Brood XIX (12 page)

He wished he'd had the opportunity to find
his pistol, but it would have been useless against their superior
numbers. His only hope was to run, to reach the river. From there
he could only pray that he would be able to survive the rapids and
that they wouldn't be able to track him from the shore. It was a
long shot. Unfortunately, it was also his only shot.

Tightening his grip on his backpack, his
muscles tensed in anticipation.

Through the curtain of lianas, the rain
continued to pour, creating puddles in every imperfection in the
earth and eroding through the steep slope ahead, which plummeted
nearly vertically into the valley below. If he fell, they would be
upon him in a flash. And that was only if he didn't slide over the
lip of the limestone cliff and plunge hundreds of feet through the
forest canopy to his death.

Hunter drew a deep breath and bolted out
into the night. Narrowing his eyes against the sudden assault of
raindrops, he focused on the rocky path that led down toward the
river. The ancient fortress wall flew past to his left, a crumbling
twenty-five foot structure composed of large bricks of chiseled
obsidian nearly consumed by the overgrowth of vines, shrubbery, and
bromeliads. Every footfall summoned a loud splash he could barely
hear over his own frantic breathing. The mud sucked at his boots as
though he were running through syrup. He barely managed to stay
upright long enough to reach the path, little more than a thin
trench between rugged stone faces. The ground in the channel was
slick and nearly invisible under the muddy runoff. His feet slipped
out from beneath him and he cracked his head on a rock. His
momentum and the current carried him downward onto a flat plateau
dominated by Brazil nut trees draped with vines and moss.

The roar of the river became audible over
the tumult of rain. He was so close---

A crashing sound from the underbrush to his
right.

He glanced over as he crawled to his feet
and saw nothing but shadows lurking behind the shivering
branches.

More crashing uphill to his left.

He wasn't going to make it.

Willing his legs to move faster, he sprinted
toward the edge of the forest and the cliff beyond. The waterfall
that fired from the mountain upstream was a riot of mist and spray
that crashed down upon a series of jagged rocks. Hopefully, there
was enough water racing through now thanks to the storm to have
raised the level of the river above them. Either way, he'd rather
take his chances with broken bones than the hunters that barreled
through the jungle, leaving shaking trees in their wake.

They were all around him now and closing
fast.

If he could just reach the rock ledge, he
could leap down into the river and allow it to whisk him away.

Ten yards.

Through the trees, he could see only fog,
but he'd been down here enough times to know that the foaming
whitecaps flowed only fifteen feet below. He would then need to
navigate a series of waterfalls, and keep from drowning long enough
to reach the bottom of the valley and the start of the real
trek.

Five yards. Another four strides through the
snarl of brush and he could make his leap. Just three more strides
and---

Searing pain erupted in his back as he was
slammed from behind. Something sharp probed between his ribs to
either side of his spine. The mist-shrouded cliff disappeared and
he saw only mud rising toward his face. The backpack against his
chest broke the brunt of his fall, but his forehead still hammered
the ground. He saw only blackness and tasted blood. The weight
pounded down on his back, knocking the wind out of him. Something
clawed at his shoulders as he slid forward.

The pressure on top of him abated and
whatever had stabbed him was yanked out as he rolled over the ledge
and tumbled into the fog toward the frigid river, unable even to
scream.

Chapter One

Pomacochas, Peru

October 14
^th

8:38 a.m. PET

By the time Wes Merritt caught up with the
children, they were giggling and prodding the corpse with
sticks.

This certainly wasn't how he had envisioned
starting his day.

He had been down on the rickety floating
dock on Laguna Pomacochas, loading his 1953 DHC-2 #N68080 seaplane
with supplies for a quick jaunt down to the City of Chachapoyas,
capital of the Amazonas Province of Peru, when the three boys had
raced up the wooden planks and begun chattering at him in Quechua.
Far from fluent in the native tongue, he had captured just a
handful of words here and there, but the few he understood told him
he wouldn't be making the flight that morning. Two words had stood
out specifically. The first,
aya
, meant "dead body." And the
second, undoubtedly the reason they had come directly to him rather
than the policía, was a word that he had been called on more than
one occasion himself.

Mithmaq
. The Quechua word for
stranger.

As Merritt approached the bank of the river
and the partially concealed body, he wondered if the children had
been mistaken. What little skin he could see was mottled bluish
black, and the hair was so thick with mud and scum that it was
nearly impossible to determine the color. The Mayu Wañu, or,
roughly translated, Resurrection River, rose and fell with the
seasons, alternately climbing up the steep slope behind him in the
spring into the primary rainforest, where the massive trunks of the
kapok trees bore the gray discoloration of the water, and
diminishing to a gentle trickle mere inches deep during dry spells.
The body was tangled in vegetation, half-buried in the mud on the
shore, half-floating in the brown river. Swirling eddies attempted
to pry it loose to continue its journey along the rapids into the
lagoon, but the earth held it fast.

"
Sayana
," he said in Quechua.
Stop.

The boys looked up at him, then slowly
backed away, their fun spoiled. One, a shaggy-haired boy of about
twelve in a filthy polo shirt and corduroys that were far too
short, peeked at Merritt from the corner of his eye and gave the
corpse one final poke. All three whirled and sprinted back into the
jungle, laughing.

Merritt eased down the slippery bank. The
mud swallowed his feet to the ankles and he had to hold the limp
yellow ferns to maintain his balance. A quick glance at the ground
confirmed the only recent tracks belonged to the barefooted boys.
He breathed a sigh of relief. There was a long list of creatures he
didn't want to encounter in his current compromised position.

Merritt hauled himself up onto the snarl of
branches that shielded the body from the brunt of the current and
crouched to inspect the remains. Judging by the broad shoulders and
short hair, the corpse belonged to a male, roughly six feet tall,
which definitely marked him as a foreigner to this region of
northern Peru. The man's shirt and cargo pants had both absorbed so
much of the dirty river that it was impossible to tell what color
they might once have been. Twin black straps arched around his
shoulders. His left leg bobbed on the river, the laces from his
boot squirming beneath the surface. His right foot was snared in
the branches under Merritt, the bulk of the leg buried in mud. Both
arms were pinned somewhere under the body.

Back home in the States, this was when the
police would arrive and cordon off the scene so the forensics team
could begin the investigation. But he wasn't back home. He was in a
different world entirely. A world far less complicated than the one
he had left behind, one that had initially welcomed him with overt
suspicion, but had eventually introduced him to a culture that had
made him its own. And although his white skin would always brand
him a
mithmaq
in their midst, no place in the world had ever
felt so much like home.

He looked to the sky, a thin channel of
cobalt through the lush branches that nearly eclipsed it from
either bank. Blue-capped tanagers darted through the canopy in
flickers of turquoise and gold, and common woolly monkeys screeched
out of sight. The omnipresent cloud of mosquitoes whined around his
head, but showed little interest in the waterlogged corpse, which
already seethed with black flies.

Merritt had seen more than his share of
bodies during his years in the army, and approached this one with
almost clinical detachment. That was the whole reason he had run
halfway around the world to escape. There was only so much death
one could experience before becoming numb to it.

With a sigh, he climbed down from the mound
of sticks and rounded the body again.

"This is
so
not cool," he said,
leaning over the man and grabbing one of the shoulder straps.

He braced himself and pulled. The body made
a slurping sound as he pried it from the mire and dragged it higher
onto the bank. Silver shapes darted away through the water, their
meal interrupted.

The vile stench of decomposition made him
gag, but he choked down his gorge. It wasn't as though this was the
first corpse he had ever seen. A flash of his previous life
assailed him.
A dark, dry warren of caves. Smoke swirling all
around him. Shadowed forms sprawled on the ground and against the
rock walls. One of them, a young woman with piercing blue
eyes---

Merritt shook away the memory and willed his
heartbeat to slow.

He blew out a long, slow breath, then rolled
the corpse onto its back. The angry cloud of flies buzzed its
displeasure.

"For the love of God..." he sputtered, and
drew his shirt up over his mouth and nose.

The man's face was a mask of mud, alive with
wriggling larvae, the abdomen a gaping, macerated maw only
partially obscured by the tattered remnants of the shirt. Merritt
had obviously dislocated the man's right shoulder when he wrenched
it out of the mud. The entire arm hung awkwardly askew, while the
left remained wrapped around a rucksack worn backward against his
chest, the fingers curled tightly into the fabric as though afraid
to release it even in death.

Merritt groaned and knelt above the man's
head. He really wished he'd brought his gloves. Cupping his hands,
he scooped the mud from the forehead, out of the eye sockets, and
from around the nose and mouth. The skin beneath was so bloated it
felt like rubber.

Even with the brown smears and discolored
flesh, Merritt recognized the man immediately. He had flown him and
his entire group into Pomacochas from Chiclayo roughly three weeks
ago. So where were the rest of them?

His gaze fell upon the rucksack. If it was
still here when the policía arrived, nothing inside would ever be
seen again. Corruption was a way of life down here.

Merritt unhooked the man's claw from the
fabric, pulled it away from the bag, and set it on the ground. He
unlatched the clasp and drew back the flap. At first all he saw was
a clump of soggy plants. He moved them aside and blinked in
astonishment.

"Son of a bitch."

Hospital Nacional Docente Madre Niño San
Bartolomé

Lima, Peru

October 15
^th

9:03 a.m. PET

Eldon Monahan, Consul-general of the United
States Consulate in Peru, waited in the small gray chamber,
handkerchief over his mouth and nose in preparation for what was to
come. At least this time he'd had the foresight to dab it in Vicks
VapoRub before leaving the office. He wore a crisp charcoal
Turnbull & Asser suit with a navy blue silk tie, and had
slicked back his ebon hair with the sweat that beaded his forehead
and welled against his furry eyebrows. His piercing hazel eyes
absorbed his surroundings. It took all of his concentration to
suppress the expression of contempt. Slate gray walls lined with
ribbons of rust from the leaky pipes in the ceiling surrounded him
on three sides. The fourth was a sheet of dimpled aluminum that
featured a single door with a wide horizontal handle, the kind of
freezer unit they installed in restaurants. Twin overhead sodium
halide fixtures were mounted to the ceiling on retractable
armatures. The diffuse beams spotlighted the scuffed, vinyl-tiled
floor in front of him.

God, how he hated this part of his job.

A baccalaureate degree in Political Science
from Stanford and a doctorate in Politics and International
Relations from Oxford, and here he was in the basement of what
could only loosely be considered a hospital by American standards,
in a backward country half a world away from where he really wanted
to be. Paying his dues. Mastering the intricacies of foreign
diplomacy. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was still about as
far as a man could get from a seat on the Senate floor. Here he
was, thirty-six years old and not even an actual ambassador.

The screech of his grinding teeth reminded
him of his hypertension, and he tried to focus on something else.
Anything else.

The door in the aluminum wall opened outward
with a pop and a hiss. Eldon took an involuntary step in reverse.
The morgue attendant acknowledged him with a nod as he wheeled the
cart into the room and centered it under the lights. A sheet,
stained with a Rorschach pattern of mud and bodily dissolution,
covered the human form beneath.

"What can you tell me about the body?" Eldon
asked in Spanish through the handkerchief.

"The policía dropped it off last night," the
attendant said, visibly amused by the Consul-general's
squeamishness. He wore a yellow surgical gown and cap,
finger-painted with brown bloodstains. "Found him way up north in
the Amazonas. Textbook case of drowning, you ask me."

"How do we know he's an American
citizen?"

"The pilot who flew him into Pomacochas
recognized him."

"But he couldn't identify him?"