Soon the trail intersected another. All directions looked equally unused. In the end we chose the one that seemed to head north, towards the Caribbean, but after five minutes it bent westwards into the heart of the mountains. I wondered if Lisa and I might wander here forever, the Flying Dutchmen of the Colombian jungle, lost for all eternity in this labyrinth of long-abandoned trails carved by those men and women who now lay slaughtered in that mass grave, or perhaps newly scattered by the drone’s detonation.
I couldn’t get the image of that tiny skull out of my head.
We waded across a trickling stream, and then another. The water reignited the agony in my blistered feet but I was grateful for the chance to drink. Then we struggled through an agonizing climb along an endless series of muddy switchbacks to the top of a steep ridge. My legs and lungs both felt filled with molten lava, and ahead of me even Lisa finally began to stagger and stumble. The rest breaks she allowed were never long enough. Sweat soaked my clothes as thoroughly as yesterday’s rain, and halfway up I was already parched with thirst. But I thought of those buried bones and kept going.
A fire had swept through the jungle atop the ridge, reducing it to a sparse and jagged army of charred tree trunks and branches, opening up the view in all directions. In other circumstances the panorama would have been heart-stoppingly gorgeous: snow-capped mountains surrounded by rippling green foothills, pockmarked by waterfalls and chalk-white cliffs, clothed in dense bushes and canopy trees so tall that their pale trunks looked like slender straws. Birds of prey soared across the sky, hawks in ones and twos, vultures in circling clusters. Dark clouds clustered in the north. The trail we had climbed switchbacked down the ridge again before disappearing into jungle.
“Look,” Lisa said urgently, pointing to a relatively wide and flat river about a mile away. There was something moving in the water, coming our way. I squinted in the flat light. Some kind of animal -
“Horses,” I said. At least three of them, being ridden by people. “More locals? Like that kid we saw?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” She looked around, worried. I realized what she was thinking; this burnt-out forest that afforded us the view also left us nowhere to hide. “Let’s not find out. Come on. Move. They’re not far away. Move.”
I realized she didn’t think they were locals. She thought they were the men hunting us. Less than a mile away, coming straight towards us. My breath seemed to stick in my throat. I doubled my pace, almost jogged downhill, skidded and fell on my back and came to my feet again, kept going almost without missing a beat, prodded onwards by the sharp knife of new fear.
Chapter 15
“OK,” Lisa said sharply, once we had left the burnt-out area. “You’re bigger. Get off the trail, go right for about thirty feet, break up the brush as much as you can. Then come back, cross the trail without stepping on it, and try to follow me without leaving any trace. Hurry. They’re on horses.”
I obeyed without discussion, ignored the jungle’s clutching vines and slashing branches, and left the equivalent of a big THIS WAY sign on one side of the trail before doubling back the other way as surreptitiously as possible.
“You think that will work?” I panted a few minutes later, as we thrust our way through a particularly tangled wall of brush.
“It might. At least it will buy us time.”
“Time for what?”
As if on cue, a fat raindrop fell on my outstretched palm.
“Rainy season,” she said simply, and I understood; she was counting on the daily tropical storm to wash away all traces of our true route.
Moments later the skies opened up with the fervour of a convert who had been convinced that all life on Earth should be washed away. At least the water quenched my burning thirst. The jungle caught most of the rain, but enough drizzled onto us that we were soaked again within minutes. By then we had both lost all sense of direction.
“We better stay here.” For the first time I heard exhaustion that rivalled my own in Lisa’s voice. “No sense going around in circles.”
We sat side by side in the best natural shelter we could find, which wasn’t saying much, with our backs against a thick tree trunk, surrounded by the usual cloud of mosquitoes. For a long time neither of us said anything. We were still capable of pushing ourselves onwards in spurts, but once such an exertion ended, for a long period we were too drained to even think, much less speak. I was too tired to even change my position so that water no longer trickled down my neck.
Eventually I said, “Can I have my phone?” She still held it bundled in her jacket.
She looked at me warily. “What for?”
“I’ll switch it to airplane mode so it’s not transmitting. I just want to look at that picture.”
She acquiesced. I called up the photographs I had taken from the helicopter, zoomed in and panned around, trying to work out where we were. Eventually I narrowed it down to an area pathetically near to the schoolhouse. If I was right then we had travelled maybe ten miles since the mortar attack, probably less.
“Here.” I pointed. “Here’s the big river, here’s where I think the helicopter crashed, and here’s the other river we saw from the ridge. It looks like they join together right outside the picture.”
Lisa took the camera, zoomed the picture to maximum, and squinted at the rainwater-filmed screen. She panned from my estimate of our location to the two waterways I had pointed out.
“Looking for gold?” I asked.
“Something like that.”
She handed it back with trembling hands. It wasn’t fear; she was shivering with cold. I had half again her body weight, and thus a more potent internal furnace. I put my arm around her and pulled her close against me. At first her wet skin felt as clammy as a corpse’s, but slowly, despite the cold relentless rain, we managed to warm each other in the places where we could press our bodies together. It was better than nothing.
“My feet are killing me,” I said.
I wasn’t even sure it was hyperbole. They were so swollen that I doubted I could remove my shoes without cutting them off. Even my blisters had blisters. The first ten minutes after every rest stop was like walking on razors and broken glass, until the pain dulled. Now that the rain had washed the mud away my socks were visibly wet with blood, and we were trudging through a jungle teeming with bacteria. It wouldn’t take much for an infected cut to turn to blood poisoning.
I thought of a book I had once read, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, in which an American parachuted into South American jungle and joined an uncontacted tribe. His biggest problem had been his feet; his new friends had inch-thick callouses, but he was crippled by his soft, bloody, blistering soles. It had been more realistic than I had known.
“Try to enjoy the moment,” Lisa said.
“Yeah. Right.” I shook my head. “Ancient Chinese proverb say, if you wish to forget about your problems, wear tight shoes. Or cover your feet with fucking blisters.”
“Mine aren’t great either,” she admitted.
I looked at her shoes. “Are those Doc Martens?”
“They are.”
“Is that part of the official federal agent uniform?”
“No. Kind of a reminder, I guess. I used to be a punk, believe it or not.”
“No kidding.” I almost smiled. “You know, when I first met you I figured you for the straitlaced no-nonsense churchgoing fascist type.”
After a moment she said, “Believe it or not, not all churchgoers are fascist.”
“I know,” I said quickly. “I mean – that’s not what I meant.”
“OK. Understood.” She took a breath. “Just so you know, not that it really matters, but I’m pretty religious. In my own way. It’s a big part of my life, maybe the biggest. I just don’t usually talk about it.”
“Sorry.”
