Jamie Freveletti - Running from the Devil

He nodded again; his eyes flashed as they caught a shaft of moonlight. Emma crossed her fingers that he hadn’t gone over the deep end, and crawled into the tent. Sumner joined her a minute later. Their bodies lay against each other from shoulder to ankle. Emma moved as far away as possible, which in that closed space meant about two inches. She lay awake a long time, sweating, with the sounds of the night pressing down on her.

22

THEY WOKE AT DAWN AND ATE A LITTLE BEFORE HEADING OUT. Two bright red circles on Sumner’s cheeks indicated that he was feverish.

“Can you walk today? You look like you have a fever,” Emma said.

“Yes,” he said.

It was the last thing he said for the next eight hours.

The only bright spot in the day was when they found a stream.

“Oh, thank God, water.” Emma’s relief was profound. “We need to stay along this stream. If there are any villages in these mountains, they will be near it, you can bet.”

They spent the rest of the day following the river. As good as finding it was finding the cattails that grew alongside. Emma collected them as they appeared.

“We can eat these. What a great day!” Sumner raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Emma used a vine to attach them to the outside of her pack. Sumner watched her without interest. That his mind was elsewhere was obvious. Emma didn’t bother to try to snap him back to the present. Perhaps his thoughts consisted of things more pleasant than their current circumstances. Far be it from her to force him back to the grim reality they faced. It seemed they were to be forever silent.

By late afternoon, Sumner’s eyes burned bright, and the two spots on his cheeks expanded to cover his face and neck. Emma continued to march him through the jungle despite his rising fever. Each hour his cheeks grew more flushed and his eyes more glazed. The only thing that kept him going seemed to be sheer determination. Emma was familiar with the type. Endurance runners have the same undivided drive to push themselves against all reason. Except Sumner had a reason, a very good one. They could hear chopping sounds.

Emma knew from her many trips to search for medicinal plants that while the jungle foliage made it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead, it also magnified, rather than dampened, sound. It was a paradox she never could figure out. The chopping sounded close, but in reality the person making the sound could be miles away. While Emma knew this intellectually, she was having a hard time accepting it. Her adrenaline surged every time a sound echoed through the forest. Her mental state was deteriorating with each hour in the jungle.

Sumner stumbled, and this time he stayed down. He rolled onto his back and waved her off.

“I need a break,” he said.

Emma squatted next to him to wait. He had lapsed into his usual silence, but she felt compelled, finally, to break it.

“Your name is Cameron Sumner, isn’t it?”

He shot her his signature wary look.

“Yes,” he said after a long minute.

“Don’t worry, I’m not psychic or anything. I saw you hide your luggage from the guerrillas. When you left I retrieved it and read your business card. Southern Hemisphere Drug Defense.”

“I saw you at the airstrip. Why were you trying to get into the truck?”

“The Smoking Man had a spare field phone. I was trying to steal it.”

Sumner shook his head. “That was an incredibly risky move.”

“Thanks for diverting their attention to the capybara. I thought I was done for when that thing shot out of the forest and the woman screamed.”

“How did you manage to avoid capture in the first place?”

“The crash catapulted me out of the plane, free of the fuel.”

“Lucky you. That was a scene from hell.”

“Where were you thrown?”

“To the rear. I landed right in the group of guerrillas.”

“You didn’t have a chance,” Emma said.

“I was a damn sight better off than most of the others. I’m alive.”

Emma couldn’t argue with that.

“I’m Emma Caldridge.”

She didn’t give the usual smile that accompanied an introduction. Under the circumstances, smiling was unnecessary.

Thirty minutes later, Sumner dragged himself to a sitting position. After a few minutes sitting, he hauled himself up to standing.

They started again. A sheen of sweat covered him. Emma warred with herself over whether she should ask him to wade into the stream to lower his temperature, or whether she should continue to drive him forward, away from any pursuers. She chose to drive him forward. When he collapsed there would be time enough to work on bringing down the fever.

The heat rose to over ninety degrees. The path alternated between oozing mud and wet leaves. Emma plunged into a spiderweb, its sticky gossamer threads clinging to her face and hair. She saw the web’s maker, lurking at the edge. It was almost three inches across, black, and hairy.

“Ugh. Sumner. A spiderweb. I hate spiders!” Emma spoke louder than she’d intended, a mistake, because noise carried far in the jungle. She clawed at the web with her fingers. Her frantic movements alerted the spider. It scuttled sideways toward her.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Emma plunged forward so fast that she tripped over a root. She jogged another couple of feet, all the while brushing at the web that clung to her arms and face, and then hauled up short just inches from another web stretched in front of her.

Sumner banged into her back. He grunted.

“Sorry,” Emma said. “We’ll have to go around this one.”

She turned and came face to chest with Sumner. She looked up, and it took all her control not to gasp. It was as if Emma was staring into a death skull. Sumner’s face was gray. Drops of perspiration dotted his forehead, and rivulets of sweat ran down the sides of his face. His eyes had sunk into his head and dark, black circles ringed them. His lips were cracked and dry, strange because the air was filled with humidity and nothing in the entire jungle was dry, and when he exhaled Emma could smell the excess ketone bodies in his breath. She recognized all the symptoms of infection, dehydration, and malnutrition. Starvation and infection were causing his liver to oxidize his body’s fatty acids, a process accelerated by the strenuous pace she had set.

“Sumner, can you continue?” Emma whispered the question. He looked at her through eyes that were glassy with fever.

He nodded. Once. And then swayed a little. He straightened slowly. Emma turned and continued on, but now at a drastically reduced pace.

An hour later, his legs gave out. Fever consumed him. Emma dropped the backpack and set up the tent. They’d gone only about an additional six miles the whole day due to the lack of a machete. At around noon gunshots had echoed through the forest a lot closer than Emma had hoped. Sumner’s collapse couldn’t have come at a worse time. Tears ran down her face, and her hands shook. Having company had felt better at first, but now she couldn’t leave him, and she suspected that the guerrillas were close.

Emma stripped his shirt off and peered at the machete wound. The skin around the slice was swollen like a balloon and a dark, angry, red color. Pus dripped out of the slash. The wound smelled sweet, putrid, and thick, like decaying flesh. It was clear to her that Sumner would die unless she could find a way to draw the infection from the wound and hold his fever down while she did.

Emma stripped Sumner’s remaining clothes off and carried them to the stream. She submerged them in the water, wrung them out, and placed them over the branches of a bush in the sun. She wanted the sun’s rays to burn off any infection that remained on the clothing. She heard a loud buzzing noise. A nearby bush seemed to vibrate with the sound. Emma took a cautious step toward it. The sound intensified. When she reached the bush, she saw the sound’s source. A dead capybara lay next to the bush. Hundreds of blowflies covered the corpse. The black mass stayed in constant motion, the flies moving and battling one another for position. New flies hovered over the body, plunging into the heaving mess and flinging themselves back into the air. Several buzzed around Emma’s head, dive-bombing close to her face.