time with the rhythm of the paddles in the water.

  Despite the thick darkness around us, the natives seemed to know exactly where we were going. They paddled hard, leaving behind the bloodied sandbar on their way toward a shore whose location we could only guess.

  I held onto the edges of the canoe with trembling hands. Because of the rain we had already taken in about three fingers of water but, after this last-minute rescue, getting my butt wet was the least of my worries. I still could not get over the miraculous appearance of the Menkragnoti.

  I could not believe our luck, although I was tempted to reproach them for not coming earlier and sparing us the scare. But the truth was that I felt like thanking and hugging each of them as soon as we reached land.

  I could tell we were going upriver by the occasional jerks of the canoe. The moment our progress became smoother and the men slowed their paddling, I guessed we had left the main course of the Xingu and turned away from the strong current into a side channel. At the same time the rain slackened as if we had reached shelter. As I discovered later, we were now under a thick bower of foliage that acted as a natural umbrella.

  At last the canoe seemed to run aground on a sandy bottom. At once the archer who had been sitting in front of me jumped out. He and his companions grabbed the canoe and pulled it overland to a little inlet, with me still sitting in it and not knowing what to do.

  Then I saw the shadowy outline of one of the natives coming closer. He took my arm and invited me to disembark.

  “Thank you!” I said effusively to the shadows, hoping I was not addressing a bush. “Thank you so much, my friends. You’ve saved our lives. Moito obrigado.”

  The natives did not say a word. They either did not care or did not understand us.

  By contrast, Cassie and the professor, who had arrived before me, did have a lot to say.

  “Don’t bother,” Eduardo’s voice said, quite close to me. “Our friends are not very talkative.”

  “I tried to hug one,” Cassie’s voice said, “and the rude bastard pushed me away!”

  As I was looking around, unable to make out anything more than shadows that seemed to be pulling the canoes out of the water, someone poked me in the back. I figured they wanted us to get going.

  We walked in single file through the fitful rain, along a narrow path where invisible thorns and branches constantly scratched my face and arms. My two friends were directly behind me, complaining about the foolishness of walking at night through the rainforest with no light, while I kept asking myself how the Menkragnoti at the front knew where to put their bare feet. There were no visible stars to guide them, no reference marks on the ground. All I could think was that they possessed a fantastically developed night vision… but even so, a cat would have had trouble finding its way in that darkness.

  The walk seemed to take an eternity, although in fact it must have lasted about twenty minutes. A couple of times I tried to light my headlamp but our escorts quickly made me turn it off. They showed by signs that it dazzled them. Luckily, my pupils had become accustomed to total darkness, so that I ended up guessing, rather than seeing, the trace of a path under my feet. I even managed to dodge an occasional branch in time.

  Gradually my hearing too began to adjust to the silence of the jungle. A silence that was really nothing of the sort, because once I was able to tell my own footsteps from the rain pattering on the canopy of the jungle, the world filled with strange sounds. They ranged from the sublime to the chilling.

  The tree frogs croaked extravagantly over our heads, alternating with dozens of different kinds of birdsong, from the sharp cries of parrots to the cooing of night birds mating. These were interrupted occasionally by the shriek of monkeys or the distant roar of a cat marking its territory.

  I was so intent in appreciating all the sounds that Cassie’s sudden outburst took me completely by surprise.

  “There! I can see a bright light ahead!” she announced enthusiastically. “They’re taking us to their village!”

  16

  With no transition whatsoever we stepped out of the thick underbrush into a wide circular open area. This was lit by a myriad fires and a shy moon that was beginning to peek out from behind rapidly dispersing clouds. Around a bare space the size of two or three soccer fields a number of huts with palm roofs faced inwards. In the center, a structure stood out clearly.

  It was an imposing construction, an oversized version of the huts surrounding it, the same shape but of a size that seemed absurd in such a primitive building. It must have been at least a hundred and thirty feet long and sixty-five wide, with a pointed roof that reached the ground and was more than fifty feet high. It made me think of a giant Canadian camping tent made of palm trunks and leaves.

  As soon as we entered the space, a great number of children approached us with wondering cries. They were followed by their mothers, as well as dozens of other curious people. Our saviors, on the other hand, had not said a word so far.

  The men wore only loincloths, but their arms and necks were adorned with bunches of feathers of different colors tied behind thei
r necks, colorful bracelets, and necklaces, together with round earrings made from animal bones. They were also totally covered in intricate designs from top to toe. The women, on the other hand, only wore a couple of discreet pendants apart from the loincloths, with almost no feathers or body painting. The children, both boys and girls, wore nothing but the hair on their heads.

  There was a common element to all of them, though: a stripe of red paint on their forehead, from ear to ear. It did not take much to guess that it was the distinctive mark of this tribe.

  We were following our escort across the open area to the big central hut—according to the professor it was commonly called a maloka—when a little boy walked up to Cassie and reached up to touch the tips of her blond hair. To our surprise, one of the warriors grabbed the boy and slapped him so hard that he fell on the ground.

  “Kú alawe manín!” he shouted in warning to the rest of the people. “Kú alawe!”

  Everybody took a step back. The women grabbed their children, and in the unsteady light of the fires, their expressions as they looked at us turned from intrigued to strangely wary.

  The dozens of fires spread throughout the open area danced eerily in the night as if they were part of an exotic dream which would disappear when morning came. Meanwhile, the whole village had come to view our improvised parade in the form of a corridor of whispers and cautious looks, although they kept at a distance from us, as the warriors’ shoves and warnings had imposed.

  The entrance to the maloka was guarded by two plumed warriors, who each carried a spear in one hand and a torch in the other. When we reached them, they crossed their spears, barring the entrance. An expectant murmur ran through the crowd.

  Suddenly all the chattering that had been following us from the moment we had been brought there stopped. It was replaced by a heavy silence, broken only by the crackling of the torches. I turned to Cassie and the professor with a look of interrogation. They both shrugged. They had no more idea what was going on than I did.