Donald Westlake - High Adventure

With that, he hopped into the Land Rover, a second later the starter made its grinding noise, the engine caught, and headlights cut the night into the quick and the dead. The Land Rover jolted backward in a half-turn, those bright beams swinging this way, then it roared off, bouncing like a toy down the road, soon out of sight, then out of hearing.

Valerie stood. She had the night to herself. But at least she had that road. By morning, she would be back in her room at the Fort George, enjoying a wonderful shower, and Kirby Galway and Innocent St. Michael and Vernon Vernon would all be in jail, right where they belonged.

If it hadn’t been for the headlights, everything would have been all right. Valerie had been walking almost two hours when she saw them slowly advancing, jouncing along, the beams first looking up at the sky then ducking down to stare at the road immediately ahead then snapping up to gaze at the sky again, and her first thought was: Rescue !

But her second thought was: Maybe not.

She was alone in a strange land. So far, the people she had trusted — Innocent and Vernon and to a lesser extent the driver — had proved false. So she should think very carefully before attracting the attention of whoever was coming this way.

Could this be the driver, panic over, realizing Valerie wouldn’t get far at night on foot, coming back to do the job after all? It could.

Could this be Vernon, returning to make sure his orders had been carried out? It very well could.

Could this be some other friend or ally of those people, who would smile at her and promise to take her straight to the police, but who would take her to her death instead? It most definitely could.

The headlights jerked closer. Valerie wanted to believe she could just stand here, wave her hand, and be rescued, saved, returned to Belize City. She wanted to believe it, but she turned and hurried away from the road instead, up a rocky slope where she kept feeling too exposed, because of those headlights flashing around all over the place. So she kept going, up over the top, and down into a shallow basin, and waited.

Some sort of truck engine. She couldn’t see the lights any more, but she could hear the straining engine, hear it approach, become briefly very loud, then recede, then fade away.

She waited a while longer, mostly because she was very tired, her muscles very sore. Then she made her way back up the slope, and it took much longer than she’d expected to reach the top. When she finally did, there were no headlights to be seen anywhere, so she made her way down the other side and found nothing but a narrow ravine with a little quick stream running through it.

Where was the road? She kept looking around, but in the moonlight every hill and boulder and shrub looked the same. Still, the road had to be very close by.

She never found it again. The moon had risen higher in the sky, giving marginally more light but no longer marking the east. The road was gone. It occurred to her to worry about wild animals.

She remembered from something she had read that the best way to be safe from wild animals in the wilderness was to sleep in a tree, so she chose a rough-barked thick-trunked tree near the crest of a hill and with some difficulty climbed up to a crotch about seven feet from the ground, where she did her best to become reasonably comfortable, and to sleep.

No wild animals found her in the tree, but many mosquitoes did. They kept her awake a long while, until at last nothing in the world could keep her awake any longer, and she slept, crumpled up in the tree crotch, being fed on all night by nasty little flying things.

In the morning she was so stiff, and so hot, and so itchy, and so dry, and so hungry, and so uncomfortable, she thought she would die. She thought it would be more comfortable to die. Twisting around in the tree crotch, every movement an agony, she searched from her vantage point for the road — for any road or any other sign of human existence — and saw nothing but woods, forests, jungle growth, high mountains to the west and south, a broken tumbled landscape untouched by man. Sighing, she made her creaky painful way down from the tree and plodded off northward, guided now by the sun.

At first her spirits weren’t really low, because she was distracted by her training. Her studies in archaeology and her interest in the ancient Mayans had led her to Belize in the first place, and now here she really was, in conditions as primitive as anything the Mayans ever faced, crossing broken barren ground they had crossed a thousand years ago.

They had survived. She would survive. In the meantime, were there discoveries to be made in this wilderness, finds of archaeological interest and importance? She surveyed every rut and arroyo, frowned at every rock.

And yet, the distraction wasn’t total. In the back of her mind, she already knew this wasn’t an adventure of the kind she’d dreamed of while half dozing over her textbooks. She had imagined a life of purpose and work with some limited hardships — nothing a sturdy pair of boots couldn’t handle — but not all this, this, this...

Danger.

Confusion.

Trouble.

She had come out to find the world, knowing she knew nothing about the world, and was this it? A hot and stony place, alone, with no comforts and no certainties. All her old beliefs seemed to flow out of her with her perspiration, leaving her miserable and confused and dizzy. Plodding along, walking because there was nothing else to do, she soon forgot to look at stones for significance, holes in the ground for meaning. Here was the meaning: There was no meaning.

She hadn’t wanted to know any of this.

The next three days were terrible. In the middle of the day she would rest in whatever shade she could find, while all morning and all afternoon she walked northward, seeing no one, never finding any road. Each night she slept in another uncomfortable tree. The occasional quick cold stream provided water for bathing and drinking, and on the morning of the third day a brief torrential downpour did her laundry, but she never did find anything to eat. Berries, she thought, but there were no berries. Roots, she thought, but had no idea how to recognize an edible root nor where to dig for it nor what to dig for it with.

I could die out here, she thought, getting lightheaded from the sun and the lack of food. The thought was frightening, but what was even more frightening was that the thought was also tempting. To give up the struggle, to lie down and rest, to stop being hungry and itchy and tired and stiff. She fought off that temptation by thinking about Innocent St. Michael, and Kirby Galway, and Vernon, and Fred C. She would not die. They would not get away with it. She would live through this experience somehow, and bring those devils to justice! Thus thinking, while her shoes disintegrated on her feet and her sunburned skin peeled and her empty stomach begged for something more than cold water, Valerie soldiered on.

It was near sundown on the third day when, coming up along another stream, starting to look for tonight’s tree, she had stumbled into this little Indian village, where a great fuss had been made of her and where the head man, Tommy Watson, had announced, “It’s Sheena, Queen of the Jungle!”

And so that’s who she was, and who she had been for a week. The tribespeople had fed her and given her a place to sleep, and the next morning had treated all her many cuts and scratches and abrasions; not with ancient tribal remedies but with mercurochrome and Unguentine and Band-Aids. “From the mission,” they told her.