Don't Look Back (31 page)

Fortunato finally reached the base of the house, maybe ten yards away. He waved an arm to draw her attention, then pointed. She assumed that there was a hole drilled into the wall through which the wire carried.

He rose quietly and peered through the window into the back room, the one with the prayer rug. Refocusing, she noticed right away.

Rusted cans, clumped like grapes, were bunched at the base of each visible wall. A rudimentary early-warning system—trip the wire, the cans clatter together. Her eyes darted across the metal bouquets, and she realized that each was composed of a distinct type—soda cans, soup cans, hockey-puck-size tuna cans—ensuring a different timbre to the alert depending on which line was triggered. No wonder al-Gilani looked so relaxed in the other room waiting for their approach.

The wire at her ankle must have been stretched just below the tension point that would make the cans jump. She didn’t dare ease her leg back for fear that the movement would trigger a clank. Beads of sweat trickled down the sides of her neck, and she fought the urge to lift her hand to brush them away. She waited as Fortunato tiptoed silently back to her.

He gestured for her not to move, then reached down and pinched the wire, holding it in place. She took a deep breath and eased her foot away.

Painstakingly, he inched the wire back to its resting point. They stood a few feet from the wire, watching it distrustfully, as if it might attack if left unsupervised.

“Now,”
Fortunato whispered,
“what were you saying?”

As if on cue, al-Gilani stepped into the back room. His stare swept the window, and for an ice-cold moment Eve was sure he’d spotted them standing there in plain sight. But he moved to the prayer rug and crouched on his knees.

She didn’t hear Fortunato exhale but felt his breath change the consistency of the air. They watched al-Gilani there on his knees. His mouth moved rapidly as he prayed. It was mostly silent, but now and again his murmured Arabic was audible through the thin glass of the window.

He repositioned the Qur’an before his knees, then pulled a thin blanket over his head. His ghostly form rocked and swayed, trancelike. All around him the clumps of rusted cans lay dormant. Waiting.

Fortunato said,
“Now. We must go get Claire.”

Eve followed him around to the front of the house, on high alert for wires. They noticed one and moved over it with exaggerated steps. As they crept to the door, dread pooled in Eve’s gut, as pure and black as oil.

The knob was smooth and lockless. Fortunato rested his hand on it. Panic surged up Eve’s throat, threatening to choke off her air.

She reached up, clutched Fortunato’s shoulder. He paused. She had to fight out the whispered words:
“I can’t go in there. I’m sorry. I can’t do it.”

He looked into her eyes. Believed her.
“Then go around front. Watch through the window. If you see him rise, kick the trip wire to alert me.”

The knob gave the faintest squeak as he rotated it. The door swung inward, affording them a sliver angle of Claire on the floor. Her head snapped over at the movement, and her wild eyes grew wilder.

Eve held a finger across her lips. Fortunato set a stone to hold the door open, then eased inside, unfolding the steak knife.

Eve moved to the front of the house, mindful of the trip wire. Through the window she watched Fortunato working on the straps binding Claire to the board. But she could also see through the back doorway into al-Gilani’s bedroom, where the inhabited sheet bobbed and swayed. Acid licked the walls of her stomach. An urge to scream scrambled up into her throat, and she trapped it there, breathing around it.

Fortunato’s arms sawed silently. Claire waited. The ghost meditated. The sheet fluttered with his breath. Now and then the guttural utterance of Arabic drifted to Eve. She realized she was grinding the ball of her foot into the ground with agitation. The sawing and swaying and grinding seemed to go on forever.

Finally Fortunato peeled back the halved straps, setting them delicately on the floor. He stabilized the plywood with a knee so it would not clatter and helped Claire wriggle up to a sitting position, then standing. They crept across the floor, Claire loosening her gag.

Beyond the doorway in the back room, the ghost prayed, oblivious.

Eve met them at the front trip wire, pointing, her finger mashed across her lips. Silence was a necessity. Claire breathed in clumps and gasps, fighting back tears. Eve helped her across the wire.

And then they ran, one on either side of Claire, heading upslope toward the clearing with the fallen trunk, casting glances back over their shoulders to check on the praying form. Soon they were high enough that they lost the angle through the window into the back room.

They scrambled over the rotting log. Beyond, the toilet lay on its side in a spill of waste, washed over by the rains. They flew through the clearing onto the trail to the river, Fortunato now prodding Claire ahead of him to keep her speed up.

Claire shouldered first through the orchids and fell hard, her forearms skidding through the mud. She looked back at what had snared her ankle.

A trip wire.

Eve tracked its course into the brush, threading through eyelets, rising up a tree, running like a telephone line through the canopy back toward the canyon. Toward
him.

The acid flared to life again in her stomach. The roar of the river matched the roar between her ears. They all stared at one another for a frozen moment.

Fortunato lunged to untangle Claire’s foot, fighting the filament off her metal brace. He yanked her to her feet, and they worked their way onto the riverbank and then across the upper rim, luminous green water clawing up at them. The mud slid beneath their shoes. Eve’s legs throbbed; she could only imagine what Claire’s felt like. She pictured those cans jumping, al-Gilani flying up from beneath the sheet. His feet, sure and silent, speeding across the canyon floor.

They reached the zip line. Blessedly, the hand trolley remained where they’d left it. Eve all but hoisted Claire onto it. Claire said, “Wait, I—” but Fortunato hurled her out over the river, hard. She twisted and swung, her arms bent in a half pull-up to try to keep clear of the water. Her legs dangled limply, her feet catching some drag in the swells, but the momentum carried her across.

Eve risked a look toward the orchids. No movement at the main trail. The jungle crouched at their backs, all wavering leaves, concealing countless approach routes. Again she pictured al-Gilani’s footsteps flying across the mud.

Claire found her footing on the far side and whipped the hand trolley back across. Fortunato caught it with an expert stab of his fist and put it in Eve’s hands.
“You next.”

It felt craven not to object, but there was no time to argue, so she ran and leapt.

The crossing felt harder this time, or maybe she was just more exhausted. The water seethed underfoot. Her arms ached. She rocked violently on the line, her view going on horror-movie tilt. She could see Claire across on the opposite bank, kneading her hands in the fabric of her shirt, hunched forward.

As Eve winged past the midway point, Claire’s face transformed. The muscles bunched beneath her cheeks, and her skin hardened into a shiny hide, a mask of terror. Her gaze had gone wide, focusing past Eve on the far bank. Hanging on with all her strength, Eve couldn’t turn to see what was behind her, and this filled her with indescribable panic, the unseen spectacle like a sheet of flame across her back. Claire’s hands rose clawlike and tore at her hair.

Eve swayed on the line, rocketing toward her screaming friend, blind to whatever horror was unfolding behind her.

Chapter 41

Eve released the hand trolley too early, falling five feet onto her back and jarring the breath from her lungs. The pain came on as something removed, filed away for later consideration. She hopped to her feet beside Claire, whirling around, her eyes moving frantically to behold whatever sight awaited.

On the far bank, one hand hooked apelike over the zip line, stood al-Gilani. His bulky chest thundered with breath from the exertion of his run. Mud darkened his bare feet, his shins, his knees. He’d sweated through the thin cotton shirt, a dense mat of chest hair visible beneath. The glowing river uplit his face into that of a specter. He studied them without emotion.

Eve’s gaze pulled slowly down to the river itself.

Fortunato lay mostly submerged, pinned by the current against a rock, his torso arched at a severe angle across a broken back. His arms floated, pulled outward by the clear water. His head was twisted fifteen degrees further than possible, his eyes wide and unblinking even as surges lapped over them. Floating flowers and leaves had collected at the hollow of his throat. He reminded Eve of a painting she’d once seen in a textbook, of Ophelia lying dead and beautiful in the brook.

Her lungs finally released, raking in air with a screech. Across, al-Gilani stared at her evenly. He jostled the zip line abruptly, and it gave off an angry metallic twang. The hand trolley shuddered loose. It started to slide back across to him, but Eve grabbed it just before it sailed past her reach out over the water. She held it firm and glowered at him. Calmly, he stared back.

His hand tugged at the zip line now differently, testing it. It was sufficiently long and al-Gilani sufficiently heavy that it seemed implausible he’d be able to haul himself across without the hand trolley. But if he jerry-rigged a belt into a sling later, there was no telling.

Eve grabbed a skull-size rock and hammered at the clamp securing the zip line’s loop point around the trunk. Three, four blows bent it out of shape, and with the fifth the cable whipped free with an outer-space warble, slicing past her cheek and onto the dark waters like a cast fishing line. One end stayed tethered to the tree at al-Gilani’s side, the main length rippling serpentlike in the surges between them.

The whole time al-Gilani watched her.

Now his eyes lowered to consider the water. Eve stared down as well. The river looked furious; crossing would be hazardous in the dark.

“Fuck you!” Claire yelled. “Fuck you for taking me and dragging me here and tying me up, you fucking
animal
!”

It was impossible to read al-Gilani’s face, but he seemed faintly amused. Eve took Claire by the arm, started tugging her up the bank, but she kept screaming, tears falling from her chin.

“We have to move,” Eve said. Claire wasn’t listening, so Eve shook her. “We
have to
get back to the lodge before dawn. Or they leave without us.”

Claire stopped fighting her and limped along in her wake. At the first bend, Eve looked back to see al-Gilani down at the water’s edge, testing the seething river with a toe. Tackling the violent current and the rocks at night promised an injury. She left him behind, considering his options.

They passed the crumpled bridge and the phosphorescent spout. At the next turn, Claire’s legs started failing. “I won’t be able to make it back,” she said. “Not before morning.”

“There’s a burro just ahead. You can ride. You need to keep on.”

Claire did.

They reached the spot and broke through into the jungle, the moonlight diffused by the canopy into tiny bits scattered like broken glass across the floor. Eve pushed forward eagerly.

Ruffian was gone.

The branch to which Fortunato had tied him was snapped, twirling from a strip of intact bark.

The night crushed in on Eve.

“No,” Claire said. “No, no, no.”

Eve tugged the dangling branch, and it came free in her hand. She threw it down. Deep breath. “He can’t have gone far. We have to look.”

Claire sat on the ground. “I can’t. I can barely move.”

“At daybreak we’ll be left for dead,” Eve said. “After what I risked, after what
Fortunato
risked…” Her voice cracked. She thought of those floating flowers gathered in the hollow of his throat.

“You don’t know what I went through.”

“Right now I don’t
care
what you went through,” Eve said. “Start looking.”

“It’s useless,” Claire said. “I just need to sit here.”

Eve looked down at her. “If you sit, you die.”

Claire glowered at her. Then she lifted her hand to Eve.

They grasped hands around the wrists, Eve pulling her to her feet. Keeping within eyeshot of each other, they moved between the trunks, searching for broken twigs, trampled bushes, hoof prints, anything.

Claire took a step back and shouldered into a giant prop root to rest. A black mass the size of a beach ball pulsed in the shadow of the root next to her legs, the sight cinching off Eve’s breath.

“Don’t. Move.”

Claire’s calf was nudged up against the black mass. “Now you
don’t
want me to—”

“Don’t
move
!”

Eve crept forward a few steps, Claire tracking her focus. The ball clarified as an organic mass, composed of hundreds of thousands of living parts.

Sweeper ants.

A roost of them, gummed together, oversize mandibles interlocked to hold the colony together in defiance of gravity. Mating? Resting? Either way, one step in the wrong direction and Claire would be embedded in the living nest. A few of the ants scattered free from the grouping, scurrying onto her bare leg.

Eve seized Claire’s wrist and jerked her forward. At her movement the ball collapsed. It melted into life, spreading like a scoop of ice cream dropped on a griddle. Claire yelped and struck at her ankles. Eve tugged her away from the banyan, both of them swatting at their limbs, shaking off ants, exoskeletons crunching beneath their shoes. The ants grew sparser with every stride the women took. At last they outdistanced the swarm, but still they ran for a while before slowing. Finally Claire stopped and put her hands on her knees, jerking in quick inhalations. Beside her, Eve struggled to catch her breath, too.

She gave a silent prayer of gratitude that she’d noticed the roost, as Fortunato had noticed the termite nest earlier. It occurred to her that maybe, watching him read the jungle these past two days, she’d learned from him without being aware that she had. And she thought about how his maturity had amplified out here beyond the lodge, how she’d seen in his face intimations of a grown man—the grown man that he’d never have a chance to become. As they continued on, she railroaded her mind back to the humid here and now.