Jon Evans - Swarm

Around noon we were discovered.

A muddy trail emerged from the jungle and ran along the river. It was only a foot wide, but against that backdrop of rampant botanical chaos it was as obvious as a six-lane highway. I didn’t want to stop, I felt like only momentum was keeping me from collapse, but Lisa halted and motioned me to do the same.

We stared silently at the trail. The dilemma was obvious. On it we would make far better time, and greatly increase our chances of discovery.

A few seconds later I heard a clopping noise, turned to face it without thinking, and saw a teenage boy with a dark aboriginal face, riding a saddled donkey. He looked like a miniature cowboy, right down to the lasso hanging on his donkey’s side, except for his Yankees baseball cap.

The shock of encountering another human being felt like being struck by lightning. We exchanged flabbergasted looks for a full five seconds. Then, without anyone saying a word, he pulled on the reins, turned the donkey around, jabbed his heels into its flanks and raced away.

“Fuck,” Lisa breathed.

“You think he was with them?”

She shook her head. “Just a local. But he might tell them. He’ll tell somebody.”

“Maybe the police.”

“That’s not a comforting thought, in Colombia. I’ll bet you whoever set us up already paid the local police to turn us over to the narcos. Who have also probably already made it known to the locals that if they see us and don’t report us, they’ll be in a world of shit.”

“Oh, Jesus.” I felt like I had been punched. “Every time I think this can’t get any worse… “

“Don’t kid yourself. Things aren’t even so bad yet. We’re still both in one piece. Imagine how much fun this would have been with shrapnel in your gut.”

“I don’t know how much further I can walk.”

“You’re going to be fine.” She considered. “I guess we might as well take the trail. Not much point in hiding now.”

It was a relative relief walking over mostly level ground devoid of vegetative pitfalls, but I still felt like I was near the end of my strength, limping on both legs. Their weakness that worried me more than the pain. I felt like my legs might suddenly buckle and fail to continue no matter how strong my will. And I was starving, we hadn’t eaten since a snack box before the helicopter.

Ahead of me Lisa froze in mid-step, as if suddenly turned to stone, and I nearly collided with her. I didn’t understand until I saw motion on the ground less than two feet from her; a snake, long and brightly coloured. I held my breath until it finished slithering behind a curtain of ferns. We gave it a wide berth.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, both scared and irrationally exasperated. “You guys should have just napalmed and Agent Oranged this whole fucking country.”

“Don’t think we haven’t tried. They’ve been dumping herbicide here for ten years. You can see how well it’s worked.”

The trail veered away from the river. We took a last drink and followed. It was like a narrow canyon through steep green walls. My ears rang with the collective buzz of the ambient mosquitos, whose feasting I had long since given up trying to prevent.

“Hey,” Lisa said, a note of hope in her voice.

“What?”

She gestured at a strange tree. It looked a little like a giant stalk of asparagus, with peeling brown skin, a starburst of huge green leaves erupting from its top, a weird purple protrusion like a phallus – and a tight clump of very familiar objects indeed, clustered together in a dangling bundle the size of a shopping bag: bananas.

They were somewhere between green and yellow, but we weren’t feeling fussy. I grabbed the rubbery trunk and pulled it downward so Lisa could cut them free with the knife I hadn’t even known she had. A day earlier I would have described them as tasteless, with the consistency of wet cardboard, but under the circumstances they were indescribably delicious.

When we turned the corner we found that it had only been the outlier of a whole stand of banana trees. Minutes later Lisa spotted a pair of avocado trees. I had thought my belly full of bananas, but changed my mind when she cut open a perfectly ripe avocado.

We marched on with new strength and purpose. But Lisa was also moving more slowly, more watchfully.

“What is it?” I asked.

“That wasn’t a random patch of fruit trees.” Her voice was low. “That was a plantation. People live near here. Stay quiet.”

I obeyed. But when she turned a bend and held up a hand to stop me I couldn’t resist edging forward until I saw what she saw: a collection of a dozen mud-and-thatch buildings in extreme disrepair, surrounded by neck-high grass. In places the roofs and walls had fallen in.

“Nobody home,” I murmured.

“Doesn’t look like it.” But she moved forward very cautiously.

The huts had been abandoned for months, if not longer. A thin layer of muddy dust covered the aluminum pots, neatly folded Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt, and Titanic poster in the first hut we examined. A few rats scurried in the shadows. Some rotted pineapples lay stacked beneath a crude wooden table. The utter desertion was eerie; I felt like the discoverers of the Marie Celeste.

“I guess they moved out.” I said.

“I guess.” But she didn’t sound convinced.

In an earthenware pot Lisa found what looked like mud, and scooped a handful of it into her pocket.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Better living through chemistry.”

On the way out of the village she paused to strip elliptical leaves about the size of Oreo cookies from a cluster of bushes near the path, then handed a damp handful to me, along with a marble-sized clump of the mud she had claimed.

“What is it?”

“The clay acts as a catalyst. You need it to activate the coca leaves.”

“Coca?” I stared at the wadded leaves. “As in cocaine?”

“Yes. You won’t get high, it just increases energy and dulls pain. Millions of campesinos chew it every day. Stick the clay in your cheek and chew the leaves.”

I obeyed. That side of my tongue quickly went numb, and indeed I soon began to feel a little stronger and less miserable.

The trail passed a muddy hill the size of a school bus, covered with thin patches of grass and a dense storm of clawed animal tracks. Pale knobby stones were visible amid the crumbling mud. Lisa continued on, her mind on the road ahead. I glanced at the hill, wondering why its grass was so emaciated when the rest of the jungle was teeming with life.

Then I came to a sudden stop and said, hoarsely, “Lisa.”

“What?”

“Those aren’t stones.”

We advanced slowly, crouched, and examined the gnawed bones protruding from the earth as if they were some fragile and valuable archaeological discovery. Then without speaking we began to circumnavigate the grassy mound. On the the other side one of the misshapen holes dug by animals revealed a human skull and most of a hand. The hand had belonged to an adult. The skull was so small it had to be a child’s, maybe an infant’s.

“Oh my God.” I backed away as if some horrific demon-thing lurked within the mound. It was big enough for dozens of corpses. A hundred. Maybe more. “Why? Who?” “The paramilitaries.” Lisa’s voice, unlike mine, was flat. “The FARC, the Marxist guerrillas, they’re still active around here. The indigenous tribes and campesinos tend to support them. So the paramilitaries have this strategy called ‘draining the water where the fishes swim.’ They massacre a village or two to convince everyone else in the area to abandon their homes and run like hell. Leaving no local support for the FARC, and new land for the paras to use.”