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Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
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  29. 29
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  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
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  63. Author’s Note

This morning we rose with the sun, and we’d been charging through the jungle at a heavy clip for the past seven hours. I wouldn’t have made it even a mile had it not been for the bag of coca leaves Juan Pablo had given me when we departed. The mild stimulant from the coca, along with the several Advil I was taking every few hours, slightly numbed the pain in my joints, and this combination was the only reason I’d been able to make it as far as I had.

Diego hiked back to where I was sitting—nay, lying—in the heavy grass. He stood over me, Camila hanging around his neck. Diego had intended to leave the baby sloth with Vern, but perhaps sensing Diego was leaving her, she’d refused to let go. She’d clung to his shirt with her claws and squeaked until Diego relented.

Diego reached down and put his hand on my forehead. “The fever has not returned.”

“That’s good,” I murmured. As weak as I was, if the fever returned, I didn’t have much hope I’d live to tell about it. Unlike Atlantic City, the closest ambulance was a fourteen-hour hike and a helicopter ride away.

“We rest,” Diego said.

By “rest,” I assumed he thought at some point I would be able to resume hiking. That was not going to happen. Unless he and Rix wanted to play Weekend at Bernie’s with my lifeless body.

I said, “I can’t go any farther.”

Diego asked, “What about Gina?”

I glanced up at him.

His squinty eyes were open slightly more than normal.

“Yeah,” I breathed. “Gina.”

Gina was all I’d been thinking about for the last several hours. Replaying the first time I saw her, our first kiss, the first time we’d slept together, the first time she went to the bathroom with the door open—you know, all the highlights. The images were in high definition at first, but then, gradually, whether it was my fried neurons or because I was losing hope I would be able to continue, the images started to get grainy and pixelated, until I could no longer conjure them at all.

I said, “She could be fifty miles from here.”

“No,” Diego said, shaking his head. “These tracks fresh. She is close.”

He might have told me this before—my brain was as fatigued as my legs—but I didn’t remember him saying it so defiantly.

“We must keep going,” he said.

47

47

tribal village
august 23, 2:12 p.m.
days since abduction: 18

The Nsé-Eja village was a fifteen-minute climb up a steep incline. Gina was in the middle of the pack, behind Patrick, Martin, Bill, and one of the four soldiers. With their spears held high, the tribesmen marched them up the hill.