Max looked at him. He needed Xavier to feel good-especially for what Max was going to propose. “You’re tougher than I thought,” he said.
“Yeah? I mean, yeah. I’m tough.” And then he thought about it. “Why?”
“It’s infected-it must hurt. You didn’t say anything.”
Xavier wasn’t in much pain, but he pulled a face. It was good to let Max think he could handle it. “It don’ hurt so much.”
“But if that infection gets worse …” Max paused and shook his head sadly, turning away from the boy’s gaze.
“What? Is bad? You think is bad?”
“I wouldn’t be able to get you out of here. I’d have to leave you.”
“What!”
“I’ll send help as soon as I find it.”
“No way! You go, I go. That’s the deal. That’s what I said. I’m with you.”
Max put his arm on the boy’s shoulder. “Good, I was hoping you’d say that. Then you’ll let me fix it?”
Xavier wasn’t certain, but he had talked himself into a corner. Or rather Max had. “OK,” he said.
Max turned over a rotten log. Poking it with his steel-tipped piece of wood, he made sure there were no snakes curled beneath it. Then, skimming away the desiccated wood with his new ax, he found what he was looking for. He carefully lifted the wriggling maggots from the trunk and laid them on a palm leaf. Food and medicine.
Xavier lay on his side, his arm covering his eyes. Max had just explained that you could eat maggots for protein, providing you didn’t take them from a rotting carcass of an animal. Xavier had squirmed almost as much as the maggots, and the reason he had covered his eyes was because Max had popped two or three of the maggots into his own mouth and crunched, not so happily, away. Max grimaced.
“They’re not that bad,” he lied. “They’d be much better cooked, I suppose, but beggars can’t be choosers.”
“I am not going to eat those things. I will puke if you put those squirmy things into my mouth. Puke more than you have ever seen in your life. I would rather die.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to eat them-I brought these for your wound; I’ll find us some food later.”
“And you’re gonna do what?”
Max knelt next to him, took three or four maggots from the leaf and laid them gently on the festering wound. “Don’t look, Xavier. These things could save your life.”
Xavier muttered a private mantra-which sounded like a prayer-to keep his mind off the things that were eating into his flesh. He could barely feel anything other than a soft tickle as they dug into his wound. But he refused to look at it and decided to stay somewhere in his head until this crazy English kid told him it was all OK. He should have been in Miami or New Orleans or anywhere else in the big U.S. with a new name and a new identity, money in the bank and he and Alejandro driving open-top sports cars. It would have been a good life, a safe life, and they would have been legal. But it had all gone horribly wrong, and now he lay in the jungle with maggots eating into him. The devil must be laughing somewhere, getting his own back for all the bad things Alejandro and his men-and Xavier-had done.
“I’m going to forage for food,” Max said, interrupting his thoughts.
Xavier propped himself up and looked toward the dense undergrowth. “You forgettin’ what’s in there? How many lives you think you got? Just ’cause that big cat killed somethin’ las’ night, you think he still ain’t hungry? Maybe he has a friend and say to him, ‘Hey, amigo, you hear about those two kids down near the beach? They got no water; they got no food. They’re just two dumb
“Jaguars hunt alone and at night.”
“So how come you know everything?”
“I read books and my dad told me.”
“Uh-huh. Your daddy lets you come all the way out to Miami where you help a drug smuggler from gettin’ whacked?”
“I didn’t know you were a drug smuggler.”
“So? If you’d known, you’d have let that crazy guy kill me!”
“If I had, I wouldn’t be in this mess,” Max said.
“Hey,
“I don’t think so. You didn’t shout loud enough.”
“You got all that mud and water in your ears-tha’s not
“Thank you, Xavier Morera Escobodo Garcia, for trying to shout loud enough.”
“You’re welcome. But you get into trouble again, you on your own.”
Max left him in the shade of the palm trees. He knew he wouldn’t move. The jungle was one place Max did not want to be injured or ill; it was bad enough being fit and strong and having to cope with the energy-sapping heat, which was why he had some sympathy for Xavier.
Max scoured the jungle for any berries, seeds or nuts that he thought were safe to eat. Some he was uncertain of and let them rest on his tongue before spitting out the acid taste. He found three fruits he recognized- light yellow guavas from a tree with white flowers and a nice dark clump of finger bananas. Green-encased coconuts that had fallen from the palm trees had stubbornly resisted being smashed against a rock outcrop, but Max wedged his spearlike shaft into a twisted tree trunk and slammed the coconuts onto the metal tip. They split, revealing the brown hairy coconut inside. He pierced a coconut’s eyes and sucked the white liquid. Now that he had supplies, their chances for survival grew every moment. Cutting and splicing palm leaves together, he made an efficient bag to carry the food he’d foraged.
Max bent down, scuffed aside fallen leaves and dug his fingers into the earth. There was moisture in it, which wasn’t unusual-jungles were usually damp-but he knew rain squalls often hit this part of Central America. One of the noises that came out of the jungle was a creaking groan. It had taken Max some time to remember where he had heard those sounds before-it had been in a bamboo garden his dad had once taken him to. And bamboo held water. There was no choice: Max had to penetrate the darkened jungle, locate the bamboo, then find his way out again.
Flashes of color dipped and swirled through the branches as screeching birds clattered their way into the high canopy. Max moved carefully, listening to the rustling footfalls from unknown creatures around him. The pictures of his mother were still safe and dry in the wallet in his breast pocket. He saw her smiling face in his mind’s eye, felt the warmth in his chest and imagined the melodic song of a jungle bird was that of his mum gently calling him.
Max eased aside the low branches and stepped inside a claustrophobic world that soon engulfed him.
14
Sayid watched as the people in biohazard suits carried a covered corpse out of the tunnel. They eased the orange-colored body bag onto a gurney and wheeled it to an isolation tent that had been set up on the platform, where another figure, also dressed in a biohazard suit, waited. Sayid could just make out what was happening inside. The body bag was lifted, slipped into yet another protective covering and replaced on the gurney. The side flaps of the tent were opened; regular paramedics took the stretcher and disappeared from view. For a moment, Sayid watched while the recovery team was washed down with what looked like a steam hose as they stood in a catchment tray. He was less interested in them than where Danny Maguire’s body was being taken.
Sayid quickly manipulated the keyboard, found the cameras he wanted and watched as the body was loaded into the back of an ambulance. The area had been cordoned off by police. He had lost sight of the two men who had initially run after Danny, but now he saw a police officer wave a silver Mercedes through the security area. Sayid froze the frame and zoomed in on the car’s window. It was the same two men.
A police motorcycle escort led the ambulance away from the station, and the Mercedes tucked in behind. The small convoy sped away into London traffic. Seconds later the tape went blank. Sayid keyed in a search for a London street map. He needed to work out which way the ambulance was going. And now that he had his program in place,
