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Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
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  63. Author’s Note

The tall soldier reached forward and grabbed Gina by the shoulder. Gina’s hundreds of hours of combat training took over, and she clamped the man’s hand and twisted. The man fell to his knees with a loud groan. Gina kept twisting his hand until a loud gunshot echoed through the high canopy.

Gina glanced at a second soldier striding toward her. He was holding a pistol to the left temple of Miguel, a six-year-old boy Gina had been teaching English for the past year. Just a few days earlier, Gina had helped pull out one of Miguel’s stubborn front teeth.

“Let him go,” the soldier said in stilted English.

Gina released the man’s hand. He shook out his arm with a grimace and shouted, “¡Puta!” Whore.

The second soldier yelled at him to go watch the group of villagers, then he settled his eyes on Gina and said, “You is doctor, yes?”

She locked eyes with Miguel, willing him to be strong. His bottom lip trembled. “It’s going to be okay,” she said to him in Tibióno.

To the soldier she said, “Yes, I am a doctor.”

“You come with us.”

“Come where?”

He ignored her. “You come now.”

“And if I don’t?”

The man pressed the gun hard against the small boy’s head.

“Okay,” Gina said. “I’ll come with you. Just don’t hurt anyone.”

3

3

nice, france
august 11, 2:12 p.m.

I listened to Gina’s voicemail three more times—each time, the muscles in my chest constricting a notch tighter.

“Thomas! I don’t have much time! Four days ago, a group of men came to my village and abducted me. They said they needed a doctor. I think they are narcotraff—Oh, shit, here they come! . . . Please find me, Thomas! Please!”

I’d met Dr. Gina Brady three years earlier in South Africa under grim circumstances. But like any good romantic comedy, after the two of us barely survived a thermobaric missile and mass genocide, Gina and I fell in love. She moved to Seattle and found a job working at a health clinic, and life was good—no, life was amazing. But then, six months later, and just a week after I asked her to move in with me, Gina got news that the village in Bolivia she used to live in had been struck by another outbreak of tuberculosis. Like me, Gina had lost both her parents, and she’d once confided that the villagers were the closest thing she had left to family.

She asked me to go with her to Tibióno. But even as much as I loved her—and I did, more than I’d ever loved a woman before—I couldn’t fathom living in a hut in the Amazon jungle.

Where would I get my pumpkin spice latte?