her arm.
“I heard you.”
Broken shards lay scattered across the clearing. The forest floor was chopped and muddy. Pieces of pottery had been trod into the ground.
“This is strange,” Duncan said. “Look at how deep some of these footprints are. It’s like a herd of horses came through. But the prints are human.”
“The rain must have softened the earth,” Molly said.
“Not enough for this.” Duncan stomped at the ground but didn’t make a dent. “It’s hard to believe Samnang could have done so much damage. And why only the pots and not the heads? There must have been fifteen heads. How could one man carry them off so quickly?”
“No idea, Duncan.” She didn’t care about pots and heads and footprints. Samnang was dead.
The brothers materialized in the mist. They were circulating back and forth, from the Land Cruiser to the enshrouded truck. Their rifles twitched at Molly and Duncan’s approach.
At first she paid no attention to the vehicles. She’d never had a gun pointed at her. The bluing on the gun metal had worn through in places, like the finish on secondhand guitars. The guns had traveled many miles through many wars before ending up in these tattooed hands.
Duncan announced himself, arms wide, and they lowered the barrels. Toting his silver briefcase like an insurance adjuster, he spoke in quiet tones. Doc, with his full armor of body ink, shouted back at him and shook his rifle. Duncan went on talking, moving closer.
Molly stayed back, hating them for what they had done. It took her a minute to even look at their faces. She expected hangover scowls or bully glares, but their eyes were filled with voodoo fear. Their panic caught her off guard.
Then she noticed the Land Cruiser, and the truck, and was frightened, too. Tilted at ridiculous angles, gripped by vines, the vehicles were trapped. The forest was car-jacking them.
A fast-growing tree root had hoisted the rear of the Land Cruiser a foot off the ground. The back tires dangled. She went with Duncan to it.
Creepers had infiltrated a crack in the windshield. She peered inside. Vines wrapped the plastic steering wheel and were rooting into the underside of the dash panel.
The old Mercedes truck was being overrun, too. Vines roped its hood and doors, but it was being sucked backward into the earth. The rear wheels had sunk to the hub, tilting up the front end like a bull struggling from quicksand.
In a different setting, in a museum of modern art, it would have been sardonic, nature’s revenge. Here, this morning, it scared her. Her mind careered through explanations. The rain had created a mire under the truck. In the darkness, the first night, they’d inadvertently parked on top of a tree trunk. The vines were genetically programmed to raid. Mother Nature was tripping on speed. Nothing human was to blame. There was some consolation in that. They were all victims. They were in this together now.
The brothers were in a state. Vin had the machete they’d used on the turtle last night. His brother So carried an ax. She glanced at the tools, looking for blood. There was none, and her hopes rose, foolishly, she knew.
Duncan opened his briefcase and gave Doc a pack of Camels still wrapped in cellophane. What else did he harbor in there? A sketch pad, she knew, though he was too shy to show her his sketches. Maps, surely, his obsession. A day journal, perhaps, and photos of some long-lost loved one. Had he kept the stub of his air ticket from the States as a memento?
The pack of cigarettes went around the circle, and Duncan accepted one. The Heng boys skirted their smashed plunder, gawking at their precious vehicles, afraid to touch anything.
“How could they sleep through this?” she said. It was a silly question. The same way she had slept through the destruction of her tent.
“I’m not sure any of them did sleep,” said Duncan. “They were drunk. And busy.” Hunting in the forest.
“What do we do now?”
“We need to work with them, Molly.”
“Work with them, after what they did?”
“They have the wheels.”
“We should just go,” she whispered to him. “This very minute, Duncan.” They could fade into the mist and find the causeway, and cross between the
“Without Kleat?”
“He’d leave us and you know it.”
Duncan shook his head. “We’re in this together.”
“That’s very high-minded. But look around. You can’t make this better.”
“No.” He had his mind made up. “The best thing is to try and help them. We’ll be okay.”
He joined the brothers again, moving with them, taking stock of the damage. He laid his hands on the metal and glass, and that simple act did more than anything else to break their terror. At least Doc quit shouting.
The brothers’ tight faces loosened. Duncan made a suggestion, and Vin handed him the machete without hesitation.
With the care of a surgeon, meticulous so as not to scratch the white paint, he slipped the blade under a creeper binding one door and sliced it free. He cut away more vines and, opening the door, made a show of returning their machete.
Little by little, he showed them how to regain control. He got So to begin unraveling the vines from the wiring. He called Molly over, and four of them manhandled a rock into place under one of the Land Cruiser’s wheels. “We’ll get this straightened out,” he said. He put Molly to work with a shovel.
After fifteen minutes or so, he came from the Land Cruiser carrying a burlap sack stuffed with other sacks. Vin trailed behind him with his machete and rifle. “All right, let’s get Kleat,” he said. He propped her shovel against the truck.
“What are we doing?” She didn’t mean for her voice to be shrill.
“Everything’s going to be okay.”
Kleat was dragging another log from the brush. Sweat ringed his flak jacket at the neck and armpits. “We’ve got a deal,” Duncan said. “We’re all leaving today, before the rains return. But first we have a job to do.”
Kleat guessed from the sacks. “They want us to mule down more loot for them.”
“A little salvage work.” Duncan spoke to Kleat in the same soothing tone he’d used with Doc. “They need to be made whole, that’s how they see it. They’ll keep digging while we go up into the ruins. Vin’s going with us.”
The kid had found a pebble and was playing soccer with it, batting it between his toes, waiting, with the AK- 47 on his back.
Kleat had a dark thought. “You know he’s taking us off to shoot us.”
“No he’s not. They want their share of the city, that’s all.”
“Then they’ll do it down here,” Kleat said. “Later, when they’re done with us.”
“Show some faith, John. We scratch their backs, they scratch ours. Everything will be fine.”
“They’re not on our side,” Kleat said. “They could do anything to us in here. Look what happened to Samnang.”
“I talked to them about that. They said he ran away. They were only searching for him. They wanted to bring him back to the camp.”
“They were trying to save him?” Kleat snorted. “They had a gun at his head.”
“They know that was wrong. But they say what he did was wrong, too. They only wanted to know where he hid the rest of their possessions.”
“They were hunting him like an animal.”
“They say it was the other way around.”
“The old man was hunting them?”
“No.” Duncan grew quiet. “The
Vin heard the word and stopped his little soccer game.
“The what?” said Molly.
