Wildefire (18 page)

for herself. Strange how even in the cold of the jungle night, she never shivers.

Day 3: It’s going to rain. Even the macaws, which are jabbering excitedly up in the canopy, seem to know it. The girl moves slowly, weakened by hunger, but she never takes her eyes off the sky.

The drizzle doesn’t start to come down until an hour before dusk. Soon it increases to a pour, the droplets coming down in long, cold strands, liquid icicles sent like darts from the sky. The girl smiles, interestingly, fool-ishly. The rain may replenish her water, but it’s still only a matter of time before she starves to death.

Before you can wonder further on this, she drops to her knees and plunges her hands into the soggy ground.

Her fingers pull aside handful after handful of soil until she spots something in the shallow earth. She loads a few clumps of dirt into her basket, and when you float down closer, you can finally see her precious cargo: a mass of worms wriggling in the mud pie, confused by their sudden exposure to the jungle air.

White Coat A, galvanized by the sight of the girl at work, casts his notebook to the ground. He looks ready to jump the citadel wall to observe her close up, but settles for leaning as far over the railing as gravity will allow.

The rain splatters down around her. The thunder growls explosively overhead, and the girl goes to work.

She heads to the southeast corner of the citadel and sets the basket down next to a pile of fruit that has fallen from 171

the tree. There she finds a stone with a sharp edge, and with the verve of a serial killer, she stabs the stone into one of the plumlike fruits. Nectar spurts up onto her face, and she wipes it clear with her hand. Several strikes later, the fruit splits in two, right through the core. From the basket she produces two worms and mashes them into the open pulp. She plants a half-live worm, still writhing, on top of the fruit as if she were placing an angel atop a Christmas tree.

She moves from tree to tree, repeating the process at each of the four corners of the garden. Once she completes the task, she returns to the trough and washes her face in the water basin.

Then she sits down in the dirt.

She waits.

Eventually the jungle storm that had come in with a roar exits with a whimper. Light peeks out from behind the clouds, and with it returns the squawking of the macaws.

The first bird must be a hungry one. A little brown thrush drops down from the canopy above. Twenty more thrushes quickly follow suit and cascade from their perches down into the four corners of the garden. Some peck at the soil itself, but most of the birds take the bait and gorge themselves on the delicious buffet the girl has left out for them.

She doesn’t have to wait long for results. The feeding frenzy has barely begun when, from the southeast corner, 172

their echoes a harsh squawk. It is the overeager thrush that came to dinner first. It flaps its wings, attempting to take flight, only to crash beak-first into the ground. Its body shudders violently before it rolls onto its back. Its legs twitch and its talons curl for the final time.

This ritual repeats in the northeast and southwest corners of the garden as well, a cacophony of birds dying violently in the wake of their last, poisonous meal, as the venom from the fruit seeps into their nervous systems.

The girl wanders unhurriedly over to the northwest corner. The birds are feasting hungrily on their fruit-and-worm cocktails, but when she gets close enough, the remaining thrushes explode up into air, vanishing into the dusk light with heavy bellies.

Three days’ worth of hunger overcomes the girl, and she lunges for one of the fruits at the base of the tree.

She sinks her teeth voraciously into the supple skin, and nectar bursts over her cheeks. Within seconds it’s only a core. She dives for the next fruit and rips into it.

The two scientists watch with bated interest. She’s done it.

Halfway through her third fruit, the girl’s chewing slows and eventually stops altogether. Her eyes glisten and she holds the fruit out away from her body.

She crumples to the ground clutching her stomach.

Her tortured screams echo up into the trees. The fruit tumbles across the dirt before coming to rest against the concrete of the citadel wall.

173

You catch only snippets of what the scientists, who have exploded into full-blown panic, are saying above.

White Coat A: “. . . the venom . . . not this tree!”

White Coat B: “. . . get the antivenin . . . not much time until . . .”

White Coat A: “. . . down there. Stay with her until I get back!”

White Coat A vanishes from the railing. White Coat B adjusts his glasses and stares down at the ground, contemplating whether the fall will injure him. White Coat A shouts something in the background, and White Coat B

mouths “Screw it” and climbs over the railing so that he’s dangling from the other side. He drops the remaining fifteen feet to the ground, but lands wrong on his ankle. He curses with pain, but still frantically hobbles with a limp over to the Northwest corner.

He limps to a halt. The earth beneath the tree where the girl had been rolling in pain a minute earlier is now empty, but the dirt shows signs of fresh struggle. White Coat B, perplexed, gazes 360 degrees around the empty courtyard before walking over to the half-eaten fruit that fell from her hand. He picks it up and studies it. He brings it closer to his face, raises it to his nose, inhales its sweet aroma. . . .

The fronds of the tree overhead rustle. White Coat B

has time only to look up and watch the girl, like a feral beast, nose-dive out of the tree, her eyes wild and her fingers extended. He collapses to the ground under her 174

weight. Before he can toss her off him, her hand pulls back and her clawed fingers come slashing across his throat like a pendulum. Red blood splatters against the previously clean whitewashed citadel wall. His feet shudder, but before he can even try to scream through his devastated throat, his eyes roll back into his head and he’s gone.

The girl examines the blood covering her hand, innocently, curiously. She holds it up so that it eclipses the emerging dusk moon. The crimson around the end of her hand glistens faintly like a corona. On a whim she brings her hand up to her face and smears the blood beneath each of her eyes.

She lowers her hand, the curtain coming down, and behind it stands White Coat A. He has a syringe in his hand, but when he sees his colleague’s blood painted on the girl’s face, he drops it, needle down into the soil so that it stands upright.

“Wait—,” White Coat A starts to say, lifting his hands.

The little girl lunges.

175

Sunda

y

Ashline emerged out of the nightmare right into one of the worst migraines of her life.

It was like a pitchfork right through the back of her skull, the tines slicing neatly through the gray matter. As she tried to open her eyes, one of them lingered closed.

Swirling around in the pain was a mosaic of colors from her dream. The emerald of the jungle canopy. The fresh mortar of the prison walls. The linen white of the lab coats. The crimson stains afterward. All etched together in one grisly stained-glass window that refused to fade even on this side of consciousness.

She could almost feel the heat rising from her forehead before she even put the back of her hand to her skin, which was hot to the touch. Maybe she’d contracted malaria from her jungle dream. Her temples throbbed with each stroke of her pulse. So loud, in fact, that it almost sounded like someone was pounding on the . . .

179

Knock, knock, knock.

Ashline massaged her face roughly with the palm of her hand, a futile attempt to rub the sleep from her eyes.

Pound, pound.

“Enough,” Ashline mumbled. She grudgingly slipped out from between her sheets, trudged across the room, and opened the door.

Bobby Jones looked like a wet badger. He was dressed head to toe in his soccer gear, from the mud-stained knee-high socks right up to the stupid shamrock headband that he superstitiously wore to every game and practice

. . . and never washed. She blamed the headband for at least 50 percent of the offensive boys’ locker room odor that washed over her as soon as she opened the door.

How much of the water that had soaked his number thirteen jersey was the morning drizzle, and how much was sweat? Ash didn’t want to venture a guess.

When he didn’t say anything, Ash could think to say only, “You smell like a used towel.”

“Came right from practice.” He ran an anxious hand through his tousled hair. “Didn’t have time to splash on any of that Polo cologne you like.”

Ash wrinkled her nose. “You’d have to fill a hot tub with cologne to improve the lovely fragrance you’re exud-ing right now.”

“Would you get into the hot tub with me?” Bobby flashed a wicked grin.

Ash took an exaggerated step back into her room.

180

“And thanks for coming, Bobby.” She started to push the door closed.

“Wait—” His hand shot out to hold it open, his fingers dangerously close to being crushed in the door.

He was really at the mercy of Ashline, who with a sharp kick could have made the whole thing look like an accident. Did he really need the use of both hands in soccer anyway?

“Bobby, what is your malfunction?” Ash threw the door open so that it slammed against the inside wall. “Is there an apology in here somewhere? Did you come with some plea to reunite? Or did you just want to have the last word?”

“Listen, I left in the middle of practice to come here.”

He put his hand on the door frame and leaned in. “Right in the middle. I literally was about to throw the ball in bounds, but then I dropped it and just started running to get here. Everybody must have thought I’d gone crazy, or really had to take a shit.”

“Great image.”

“I messed up,” he said, and before Ashline could protest, he brushed past her into the room. He gestured wildly as he continued. “I mean
really
messed up, and it’s messing
me
up. My whole schedule. My stomach feels all tight, I can’t sleep, and I look like a raccoon when I wake up. If I keep playing like shit out there on the field, pretty soon coach’ll kick me to second string.”