by Jeff Strand
“You’re not going to turn a piss break to your advantage,” said Jasper. “You can hold it or you can go in your pants. I don’t care either way.”
“Oh, I’ll bet you care a little, you naughty boy.”
Connor cried out. The bushes rustled, and he emerged, covered with inch-long ants that he was frantically trying to brush off. Steve and Ernest both turned to look at him. Jasper, clearly sensing that this was the kind of moment where a guy like me might try to escape, held up his machete to make sure I knew he’d anticipated my thought process.
“Get ‘em off me! Get ‘em off me!” Connor shouted.
“Oh, dear, those are bullet ants,” said Henrietta. “It’s literally the most painful sting you can get from an insect.”
Connor screamed in pain.
Henrietta nodded. “Yep, that’s the right reaction.”
Ernest reached out to help brush them off.
“You won’t want to use your bare hands,” said Henrietta. “They’re called bullet ants because their sting feels like getting shot by a bullet.”
“It hurts!” Connor wailed.
Ernest used the dull edge of his machete to try to get them off. Connor slapped at them, almost blubbering now. I saw one crawl up onto his neck then go around to the back. I didn’t actually see it crawl down the back of his shirt but I like to think that it did.
I wasn’t timing the process, but it took wonderfully long for Ernest to declare Connor ant-free.
“Oh God, oh God, it just hurts so bad,” said Connor.
“Don’t worry,” said Henrietta. “The pain should go away in twelve to twenty-four hours.”
“Shut up!”
“What? I’m giving you useful information. You’re not going to die, and you’re not looking at an eternity of torment. I’d think you’d be happy to hear that.”
“It hurts!”
“Did one get on your willy? Oh, that would justify the shrieking. You’d better take it out and let everybody have a look.”
“I told you to shut up!”
“Don’t get mad at me. I’m not the one who stung you dozens of times.”
“Enough,” Jasper told her.
“I apologize. I should’ve warned him not to lean against a tree or whatever he did to get all of those bullet ants on him. I could’ve saved him a lot of needless suffering. So, just for everybody’s information, he’ll probably start shaking. That’s normal when you’ve got bullet ant venom coursing through your veins. He might get nauseous, so don’t put him on any amusement park rides until that clears up, and he might get a fever, so don’t put your hand on his forehead unless you don’t mind it getting warm. And he might puke. I don’t know how the rest of you feel about watching somebody vomit, but I don’t like it at all. I hope you didn’t have a colorful breakfast.”
Connor started to shout something at her, but instead he contorted his lips.
“Oh, crap,” said Henrietta. “Did one get in your mouth? That’s not good at all. That’s no fun. Yeah, you’ll want to spit it out before it stings your tongue.”
Connor spat a couple of times. Then he dug around his mouth with his index finger and thumb, finally pulling out a squashed ant and flicking it away.
“There could also be a speck of paralysis,” said Henrietta. “So you’ll want to be ready for that.”
“One more word and I’ll kill you,” said Jasper.
Henrietta nodded.
“Connor, we can leave you here and hope we find you on the way back, or you can keep walking with us. What do you want to do?”
Connor just wept.
“Hey! Listen to me! Do you want us to leave you here?”
Connor wiped his eyes with his swollen hands. “No. I’m coming.”
“Then let’s get moving. We can’t afford any more delays.”
We started walking again. I honestly felt kind of bad for the poor guy, and I’m not sure if that paints me in a positive or negative light. He whimpered a lot as we walked, but I couldn’t blame him.
“Hey, uh, Connor?” said Roger. “You’ve got a blue frog on your shoulder.”
Henrietta glanced at it. “That’s a poison dart frog.”
Connor grabbed the frog and flung it away.
“Okay,” said Henrietta, “that’s the opposite of what you should have done. They secrete the poison through their skin. I personally would not have touched the frog with my bare hand, but I’m a prisoner and I’m not really in a position to give you orders.”
“I told you to shut up,” said Jasper.
“He’s grabbing poison-secreting frogs with his bare hands! He’s a danger to himself. What did you want me to do, wait for him to lick it?”
“Lick it?” Roger asked.
“Oh, don’t pretend you’re not aware of licking hallucinogenic frogs.”
“I’m really not.”
“Shut the fuck up!” said Jasper. “The next time somebody talks without being asked a direct question, they die, no questions asked.” He seemed to immediately realize what a stupid sentence that was, but his expression dared us to call him out on it.
We once again resumed walking. It sucked that Jasper had been so attentive, because if I couldn’t use Connor being covered by stinging ants as a distraction, what could I use? Henrietta pissing him off so much that he made a crucial mistake? Seemed unlikely.
I kind of felt like my master plan was going to be to keep walking, praying that we’d find the ruins, and if Jasper finally reached his breaking point...well, we were going to have to immediately attack and hope we didn’t lose this incredibly lopsided battle. The odds were against us even if you left out Connor, but I didn’t think we’d have another choice.
Connor fell over.
By Jasper’s rules, it was time for him to get a machete blade to the neck, and I could tell that Henrietta desperately wanted to make a smartass comment to that effect. But she kept her mouth closed.
Connor got back up and we continued.
“Hold on,” he said. “I’ve gotta puke.”
“Puke while you walk,” said Jasper.
“I’m serious.”
As I looked back, Connor veered off our path, doubled over, and vomited. Then he fell to his knees and vomited again. And then he cried out in pain.
A snake slithered away from him. Wow. We were having amazingly poor luck with those things on this trip.
“What kind of snake was that?” Jasper asked.
“I don’t know,” said Ethan. “A big one.”
“Do you know?” Jasper asked Henrietta.
She nodded.
“What kind was it?”
“Pit viper.”
“So he’s basically dead, right?”
“I’d say so, yeah.”
Connor got back up. He had vomit on his knees. “I’ll be okay,” he said. “I can make it.”
“He can’t make it,” said Henrietta.
“You answered my direct question, so now you’re back to shutting up or I’ll kill you.” Jasper sighed. “It’s over for you, Connor. Do you want us to leave you here to die of the poison, or do you want us to put you out of your misery?”
“I want to come with you!”
“That wasn’t one of the choices.”
“I’m feeling a little sick, but I’ll be all right. I don’t even need time to rest. Let’s go.”
“You’re not even looking directly at me,” said Jasper. “How many copies of me are you seeing?”
“Three, but that doesn’t matter. I’m ready to go. Let’s do this.”
“Again, do you want us to leave you behind or do you want us to put you out of your misery?”
“I don’t want to be hacked up by machetes.”
“We’d use a gun.”
“Just...just leave me. I’ll catch up.”
“If we leave you, it’ll be a slow, agonizing death. Is that what you want?”
“No,” said Connor.
“You deserve to die with dignity. Who wan
ts to do it? Ernest? Steve?”
Steve’s face lit up so much that I expected him to wave his hand in the air and go “Ooh! Ooh! Choose me! Choose me!” Instead, he simply said, “I’ll do it.”
He set down his machete and took a gun out of his backpack. As he did this, everybody stepped away from Connor, leaving him standing alone behind us. Again, this would have been another prime opportunity for an escape attempt, but Jasper seemed ready for it.
“Any final words?” Jasper asked.
Connor nodded. “Please don’t kill me.”
Steve shot him in the knee. Connor screamed. Before he could fall over, Steve shot him in the other knee. Connor dropped to the ground, landing on his knees, which was presumably unpleasant. He shrieked until Steve shot him in the forehead. He toppled over, dead.
“What the hell was that?” Jasper demanded.
“What?”
“Why’d you shoot him in the knees first?”
“I dunno. Felt like it.”
“You added to his suffering!” said Ernest.
“Oh boo hoo. He suffered for an extra three seconds. Cry me a river.” Steve didn’t even try to hide his grin.
“That was messed up,” said Jasper. “Don’t do anything like that again.”
“Okay. You’re the boss. I figure, his knees hurting for a moment doesn’t compare to what he’s going through in Hell.”
“Seriously, that was a psychotic thing to do. Keep those impulses in check.”
“I said okay.”
“I don’t like that the numbers are even,” said Ernest.
“Two of us have our hands tied behind our backs,” said Roger. For a second I was horrified by Roger breaking the “no speaking” rule, but Jasper seemed to have forgotten about it.
“Still, I think we should take out one of them. What do we need all three of them for?”
“Nah,” said Jasper. “What if we get chased by cannibals? Wouldn’t it be nice to shove them to the ground while we run away?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Anybody want to say a few words to pay their respects to Connor?”
Nobody did.
Jasper shrugged. “Then let’s get this show back on the road. And Andrew, if you don’t mind me being blunt, I don’t think you’re contributing much. In fact, I’m really starting to believe that you’re just jerking me around.”
“I’m not.”
“Uh-huh. Well, guess what? You’ve got half an hour to prove your worth. If we’re still wandering around by then, it’s execution time for you, and we’ll work something else out.”
“How does that benefit you?” I asked.
“It’s not your problem. Your problem is making sure we keep going in what you claim is the right direction. Your thirty minutes start now.”
So now I had my plan. In twenty-five minutes, if we hadn’t found the ruins, I’d attack the bad guys and hope it all worked out okay. Of course, I didn’t have anything to keep track of time, but I hadn’t seen Jasper start a timer, so he was probably just going by an estimate. Maybe twenty minutes was better. When I felt like twenty minutes had passed, I’d attack.
This was going to suck.
About ten minutes later, the area in front of us looked like it was clearing up. A couple of minutes after that, the path we were forging opened up to reveal a pond, the size of, I dunno, two basketball courts.
A circular stone wall protruded from the water, with maybe half of it above the surface. Other parts of the stone structure were within the circle. It was hard to tell what this had originally been, but if we were looking for ruins, these sure as hell seemed to be ruins!
I couldn’t believe it. I’d used the compass correctly, picked the right direction to walk, and (most likely) seriously lucked out.
That said, I hadn’t expected the ruins to be in the middle of a pond. That seemed like something that might have been nice to include on the map, though to be fair to the pirate Erik Bestard, the pond might not have been there over a century ago.
“Gentlemen,” I said, taking off the backpack and dropping it onto the ground. “I think we’ve arrived.”
Jasper grinned. “Admit it. You were terrified that we wouldn’t find it, weren’t you?”
“Sweating bullets.”
“Now what?”
“The map said ‘The key lies within the ruins.’ So, uh, I guess we look for a key.”
Everybody stared at the pond for a moment.
“That’s it?” asked Jasper. “That’s all we have to go on?”
“Yeah.”
Jasper turned to Ernest. “Apologize to me.”
“Why?”
“I said, apologize to me.”
“I’m sorry. What did I apologize for?”
“I don’t want to splash around in that nasty, parasite-filled water, do you? Who knows what lives in that muck. You wanted to kill one of them, but since we didn’t, we can send both Roger and Henrietta out there to look for the key. So you owe me an apology for suggesting that we kill one of them. It was a terrible idea. I’m glad I overruled you.”
“Ah, yeah, okay, I get what you’re saying.”
Jasper clapped his hands together. “Roger? Henrietta? This is your chance to be useful. Go find us a key.”
Chapter Sixteen
Roger's Side
Hey, it’s your buddy Roger Tanglen! I finally get to chime in on one of these narratives. I did get to contribute that other time, but that was a transcription of stuff I was saying into a tape recorder during the actual experience. This time I’ll have the opportunity to perfectly express myself, instead of relying on whatever babbling I was doing in real time when I thought I was doomed.
The fact that I’m writing this is kind of a spoiler that I survived, but it’s like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s tagline: “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” What will be left of me? Enough to type up this chapter, in theory, unless I’m using voice recognition technology.
I’d really like to devote some space to constructive criticism about how I was portrayed in prior retellings of our adventures (and, yes, this one as well) but we’re well past the halfway point and I don’t want to disrupt the momentum any more than I already have. So I’ll just do what I’m being paid an extremely unimpressive sum of money to do and pick up right where Andrew left off.
My first thought when Jasper said “Go find us a key,” was “Have you lost your effing mind?” The ruins were mostly underwater. Unless the key was just out there sitting on one of the chunks of stone, I didn’t see any way we could find it without scuba gear or a metal detector.
I didn’t express this thought, because Steve, guessing that we’d protest, had already pointed a gun at me. I didn’t want to get shot in the knees and the head like poor Connor (kudos to Andrew for having the good taste not to describe the way his brains blasted out of the back of his skull) so I just nodded.
“You’ve got to untie my hands first,” I said.
I honestly thought that Jasper was going to tell me to swim around a pond and find a tiny little key with my hands tied behind my back, but he wasn’t quite that impractical. Jasper untied my hands while Ernest untied Henrietta’s. Steve kept the gun pointed at us as if to say “Go on, try something, I dare you. I’m begging you. Give me a reason to shoot you. Any reason at all.”
Henrietta and I walked over to the edge of the pond.
I considered removing my shoes, then I remembered that I didn’t want my feet to get slashed apart by objects I couldn’t see in the murky water. Better to walk around in wet squishy shoes than to be bleeding from 20+ lacerations.
“That’s really all we have to go on?” I asked Andrew. “Find a key in the ruins?”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Credit where it’s due: Andrew looked genuinely upset that I was being forced into this, and I’m positive that if Jasper weren’t keeping him alive because of his duties as the guy who knew what the map looked like, he would’ve gone into this nast
y-ass pond in my place.
I glanced over at Henrietta. “What kind of horrible stuff do you think’s in that water?”
“I think it will be fine.”
“No, it won’t. You’ve been Ms. Worst Case Scenario this whole trip. Is there anything I should know?”
“I wouldn’t drink any of it. That’s about all I can say.”
“Great.”
“You go clockwise,” Henrietta said. “I’ll go counter-clockwise. We’ll meet on the other side. Don’t bother doing a thorough investigation on this pass. Just get a general idea of what we’ll be searching.”
“Sounds good.”
We stepped into the gross water and went our separate ways. The ruins certainly didn’t look like any tourists had been here in the past century. There was slime a-plenty. Truthfully, if there was a key, it had probably turned to rust and disintegrated long before we got here, but I’d worry about that when we were on our ninth hour of searching and hadn’t found anything yet.
Around the perimeter of the ruins, the water came up to my waist, and each step was difficult because my feet sunk into muck. I tried to search for anything unusual, like perhaps an etching of a key with the words “Look Here!” but I saw nothing to give any indication that I was on the right track.
Henrietta and I met on the far side. “Any luck?” she whispered.
“No. You?”
She shook her head and lowered her voice even more. “Sound carries over water, so talk very quietly, and don’t react. Make it look like we’re working out a searching strategy. I’ll point to different spots, and you nod, and you can also point to some spots and I’ll nod. Okay?”
“Are you going to suggest that we run?”
“No. You wouldn’t leave Andrew behind, I’m sure.”
“Correct. And I don’t know how we can fight back, unless we throw pond muck at them.”
“I’m not talking about a plan for escape right now,” said Henrietta. She glanced over at where Andrew and our captors stood. “Let’s keep moving and searching.”
We began to slowly search the parts of the perimeter that were above water.
“Do you remember when you were checking out that skinned body?” she asked.