Quintana Roo (18 page)

Roots and hanging vines reached out for them like clutching hands as the two men and two women stumbled in single file through the dripping jungle. They hacked at the brush with the sword and the knives taken from the dead Mayas back in Iztal. The weapons proved to be poor substitutes for the curved machete, which was designed for the purpose, and their progress was painfully slow.

“We’ll never get anywhere through this muck,” Connie said.

“Shut up and stay close,” Hooker snapped.

Some ten minutes after they went over the wall, though it seemed like much longer, Buzz cried out, “Here it is! The trail.”

“Are you sure?” Hooker asked.

“Hell, no, I’m not sure. But it is
a
trail, and that’s a whole lot better than chewing our way through that shit.”

“Amen,” Connie said with feeling.

“Which way do we go?” Hooker said.

There was a subtle change in the sound of the night. The four people looked at one another. Unconsciously, they moved closer together.

“The rain’s stopped,” Connie said.

“A good omen,” Alita added.

As they looked up, there was a break in the clouds and a near-full moon shone through. The pale light that filtered down to them seemed dazzling after the darkness.

“This way,” Buzz said, pointing, “I’m sure of it now.”

“You mean you weren’t sure before?” Connie said. “You sure sounded sure.”

“I was keeping up the troops’ morale,” Buzz told her.

“Oh, swell.”

They started along the jungle trail in the direction Buzz had chosen. Buzz took the point position, with the women in the middle and Hooker at the rear.

“This is more like it,” Connie said.

“Better,” Hooker agreed, “but don’t get careless.”

Underfoot, things they couldn’t see slithered and scuttled out of the way. Once, from a branch above their heads, the eyes of a jaguar glowed like twin jewels. Hooker was reminded of the Tenniel drawing of the Cheshire cat from
Alice in Wonderland
. Only here it was the eyes instead of the grin that remained.

They had not gone far along the trail when shouts were heard from back toward the city of Iztal.

“We’ve been missed,” Hooker said.

“They’ll catch us,” Connie said.

“Maybe, but they haven’t got us yet, so keep moving.”

“What’s the use? We don’t have a chance of keeping ahead of them.”

Buzz turned around and growled at her, “What’s the use? I don’t want that Indian poking around inside my head; that’s what’s the use. Now will you for Chrissake shape up?”

“Sorry,” Connie said in a small voice. “I’ve never been a whiner. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Hooker squeezed her arm. “Don’t worry too much about it. You had to do some hard things tonight. You’ll be all right.”

She looked up at him, her face pale in the moonlight. “Have you killed many men, Hooker?”

“Not as many as you might think.”

A smile grew slowly on her face. She laughed. “You know, you really look funny without any hair.”

“Never mind about the hair,” he said in a mock-gruff voice, then grinned at her. “Just keep moving.”

Up in the front of their little column, Buzz grunted and fell heavily to the ground.

Hooker moved past the women to kneel beside him. “You okay?”

Buzz was sitting up tugging on the straps that held the carved wooden foot to the stump of his leg. “Goddam thing came loose. Fucking Indians can’t do anything right.”

“You going to need some help?”

“Shit, no. I’ll hop along on the goddam stump if I have to.”

He pulled the straps tight and fastened the complicated buckle arrangement. Then he stood up, took a step, and fell on his face.

“Hooker,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“I’m gonna need some help.”

Hooker pulled Buzz upright. “Put your arm over my shoulders.” They took a couple of experimental steps together.

“Feel okay?”

“Fucking cripple,” Buzz muttered. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

Hooker turned to the women. “Connie, you stay close behind us, and Alita, stay close to Connie. We don’t want to get separated. The moon helps a little, but it could go back behind the clouds at any time.”

“Aye, aye, skipper,” Connie said.

“Alita?”

“I’m here, Johnny.”

Hooker took a long look, wondering at a strange note in her voice. But he could see only her silhouette in the filtered moonlight.

“Okay, let’s go. If you have any problem back there, call out.”

The moon stayed with them as the clouds thinned, but the dripping water from overhead branches was nearly as heavy as the rain. Hooker fell into a rhythm with Buzz, keeping the bad foot between them, and they managed to make a fairly good pace. He was stopped by the touch of Connie’s hand on his shoulder.

“Hooker.”

“What is it?”

“Alita isn’t behind me anymore.”

“What the hell …?”

Buzz disengaged himself from Hooker’s shoulder. “Go on back and take a look. I can use the rest.”

Hooker made his way back along the trail, calling Alita’s name softly. From back in the direction of Iztal, the sound of voices was becoming more organized. Not a good sign.

“Over here, Johnny.” Alita’s voice, coming from the shadows, was so close it startled him.

“What are you doing back here? I told everybody to stay close together.”

“I took a little rest.”

“This is a hell of a time for it. If you listen, you can hear them coming after us.”

Alita took his hand and got to her feet. “I’m sorry, Johnny. I just got tired for a minute.”

“Hey, don’t you go weak on me,
chiquita
. I’m counting on you.”

“Don’t worry. I’m all right now. I just needed that little rest.”

Together they walked back up to join Buzz and Connie.

“She just took a little rest,” Hooker said.

Connie shifted her feet nervously. “I can hear them back there behind us.”

“I doubt if they can track us over the wet ground in the dark,” Hooker said, “but sooner or later they’ll get onto this trail, so we can’t afford to slow down.”

As they pushed on through the night jungle, the sounds of the followers diminished and finally could be heard no more. The four of them stopped to listen.

“Do you think they’ve given up?” Connie said.

“Mayas never give up,” Alita said.

“Maybe they took the wrong trail,” Buzz suggested.

Hooker shook his head. “Let’s not get our hopes up. They’re probably just waiting for daylight. They know these trails, and they can cover them all in the light more effectively than we can move straight ahead.”

“You’re probably right,” Buzz admitted. “So we better put as much distance between us and them as we can while it’s still dark.”

They pushed on, groping along the trail, falling, rising again, tearing their clothes and their flesh on thorns, no longer even startled when something live scurried across their feet. At last, the sky turned charcoal ahead of them, then pale gray, and finally a delicate blue.

Buzz stopped suddenly, almost dragging Hooker and himself to the ground. “There it is!” he cried.

He pulled free of Hooker’s supporting arm and staggered forward on the wooden foot. The others stumbled after him. Then they all saw it. With the sun glinting off the wet aluminum, it was the wreckage of Nolan Braithwaite’s airplane.

“I found it!” Buzz yelled. “I found the son of a bitch!”

“You sure as hell did, buddy,” Hooker said. He hurried forward to catch Buzz, who was wobbling badly.

“My God, look at that,” Connie said.

They followed her eyes and saw the skull and scattered bones of Manuel, the
chiclero
who had died with a Mayan spear through his chest.

“Is that all that’s left of him?”

“The jungle makes quick work of its dead,” Kaplan said. “What the
zopilotes
don’t eat, the land crabs and the insects finish off. Very efficient.”

Hooker looked over and saw Alita sitting near the twisted tail section of the Orion, facing away from him. She used one hand to shade her eyes from the sun. He walked over and sat down on his heels next to her.

“Feeling better?”

“Oh, sure, I’m fine, Johnny.”

“You’re hungry, probably. We could all do with something to eat.”

“I stashed some coconuts inside the plane,” Buzz said. “We can crack a couple of those.”

“How far are we from the river?” Hooker asked.

“I figure half an hour.”

“Then let’s eat.”

Hooker climbed into the twisted fuselage of the Lockheed and found the coconuts where Kaplan said they would be at the forward end of the passenger cabin. Up in the cockpit, he could see the stripped bones of the pilot, forever waiting for clearance from some ghostly control tower.

He punctured two of the coconuts and poured the contents into a half shell to pass around. Each of them drank deeply of the cool, sweet milk. Then, using the heavy sword, Hooker cleaved the nuts in half. They used the smaller knives to dig out the chewy white meat.

Buzz looked up from where he sat on the ground and cocked his head, listening. Hooker did the same and heard a strange coughing grunt that was repeated from several directions in the jungle.

“What’s that?”

“That’s the way the Mayas tell each other where they are,” Buzz said.

“Then it’s time for us to go,” Hooker said. “Which way to the river?”

Buzz stuffed a last chunk of coconut meat into his mouth and pointed at a faint break in the foliage on the far side of the airplane.

“Through there,” he said. “It’s not much of a trail, but we can make it in the daylight.”

Buzz used the sword to hack off a Y-shaped branch to use as a crutch, and the little party pushed through the brush and started along an overgrown path that took them gradually downhill. After twenty minutes, they could hear the sound of running water. They could also hear the sounds of pursuers behind them.

“Almost there,” Buzz said.

Hooker recognized the false note of heartiness in his voice and tried to match it. “Good. I don’t think we’re all that far ahead of our Indian friends.”

The river came almost as a surprise. The trees stopped, the ground sloped suddenly down, and there it was. Some twenty yards across, brown and swollen from the rains, it flowed seemingly from nowhere around a bend off to their left and to some other nowhere off to their right.

“I can see how the map makers could miss it,” Hooker said.

“Hell, it looks like the Mississippi now,” Buzz said. “Before the rains, it was just a trickle. I didn’t even know if it would float my raft.”

“Where is this famous raft?”

Buzz looked up and down the river bank. His face darkened for a moment, then lit up in a relieved smile. “There she is, downstream at the base of that crooked tree. For a minute, I was afraid she might have washed away.”

The four of them made their way gingerly along the muddy river bank to the twisted ceiba tree Buzz had pointed out. Lashed to the bottom of the trunk were several hacked-off logs tied together to form a raft about six feet square.

“What did you use for rope?” Hooker asked.

“Cut strips from the carpeting in the plane’s cabin.”

“It’s kind of, uh, small.”

“Well, shit, I only planned on it carrying me, not half the population of Veracruz.”

“Didn’t mean to criticize, buddy,” Hooker said. He took hold of one end of the raft and shook it. “We could tighten it up a little.”

Hooker and Buzz cinched the lashings of the logs tighter, making a reasonably solid platform. Then they pushed it gingerly into the water, leaving the rope tethering it to the tree trunk. One by one, the four of them stepped aboard.

It sank under them.

“Well, shit goddam,” Kaplan said.

They scrambled back to the river bank. Alita slumped into a sitting position, her head forward, arms crossed over her breasts.

“Nice try, buddy,” Hooker said, “but it won’t quite carry us all.”

“I think it’ll take three if there’s not too much moving around,” Buzz said.

“So what? There are four of us.”

“Listen, I’m already half shot. I can’t walk, and I think the fucking leg is infected. I probably wouldn’t make it, anyway, so why don’t you three — ”

“Bullshit,” Hooker cut him off. “You built the goddam thing. You’ve spent a year surviving in this rotten jungle. If you think we’re going to leave you — ”

“Will you guys shut up a minute?”

The others looked at Alita in surprise. Her face was pale in the morning sunlight.

“Don’t worry,
chiquita
,” Hooker said. “We’ll work something out.”

“It’s already worked out.”

Something in the tone of her voice sent a chill through Hooker. He knelt beside Alita and looked into her eyes. Gently, he took her hands and drew her arms away from her breasts. The front of the white dress was a sopping crimson.

“Jesus Christ!” Hooker said. “You didn’t say anything.”

“It wouldn’t have helped. That kid got me pretty good with the knife after I put the sword in him.”

“Oh, God, look!” Connie cried.

Back up the river, where they had come through from the plane wreck, others were now breaking out of the brush. They had the emotionless faces, the staring eyes of the
muerateros
.

“Go, Johnny,” Alita said. “Don’t let them get you.”

He held her tight and could feel her blood seeping through his own shirt. He imagined he could feel her life slipping away, too.

“Chiquita — ”

“Just tell me one thing, Johnny.”

“Sure.”

“You do adore me, don’t you?”

“Always have.”

“I knew it.”

Alita closed her eyes and died. Just died. No shudder, no death rattle, no drumming of the feet. She simply died. Hooker knew it was useless to check her throat for a pulse, but he did it, anyway. There was none.

He looked up at Buzz and Connie, who were watching from a few feet away.

“She’s dead.”

“I’m sorry, Hooker,” Buzz said.

Connie opened her mouth but did not say anything.

Hooker placed the body of the Mexican girl gently on the river bank. Upstream, the
muerateros
had seen them and were coming toward them through the brush, heedless of thorns and branches.

“Let’s get out of here,” Hooker said.

Buzz, moving clumsily on the wooden foot, stepped aboard the frail raft.

Hooker gave Connie a shove. She was staring at the advancing
muerateros
and seemed unable to move. Finally, Hooker picked her up and set her aboard the raft. Buzz took her there and held her. Hooker got on then and cut the rope holding them to the tree. The raft spun out into the river current just as the first of the
muerateros
reached the ceiba tree.

The creatures hesitated at the water’s edge. They were of different sizes and skin shades but alike in the emptiness of their faces. Several of them waded out until they were knocked over by the current. They pulled themselves back to shore and began following along on the river bank.

“Close,” said Buzz. He sat cross-legged, his arms wrapped around Connie. She was on her knees, still staring back at the walking dead men.

Hooker sat close to them, so all three were huddled in the center of the raft. They picked up speed as the raft was drawn to the swifter current at midstream. Hooker took Connie by the shoulder and shook her, not too gently.

“Hey. They haven’t got us yet.”

Connie pulled her eyes away from the bank where the creatures were struggling to keep up with the now swiftly moving raft.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “One of them was Nolan.”

“What do you mean?”

Speaking slowly and carefully, Connie said, “One of those zombies was my husband, Nolan Braithwaite.”

“You must be wrong.”

“I’m not wrong. He stood out from the others because his skin was the whitest. Nolan never could get a decent tan. It was his body, his face, only … only, he was dead.”

Hooker and Kaplan exchanged a look.

“It could be true,” Buzz said. “I never knew what they did with him.”

“Connie, I don’t know what to say.”

She reached out and touched Hooker’s face, trying a smile. “What the hell,
you
should be comforting
me?
”

There was a jolt as the raft banged into a rock that just broke the surface of the river. One of the end logs was knocked askew.

“We can comfort each other later,” Hooker said. “Our job now is to stay afloat.”

He retied the loose log while Buzz used his makeshift crutch to keep the raft off other rocks that jutted out of the water. Connie gripped the back of Kaplan’s belt with both hands to keep him from falling overboard. And always, along the bank, there were the ominous shadows moving among the trees, tracking them.

“Shit!” Buzz said. “They’re on both sides of us now.”

Hooker looked across to the opposite bank of the river and saw they had company there, too. But there was a difference.

“Those are Indians,” Hooker said. “Live ones. With spears.”

As he said it, one of the Mayas on the far bank let fly with his spear. It wobbled in flight and sliced into the water well upstream of the raft.

“Let’s hope their aim doesn’t improve,” Buzz said.

Another Mayan spear dove into the river alongside them. “The footing isn’t solid along the bank,” Hooker said. “They’ll have to be really good to hit a moving target.”

“Or lucky,” Connie put in.

“Yeah.”

• • •

The river twisted and writhed like a great brown snake through the dark green jungle. For a long stretch, the growth was too thick on shore for them to see if the followers were still there.

“Maybe they went home,” Connie said.

Hooker frowned. “Like Alita said, Mayas never give up.”

They floated along without speaking, almost peacefully for a while. It was Connie who broke the silence.

“You liked her a lot, didn’t you, Hooker.”

“A lot,” he said.

“I’m sorry about what happened.”

“People die. None of us are out of this yet.”

“Goddam!” Buzz’s shout brought Connie’s and Hooker’s heads around in time to see Buzz start to slip into the river.

Hooker lunged across the raft and grabbed him by the collar. The bottom half of Buzz’s body was in the water where something dark and leathery was thrashing the river water into a froth.

“Cayman!” Buzz shouted. “Son of a bitch came out of the water and grabbed me.”

“Hang on to him,” Hooker yelled. He snatched up the Mayan sword from where he had wedged it between the logs of the raft. Over and over, he struck at the thing in the water while Connie hugged Buzz from behind to keep him from being pulled away from them.

The sword bounced off the bony head of the gatorlike cayman with no effect. The vicious teeth dug in deeper. Hooker stopped his useless slashing, gripped the hilt of the sword with both hands, and went for the creature’s eye. The sword point slid into the eyeball and scraped the ridge of bone around the socket. The cayman opened its jaws to bellow, and Connie toppled backward onto the raft with Buzz in her arms.

The six-foot reptile dove under the water to reappear almost immediately upstream and bellow again. Still holding the sword, Hooker turned to Buzz, who was disentangling himself from Connie.

“Where’d he get you?”

Buzz held up his leg. There were fresh, deep gouges in both sides of the wooden foot. “Honest to God, I never thought I’d be glad to be wearing that thing instead of a real foot.”

Hooker drew a deep breath. “Maybe you shouldn’t dangle it overboard.”

“I told you the bastard jumped up and bit me.”

“Okay, but let’s try to stay as close to the middle of the raft as we can.”

• • •

The morning wore on, and the river broadened as it was joined by underground streams. They kept a close watch on both banks but saw no more sign of Mayas or
muerateros
.

“That doesn’t mean they aren’t there,” Hooker said. “They can be watching us all the way.”

“Where, exactly, is this river going?” Connie asked. “If that isn’t a dumb question.”

“It’s got to take us to the Caribbean,” Buzz said. “As near as I can figure, it comes out somewhere in Ascensión Bay.”

“Where does that leave us?”

“Hell, once we get to the sea, we’re as good as home. There are fishermen up and down the coast all the time.”

“Any idea how far it is?”

“The whole territory isn’t sixty miles across here. The river has pretty much straightened out, and we’re floating west at a good clip. I figure we ought to reach open sea well before sundown.”

“We better,” Hooker said. “There’s no way we can handle this thing in the dark.”

Hooker took over using Buzz’s crutch to keep the raft away from tangled roots along the bank and rocks out in midstream. They saw no further activity in the brush on either side of the river.

The sun reached its zenith and started down ahead of them.

“I wish we’d brought some of those coconuts,” Connie said. “I’m starving.”

“We really weren’t equipped to carry provisions,” Hooker said.

Buzz grabbed his arm and pointed ahead of them to a mud flat that extended well out into the stream. “Think you can guide us over there?”

“Sure. What for?”

“Food. Come on, paddle.”

The three of them used their hands, the crutch, the sword, to paddle furiously and bring the raft within a few feet of the mud flat. Hooker jumped out into hip-deep water and dragged the raft behind him to the flat.

“Now what?” he said.

“Look around for a depression in the mud, like a dish, with a kind of mud ridge around it.”

“They’re all over the place.”

“Dig your hand down into one of them.”

“Wait a minute, is something going to bite me?”

“Trust me,” Buzz said.

Hooker sighed and thrust his hand down into the greasy black mud in the center of one of the depressions. It was warm from the sun. His fingers touched a firm surface, and he pulled back reflexively. He glanced at Buzz and dug deeper. He got his fingers around something that felt like a Ping-Pong ball. He brought it up carefully and washed off the mud in the running stream.

“Swell,” he said. “What is it?”

“Turtle egg,” Buzz said. “There’ll be more down there.”

“Are we supposed to eat those things?” Connie said.

“The Indians think they’re delicious.”

“Raw?”

“Unless you can think of a way to start a fire on the raft. Give it here.”

Buzz held out his hand, and Hooker put the turtle egg in it.

“I think I’d rather starve,” Connie said.

“You got to give it a chance,” Buzz said. He took up one of the Mayan knives and stabbed a hole in opposite sides of the egg. He put the egg to his mouth, tilted his head back, and noisily sucked out the contents. When he had finished, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and smacked his lips in an exaggerated way.

“Man, that is what I call a turtle egg.”

Connie shuddered.

There were five more in the nest. Hooker dug them out and brought them aboard the raft. He tried jabbing holes in one of them as Buzz had, but the egg shattered in his hand. He rinsed his hand in the river and tried again. This time, he successfully punctured both sides of the egg and sucked out the contents. It tasted like a raw egg.

“How is it?” Connie asked.

“Delicious. Here.”

She took an egg from him, punched delicate little holes, and sucked. She made a sick face at them but finished off the egg.

“Have another?” Hooker asked.

“No, thanks. I don’t seem to be hungry anymore.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Hooker caught a movement in the brush along the river bank upstream of them. He called the others’ attention to it with a nod.

“I think we’d better be under way.”

Hooker jumped off and waded out into the river, pushing the raft until he was waist deep; then he pulled himself aboard and looked up at Buzz and Connie. Their faces were white.

“What’s the matter?”

“I guess you didn’t see what was coming after you,” Buzz said.

Connie pointed down at the water.

He looked and saw a black snake with coppery bands swimming away in a series of graceful S’s.

“Probably harmless,” Hooker said, but his knees suddenly felt watery.

• • •

It was late afternoon when they noticed a change in the foliage along the river bank. There were more palms and fewer of the deep jungle trees like chicle and ceiba. Then they heard the sound up ahead, A whisper first, then a sort of rushing, and finally a muffled roar.

The men looked at each other.

“You know what that is?” Buzz said.

“Waterfall.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“I think we’d better beach.”

They steered the raft over to the bank and climbed off. The ground was harder there, making it easier for Buzz to use his crutch. The roar of the waterfall could be clearly heard now, and there was a mist in the air that dampened everything.

Connie ran on ahead while the men stowed the raft under some branches. They heard her cry out and looked up. She came back smiling and laughing like a child on her birthday.

“Come and look,” she called. “Come on!”

Hooker and Buzz followed her up a slope and through a dense stand of palm trees. There they stopped suddenly, unable to speak.

Immediately before them was a cliff dropping some fifty feet to the rocky beach. Off to their right, the river plunged in a misty cataract. Ahead of them, beyond the beach, lay the sheltered Ascensión Bay and the deep blue Caribbean.

Buzz Kaplan began to dance — crutch, wooden foot, and all. “We made it!” he yelled above the roar of the waterfall. “We goddam made it!”

Connie hugged Buzz, then she hugged Hooker, and the three of them talked at once, and nobody listened until Hooker suddenly fell silent, looking off along the beach.

“There’s something down there.”

Connie and Buzz quieted and looked.

“I don’t see anything,” Connie said.

“Look close.”

“By God, there is something,” Buzz said. “Buildings. Three, no, four of them. And a dock. There’s even some kind of bridge across the river down there. But everything’s painted to make it hard to see. Camouflage. What the hell?”

“I’ve got a feeling we better head down the beach in the other direction,” Hooker said.

“Wait a minute,” Connie said. She leaned forward, squinting against the sun. “There are men moving around down there. Oh, thank God. They’re white men.”