Emma switched her attention from the bandanna to the rope tying the boy’s hands. He didn’t need to speak, he just needed to be able to get away. The rope knot came free quickly.
The second his hands were free, the boy swung his legs out of the tarp and began working on yet another rope wrapped around his ankles. Emma helped him. She glanced sideways at the guerrillas. She wanted to see what they were doing but was unwilling to take her eyes off the task at hand. The guerrillas stepped back, and two turned. Their conference was over.
“Faster!” Emma said.
The boy nodded, never removing his gaze from the rope. Tears ran out of his eyes and fell on the rope as he and Emma scrabbled at the knot. Emma cast one long look at the field phone and apples sitting in the second truck. They were only a few feet away, but they might as well have been a mile. She would never reach them and get back into the trees undetected. She returned her attention to the knot binding the boy’s feet. It came free. In an instant the boy was up. He leaped over the truck’s side. Emma leaped after him. She thudded onto the dirt and pitched forward onto her hands. The boy ran into the tree line. Once in the shadows, his camouflage pants made it appear as if he’d disappeared, like smoke.
Emma ran forward to follow him just as a capybara burst from the foliage three feet in front of her. It ran straight at her. She pivoted to avoid it, and her feet flew out from under her. She landed on the ground, hard. She watched in horror as the small animal shot toward the circle of passengers.
The capybara barreled past Wary Man. A woman shrieked at the sight of the flat-faced rodent about the size of a small dog. The bodyguards spun around at her screams. They raised their assault weapons into firing position. Wary Man shot to his feet and stepped between the men and Emma on the ground, using his body to block their view. He pointed at the animal shooting toward the tree line. The bodyguards trained their rifles on the little beast, tracking it across the strip. Emma scrambled backward on her seat, fighting her way back into the safety of the trees, all the while keeping her eyes on the guerrillas.
The capybara veered sideways, making a play for the forest and safety. One bodyguard took aim and fired. The capybara flew into the air before landing on its side. It twitched once and then stilled.
The guerrillas applauded the shot. The second bodyguard slapped the first on the shoulder. Emma inched backward until she was once again far enough in the trees to work her way around to her backpack. She sat down next to it and buried her face in her hands.
Smoking Man barked an order and his entourage climbed into the pickups. The engines kicked to life, and Emma watched the trucks as they drove up the road, zigzagging to avoid the scattered metal disks. Emma wanted to cry as she watched her only possible link to the outside world inch slowly away.
The rat-faced guerrilla blew a whistle. His soldiers lined the passengers up, front to back. They marched into the forest, led by two passengers who hacked at the dense foliage with machetes. Wary Man glanced once at the place where Emma had fallen before he turned to follow the others.
They left the clothing, airplane, corpses, and Emma behind.
7
EMMA LAY FACEDOWN IN THE DIRT AND LET THE TEARS FLOW. She cried for Patrick, for her, and for the dead people that lay all around her. The familiar feeling of despair washed over her. For the last year, since Patrick’s death, raging anger and debilitating despair had been her constant companions, sucking her will to live.
She lay on the ground and thought about Patrick. The way he read the Financial Times on the train to work, his brow furrowed in thought, and dropped a dollar in the guitar case of the blind musician playing on the subway platform. How he kept his apartment stocked with the tea she liked even though it cost a fortune and he thought it tasted like grass. How he’d keep an eye out for unusual plants when he traveled on business and once even carried them home to her, pressed between the pages of a book, only to be stopped at O’Hare Airport by the Department of Agriculture when their sniffing beagles sat next to his briefcase.
His death had sent her into a tailspin with an intensity that shocked her. Her anger knew no bounds. As far as she was concerned, God had let Patrick down, and her rage threatened to consume her. Some days were so gray that she wondered if the fog would ever lift. Even her move to sunny Miami Beach, with its sparkling sea and bright Art Deco colors, had failed to revive her love of life.
The only way she found to quiet her mind was running. In this, she excelled. While Emma’s daily life was marred with a depression so deep that the antidepressants prescribed by her doctor were rendered useless, she found she could channel the despair into her running. When Emma ran, she focused on her muscles, the path, her heart rate, her hydration, her caloric intake, and her distance. With these concerns foremost in her mind, the despair stayed at bay. Emma channeled her rage and used it to fuel her legs to greater speeds. Her single-minded focus allowed her to breeze past others who had collapsed in the dark hours of the night on the eightieth mile of a hundred-mile race. Emma threw away the pills and trained more and more each week.
But now she was having periodic bouts of uncontrolled crying. It was just like the first days after Patrick’s death, when she cried for two days without stopping. She felt as though all the small gains she had managed these past months had been wiped away in one horrifying minute.
An hour ticked by before Emma felt the darkness lift. It took another half hour after that for her to feel brave enough to leave the safety of her hiding place. She hauled herself upright, wiped her face on her sleeve, and started to move. She skirted around the nose of the plane, cowering in the shadows it provided. A glance showed her that nothing remained of the first-class cabin but wreckage and twisted metal. She avoided looking in the cockpit. She didn’t want to know what happened to the pilot with the smooth voice that never shook, professional to the end.
She rooted around the tree line by the nose and found useless debris and charred bodies, many still strapped into their seats. The stench of the dead permeated the air. It was a good thing that she hadn’t eaten in a day, because she would have thrown up at the sight of the dead. As it was, acid saliva was all she tasted.
A food cart, blackened and bent, lay on its side about thirty feet from the edge of the landing strip. Dead bodies surrounded it. The bodies created a macabre maze that Emma would have to navigate to reach the prize. Once there, she would have to work on the cart while the bodies kept her company. She forced herself to think about survival.
Emma took careful steps over the bodies of three passengers. She turned her eyes from their faces and did her best to focus on the goal of reaching the cart. Two more bodies lay on either side of the metal box. She stepped over one’s leg, and this step brought her flush up against the box. She had no room to maneuver, however, without moving the other body out of the way.
It looked to be a man, badly burned. She nudged it with her toe. It rocked but didn’t move far enough to give her any room. She tried to push it again, but it again rocked and fell back into position against the cart. In a fit of exasperation and gnawing hunger, Emma bent her knees, leaned the small of her back on the cart, bracing herself against it, and put one foot on the corpse. She shoved it as hard as she could. It rolled over one complete rotation before stopping a foot away.
Emma grabbed the door of the cart and yanked it open. Food packets tumbled out. She pounced on them. Her hands shook as she sorted through the scorched packets. She fought with one, trying to pry the aluminum lid off the shallow plastic container that acted as a plate. She ripped it open and looked inside.
The plastic plate had melted onto the food and then hardened into one congealed mess once it cooled. Emma couldn’t tell where the plastic ended and the food began.
Oh no. I need this food, Emma thought.
She tossed the ruined plate and grabbed the next one. Same congealed mess. She grabbed a third, also inedible. She clawed at a fourth. This time when she removed the foil she found an intact filet mignon, side salad, and baby carrots, all nestled in their own little sections.
Emma grabbed the filet and shoved it in her mouth, ripping off a section with her teeth. It tasted like heaven. She couldn’t chew it fast enough. She swallowed a large portion whole and ripped at the filet again. She chewed twice before raising her eyes.
She glanced at a nearby corpse. It was a woman. Her eyes gazed at Emma in an unblinking stare. Emma stopped chewing and felt her stomach start to rebel. She closed her eyes and took slow, deep breaths. Keeping the food down was imperative. After her stomach settled, she opened her eyes and looked at the dead woman.
“I’m so sorry.” Emma whispered the words.
An overwhelming sadness settled over her. She got up, still clutching the food plate, and stumbled away from the body and the woman’s lifeless eyes. She sank down near her pack and finished the filet, all the while doing her best to keep her gaze off the destruction all around her.
When she was finished she made her way back to the cart and fished through the plates. Out of fifty or sixty packets, she found ten still intact. She grabbed them and carried them to her backpack.
She sat at the end of the runway and stacked the few precious food plates next to her pack along with a small parcel of airline napkins. She’d brought the pack, a compass, compact tent, bedroll, and a portable Coleman stove. Only the pack went with her as a carry-on. The other items she had checked into cargo.
She assessed the backpack’s contents. It contained a paperback book, her passport, wallet, a reflective sheet that collected heat, a pillow that could be blown up to act as a neck rest on the long flight, her telephone, notepad with attached pen, and tester tubes of the new Engine Red lipstick that she’d created for a cosmetic customer’s elite makeup line. Their development was shrouded in secrecy. She tossed the book, the pillow, and stared at the lipstick testers. There were two. Their cases were different, but the color was the same. She shoved them into a side pocket with the useless cell phone.
She continued rooting through the discarded remnants of the passengers’ things. She found a traveler’s first-aid kit, several airline bottles of scotch, and one small bottle of wine. She also found a beautiful silver lighter with the initials AEG engraved on the side.
She reached the area where Wary Man had hidden his luggage and the briefcase. A brass bag tag on the luggage held a business card that read Cameron Sumner, Southern Hemisphere Drug Defense Agency and listed an address in Key West, Florida.
Emma sat back on her heels. So Wary Man has a name and a job fighting drugs, she thought. She opened the suitcase. It contained nothing of interest. Just all the normal items packed by any business traveler.
She turned her attention to the metal briefcase. The words UNITED STATES ARMY were stenciled on the top in black script. Emma pried it open. It contained two handguns and some spare ammunition. She nearly wept when she saw them, partly from joy and partly because she didn’t know how to fire them.
Emma’s bags weren’t among the looted luggage that lay all around. She didn’t care much about the clothes she’d brought, what she really wanted was the bag that held all her hiking material and the separate duffel that contained her compass and the special hiking tent. The compass was crucial to her survival. Without it she could wander in circles until the food ran out or the guerrillas captured her.
The tent was far less important. Designed to be worn on a hiker’s back, it weighed only four pounds but opened to accommodate two people. The manufacturer claimed that it was rugged enough for an expedition to Everest. When collapsed, it didn’t look like much, and she hoped the guerrillas hadn’t recognized it for what it was.
Half an hour later she found the duffel. It was ripped in half, and empty. Emma rifled through it before tossing it down. She searched in a circular pattern but didn’t find any pieces. Her precious compass was gone. She tried to ignore the sudden rush of panic that accompanied this realization.
“Get a grip, Emma. It’s not like it was food or anything.” She spoke out loud. Her voice sounded strained, but surprisingly normal. Just hearing herself helped. It confirmed that she was alive, and not a wraith wandering among the dead.
She found her luggage twenty-five yards into the trees, blackened, but otherwise in perfect condition.
“Louis Vuitton, god of luggage design,” Emma said. “Why the hell didn’t I put the compass in here?” She started laughing like a hyena. She sank to her knees. The laughter morphed into tears and then panic.
Emma forced herself to take deep breaths to halt the riot of emotion that overwhelmed her. She dragged herself upright, took an extra pair of socks from her luggage, and halfheartedly resumed her search. She found the tent under a heap of discarded clothing. The black outer nylon carry bag had melted at the corners, but the tent itself was undamaged. Her joy at finding it far outstripped its value to her, she knew, but she felt as though fate had thrown her a bone. She attached the tent to the flat side of the backpack. It acted as a frame, and made the load a bit more bearable. She finished rummaging through the luggage but found nothing useful.
She went back to her pack and filled it with the food and alcohol. She shoved one pistol into the pack and put the other on top. She took out the notepad, dated the first sheet, and hesitated. While Emma itched to leave the airstrip, she knew she should stay with the wreckage. The authorities would search for the plane first. Staying near it would give her the best chance for rescue. Her only other options would be to run down the dirt road Smoking Man used, or follow the passengers into the forest. Emma wanted to avoid Smoking Man and his soldiers at any cost, and the guerrillas holding the passengers were no less frightening.
She wrote, I’m still alive. The guerrillas took passengers into the jungle. About seventy. Cameron Sumner is one of them. The others I don’t know by name. I will stay near this crash site unless forced to leave.
She signed the note, ripped it out of the pad, and placed it in her bags on top of the clothes. She stashed Sumner’s luggage under a palm and shoved her own next to it.
The sky clouded over and an afternoon rainstorm began. Emma moved into the tree line. She sat with her back against a tree and watched the fat raindrops hit the dirt, making little puffs of smoke with each hit. The airplane sides sizzled. The charred bodies simply smoked.
Emma sank into a torpor. She watched the rain pummel the earth in a hypnotic trance. She gazed at nothing, letting her mind wander. Once she was in the trees, the air felt thick with humidity and smelled like warm earth and green leaves. After the stench on the runway, Emma thought it was one of the sweetest smells she could imagine. She didn’t want to go back near the jet’s wreckage. She shrugged off her pack and lay down, using it as a pillow.
