Fault Line (3 page)
Authors: Chris Ryan
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Juvenile Nonfiction, #Science & Nature, #Environmental Conservation & Protection
Li found their progress slow and frustrating. She liked doing things fast, with the wind in her long hair and the whip of adrenaline through her veins. Her mind wanted to wander. All around her was fantastic wildlife. The jungle was literally shrieking with it: birds and animals called to each other; leaves rustled as creatures skittered away from them. She dug her toe into a mound to see if it was safe to step on and insects ran all over her black jungle boot. Even the dirt was teeming with life. With a wrench she brought her mind back to the task in hand.
But if Li longed for time to gaze around at the natural world, Hex wanted the opposite. He wasn’t keen on jungles. Leaves touched his shoulders, whipped his face. Branches prodded him like nagging fingers. Vines tangled around his legs. Things hopped and scuttled out of his way. He was claustrophobic and began to feel that the trees were closing in. It was sweltering, too. It was just as well he had the pace-counting to do; otherwise he’d have been thinking about the fact that his palmtop couldn’t get a signal. Their only contact with the outside world was the signal balloon they’d brought in case they needed to call for help. Hardly the state-of-the-art communications Hex was used to. Without access to the web, Hex felt very isolated indeed.
Click. Li counted another ten metres. ‘Check,’ she called, and Hex echoed her.
Amber cursed. Her foot was caught in something. She felt something like claws in her leg. She looked down to see a tangled mass of spiky thorns, like brambles.
‘Amber, stop!’ Alex said. ‘Don’t try and struggle. It’s a wait-a-while. If you struggle you’ll just get more stuck. It’s like barbed wire.’
Amber stood up straight, hands on hips. ‘Well what do I do? Wait for them to dissolve?’
‘I’ll help you.’ Alex handed the map to Paulo and knelt beside Amber. He grasped one of the barbs and pushed her leg carefully back.
‘Ow,’ said Amber. ‘That hurts.’
‘Sorry. You have to unhook it back the way you came.’ The first barb came out. He got to work on the second. ‘This stuff used to be the bane of my dad’s life.’
‘You know,’ said Paulo, ‘I think he’s pleased we’ve found some because he can show us what to do. Look at his face.’
Alex tried to hide his smile but it broke out at the corners of his mouth anyway. He tried burying his chin in his collar instead.
Amber tutted with frustration. ‘Well, the least you could do is thank me for enabling you to demonstrate another vital SAS survival skill,’ she said. ‘This stuff isn’t poisonous, is it?’
Li shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Ow!’ said Amber again, more insistently.
‘Oh, quit complaining,’ said Hex. ‘You probably feel worse when you inject yourself.’ Amber was a diabetic and had to inject herself with insulin twice a day. She carried an insulin injection kit in a small leather pouch on her belt pack.
‘It’s different if you do it to yourself,’ she said.
‘Last one,’ said Alex. ‘You got off lightly. Dad said you can get really stuck in these. We’d better look at the scratches when we get to camp.’
They got back in formation and walked on.
In the jungle, they knew that you could become disorientated if you didn’t have complete confidence in your map and your navigators. It was easy to lose track of time. It was monotonous terrain – the same kinds of trees, the same kinds of animal noises, hour after hour. Even though Paulo was alert, when he saw the landscape change, he felt like he had been shocked out of a sleepwalk.
‘What’s that? Over to the left? There aren’t any trees.’
The others followed where he was pointing. The trees on the right-hand side were not nearly as thick. Beyond, there seemed to be some large open space.
‘Brilliant,’ said Hex. ‘No more trees.’
Paulo hacked into a tree with his machete, carving a shape like an arrow so they knew where to come back to. They picked their way through the vegetation. Ahead, the tree canopy disappeared and brilliant blue sky showed through. The sun shone down. It was like moving close to a fire.
Paulo was through first. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Careful, I’m quite close to the edge here.’
They stepped forwards until they were level with Paulo. He was standing on the edge of a crater fifty metres wide. It was as if the floor of the jungle had fallen away and left a great circular hole, lined with limestone cliffs. Forty metres down, a still pool of water reflected the blue sky and their five faces at one edge – tiny and insignificant.
‘A sinkhole,’ said Alex. ‘Dad told me about these. They used to abseil into them and go swimming. He said he never touched the bottom of one.’
‘Typical,’ snorted Amber. ‘Hundreds of years ago these sinkholes were sacred to the ancient Maya civilization. They made sacrifices to the gods in them. And you guys went swimming in them.’
‘Didn’t know you were such a hippy,’ said Hex.
Li looked at the water and imagined diving in, slipping beneath its cool surface. She grabbed Paulo’s arm and made to throw him in. ‘Go on, jump – I’ll rescue you.’
For a moment Paulo thought she would. He imagined plummeting straight to the bottom with his bergen and ran backwards smartly. She looked at him, a teasing glint in her eye. He grinned back but he knew that if she’d really wanted to throw him in he wouldn’t have got away.
The five friends looked at the water longingly. They were so hot and sticky and it looked so refreshing.
Hex checked his watch. ‘I don’t want to be a spoil-sport, guys, but we haven’t got our camp sorted yet and we should do that in the next hour. We don’t want to be tramping through the jungle in the dark.’
Alex nodded. ‘You’re right. We’re bound to see another sinkhole.’ He led the way back to Paulo’s mark.
‘Anyway,’ said Amber, ‘we’d have to find some rope.’
‘Maybe,’ suggested Li, ‘we’ll find some abandoned in a tree – what do you think, Paulo?’
‘Not a chance,’ said Paulo. ‘Nobody would do a thing like that.’
As they walked reluctantly away from the sinkhole, they didn’t see what happened next. One moment the water was absolutely still, like a painting. Then it trembled. The entire surface shivered, as though the rocks around it had been shaken, hard. Gradually, it settled.
An earth tremor.
3 J
UNGLE
N
IGHT
UNGLE
N
IGHT
‘Have you seen this?’ said Hex. ‘I thought you said the jungle was uninhabited.’
They had stopped in a clearing to see if it was suitable for their camp. While Li looked for water and Alex and Amber checked the tree canopy for broken branches that might fall on them, Paulo and Hex checked the ground to make sure there were no swampy patches.
Now Hex was looking at a row of stones like cobbles about a metre high. They continued in a straight line into the undergrowth.
Paulo joined him. He brushed away some earth on the top of the wall with his hands. ‘It’s not a wall, it’s a platform.’
Hex straightened up. ‘Well, the furry tree creatures didn’t make that.’ He put on a spooky voice. ‘We are not alone.’
‘I know what it is,’ said Paulo. ‘It’s an ancient Maya settlement.’ His eyes were glittering with excitement. ‘This might have been a city.’
‘That explains this,’ said Li. She had found a hole in the limestone like a miniature well, about twenty-five centimetres in diameter and filled with water. ‘Looks like it’s been here a long time.’ She dipped her finger in and smelled it. The water was reasonably clean. ‘Not bad. We should be able to purify it.’
Alex smiled. ‘We’ve got water, the canopy looks safe, the ground is dry . . . ideal place for a camp.’
Amber was looking at Hex’s low wall. ‘I don’t think we should camp on somebody’s tomb.’
‘Well, what harm would it do?’ said Hex.
Amber shrugged. ‘We’re going to eat, drink, sleep and – er – do other things here. It doesn’t seem very respectful. It makes me really cross when people in the US put trailer parks on sacred Indian sites.’
Paulo started tracing the wall. It ran for some distance in a straight line. ‘I don’t think this is a tomb. More like some kind of agricultural terrace.’ He came back and eased his bergen off. ‘There’s probably nothing sacred about it.’
Hex took his bergen off too. It was a relief to put it down – and let the air get to the sweaty patch of material underneath it. ‘Who are these Maya anyway?’
Paulo swung his arms to loosen his shoulders. ‘Lovely people. They lived in central America a few hundred years ago and were good at art, pyramids and bloody sacrifices.’
‘Damn,’ said Hex. ‘We forgot to appease them by throwing a sacrifice into their pool. They’ll hate us.’
Amber reluctantly took her bergen off too. She didn’t look happy. She glared at Hex. ‘You mean you don’t know who the Maya Indians are? You must at least have seen them in a computer game.’
Hex swiftly moved up behind her, grabbed her and made his hand into an imaginary knife at her throat. ‘Better than games,’ he hissed menacingly, ‘let’s appease the gods right now.’
Amber shook free. ‘Get off me, you nerdy creep.’
Alex saw her discomfort. ‘Amber, I’m sure that’s not a tomb. I think they’re a bit taller than that.’
‘Yes,’ chipped in Hex. ‘Pyramids, in fact.’
‘Well, aren’t you a mine of information?’ said Amber. ‘A moment ago you didn’t know a Maya from a moron.’ But she did look a bit happier.
‘How long until dark?’ asked Paulo.
‘About an hour,’ said Alex.
They got to work. Having stacked their bergens neatly, they enlarged the clearing by hacking down the undergrowth. Paulo used the machete and Alex used the hunting knife he carried at his belt. They each found a pair of trees for their hammock and put up green nylon ponchos – waterproof sheets, to act as a roof. In no time the small jungle clearing looked like a proper camp – the hammocks in a circle, each with a bergen beside it and a mosquito net. A small fire in the middle threw up a plume of smoke.
Alex was tying a piece of string to one of his hammock straps. He’d done the other ones already. ‘Hey, guys, you should do this.’
‘Why?’ said Paulo.
‘In case it rains. The water will run down the string. Otherwise it runs down the straps and makes a nice pool under your backside.’
They took off their wet clothes. Underneath they wore black lycra shorts to minimize rubbing from the constant sweating. Li and Amber had lycra sports tops too.
Li shed her shirt and trousers with visible relief. ‘Yuck. I don’t think I’ve ever been so filthy.’ She put her black jungle boots upside down on sticks to stop wildlife getting into them and then put her clothes on hangers made from twigs.
Alex laughed. ‘There’s no point hanging those up. They’ll never dry.’
‘Is that the voice of Belize SAS experience I hear?’ teased Amber.
‘I don’t care if they don’t dry,’ said Li. ‘I feel better if I try.’
‘Leech check,’ said Paulo, walking up behind her. He carried a smouldering stick from the fire. Li stood still while he inspected her back and legs. A fat black leech was attached to her calf, pulsing as it sucked her blood. ‘Yes, you’ve got a nice big one here.’ He touched the smouldering stick to the leech. It shrank away from the heat and dropped to the floor. ‘OK, you’re clear. Who’s next?’
Amber came forward for inspection. Paulo gave her the all clear and moved on to Hex.
‘Oh lovely,’ said Paulo. ‘That one’s huge. Hold still.’
Hex grimaced as he felt the heat of the smouldering stick near his skin. Then he felt Paulo clap him on his bare shoulder. ‘All done.’
Hex glanced over his shoulder. The leech was on the ground, curling and wriggling. ‘That’s huge. How did that get in?’
Alex was next for inspection. ‘Through your boots. See those eyelets?’
Amber was rubbing her legs with antiseptic wipes, cleaning the scratches she’d got from the wait-a-while. She looked at her jungle boot hanging on its stick. The hole was tiny, barely bigger than the hole in a sheet of Filofax paper, but the glistening, pulsing thing Paulo had removed from Hex was like a fat sausage. She looked at Alex. ‘How?’
‘They’re like threads,’ explained Alex. ‘They swell up once they’ve had your blood. You also have to look out for little red crabs, like spiders. They bury their claws in your skin and feed on it. Some people get them more than others.’
‘Alex,’ said Paulo behind him, ‘did your dad say he got them a lot? You’re covered in them.’
Amber put antiseptic cream on her legs. She’d got a bite too; probably a mosquito. You had to take extra care with any wounds in the jungle. The hot, humid conditions meant that infections spread like wildfire – and with her diabetes she had to be especially careful as cuts might not heal as quickly as normal. When she’d finished she waved the medical pack in the air. ‘Who’s next for wound treatment?’
Li settled on her hammock with her boil-in-the-bag ration pack and dug her spoon in. It was something wet and meaty in a foil wrapper – not what she’d imagined as jungle fare – but it was hot and she was hungry. She shivered as the heat penetrated her hands. She hadn’t realized how cold it would be at night.
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