David Walton - The Genius Plague

The officer smiled at the riverboat passengers and nodded. He was clean-shaven, with a wide face and laugh lines at the corners of his mouth. From the upper deck, Paul could see that he had a small, sunburned bald spot. The man gave the pilot a broad shrug, as if sorry for the inconvenience. He seemed like a reasonable man, a man you’d like to get to know. Until he drew a pistol and shot the pilot in the face.

It was so sudden, so unexpected, that for a beat nobody moved. A bloody spray erupted from the back of the pilot’s head, and he collapsed to the deck. The shot echoed across the water, startling a flock of birds out of the trees. Then chaos broke out.

The passengers screamed and scrambled away. On the patrol craft, three men lifted automatic weapons in tandem and began to fire into the riverboat. Paul didn’t think; he just reacted. Maisie was still staring at the patrol craft, frozen in shock. He took her by the shoulders and pushed her over the railing. “Swim for shore,” he shouted after her.

On the deck below, the other tourists were dying. There was nowhere for them to run. A few of them managed to jump into the water as well, but Paul couldn’t tell if they had been hit or not. It didn’t matter. There was nothing he could do for them. He dove into the water after Maisie. With the riverboat between them and their attackers, they struck out for shore as fast as they could swim.

It turned out she was the better swimmer. The northern shore didn’t look that far away, but he swam to the point of exhaustion, and it didn’t seem to be getting any closer. They had kicked their shoes off, but their clothes were heavy and soaked through. Maisie stayed with him and helped him, encouraging him to float on his back when he needed to rest. He was young and in good shape, but he never would have made it if not for her.

When they finally reached the shore, he heaved himself up on the swampy bank, shuddering and coughing, his arms and legs shaking with exhaustion. Still, she urged him forward. “Come on, into the forest,” she said. “We want to be out of sight, in case they come looking.” He dragged himself to his feet and leaned on her as they stumbled in among the trees.

The light dimmed as they pushed their way through the vine-choked undergrowth. Once they were inside, the foliage thinned out, no longer fueled by the sunlight into riotous growth. The air was moist and the sounds from the outside deadened. They sat on a fallen branch and just breathed for a time, recovering their strength.

“What are you, some kind of Olympic swimmer?” Paul finally said.

“I do triathlons,” she said woodenly. They were both shivering from the damp, despite the warm air. Paul felt like his clothes were constricting and trying to smother him. He pulled his phone from his pocket, but it was wet through, and when he pushed the button, nothing happened. “Mine, too,” Maisie said. She produced her phone and shook it, and he could hear the water sloshing around inside the case.

They were silent again, until Maisie said, “What happened out there?”

“I don’t know. They weren’t Brazilian Navy, I can tell you that.”

“How did you know what was going to happen?”

“I didn’t. But the men in the boat weren’t speaking Portuguese. It wasn’t any language I recognized.”

“There are indigenous languages spoken around here,” Maisie said. “Couldn’t it have been one of those?”

Paul shook his head. “Not in the military. Doesn’t make any sense.”

“Do you think the others…” she started, but she couldn’t finish the question.

“I don’t know,” he said. “There were some who made it into the water, so they might have escaped.” He tried to sound positive, but privately he thought Maisie’s friends were probably all dead. “How well did you know them?”

She shrugged. “Hardly at all. We put a group together over the internet, to get a package rate on the trip. I met them all a week ago, when we arrived in Manaus.”

He touched her arm briefly. “I’m sorry.”

All the electricity of their flirtation on the boat was gone now, and he felt the gulf between them of strangers stranded together. He didn’t know this woman, didn’t know her background, how she handled things emotionally, or how she would react to this situation.

Paul stared at his hands, not at all sure how he was handling things himself. His muscles still twitched from the adrenaline of the unexpected attack and the grueling swim. People who just a little while ago had been laughing over photographs and arguing about the price of beer were now dead. His mind raced and spun, unable to think about anything clearly.

Finally, Maisie broke the silence. “What are we going to do?”

The question focused him. “We’re going to survive,” he said. “We’re going to make it back to Manaus, tell the police what happened, and go home.”

She raised her hands, indicating the jungle around them. “We must be fifty miles from Manaus. That’s a long way in the rainforest. We have no food, no packs.” Her voice had an edge of panic.

“Relax,” he said, trying to sound more confident than he really was. “There are plenty of things in the rainforest to eat, if you know what you’re looking for. And we have the river to navigate by, so we can’t possibly get lost. We’ll be fine.”

He was wrong about getting lost. The land near the riverbank was a swampy marshland, almost impossible to walk through, forcing them deeper into the interior where they could no longer see it. The higher the ground, the easier it was to negotiate, but the tendency to steer toward drier ground led them farther from the river. The thick canopy blocked the sun, and there were no paths. Paul had left his compass behind with the rest of his pack. They were forced to navigate by dead reckoning, which he knew full well was a good way to get thoroughly lost.

If they could just keep heading east, they would hug the river and eventually get close enough to Manaus to find a road or other people. The problem was, it would be all too easy to veer north instead, where there was nothing but rainforest for hundreds of miles.

“Maybe we should just go back to the river and wait for a boat,” he said.

“No.” She was adamant. “No more boats. If those men were thieves, that means they’re lying in wait for any tourist boat that comes through these waters. I don’t want to give them a second chance at me.”

Paul didn’t argue. He didn’t think the patrol boat would still be out there, but he also thought it unlikely there would be boats of any other kind, or that they could get a boat’s attention from the shore if there were. It was better to press on, and do what they could.

As they walked, he kept an eye on the ground, occasionally stopping to examine a mushroom or a fungal shelf growing out of the side of a tree. “What are you looking for?” Maisie asked.

“Our supper.”

She made a face. “I’ve never been much of a mushroom fan.”

“They’ll taste pretty good if you’re hungry enough.”

“Are they hard to find?”

“Not very. There’s fungus all over this forest. All through the soil, growing up around or even inside the trees. It’s like a huge network, keeping the forest alive, culling some plants and allowing others to survive.”

“You make it sound like the fungi are in charge.”

“Well, they sort of are. Organisms aren’t self-sufficient out here; they need the whole ecosystem. Fungi are like the bloodstream. They transfer the moisture and nutrients to where they’re most needed.” He settled gratefully into the familiar topic. Talking about mycology made it easier to avoid thinking about the blood exploding from the back of the riverboat pilot’s head.