They found their way back to the remaining backpacks and Nick gave Joel a T-shirt. Joel thanked him, subdued, diminished in some way by what he’d just experienced. Tom’s T-shirt was wet with blood and he pulled it off and threw it away before getting a fresh one from his pack.

Alice kept glancing at Chris, wanting to be sure he was okay, but she had a solid determination about her now and she said, “We should use one flashlight at a time, in case the batteries run out. The river’s that way and the hills are there, so if we head roughly in that direction, the third side of the triangle Joel was talking about, we can’t get lost without coming to the river first. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Nick.

She nodded and said, “I’ll carry the flashlight. Tom, you’ve got the machete, so we’ll take the lead.”

Chris said, “I’ll take your backpack, Alice.”

She looked ready to object but saw something in his eyes and nodded. Joel said, “I can carry yours, Tom, if you don’t mind.”

Tom wasn’t really sure what that was all about but he shrugged and said, “Sure.”

They prepared to set off, but almost as an afterthought, Alice said, “Oh, Tom.” He turned toward her and she hugged him, tightly, her head against his, and she whispered close to his ear, her voice full of emotion, “Thank you. Thank you.”

He nodded, though she couldn’t see, and he found his throat tightening with emotion too, perhaps only because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d encountered this kind of total gratitude. In fact, now that he thought of it, he wasn’t sure he’d ever done anything before in his life that had meant this much to another person.

She pulled away then and said, “What about you? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said, because he did feel fine, though he knew he probably shouldn’t, and that something had changed within him in the last fifteen minutes, whether he fully knew it yet or not. “I just killed a whole bunch of people, but I’m fine.”

“You did what you had to do, and you saved two people.”

“And a dog.”

She laughed. “And a dog.”

They set off through the jungle, and the dog went with them, sometimes scouting ahead, responding to scents and sounds they couldn’t detect themselves, occasionally becoming alert or growling before coming back to Tom.

He didn’t have the time to think much during the walk back, because walking through the jungle at night, even with the aid of a flashlight and a dog, required full concentration.

Only once did anyone refer again to what had happened, and that was when Chris said, “You don’t think they’ll come after us? Those other guys?”