He crouched among the ferns and mossy vines, listening intently for a few moments. Nothing. Just the rustle of leaves and the calls of a few birds. Visibility was no more than ten feet and all he could smell was jungle rot and a hint of smoke from what he assumed were the smoldering remains of his life’s work.

Nature’s sensory deprivation chamber.

Finding no reason not to continue downslope, he stood and did so carefully. He’d never traveled through anything this dense before, but it wasn’t completely foreign. Mukisa Odongo had taught him a great deal about the terrain on their expeditions to find novel insect species and those still-elusive mountain gorillas. And now Odongo was dead. For some reason Chism was absolutely certain of that. He could feel his absence.

What the hell was going on in this world? His friend Vicky Schaefer had recently been murdered in Yemen, where she was trying to control a deadly new coronavirus. And her team—a mirror of his own—hadn’t fared any better. All any of them wanted to do was help people.

Now his research facility was a pile of ashes. His people and patients were either scattered or dead. His active experiments were destroyed.

How the fuck could this be happening? It was like a big green nightmare he couldn’t wake up from.

Chism arrived at the stream he was looking for and lay down next to it, using his filthy shirt to filter water into a plastic bottle he’d found. The night of their escape had been hard as hell, but with the rain, drinking water hadn’t been an issue. Cold and the terrain had been their biggest enemies. Last night—their second in the forest—hadn’t been so uncomfortable, but now thirst and hunger were starting to become an issue.

“Doctor Cheesmee!”

He froze at the sound of the shout, trying to pinpoint its direction and distance.

“Daveed Cheesmee! We help you! We Ugandan army!”

He seriously doubted it. There had been no aircraft in the area and based on his lengthy political conversations with Odongo, the Ugandan government was wary of sending troops to this region. Much more likely, the shout was a siren song from one of Gideon Auma’s men.

Chism had tried to convince himself that Auma’s goal was to steal everything that wasn’t nailed down and exchange it for narcotics, weapons, and whatever else it was that kept his death cult operating. Now, though, it was impossible to deny that his men were in search of something bigger. If Chism let himself fall into their hands, they could ransom him back to Nick Ward. And that’d be real money.