Running from the Devil (15 page)

By late afternoon, Sumner’s eyes burned bright, and the two spots on his cheeks expanded to cover his face and neck. Emma continued to march him through the jungle despite his rising fever. Each hour his cheeks grew more flushed and his eyes more glazed. The only thing that kept him going seemed to be sheer determination. Emma was familiar with the type. Endurance runners have the same undivided drive to push themselves against all reason. Except Sumner had a reason, a very good one. They could hear chopping sounds.

Emma knew from her many trips to search for medicinal plants that while the jungle foliage made it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead, it also magnified, rather than dampened, sound. It was a paradox she never could figure out. The chopping sounded close, but in reality the person making the sound could be miles away. While Emma knew this intellectually, she was having a hard time accepting it. Her adrenaline surged every time a sound echoed through the forest. Her mental state was deteriorating with each hour in the jungle.

Sumner stumbled, and this time he stayed down. He rolled onto his back and waved her off.

“I need a break,” he said.

Emma squatted next to him to wait. He had lapsed into his usual silence, but she felt compelled, finally, to break it.

“Your name is Cameron Sumner, isn’t it?”

He shot her his signature wary look.

“Yes,” he said after a long minute.

“Don’t worry, I’m not psychic or anything. I saw you hide your luggage from the guerrillas. When you left I retrieved it and read your business card. Southern Hemisphere Drug Defense.”

“I saw you at the airstrip. Why were you trying to get into the truck?”

“The Smoking Man had a spare field phone. I was trying to steal it.”

Sumner shook his head. “That was an incredibly risky move.”

“Thanks for diverting their attention to the capybara. I thought I was done for when that thing shot out of the forest and the woman screamed.”

“How did you manage to avoid capture in the first place?”

“The crash catapulted me out of the plane, free of the fuel.”

“Lucky you. That was a scene from hell.”

“Where were you thrown?”

“To the rear. I landed right in the group of guerrillas.”

“You didn’t have a chance,” Emma said.

“I was a damn sight better off than most of the others. I’m alive.”

Emma couldn’t argue with that.

“I’m Emma Caldridge.”

She didn’t give the usual smile that accompanied an introduction. Under the circumstances, smiling was unnecessary.

Thirty minutes later, Sumner dragged himself to a sitting position. After a few minutes sitting, he hauled himself up to standing.

They started again. A sheen of sweat covered him. Emma warred with herself over whether she should ask him to wade into the stream to lower his temperature, or whether she should continue to drive him forward, away from any pursuers. She chose to drive him forward. When he collapsed there would be time enough to work on bringing down the fever.

The heat rose to over ninety degrees. The path alternated between oozing mud and wet leaves. Emma plunged into a spiderweb, its sticky gossamer threads clinging to her face and hair. She saw the web’s maker, lurking at the edge. It was almost three inches across, black, and hairy.

“Ugh. Sumner. A spiderweb. I hate spiders!” Emma spoke louder than she’d intended, a mistake, because noise carried far in the jungle. She clawed at the web with her fingers. Her frantic movements alerted the spider. It scuttled sideways toward her.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Emma plunged forward so fast that she tripped over a root. She jogged another couple of feet, all the while brushing at the web that clung to her arms and face, and then hauled up short just inches from another web stretched in front of her.

Sumner banged into her back. He grunted.

“Sorry,” Emma said. “We’ll have to go around this one.”

She turned and came face to chest with Sumner. She looked up, and it took all her control not to gasp. It was as if Emma was staring into a death skull. Sumner’s face was gray. Drops of perspiration dotted his forehead, and rivulets of sweat ran down the sides of his face. His eyes had sunk into his head and dark, black circles ringed them. His lips were cracked and dry, strange because the air was filled with humidity and nothing in the entire jungle was dry, and when he exhaled Emma could smell the excess ketone bodies in his breath. She recognized all the symptoms of infection, dehydration, and malnutrition. Starvation and infection were causing his liver to oxidize his body’s fatty acids, a process accelerated by the strenuous pace she had set.

“Sumner, can you continue?” Emma whispered the question. He looked at her through eyes that were glassy with fever.

He nodded. Once. And then swayed a little. He straightened slowly. Emma turned and continued on, but now at a drastically reduced pace.

An hour later, his legs gave out. Fever consumed him. Emma dropped the backpack and set up the tent. They’d gone only about an additional six miles the whole day due to the lack of a machete. At around noon gunshots had echoed through the forest a lot closer than Emma had hoped. Sumner’s collapse couldn’t have come at a worse time. Tears ran down her face, and her hands shook. Having company had felt better at first, but now she couldn’t leave him, and she suspected that the guerrillas were close.

Emma stripped his shirt off and peered at the machete wound. The skin around the slice was swollen like a balloon and a dark, angry, red color. Pus dripped out of the slash. The wound smelled sweet, putrid, and thick, like decaying flesh. It was clear to her that Sumner would die unless she could find a way to draw the infection from the wound and hold his fever down while she did.

Emma stripped Sumner’s remaining clothes off and carried them to the stream. She submerged them in the water, wrung them out, and placed them over the branches of a bush in the sun. She wanted the sun’s rays to burn off any infection that remained on the clothing. She heard a loud buzzing noise. A nearby bush seemed to vibrate with the sound. Emma took a cautious step toward it. The sound intensified. When she reached the bush, she saw the sound’s source. A dead capybara lay next to the bush. Hundreds of blowflies covered the corpse. The black mass stayed in constant motion, the flies moving and battling one another for position. New flies hovered over the body, plunging into the heaving mess and flinging themselves back into the air. Several buzzed around Emma’s head, dive-bombing close to her face.

Emma batted at the disgusting insects. She waved her hand to knock them off the capybara’s body. It was then that she saw the maggots. The tiny, flesh-colored larvae writhed on the dead corpse, creating an illusion that the animal moved.

“Perfect,” she whispered. “You guys are coming with me.” She rooted around for a stiff leaf and a stick. She found both a few feet from the capybara corpse. She scraped the stick across the body, using the leaf to catch the maggots that fell off. The flies buzzed at her angrily, hitting her in the face as she worked. Her hands were full, so she resorted to shaking her head, making her hair flick at the angry insects in an attempt to keep them at bay. Sweat ran down her face and into her eyes. A horsefly bit her on the arm and she yelped at the sharp, pointed sting. She gagged at the smell that rose in a gaseous cloud from the animal, the same smell attracting the flies and maggots that she viewed as worth more than their weight in gold. When the leaf was full of maggots she bent the edges together to form a pocket, grabbed the wet clothes, and jogged back to Sumner.

He hadn’t moved since she left him, but his face had taken on an even darker red hue. Emma rolled him over gently. She took the first-aid kit from her backpack and unrolled the gauze bandage. She carefully opened her leaf over the machete wound. She knocked the maggots onto the wound, taking care to gently push them deep into the seeping slash. They attached almost immediately, sucking onto the inflamed flesh. She made sure that the youngest, smallest ones were the ones she inserted. She carefully wrapped the writhing mass in the gauze, loose enough to let air in, but tight enough to hold the wriggling worms against the cut. She knelt back to get a look at her work. The gauze undulated, but the maggots stayed in place.

She made a small fire, burning the neem-seed pods that she’d collected when she’d gathered the leaves. They smoldered, creating an antiseptic-smelling smoke that repelled the mosquitoes. Emma now viewed them as a secondary problem. Mosquitoes carried dengue fever and malaria, two diseases that posed the biggest risk to humans in the jungle, but Emma felt they created the most damage with their bites that itched like crazy.

Sumner tossed and turned and mumbled in his delirium. Emma found herself getting desperate again. She didn’t want to be left in the jungle alone, and she didn’t want to watch another human being die.

She laid the wet clothes over him, focusing on his forehead and the area around the wound. When she was done she sat next to him and stared at the fire. She stayed that way for hours, watching the flames lick upward. Thinking about Patrick. God hadn’t spared him, and it looked as though He wouldn’t spare Sumner, either. She wondered if she would be next to die, or if He would allow her to complete the important thing she’d come to Colombia to do. She needed to set right the tremendous wrong she had done. She didn’t want to die before she did.

The flame colors mesmerized her. The dancing shadows created by the light lent an eerie feeling to the night. She dozed, sitting up.

Emma jerked awake when she heard Sumner start to moan. He began thrashing on the ground. She leaped up to stop his violent movements, which threatened to dislodge the maggots. Even feverish, Sumner surprised her with his strength. She tried to pin his arms to the ground to stop him from flipping over onto his bad shoulder. He pushed himself off his stomach with his arms. He looked around wildly, then lowered himself back down and rolled over onto his back.

“Sumner, stop. You’re running a terrible fever from the machete cut.”

Sumner gazed at her, glassy-eyed.

“Where are they?” His voice was a whisper.

“I don’t know. Near, I think.” Emma found herself whispering back.

Sumner closed his eyes. He opened them again. “My shoulder burns.”

“It’s horribly infected. I’m treating it.”

“We need to keep moving.” Sumner sat up. The clothes fell off his chest onto the ground. He looked down at them, as if he didn’t understand what they were.

Emma placed her hands on his chest. “Lie down. On your stomach or the side opposite your shoulder.”

He put a hand on her face. “Thank you for saving me back there.”

“Lie down,” Emma repeated, keeping her voice soft. “I’ll take watch while you sleep.” Sumner lay back down. Within minutes he slept again. This time Emma dragged him into the tent.

The morning came too soon for Emma. She’d slept next to Sumner. A shaft of sunlight shot through a slit in the tent door and bored straight into her eyes.

She awoke with a groan. Every muscle ached. Her mouth felt woolly, and her lids were crusted with sleep. She scrubbed her fists into her eyes and focused on Sumner. He was awake, lying on his back, his head turned to stare at her.

“Good morning.” His voice was reedy thin.

“How long have you been awake?” Emma moved next to him and checked his forehead for heat. He was much cooler than the night before.

Sumner tried to shrug. He inhaled sharply. “My shoulder feels like it’s being stabbed with a million little knives.”

“The infection nearly killed you. I’m treating it.”

Sumner raised his eyebrows. “How?”

Emma hesitated.

Sumner’s gaze sharpened. “How?”

“Maggots. They’ll suck out the infection, eat the dead skin, leave the healthy skin alone.”

Sumner stared at her. He shifted slightly. “Did you say maggots?”

Emma nodded.

Sumner blanched. “I’m afraid to look.”

Emma smiled. “It’s covered by a bandage. You won’t see them.”

Sumner took a deep breath and turned his head. Emma watched him take in the gauze, which still undulated from the writhing bodies. He groaned.

“Ah, God, that’s disgusting,” he said.

“But it must be working. Your fever is much better.”

“It hurts.”

“That’s perplexing. I’m not sure why it would hurt. Maggots don’t bite, they only attach and suck. Perhaps the wound rests across a bundle of nerves.”

“How long?”

“Forty-eight hours. But trust me, they’re all that is between you and a massive, systemic infection. If they do their job, you should be infection-free soon.”

Sumner closed his eyes. “I do trust you.” In a few minutes, he was asleep again.

23

THREE HOURS AFTER HIS MEN LEFT TO KILL THE TALL MAN AND the diabetic passenger, Luis knew something had gone wrong. The three he’d sent were his best men, reliable in a way none of the other losers on his team could ever be.

He waved over Alvarado. “The men have not returned and it’s almost noon. You go in and find them. The tall man has done something!”

Alvarado’s reaction was quick. “Me? No! I have to watch sixty prisoners and thirty guerrillas, all without one brain between them. The tall man is dead by now, Luis. The men will return soon.”

Luis advanced on Alvarado. “I said go. What are you afraid of—El Chupacabra?”

“You know I am not. But who will watch these men when I am gone?”

Luis pounded his chest. “I will.”

Alvarado glared at Luis. “Fine. I will go. Just make sure that Manzillo doesn’t hear about me having to track more missing men. Last thing I need is more deserters.”

An hour later, Alvarado found the diabetic man’s corpse and a pile of discarded clothes. Thirty minutes after that, he found the naked, bound men in the forest.

He kicked each one in the head. They groaned through their gags. Alvarado yanked the piece of rag out of the nearest one’s mouth.

“Tell me what happened. And spare me from the El Chupacabra bullshit.”

“We were attacked—” The man’s explanation was cut short by Alvarado’s boot hitting him yet again.