Insects: A Novel (21 page)

72

While the men
were gone, the women had little to do. Professor Azevedo sat against the cab in one corner minding his own business while the women disassembled the makeshift shelter, so they had room to move. By the time the men were out of sight, their nervous energy gave way to talk. At first, they avoided negative comments, so they focused on what they would do once they found high ground. Then Alison Peeples wondered whether they would be rescued.

“You know,” she said, “am I not right, Dr. Azevedo, you talked to your assistant, and he knows we need help?”

Azevedo looked up and nodded. “Yes, he knows we are in trouble.”

“Well, there you go,” Peeples said, optimistically. “There’s probably someone already on the way.”

“Yeah,” Cross said, tentatively. “The only problem is how will they find us?”

“Dr. Azevedo gave him the coordinates, didn’t you, Professor?”

The old man nodded and smiled.

“See! All they need are the coordinates, and they got ‘em.”

“You know, I wanna believe that,” Stephanie Rankin said. She’d taken several surreptitious sips of gin and seemed relaxed. “But, you know, we’re still here, and it won’t be long before it gets dark, and I can’t imagine anyone would be looking for us in the dark.”

“Okay, so what?” Peeples said. “Maybe they find us tomorrow.”

“If we move, which is what the guys are trying to do, how will they know where we went?”

“Yeah,” Peeples said thoughtfully. “I guess it depends on how far we get.”

“Which is why maybe we should just stay here.”

“We can’t,” Cross interjected. “If the water gets much higher or faster it might push us off the road. That’s real trouble.”

“Like we’re not in real trouble already,” Rankin sniffed, frowning.

“I get that,” Cross said. “We’re all scared, okay. So what? We still need to do what we can to get through this. Focusing on our fears makes things worse.”

“I’m not focusing on my fears.”

“Yes you are,” Peeples said defiantly. “What do you call what happened last night?”

Rankin gave her a puzzled look.

“What happened?”

“You’re saying you don’t remember?” Cross asked.

Rankin statued for a moment. She searched her memory. Nothing there.

“Yes, yes. Really, I don’t remember anything from last night.”

“Really?” Peeples said accusingly. “That’s convenient.”

“Yes, really. Why? What happened last night? Tell me.”

“This is going nowhere,” Cross said. “We need to focus on important stuff, like pooling our food. The rest of it. You know, the stuff you’ve been holding back. I know I have.”

“What about the guys? You think they’ve been holding back?”

“Of course, they have,” Cross said. “We should check their packs, too.”

“It’s the least we can do for ‘em,” Rankin chirped.

Their anxiety relieved for the time it took to scavenge the food, the three women used binoculars to keep their eyes on the men.

“You know,” Rankin said, “I feel safer with men around? Isn’t that silly?”

“It’s not silly,” Peeples said. “Physically, they are stronger. It makes sense. So, yeah, I feel the same way. But don’t tell them that.”

73

With the drum
tipped on its side and floating, the men pushed it out of the shed and started the return trip to the truck. With Duncan leading the way, Boyd and Johnson held fast to the drum and struggled to guide it against the moving water. The water was too high to take normal steps, so they shuffled their way toward the truck, careful to keep the fuel from spilling.

They couldn’t help but notice snakes floating in the water along with the current, which unnerved Boyd more than he had thought possible. He shivered when he saw one, even though they were no closer than fifty feet. Johnson tried to calm Boyd after he pushed too hard on the drum, which caused it to begin to roll and develop a mind of its own. Boyd tried to counter the roll, but he lost his hold, and it suddenly came about in the current, breaking free. Like an inflated ball, it began to outdistance them as they shuffled after it.

“Grab the damn thing!” Boyd shouted, but it was out of reach.

Duncan lunged at it but couldn’t gain a hold. Suarez dropped the lantern he carried, dove into the water and with several strokes caught up to it. Fighting the current to keep it from getting away, he worked his way in front of it. Leaning against it, his feet pressing into the mud, he struggled to resist it. With each roll, fuel spilled into the water, releasing a pungent odor.

Momentarily underwater, Duncan regained his footing and, as he and Johnson converged, they managed to grab hold of the lip on each end just as the drum was about to roll over the slightly built Suarez. Quickly, they turned the drum so that the bottom end faced the current. Boyd joined them, and they continued in a tightly packed group.

With the four men pushing the drum, and the women shouting encouragement from the truck, they concluded their trip to the shed with handshakes, fist bumps and wary eyes on the rising water.

74

Getting the diesel
out of the drum posed no less of a problem than getting it to float. The drum was less than half full, heavy and with only the smallish opening they’d made on the side. Standing it on end, the fuel did not reach the hole.

“Why did we cut the hole in the middle?” Boyd wondered aloud.

“Can’t we cut another one?” Hamel asked.

“With what? We left the tools in the shed.”

“Can we lift it?” Duncan asked.

“I don’t know. It’s pretty heavy,” Boyd said. “Maybe, if we all got under it.”

“If we could lift it on the bed, we’d be able to roll it so we could pour the diesel into the cans,” Duncan said.

The water was deep enough that as they stooped to get their hands under the submerged end of the drum their heads were nearly submerged. Suarez, the smallest of the group, was under water. At first, they struggled against the suction of the muck. Once they got the drum off the ground, they nearly lost it as the diesel sloshed inside. Finally, with all their strength, they managed to get one edge of the drum onto the truck bed. From there, they rolled it on its end until only a small part of the edge hung over the bed.

The women cheered, and the men once again high-fived themselves. Boyd remained on the ground while the others boosted themselves onto the truck and carefully tilted the drum so that they could slowly fill a pair of gas cans that Boyd poured into the driver side fuel tank. He’d lost count of the number of cans he’d emptied, and the tank was half full. Johnson and Duncan stood the drum on end to keep it from rolling around when the truck was moving. While the others waited expectantly on the bed, with Azevedo in the cab, Boyd pulled himself out of the water and into the heavily worn and duct-taped driver’s seat.

“Let’s get moving,” Duncan said, slapping the top of the cab several times.

75

Carvalho and Santos
waved and shouted as Captain Juarez steered his boat toward the cabin. Daniel Rocha watched from the deck as Juarez inched away from the main channel and suddenly came to a stop as the boat scraped against the river’s bottom that several days ago had been Barbosa’s landing. Juarez cut the engine and tied a rope around a tree.

“How deep is the water here?” he shouted at the two men watching from the cabin.

They shrugged.

“Don’t know,” Santos said. “Last time we were here, it was dry.”

“Probably not more than a half meter,” Carvalho offered.

“Idiots,” Juarez whispered under his breath. Using a gaffing pole, he plunged it into the water.

“Looks like he’s right,” he said to Rocha. “Maybe it’s up to our knees.”

Shoeless, they lowered themselves over the side, holding onto the gunwale as they sank into the ankle deep mud. Rocha nearly lost his balance as he lifted one foot.

“Wish I had something to keep my balance. This is slippery stuff and keeps trying to suck you down.”

“Wait a minute,” Juarez cautioned as he clambered onto the deck.

“Think this will help?” he said, handing the gaffing pole to Rocha.

“Yeah, that should work. What about you?”

“I’ll find something.”

Armed with the remnants of a two-by-four pulled from the engine compartment, Juarez dropped into the mud, and together they made their way to the cabin, soaking their shorts in the process.

Santos greeted them like long lost friends and offered them beverages and snacks. Following a moment of fellowship, Santos and Carvalho summarized their story, after which Rocha peppered them with questions about Azevedo and the expedition. Rocha thought the answers were vague and unsatisfying. They couldn’t even tell him how many people were in the group, but they agreed to help find them.

“That’s the least we can do under the circumstances,” Carvalho said, adding quickly, “in the morning. It will be dark soon.”

As anxious as he was to find the professor, Rocha agreed, “At first light.”

76

The young guide,
tethered by rope to the front bumper, led the way, using a palm branch that he stripped of leaves to help keep the ancient truck centered on the road. He used the palm to feel the edges of the road. The water was knee high on Suarez, bathed in the dull light of the search lamp mounted on the passenger side door. The dashboard lights gave the cab an eerie green cast. The single working taillight gave the water a reddish glow. Everything else around them was either impenetrably black or, where the moonlight found a way through the canopy, immersed in shadows. Occasionally, Carlos Johnson swept the beam of his flashlight on a three hundred and sixty-degree tour of their surroundings. The light was effective out to fifty feet but reflected hundreds of feet away from the eyes of unknown creatures. They guessed that the eyes belonged to jaguars or giant black
caiman
. Their imaginations were beginning to run away from them, again.

Boyd’s hands looked bloodless as he squeezed the steering wheel. With every bump, the front wheels twisted to one side, and it was up to him to prevent the steering wheel from spinning and leading them off the road. He sweated profusely, his eyes glued to Suarez, who was all that stood between them and disaster in a ditch.

Professor Azevedo, sitting next to Boyd, steadied the passenger side searchlight and offered words of encouragement, congratulating the young men on keeping the truck on the road though they moved so slowly that the speedometer suggested they weren’t moving at all. The constantly moving water filled the air with a swishing sound not unlike a distant waterfall. Carried along was a cascade of debris, mostly forest detritus stirred up by the current.

Maggie Cross drew close to Duncan, who, from his post standing behind the cab, watched Suarez struggle to keep his balance. They were going too slowly, he thought, but given that they could barely see the road, he saw no alternative. His greatest fear at the moment was of rising water. If it got too high, the truck would end up downstream, and that would end any chance of finding higher ground.

Cross put her hand on his and smiled demurely. He smiled at her.

“Are you afraid?” she asked quietly.

He sighed.

“If you mean, am I worried, yes, I am.”

“I’m not afraid to say that I’m as scared as I’ve ever been,” she confessed. “I know some of the others are, too. This is all too much.”

“Oh, yeah, I agree with that,” he said, looking at her face in the dimness. “I wish we weren’t here. Definitely. But we are, so there’s no point in giving in to fear. We have to focus on things we can do to help ourselves, and at this point that seems to be riding this tortoise until we can’t ride it anymore.”

“You think that will happen?”

Duncan gave her a puzzled look.

“I mean, do you think the truck is going to run out of gas?”

“It could. Or it could fall off the road. If anything, that seems to me to be the most likely negative,” Duncan said.

“What would we do then?”

“Hopefully, get out and walk alongside our guide.”

“We’d probably make better time,” George Hamel said snarkily. He overheard everything and insinuated himself into any conversation whenever the urge hit him.

“You know,” Duncan said quietly to Hamel, “you may be right about that. I’ve been thinking that myself.”

Hamel grinned.

“I told you so,” he said to Cross.

“Shh,” she said, annoyed. “I don’t care.” Turning toward Duncan, she added, “You don’t really think we’re going to walk in this, do you? What about the snakes? You have seen them, haven’t you? And all the other things in the water?”

“No, we’ll stay on the truck as long as we can,” Duncan said sagely. “I’m just saying that there may come a time when we have to abandon it. If the water gets above the wheel wells… hell, if it gets that high Antonio won’t be able to find the road, and then we’ll be stuck.”

“Let’s hope that doesn’t happen,” she said.

“Let’s hope,” Duncan replied. “And let’s be glad that we haven’t had much rain today.”

While Duncan and Cross continued their conversation quietly, Hamel moved to one side of the truck. Occasional flashes of lightning lit the sky, partially exposing the distant forest. It was during one of these flashes that he sensed something floating toward them that was neither a log nor a tree branch. It rode low in the water and resembled a patch of leaves. It was too far away for his flashlight to reach, but there was something about it that captured his attention. Eventually Johnson joined Hamel, peering into the vast darkness.

“Can you see anything?”

Hamel pointed into the distance.

“I can’t see a thing,” Johnson said.

“Wait for the lightning. You’ll see it.”

“What am I looking for?”

“I don’t know. It looks like a pile of leaves or something. Maybe an island. Looks like a carpet of something. It’s dark. It’s hard to tell, but it’s moving toward us. I wish we had more light,” Hamel said.

“Oh, like all the other crap that’s floating around us?” Johnson said flippantly.

“No, this is different. I don’t know; it looks weird.”

“Everything looks weird in the dark.”

Lightning flashed above the canopy, followed by deafening thunder.

“There, there,” Hamel said excitedly, pointing into the darkness. “See it? Who’s got binoculars?”

Johnson stared where Hamel pointed.

“Use mine,” Cross said. “We used it to watch you guys.”

Hamel handed his flashlight to Johnson and pointed where to shine it. He looked through the binoculars briefly. He squinted to see details, but there wasn’t enough light. Johnson turned it off.

“I couldn’t see a thing,” Hamel said, disappointed.

More lightning, followed by thunder that shook the ground.

Hamel kept his eyes on what he now took to be a pile of debris. It was rounded and spun slowly, and something jumped within it, like grasshoppers, he thought. It was still too far away for the flashlight to pick up. The lightning stopped, and the forest was once again enveloped in humid darkness. Hamel waited, ready to raise the binoculars at the next lightning strike.