Catalog: heavy canvas pants, a shirt a size too big for him, what had to be day-hiking boots made by Birkenstock. His dark brown hair lay longish on his collar, highlighting prominent cheekbones, a strong jaw and chiseled lips. I wondered briefly what he’d look like with a ponytail but decided “tasty” wasn’t a word a woman like me should use. The wire frames slipped a half inch down his nose. He didn’t move.
I turned my attention to the shed. The Brazilian who apparently acted as the local air-traffic controller was nowhere to be seen. Nothing out there but trees and bugs and already-intense heat.
The plane lurched forward. The Cessna stuttered and jerked toward the dirt runway. Deep jungle green rolled by. Workers’ arms rose and fell, blades slashing and hacking. Carlos turned the plane’s nose due west and the shed came into view again. A very dark man, maybe half Negro, half Indian, stood beside the shed, staring at us. Carlos stopped the plane to check something.
The staring man strode toward us purposefully, his gaze unwavering. A chill shot through my veins. Carlos fidgeted with controls, and still the man walked, unhurried and deliberate. How could someone stare so long without blinking?
Then the man grasped the open cargo doorway and leaned in. Twin puckered scars etched his face, neck, and the part of his collarbone I could see beneath his ragged shirt. Around his neck, a leather cord held a single jaguar tooth—a canine. His huge hands gripped the doorway with such strength I had no doubt he could bend the metal if he chose. Black eyes stared at me.
Directly at me.
The chill in my veins dropped to a freeze. He didn’t glare; his eyes were as emotionless as those of the jaguar he’d killed for its tooth.
Endless darkness welled up in my periphery. The plane’s metallic clatter heightened into deafening howls and screams and roars. The world dropped away from my feet, leaving me standing in utter blackness, alone. I no longer hunkered down in a Cessna waiting to go into the jungle. The jungle had come for me, and what hunted me breathed hot and heavy on my neck. I spun. Nothing. I spun again. Nothing. Panicked, I struck out with both arms, swinging wild. If I could just see.
As if in answer to a prayer, a dim yellow light grew near my feet, filling the darkness with itself, illuminating nothing. A single sound cut through the cacophony: a slithering hiss that singed my spine with fear and brought bile into my throat. I knew what it was. The yellow light sharpened into two flat, slitted, alien eyes. Pit viper. The kind of venomous snake whose head would chase you after you’d severed it from the body. Low words, words I didn’t understand but whose meaning I knew instantly, told me to leave this place. What waited for me in the trees was hissing death.
Abruptly, the vision disappeared.
The empty cargo-bay door yawned. Outside, trees and undergrowth lurked behind the sagging shed. The shaman—if that’s what he was—had disappeared.
Once the Evil Eye has its grip, you’re lost. The open cargo door tempted me to leave. I could jump out now before my curse found me. Jump out, go home, save myself. My fingers itched for my day pack.
I shook my head to clear it. Medicine man tales, I said to myself. Shaman lies. I’d had a hallucination due to fatigue and stress. I lived in a world of science and technology. The Evil Eye was like the boogeyman, meant to scare and intimidate you into doing what someone else wanted. It couldn’t catch me or keep me. It couldn’t prevent me from going deep into the jungle.
“Let’s get this show on the road!” I called up to Carlos.
He gave me a thumbs-up. The plane jerked twice, then bumped down the strip, gaining speed. Straight brown tree trunks and masses of green leaves flitted by. Carlos pulled back on the stick and abruptly we were up, over the treetops, heading northwest.
Heading to a place where I wasn’t welcome.
But I’d survive.
Scooter’s life depended on it.
Chapter 4
Stuttering. It’s not a good sign at five thousand feet, whether it’s the pilot or the plane. In this case, it was the plane.
The bug nerd’s eyes opened, glared briefly toward Carlos’s broad back, and closed. I knew that look: You’re the tough man, you handle it.
Brilliant emerald treetops fluffed the ground. From above, the canopy shows you a solid-looking mass with an occasional peep-show peek at the really good stuff underneath. To see the real wealth of species—the dozens of monkeys, thousands of birds, bazillions of insects—you have to go in from the bottom.
North-north-west, where we were headed, the canopy abruptly rose and fell with the stubby Guiana Highlands. The high point, Serra do Apiau, was only around 3,300 feet, not even as high as most of the hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. And nothing like the Rockies.
But the terrain wouldn’t make a nice landing pad. By the increased clattering of the engine and the intensity of the frown the bug nerd cast in Carlos’s direction, maybe we were going to need one.
On cue, the Cessna fell several feet, tossing my stomach up around my ears. Carlos’s right hand felt around over his head for some controls. The bug nerd got up, grabbed a steel rib and leaned out the cargo door. His hair whipped his left ear. He held his glasses in place with his free hand. Not a good place to be sick, I thought, but he levered himself back into the plane and headed to the cockpit.
I didn’t catch his first shouted words, but there was no mistaking the pale grimace of fear Carlos shot him in response. Time to be worried, I gathered. I got up and joined them, hanging on to a steel handhold over my head like a professional New York commuter.
“What’s going on?” I yelled over the chatter and chuff.
“Bad fuel!” the nerd shouted. “The engine’s about to quit!”
“Over my dead body!” Carlos spun dials. I could see his feet working some kind of pedals. “She hasn’t let me down yet!”
“If it’s bad fuel, you don’t have a choice!”
“Come on!” Carlos yelled at the plane. “We’re less than thirty miles from the strip!”
An earsplitting screech went off somewhere near my head.
“Shit!” Carlos shouted.
The plane shuddered, nose tipping. Chuff, chuff, a slower chuff, then the prop wound down like a bad dream. The engine spat and quit. The alarm screamed.
“Hold on!”
Carlos kept one hand tight on the W-shaped wheel and flipped some more switches. The one gauge I recognized—the altimeter—confirmed the hard lean pulling me forward. The nerd braced himself where the copilot’s seat should be and grabbed the matching wheel.
Out the window by Carlos’s head, various trees were rapidly becoming recognizable to my naked eye. Another bad sign.
“You’d better get back!” the nerd yelled at me. “We’re going to have to make an emergency landing! Find something to strap yourself down with!”
“Emergency landing?” I shouted back. “Where?”
“Airstrip ahead!”
