Catherine Coulter - The Edge

I watched Sherlock try to make a French braid of Laura's long, very matted hair. She smoothed out most of the tangles and picked away half a dozen insects. The best I could say about the result was that her hair was away from her face.

"How is it?" Laura asked.

"You're gorgeous. Sherlock's got a real talent with hair, particularly really long hair like yours." I dabbed a piece of wet shirt over Laura's mouth to get rid of the sticky mango juice. I could just imagine how all the flying critters would love that stuff.

She smiled and closed her eyes.

I got to my feet and stretched. I packed everything up, then lifted Laura into my arms. I was used to her weight now. It felt good. I looked all around me, carefully. Nothing lethal in sight, man or beast.

Sherlock, thank God, was walking on her own. She kept up with Savich, right on his heels, carrying the first-aid kit and an AK-47. "Sleep, Laura," I said. "I won't tell any bad jokes to keep you up."

"That's good, Mac," she said against my shoulder. Her voice was weaker.

We kept moving. Laura seemed lighter than she had just an hour before. It was as if she were fading away, slowly, and there didn't seem to be anything I could do to stop it. Except find help.

Savich kept up a steady stride, chopping away the undergrowth ahead of us. We saw very little but we heard scurrying sounds all around us.

Suddenly we heard screaming and barking sounds, high above us. A family of spider monkeys, about ten of them, were jumping up and down, rattling branches. Savich got hit in the middle of his back with a shriveled piece of brown fruit we couldn't identify. They hurled other vegetation and small branches down at us, but nothing that hurt us. I hurried and got a thick, sharp-edged leaf in my face for my trouble. They weren't afraid of us, just pissed that we were in their territory. Once we had moved sufficiently on, they ignored us.

When the rain came in the middle of the afternoon, hot, thick sheets of rain, I would have given two of my candy bars for a big umbrella. Then we discovered that parts of the canopy overhead were so thick, we were able to stay relatively dry if we stayed in the right spots. I covered Laura as best I could. Steam rose off the ground when the deluge finally stopped. The humidity didn't lessen, it just wasn't liquid anymore. Steam rose from our clothes again.

We all smelled very ripe.

I eased Laura onto her feet, holding her upright against me.

"Can you imagine what a cold shower would feel like, Mac?" she asked.

"Right now," I said, and closed my eyes briefly, "it would be on my top-ten list. Maybe top three. I want you in that cold shower with me, Laura, laughing and fit again."

She didn't say anything and that scared me. We kept going.

Now, to add to the impenetrable undergrowth in front of us, the ground was mud. The nicely packed clay was slippery and wet through to a depth of a good six inches. Mud covered us to our knees. It made walking as hard as sucking one of our limes through a straw. I nearly fell once. It was Sherlock who steadied me.

Sweat poured off us. Savich was grunting with each swing of the machete. Monkeys and birds shrieked and howled above us. We couldn't see even one of them. The racket was nearly deafening at times.

Just when I wanted to stop, go down on my knees, and never move again, I saw butterflies sporting the most amazing colors-reds, yellows, greens. I just pointed at them. One followed us a good distance, gliding beside my face, wide-winged, the brightest blue imaginable, its wings rimmed with solid black.

When the butterflies disappeared, taking their beauty with them, I realized we'd moved at least another twenty feet west. The rain forest was deadly, horrific, and those butterflies were the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.

Sherlock spotted two coral snakes. She came to a stop and just stared two feet to her left into some undergrowth. There was no way a coral snake could go unnoticed. The vivid orange-and-white stripes slithered away from us and into deeper cover.

I checked to see that everyone's boots were tightly laced up, the ends of their pants firmly tucked inside the boots. It was hard to tell with all the mud covering everything. At least we didn't have any mud on our skin. Talk about itching. But no insects could get inside, and no snakes. I noticed bites on the backs of my hands. No hope for it.

Survival, I thought. We just had to survive. We didn't hear any helicopters for the rest of the afternoon, or the noise of any other humans. It was just the four of us, alone in this living oven.

"Hot damn," Savich shouted. "Look what I found. Ripe bananas, to go with our mangoes. Now the Baby Ruths can be our dessert."

We also found some pipas, a green coconut you can crack open and drink out of. Since Sherlock had taken one of those huge leaves and fashioned it into a funnel to catch rainwater during the downpour, both the empty water bottles were full again. We picked half a dozen pipas just in case.

I was doing the hacking now, Savich carrying Laura. I said over my shoulder, after I'd had to whack a welter of green intertwined leaves three times to get them apart, "I wonder if they found Molinas, the bastard. Maybe they didn't. Maybe a coral snake got him. Or maybe he's still lying there with insects crawling all over him."

"Or maybe," Savich said, "this Del Cabrizo character was so angry that we escaped, he killed him."

I didn't want to think about what could happen to Molinas's daughter.

We stopped to make camp when we came to another small clearing. When we stepped into the sunlight, we saw a flock of wild turkeys running through the deep grass to the other side. They disappeared into the forest. It was late in the afternoon, time to stop anyway.

Laura was getting weaker. It required too much energy for her to talk. I gave her more antibiotics, more aspirin, and two more pain pills. There were only four left. She didn't have a fever, and the bandages looked clean, but she was getting weaker.

Sherlock swept our small campsite clean with the thick net. The ground here was nearly dry because of the direct, hot sunlight. She managed to get it completely bare. "It's important that we leave room so lots of oxygen can circulate. Once we build a fire, it will stay brighter and hotter." I collected tinder: low, dead hanging branches, rotted pieces of tree that were dry. We managed to find some birch that Laura said was good for fires. Sherlock began digging a moat around our campsite. She said it would keep the critters out.

Savich used the scissors from the first-aid kit to make several fire sticks. He shaved the sticks with shallow cuts to "feather" them. "My granddaddy taught me how to do this," he said. "It'll make the wood catch fire more quickly."

We mixed birch bark and dried grass. I stood back and watched Sherlock build a teepee of kindling over a pile of tinder. I handed Savich the matches from the first-aid kit and watched him light one of his fire sticks, let it burn brightly, and touch it to the tinder. I couldn't believe it actually worked. It bloomed up bright and hot. It must have been ninety degrees, and there we were, sucking up toil.

"A hot dog might be nice," Sherlock said. "Potato chips, some dill pickles."

"Tortilla chips and hot salsa," Savich said, rubbing his hands together, and grinned. Behind him, a branch shimmied. A brown-spotted gecko poked its head around a tree, looked at us, then pressed itself flat against the bark. I swear it disappeared.

"Maybe some pickle relish on the hot dog," Sherlock said. "Forget the dills." As she spoke, she was looking over at Laura, who lay quietly.

We were trapped in a Hieronymus Bosch painting and we'd managed, for a moment, to superimpose normalcy.

As evening settled in, the beetles began to move around. You could hear them scuttling to and fro. So many of them, all hungry. I smiled over at Laura. "We're geniuses. Just look at that fire."