The dark-haired man turned his gaze to Gina and asked, “You’re a doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for coming.”

“I wasn’t given much of a choice.”

He let that go, asking, “Where are your medical supplies?”

One of the soldiers picked up a large duffel bag they’d filled with nearly every medication and medical instrument Gina had in her hut and shook it.

“Please, come with me,” the dark-haired man said, waving her forward.

Gina followed him through fifty feet of heavy brush to where three blue tents were set up. The man lifted the flap on one of the tents, and Gina peeked inside. A lantern in the far corner of the tent illuminated an aging Caucasian man lying on his back, his chest slowly rising and falling. There was dried blood surrounding a swollen gash behind his left ear, and his face was badly bruised.

“Two days ago, he fell and hit his head,” the man explained. “He’s been unconscious ever since.”

Gina opened the duffel and extracted a pair of purple surgical gloves and a small penlight. She crawled forward and gently pushed open the man’s right eyelid and shined the light on his pupil. It was large and hardly contracted. He had a concussion at best and a subdural hematoma at worst.

Gina checked the gash behind the man’s left ear. The cut was an inch and a half long and a quarter inch wide. It would need ten stitches or more. She palpated the wound. It was angry and almost certainly infected. Open wounds were never good, but an open wound in the jungle was especially dangerous. The warm, humid climate of the rainforest was a glorified incubator for bacteria. The Amazon was home to hundreds of known bacterial strains and millions—some even theorized billions—of strains not yet identified.

Next, Gina checked the man’s vitals. His blood pressure was low, and he had a temperature of 101.4.

From behind her, the man said, “It’s imperative that you keep this man alive.”

Gina turned and said, “I’ll do everything I can.”

She was pretty sure she could stem the infection, but there was little she could do for the internal head injury.

The man blinked twice and by doing so, appeared to summon something. Something dark. Something sinister.

“I hope so,” he said, “because if he dies, you die.”

≈

“Help!” Gina yelled.

The man, whom Gina had come to think of as El Jefe, thrashed on the floor of the tent. This was the man’s second seizure in as many days.

The previous night, Gina had connected the man to an IV drip, then injected him with a powerful antibiotic and anti-inflammatory. It had taken Gina over an hour to clean the wound on the man’s head, then stitch him up.