Don't Look Back (40 page)

Behind her, footfall quickened, al-Gilani crashing through the brush.

She darted toward the aperture. The hollow tree exhaled a rich, earthy aroma. Spiderwebs clung to the bark around the opening, glistening with dew. There was no time to be afraid.

One leg in first. Ducking, she bladed her torso, exhaled, and popped through just as she heard al-Gilani charge into the glade.

The stench inside was suffocating. Her sneakers sank into the mud and kept sinking to the laces. It wasn’t mud.

It was guano.

She stiffened. Her ears strained. Above, she heard a faint rustling, the noise reverberating around the tube of the trunk and coming at her from all sides. Her trembling hand found Claire’s dive watch, still strapped to her wrist. She knew that al-Gilani was just outside, and she wanted to stop herself, but she couldn’t.

She clicked on the backlight. The aqua-blue glow reached only a few feet above Eve’s head, but its outer reach was sufficient to illuminate thousands of sequin glints stretching up and up, coating the inside of the tree.

Eyes.

She did not have to worry about screaming; she could find no air.

Warmth emanated from the excrement below. She heard al-Gilani lumbering heavily toward her, his fist tapping the prop root at intervals—
knock, knock
—and then his shadow fell across the opening. It wobbled back and forth as he neared the trunk, the raps growing less frequent but louder.

Knock. Knock.

With painstaking slowness Eve crouched into a ball, her knees pressed to her chin. She lowered her face. And covered the back of her neck.

He was right outside now, leaning in, close enough that she could have reached out and flicked his face.

Knock!

As his fist struck the trunk beside the aperture, Eve felt the air around her suck back as if the banyan core were inhaling.

And then the tree exploded downward. A fire-hose stream blasted across her hair. Countless bodies skimmed over her head, rocketing out the hole. Leathery tips brushed her cheeks, battered her shoulders.

She sensed al-Gilani fly back and away from the opening, though she did not dare to lift her head. She kept her chin tucked, drawing air from the tiny space between her mouth and her chest. It kept on, the torrent of bats, for longer than seemed imaginable—one solid minute and then another and another.

The deluge lightened by degrees until she could make out the distinct sound of individual bats. Mustering courage, she lifted her head. No sign of al-Gilani in the narrow view afforded her between the walls of the prop roots.

She slid out, gasping for fresh air, wiping at her matted locks. Summoning courage, she crept past the shelter of the tall roots, taking it step by step, letting her back slide along the bark. But when she at last stood free, he was not in sight.

She rotated her sore ankle once and then again. Searching the vegetation, she found a plant with slender, tough leaves, and she plucked two and used them to wrap her foot outside the sock. She tied her laces as hard as she could, rose, and began to hike. The brace loosened quickly, but it was better than nothing.

The trail was off-limits. The river itself was off-limits. No matter where she went, he would be searching for her, tracking her, but she’d have a better chance to slip past if she avoided any obvious routes.

She’d head south toward Huatulco, using the sun as a gauge—the same plan as before but now inland from the river. She was more confident in her ability to forage for food, so the main concerns, aside from the homicidal terrorist pursuing her, were whether her body would give out and whether she’d reach anyone before Claire and Will starved to death. When she’d left them, they were due to run out of food in three or four days, and twenty-four hours had already passed with Eve no farther down the mountain range. She had to make up time. Assuming she didn’t get lost—a big assumption—how long would it take her to reach civilization on an injured foot? Four days? Five? All she needed was to get down to where the roads were open. One passing truck. A car. A ranch house with a phone.

A Hail Mary, do-or-really-die plan. Not an hour could be wasted. She had to keep her legs moving. She had to fuel herself and sleep little. She had to remember Claire and Will in the hidden grotto and Nicolas drawing pictures of the outer reaches of the universe.

—alive for Sunday burrito night and zipping up his jacket and buying him shoes that fit and—

The sun was directly overhead, relentless. She reapplied spiked cooking oil to ward off the bugs and checked her water supply. Given al-Gilani’s guzzling, she was down to two and a half bottles. At some point today, she’d run out, and then she’d have to risk drinking from fronds or a stream and exposing herself to the same bacteria that had knocked Sue out of whack. She’d worry about that then.

Ridges and valleys rolled underfoot as she fell into a rhythm, shocked at the pace she was able to maintain. She remembered the girl she was in high school, the soccer player who always got up no matter how many times she was slide-tackled. She had found her again, found herself. One sip of water for every hill she crested—that was the deal she struck with herself.

She came upon the remains of a house, washed down a hillside and left scattered postapocalyptically when the water had evaporated. A toilet, a bed frame, a doll. She gave the strewn items a wide berth. She passed a stream that stank of sulfur, a boa constrictor sunning on a rotten log, a lizard with its head inexplicably smashed. She moved past spiders spinning beautiful golden webs and across trails of leaf-cutter ants conveying their hauls, green bites of vegetation rising up from their backs like tiny dorsal fins. Her ankle worsened. The clouds, still fat and puffy, had lightened to a snow-white gauze, diffusing the sun. She estimated where the glow had been fifteen minutes ago and adjusted her heading.

The jungle thickened until she needed to hold her arms before her as if shielding herself from boxing jabs. Thoughts of rest lulled her. She pictured herself sitting down, unwrapping her ankle, chugging water. She broke through a curtain of vines, and her teeth clenched down hard enough to make her sore jaw throb.

She stood, swaying, poleaxed. Staring.

At first the bamboo walkways and huts did not seem to be what they were. Another ecolodge perhaps, in another zone of the jungle. After all, there were no bodies, there was no scorched van in the cantina.

But the rank smell wafted from the stables, cutting through her denial. An orb of black flies swayed above blood-mottled fur of the slaughtered burros.

She was back at Días Felices Ecolodge
™
.

After exhausting herself and her resources, burning another half day that she—and Claire and Will—could not spare, she had merely come full circle to the spot where it had begun. Back not only to the danger zone but to one of the places al-Gilani would most likely come to pick up her trail.

Disbelief gave way to despair. She staggered through the splintered picnic tables into the clearing. He must have returned at some point and rolled the van into a gorge somewhere. Always covering his tracks, always one step ahead. By the time anyone came looking—
if
anyone came looking—even the burros would be picked clean, the machete slashes chewed away by millions of insect mandibles.

This was not a redeemable mistake. She could not recover the half day nor the energy she had spent during it. The coast was out of reach. Between her and civilization, al-Gilani waited. Will and Claire would die. There was not enough sand in the hourglass now, and what remained would keep falling until they were layered under, until they disappeared. Lanie would receive the phone call, and then Rick would be informed. He’d fly home. He was a flawed but good man, and he would do right by Nicolas. It would be hard, but they would figure it out.

She was on her knees now, keening, clawing at the dirt, bathed in the abattoir stench of the stable. She saw herself keeled there, shattered, broken. She clutched at the shards of herself, clutched until she bled, until she shuddered with grief and dread and the primal terror of aloneness, until she coughed and gagged out a cable of snot-thickened drool. Then she balled up all the abject desperation and consigned it to the little box in her chest where her Inner Voice once hid.

Get up, Mom. Get up.

I am, baby. I will.

She lifted her head. Through the tangle of her bangs, she caught a glint on the dirt just past the steps of the adobe hut.

Will’s flashlight.

She turned her gaze to the sky. The clouds were pulling thin, letting through holes of blue. She pictured that single bar of reception she’d gotten atop the temple ruins just before the phone went dead. She thought about Will’s plan for when the battery went out. Junior-high physics.

She looked back across at the flashlight. She crawled to it. Her thumb indented the rubber button, and it threw a faint beam.

She unscrewed the bottom, and a heavy D cell slid out into her palm. She smashed the flashlight lens and unseated the housing behind the pinprick bulb, twisting it to yank out the wires. Using her teeth, she stripped the ends.

She found her feet, started limping for Harry and Sue’s adobe hut. In the bathroom trash can, she found crumpled medical tape she’d used to secure the bandage around Will’s ankle. Painstakingly, she straightened it. It still held enough stick to seat the battery to Jay’s satphone. She positioned the wires to connect the poles to the metal contacts inside the phone’s compartment.

Juggling the wires with her fingers, she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and pressed the
ON
button.

The phone turned on.

The battery charge was red but not yet blinking. She waited while the reception icon spun and spun. It found nothing. She powered the phone down. It had locked onto a signal at a higher altitude, atop the temple. She needed to go upslope, then, instead of down. Toward the heart of the Sierra Madre del Sur.

Into the jungle instead of out of it.

Chapter 54

Fallen trees formed what looked like a World War I barricade at the fork in the trail. The way east, to Santo Domingo Tocolochutla, was blocked. But she wasn’t heading there.

She leaned back on her heels, taking in the rise of the mighty white cedar. The wooden scaffolding that formed the bird-watching platform looked in even soggier shape than she remembered, the storm having taken its toll. She rested a hand on a saturated ladder rung, and it crumbled away.

Not promising.

She took out the satphone and tried for a signal again, just in case she might be spared the climb. At every knoll or clearing on the way up, she’d stopped and tested the phone. The first D cell had stopped giving juice halfway here, and she’d fought a momentary panic when the next two batteries from the flashlight had held no charge. But the last one had come through, producing the red battery icon on the screen, and she’d checked the connection more sparingly the rest of the way.

As she fiddled with the wire connections, she sidestepped until she found a patch of warmth where the sky let through the canopy. The phone lit up, the connection icon rotating infuriatingly. It caught, holding a single bar, and her heart leapt. The bar disappeared, came back, flickered, then vanished for good.

Back to the ladder, then.

Returning to the tree, she reached for a high rung and tested it. The moss-covered wood sagged a bit but held, and she hoisted herself up onto the ladder, quickly redistributing her weight across other rungs. Some wobbled under her grip, others broke free. Her bad ankle proved almost useless on the vertical, holding little weight. Progress was halting, but she arrived at the open, spiderwebbed hatch cut into the floor of the platform and then hauled herself through the glistening threads and onto the soft wood.

Beetles scurried through dead leaves. One rail dripped with ants, though they stayed oddly confined. The view rode the canopy underbelly out in all directions; it was like floating just beneath the ocean surface, confined and yet also vast beyond comprehension. Azure backdropped the green above in colored-glass fragments. To the west the overgrown trail blazed uphill toward the
alcalde
’s. Eve swept herself a spot, sat with her swollen ankle kicked wide, and checked the phone.

One and a half bars.

She bit her lip, holding back optimism.

Her thumb pushed down on 0 and held it. A run of faint static and then a distant ring. The sound of civilization, of order, of safety. The next ring muted partway through but came back.

A voice said, “Hello, international operator.”

Eve’s mouth moved a few times, making no sound. Her jaw ached at the corner from the blow.

“Hello?”

“Hi, hello, hi, you can hear me, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“You can hear me. You can … My name is Eve Hardaway. I’m … I was staying at the Días Felices Ecolodge in the Oaxacan Sierra, north of Huatulco. Can you hear me?”

“Ma’am, yes, I—”

“And there’s a man here, trying to kill me. His name is Bashir Ahmat al-Gilani. He’s number twenty-three on the FBI’s most wanted list, but he’s here, here in Mexico. He killed the rest of my party, except for two others. They’re hiding in a grotto through an underwater passage in a cascade, a well-known cascade if you ask someone. You have to ask where Días Felices Ecolodge is and send help here for me and for them.”

“  ’am         not sure I         don’t                 ”

“Wait. No. No, please. Hello?”

“                 location            manager on       ”

Eve shifted the phone to check the screen, the solitary bar ghosting in and out of existence. “No. You’re still here. You’re still—”

Her hand slipped, and one wire pulled free of the connection. She bent over the phone, sweat dripping from her forehead onto her hands as they worked furiously on the wires. Connected again. The call lost. One bar. Battery light blinking.

“Goddamn it, no no no no
no.
”