Pray for Darkness: Terror in the Green Inferno (23 page)

Ben is running toward Brooke when another inhuman appears, blocking his path. Summoning all his strength, Ben rotates his hips, his elbow snapping forward and into the creature’s lower jaw. There is a hollow
clack!
as the metal plate in Ben’s elbow connects with the bone, and he watches in triumph as the mandible, already hanging by strings, is torn loose from the flesh. Kicking the wounded inhuman aside, Ben sprints across the clearing and slips his arm around Janie’s neck in a chokehold, pulling her away from Brooke. Janie stumbles and the two fall together in a tangled heap, Ben on his back and holding on tight as Janie’s claws tear at his forearm. Then Ernesto appears out of nowhere, dragging the machete’s blade across Janie’s throat. Her neck splits open in a bloodless smile, spilling a virulent black substance that instantly congeals in the poison air.

Janie squeals, tossing about in violent, dying spasms. Dragging himself out from under the thrashing body, what Ben sees makes his heart stop. Several feet away, Oscar lies in a bloody heap. He looks as though he’s been through a wood chipper and this is what came out on the other side.

While Cooper continues to struggle with the tribesman, Brooke crawls toward Auggie, who is sitting on the ground with his arms around his knees, rocking back and forth and muttering deliriously. On the opposite side of the clearing, blocking their path, three more inhumans advance upon them, their jaws clicking together in syncopated rhythm. Then all at once, the bigger one releases a shrill scream that is immediately taken up by the others.

This is it,
thinks Ben.
That’s their war cry. They’re going to charge us all at once.

But it doesn’t happen.

Amazingly, the creatures back away, retreating into the brush. One of the wounded ones hobbles along after them, but the other three, including Janie, are either dead or dying. As the inhumans back away, Cooper sags to the ground with his hands on his stomach. Seeing this, Auggie scrambles to his feet and runs to his aid. Lifting Cooper’s shirt he sees that the lacerations are only superficial, but it’s the fear that concerns Auggie, the blind fear that makes Cooper thrash at him hysterically as Auggie tries to quell the bleeding.

Brooke stares on and on at Janie’s body, seeing it, not seeing it, retreating somewhere deep within herself. Then someone is shaking her, calling to her. From some unfathomable distance, she hears the sound of her own name.

“Brooke!” Ben’s voice rises in its concern. “Brooke, snap out of it! Can you hear me?”

Momentarily, Ben’s voice pulls her back to the present, and there he is in front of her. Not a thousand miles away. Right there in front of her. Eyes wide, lips pressed firmly together, his face is tight with concern. She looks at him dazedly, her eyes unfocused, as though she has just awakened from sleep. Then she remembers the attack, her life-and-death struggle against Janie, everything. Flashing back to these things, the strength leaves her body and she collapses into his arms.

“Brooke,” he pleads. Holding her close, he can feel her body shaking all over. “Brooke?”

Past his shoulder, she notices something shining down through the trees, something that looks like a laser beam. All at once, the sun breaks through the clouds and morning arrives like a blessing, bringing warmth and precious light across the land.

Praying softly, Ernesto is kneeling on the ground with his hand on Oscar’s unmoving chest. Littering the ground around him are the mangled bodies of the inhumans. Their skulls crack open with a soft hiss, releasing rills of black liquid that steam and sizzle in the early morning light.

“I was wrong,” Brooke whispers. She begins to wail, her nails pressing deeper and deeper into his back. “I was wrong! Ben, I was wrong! I was so, so wrong!”

He strokes her hair, trying to calm her, but she is shaking so badly he can hardly hold her still. “Shhh,” he says. “It’s going to be okay…”

“You don’t understand…”

“Shhhh…”

The comfort of his arms around her, this sudden kindness amidst the horrors of death, causes the dam to break at last, and Brooke is overwhelmed by a torrent of emotion.

From an abyss of despair, she raises her head toward the golden sky and weeps.

Forty-seven

“I was wrong,” Brooke repeated with a look of frightened culpability. More than half an hour had passed since the attack, and her voice was still shaky. It was late morning, and they had just stopped to rest in a sunlit clearing not far from the ambush spot. After tending to their wounds, they sat down by the river to collect themselves. Their backpacks, mostly empty now, lay scattered around them, along with several spears they had salvaged. Four pairs of eyes watched her, four pairs of bloodshot eyes with little hope left in them. “I should have recognized it before,” she continued. “Their eyes; the way they move their heads. They’re practically blind, I think. They find their way by smell. Did you see the way they reacted as soon as they saw the sun coming up? The way their blood burned up in the light? They were afraid, or as close to being afraid as they can get.” She stopped to gaze into the jungle, her hands planted firmly around the shaft of a newly sharpened spear, and though she knew an attack by daylight was improbable, she refused to let her guard down, not even for a moment.

There was a heavy silence as the others processed this new information.

When no one spoke up, she continued: “I’ve been thinking—about what these things might be.” She paused, rubbing her throat, which bore a dark bruise in the shape of Janie’s fingers and hand. “There is a fungus that grows in different rainforests around the world. I read about it online. It infects certain types of bugs, like ants and spiders. It gets into their brains and—and—it uses them. Like puppets.”

“They used her,” Cooper said with disgust, unable to utter Janie’s name. “They used her as… as a decoy, in order to trap us. They knew that we’d see her and come running.”

Ben turned to Ernesto, who was eyeing the jungle as though trying to translate a difficult text. “Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

Ernesto had not said more than a few terse words since Oscar’s death. Now he turned to look at them wearily, shaking his head. “I have not heard of this ant. There are places in the jungle where no man has been, animals in the jungle no man has ever seen. If Brooke say it is possible, I believe her.”

“I have,” interrupted Auggie. “They’re called ‘zombie ants’—”

“Zombie ants!” barked Cooper. “You’re joking, right?”

Auggie ignored him. “That’s probably not the scientific term, of course, but that’s the gist of it. There’s a kind of fungus that infects them. I don’t remember what it’s called. Anyway, this type of fungus, it works like a parasite. It uses insects and sometimes spiders as hosts in order to spread to different parts of the rainforest. It uses the ant as a carrier to help it spread. The ant wanders around, confused, as the infection fills its head. Then it clamps down on a leaf where it stays till it dies. Afterwards, the infection bursts out of its skull, spreading the spore at just the right time.”

Ben snapped his head up suddenly. “Just like the monkeys,” he said. “That explains why they were hanging from the trees like that.”

“Wait, wait, wait…” Cooper put his hands on top of his head and moaned. “I saw something like that, like what Auggie was talking about, when we first arrived at the camp trail. I dropped my sunglasses and when I looked down, there they were. Bullet ants, I think they were. They were just sort of sitting there, bumping into one another like they were drunk.”

“I remember that,” Auggie said, his voice rising higher. “I was coming up behind you when you said it, but I thought you were joking…”

“But these are
insects
we’re talking about, right? Not people.”

Brooke looked at her hands, which were trembling, and then raised her head. “According to the article, the fungus uses the ants to spread its spore, so it can move to places it can’t normally reach. That’s how it survives. When you think about it, the function of any living organism is survival. Maybe the fungus, or the infection, or whatever it is, maybe it needed to spread farther than the ants could take it. That’s why it spread to the monkeys…and now people. Maybe it had to evolve to survive.”

“Maybe it’s still evolving,” Auggie said, staring off at the jungle in a visionary way.

“But why now?” Ben wanted to know. “How come no one’s ever seen these things before?”

“I think we have,” Auggie said, and his eyes glittered darkly.

The others fell silent. They looked at him questioningly and waited for him to continue.

“This jungle,” Auggie went on, “has a long history of unexplained disappearances. Some people believe there was once a massive, thriving civilization here, but no one knows who they were or what happened to them. Some of the world’s greatest explorers came here, never to be seen again.”

“What are you saying? That these things were responsible?”

Auggie licked his lips. “What I’m saying is that this thing, this infection, could have been around for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. All around the world we have these different cultures, right? Every culture has its own mythology of monsters or demons or the dead coming back to life, but they’re all variations of the same theme, and the message is always the same: you go out at night, and the bad things will get you—”

Cooper was shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Auggie. I just don’t see what—”

Auggie raised his hand to silence him. “Just bear with me, Coop. Imagine that there’s even a tiny kernel of truth in all these legends and myths. How is it that all these different cultures, who lived thousands of miles apart, all end up believing in the same thing? Not just that, but why bother building pyramids and temples that take decades to finish? The reason? To be closer to their God…”

“The sun,” Brooke whispered.

Auggie smiled at her. “Exactly. I think this thing has been around for a long time. Mankind just forgot about it, somehow. And it’s been watching us throughout the ages, waiting to return.”

“The Interoceanic Highway,” Brooke said breathlessly. “They’ve been cutting down hundreds of miles of forest. Maybe they disturbed something they shouldn’t have.”

“Maybe they just pissed it off,” Ben said firmly.

“Well, that would explain what happened to Felipe,” Auggie said in a reasoning voice. “He probably turned first, which means he was the first one exposed. But in Felix the infection took longer… you remember how his arm looked when he came back?”

“But why didn’t they turn at the same time?” Cooper wanted to know.

Brooke shrugged. “Let’s imagine that it’s just like any other type of infection. Meningitis, for instance, or Triple E. Just like a cold or the flu, it affects everyone differently. Depending on how strong your immune system is, some people die from it right away while others become
carriers
, spreading the infection before they even realize that they’re sick.”

Carriers
, Ben thought grimly.
What was it that Brooke had said that afternoon at the research center?
The jungle contains the disease and the cure?
But what was the cure for this particular disease? And just like that, it hit him. He, and Brooke and all the others… they were the cure. Deforestation. Mining. Poaching. Pollution. Humans came to the jungle and destroyed it, and now the jungle was using the humans to destroy each other. Because humans were more than just the disease—they were also the cure. If he and the others survived their ordeal in the jungle, they would bring the infection back to civilization where it would spread like a plague. The inhumans were using them as carriers in order to cure the planet of its greatest affliction: mankind. On the tail of that came another, even more horrific thought:
Later on, when people talk about how the apocalypse started, they won’t be talking about North Korea or the Middle East. They’ll be talking about right here. They’ll be talking about us…

But then another voice cut in, one that was equally rational but far more selfish:
Maybe you’re infected, maybe not. But one thing’s for sure… if you don’t go back, you’ll die, and that means everyone, including Brooke, will die right along with you… Yes, it’s risky, but you’ve got to go back…

In the end, he decided it was a risk he was willing to take. For them. For
her
.

“We have to get back to the research center,” Cooper said. “We have to warn people about this.”

Auggie picked up a pebble and hurled it across the clearing. “How?”

“I don’t know,” Cooper said, irritated. “But we have to, right?”

Auggie shrugged. Scooping up another pebble, he hurled it across the clearing where it landed against a tree with a hollow
tick
.

Ben looked at the tree for a few seconds, thinking. Then his eyes lit up, and he turned to Ernesto, hardly able to conceal his excitement. “You told us before that you used to build rafts with your father. You said you used Balsa wood from the jungle.”

Ernesto’s eyes began to brighten. “Yes…”

“So what if we make a raft? It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just something big enough for us to lie down flat and hold onto. Then we can float our way back to the research center, or who knows, maybe someone will even spot us sooner.”

Ernesto nodded. “Is very dangerous, but we have no choice now. We must hurry before the sun goes down again.”

Clutching her spear, Brooke rose to her feet. Towering over them like a warrior, her face hardened into a look of raw determination. “Let’s get to it, then. We’ve already wasted too much time.”

Forty-eight

Following the elevated riverbank, nearly two hours passed before they were able to locate the elusive Balsa, and even then they were able to find only two mature trees of a sufficient height and width to support their weight in the water. Taking turns with the machete, Ben and Ernesto chopped the trees into four six-foot sections while the others carted them down to the water’s edge to lay out the frame of their raft.

“We need more trees,” Ben said.

Ernesto placed a confident hand on Ben’s shoulder. “We will find.”

Showing Brooke how to use his knife to cut vines into thin strips, Ernesto explained how the logs should be lashed together. Leaving Brooke, Auggie, and Cooper to their work, Ben and Ernesto headed back into the jungle on a quest to find more wood. The work was painstakingly slow. By late afternoon the temperature had topped out just over 100 degrees in the shade, and their lungs labored in the humid air; it was like trying to breathe through a wet towel.

They returned more than an hour later, carrying a single log on their shoulders. Brooke, Auggie, and Cooper heard them coming and jumped to their feet with their spears held ready.

“It’s okay,” Ben called out. “It’s just us.”

The three by the water exhaled a collective sigh of relief, though the tension returned when they saw the lone tree that was unceremoniously dropped at their feet.

“All we could find…” Ben said, panting in the heat.

Brooke walked over to him and hugged him. “The leg still holding up?”

“Yeah…” He lifted her small hands, turning them over to inspect both sides. Her knuckles were bleeding; her palms callused. He remembered how she had painted her nails on their last night at the research center; the pretty red lacquer had long since worn away, and the tips of her nails were chipped and broken to the quick. “What happened to your hands?” he asked, rubbing them.

“Oh, just the usual,” she said. “You have to spend at least four days in the jungle to get them to look like this. Then you have to spend a whole day cutting vines and strips of bark to build a raft. Not to mention digging the occasional latrine. I call it the Amazon Manicure. Do you think it will catch on?”

Ben gave her a playful smile. “Let’s hope so. Maybe you’ll get rich, and then we can go on a real vacation. Somewhere tropical.”

“I would love that,” she said, her smile faltering a little. “You don’t know how much I would love that.”

Ben kissed her on the forehead. It felt so natural that he did it without thinking. Nuzzling up against him, Brooke’s lips pressed together in a slantwise smile. Standing on her toes, she kissed him softly on the lips.
Like two souls cut from the same cloth
, he thought.

“Come on,” she said, leading him back to where the others were gathered around the raft. She and Auggie had found several large water vines growing nearby, and with a prodigious effort, they were able to use Ernesto’s knife to cut the vines in half. They did this several times until they were able to fill each of their Nalgene bottles with the precious liquid. Now she held one of the bottles up to his lips. “Here, drink.”

Over the course of the last few days, the water vines had become increasingly more difficult to find, especially during their nighttime crossings, and Ben’s eyes widened comically at the bounty now presented to him. He did not stop drinking until the bottle was almost empty. After, he grinned almost drunkenly, feeling more alive and content than he had in days. “Thanks!”

“You must be super dehydrated,” Brooke followed with a look of concern. “You do look a little pale.”

“We will rest for little while,” Ernesto called out softly from the water’s edge.

“Okay,” Ben replied, and when he glanced down, he saw that Brooke was watching him uneasily.

She put her palm against his chest. “I can feel your heart racing,” she murmured. “Seriously, are you feeling okay?”

Ben laughed a little. “I’m fine. I was just dehydrated—that’s all.”

“Sit down. I’m going to check your bandage before you go.” The tone of her voice made it perfectly clear that this was not a request.

“Okay,” Ben agreed, “but first let me see if I can find one of my hydration tabs.” Kneeling, he began to rummage through the haphazard pile of gear. “Hey, Auggie-dog, have you seen the hydration tablets?”

Sitting at the water’s edge, Auggie jerked his head up. “No!” he shouted. “I’m all out!”

Muttering to himself, Ben turned his backpack upside down and dumped its contents on the ground. There was the rain poncho—ripped-up, balled-up mess that it was; about six feet of paracord, which he immediately set aside in case they needed it for the raft; the yellow waterproof bag that contained his video camera, which he’d completely forgotten about these past few days; Auggie’s other hiking sock, which he’d kept as an emergency bandage; the tube of DEET (he gave this a hopeful squeeze, but nary a drop came out); his headlamp (the batteries all but dead); his wristwatch; not much else.
Wait a minute
, Ben thought,
what’s that doing in here?

Picking up the wristwatch, he saw that it was still keeping time. Surprising, considering the abuse it had taken. Ben shook his head in disbelief. The damned thing had almost gotten them killed the other night when the alarm went off, betraying their hiding place to the inhumans. “Hey!” he bellowed over his shoulder. He took one last look at the watch and flung it into the woods with a look of contempt. “I thought you got rid of this fucking thing!”

Auggie looked up from the log where he was sitting, honing the tip of a spear with Ernesto’s knife. “Did you say something?”

Stuffing the length of paracord into his front pocket, Ben put the other items back where he’d found them. Though his body craved the salts and electrolytes, he had all but given up on the hydration tablets when, almost as an afterthought, he decided to check Auggie’s pack, just on the off chance that Auggie had misplaced them.

“Come on,” Brooke said impatiently. “I need to take a look at that bandage.”

“Just a sec.”

Unzipping Auggie’s backpack, Ben reached his hand past the balled-up poncho, which was still damp from the previous night’s downpour, past a few stinky articles of clothing, all the way down to the bottom of the pack. He had about given up hope when his fingers brushed the hard plastic tube for which he had been searching. Pulling the tube out from the bottom of the pack, he stared at it and frowned. Looking up, he saw Auggie approaching him with long strides from the other side of the clearing. In seconds, he had made it from one end of the camp to the other.

“What the fuck is this?” Ben asked in a near-shout, and the angry tone of his voice startled everyone to attention.

“Why are you snooping through my stuff?” Auggie demanded, snatching his pack from Ben’s hands.

“I asked you a question!” Ben roared.

Now the others were pressing around them, looking at one another in their confusion.

“What’s going on?”

“Is everything okay?”

“No,” Ben said, shaking the container of pills he was holding in his hand. “Everything is not okay.” He tossed the container to Brooke, who snatched it from the air, turning it round and round in her callused hands.

“Malarone?” she said, reading the label aloud. She looked at them through a cloud of confusion. “But I thought this was lost in the swamp.”

“Yeah,” Ben muttered. “So did I.”

Ben retrieved the container from Brooke and shook it in front of Auggie’s face. “What the fuck is this?” he demanded. “You told me they were ruined in the swamp.”

Auggie clutched the backpack against his chest but said nothing; there was something cold and furtive in his expression. His lips, twitching, settled into a lopsided sneer. Before, Auggie had always had trouble maintaining eye contact, even when he was speaking on a topic that truly interested him and in which he was particularly knowledgeable. Now his gaze was cool and unwavering as he looked at Ben with a newfound confidence.

Ben wanted to punch him, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Auggie flinched as Ben stepped toward him, ripping the backpack out of his filthy, mosquito-bitten arms. Saying nothing, Auggie watched in impotent rage as Ben turned the backpack upside down, spilling all its secrets onto the soggy ground for everyone to see. The poncho, several articles of clothing, an unopened package of AAA batteries, a headlamp, a small bottle of Excedrin, a blister pack of iodine tablets, a Bic lighter, and three protein bars littered the ground.

The truth blindsided Ben like a sucker punch, and there was nothing he could do to parry the blow. Now he saw how a rift had formed between him and Auggie, a fearsome black chasm almost too deep to comprehend. Auggie had changed the moment he first stepped foot in the jungle. Ben recalled how, at the research center, the once-timid boy would often venture off to be alone in the forest, spending more and more time in a self-imposed isolation. There were little things too, like the fact that he would dare to go to the bathroom by himself at night and how he always managed to pop up when you least expected it. This led Ben to another thought: had Auggie been spying on him and Brooke? Had he, like the inhumans, been stalking them all along from the green encroachments of the jungle? Ben thought it was possible. There was that time when he and Brooke had been alone on the steps of the research center, just about to share their first kiss, when Auggie interrupted, acting as though he had just happened along by chance. Now the terrible truth came to Ben; he tried to close his mind to it, but it was already too late. The pills. The wristwatch. The batteries. The missing food. It was all deliberate, all coldly calculated, all part of some twisted plan.

“Tell me why,” Ben said, eyeing him coldly.

Silence. Auggie’s upper lip twitched again, but he made no effort to respond.

“Auggie?” Brooke asked in a frightened voice.

“Cooper could have died!” Ben screamed into his face. “You could’ve gotten us all killed!”

Auggie glowered at them defiantly. “You think you’re prepared. You think you’ve done everything you’re supposed to, study hard, work hard, keep yourself out of trouble, and then—whoosh! Something arrives out of the blue that you never saw coming. Something you never even imagined. Something that’ll knock your little world off its axis. Something that’ll either change your life for the better or end it forever. Chaos—that’s what life is. Just total fucking chaos.”

Cooper began to buckle under the tension. “What are you assholes talking about?” he asked, laughing a little. “This is crazy.”

“Crazy is right,” Ben snarled between his teeth. He angled his chin toward Auggie. “Go ahead. Tell him. I want to hear you say it.”

Control, control!
thought Auggie.
Don’t cry. Don’t you dare fucking cry right now.
He cleared his throat, knowing that doing so caused a contraction of muscles that could help a person stop himself from crying. Swallowing hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, he pressed his lips firmly together and cleared his throat again. But it was too late. His emotional dam had broken, and now the tears spilled down his face. “Fuck you!” he bawled. “Some fucking friend you are, you know that?”

“Me?” Ben asked, his voice rising in indignation. “What the hell did I do?”

“What did you do?” Auggie barked a bitter laugh that seemed to lodge somewhere inside his throat. He threw his arms up in the air in frustration. “What did you do? What do you always do, Ben? Everyone loves you! You just set your mind to anything or anyone you want, and you always get it, don’t you? Like that night at the lodge. You knew I liked her, but you went after her anyway. Then you guys all paired off—oh, what cute little fucking couples you all made. Of course, no one stopped to think where that left me: the fifth wheel, as always. Glad to see it all worked out so fucking perfect.”

“Stop it!” Brooke screamed. “Just stop it! We can’t waste time arguing. Those
things
will come back for us. We need to finish the raft so we can all go home.”

Though the two boys were within striking distance of one another, they could not have been farther apart. Ben searched Auggie’s face—his thin lips, his sunken cheeks, his beady eyes—but nothing he saw looked familiar anymore. Auggie glowered back at him with an expression that bordered on hatred, and the young man Ben saw now was an absolute stranger.

Though he’d known Auggie for the better part of his life, the terrible thought crept in; the thought that he didn’t really know his friend.

In fact, Ben was pretty sure he didn’t know his friend at all.

***

As the day wore on, it became hauntingly clear that the raft would not be ready in time. Little more than a collection of six logs joined together to form something the size of a kitchen table, it would not support the weight of two people, never mind five.

It did not help that Auggie had abandoned his duties. Isolating himself by the water’s edge, he spent the remainder of the day sulking, tossing pebbles into the current and watching them disappear. As the sun began its slow descent, Ernesto and Ben returned from the forest with one last log, which they left on the ground beside the unfinished raft. There was no time left to even trim it down to size.

“Mmm, I have an idea,” Ernesto announced. “It is dangerous, this idea, but it is an idea that will help us through the night, I think.”

Ben, Cooper, and Brooke listened with interest as he laid out his plan.

***

Using Auggie’s secret stash, they replaced the dying batteries in Ben’s headlamp. Gathering their belongings, they waded out to a nearby sandbar that protruded from the water like a capsized boat.

And that was where they spent the night, spears in hand with the newly sharpened points directed toward the tree line. The moon was full and bright, but still their eyes could see a distance of perhaps only twenty feet. Several times they heard splashes in the gloom, and Ben flashed his light back and forth across the river, seeing nothing. Immediately their thoughts turned to Big Boy and the many other fearsome creatures that haunted the water, but Ernesto dismissed these things knowledgeably as the sound of fish breaking the surface. Several yards apart from the group, Auggie sat in utter silence with his knees drawn to his chest and his spear at his feet. Though Brooke and Ernesto had tried to engage him in small talk, he had not spoken a word since his blowout with Ben.