Part 9 (1/2)

A crazy thought came to her of Gus's fears of a live re-run ofThe War of the Worlds. The repeated explosions from the crater certainlydid sound very regular, like some-thing, well,venting. Nerves, she told herself. Just nerves.

Terry, too, had found shelter, leaning against the tree and gasping for breath. She had fallen, and it felt like she'd bruised and skinned her knee. It hurt like h.e.l.l.

G.o.d! This is one I'm gonna remember for an awfully long time, she told herself. Like all the rest of my life. I been shot at, chased, slapped around, and treated like s.h.i.+t, but this may be the worst. And all for a d.a.m.ned hole in the ground! Maybe this is it. Maybe this is G.o.d telling me that it's time to pack it in, demand a studio job, or find some-thing else. And those d.a.m.ned explosions! Bang! Bang! Bang! Like some kind of ghostly war.

She had just decided that it couldn't be much worse when she felt something press against the side of her head. She started; powerful hands pushed her back, and there was a gun right in her face.

”Go ahead!” Campos yelled at her in Spanish with angry satisfaction. ”Yell your head off, b.i.t.c.h! They could be five meters away and not hear you!”

He grabbed her, and she tried to kick him in the b.a.l.l.s, but he sidestepped her attempt, which was weak because of the pain in her knee and her general state of near exhaus-tion. He twirled her around and pinned one of her arms be-hind her back, twisting it painfully as he drew her to him.

”Try anything more like that and I will break it! I will break your armsand your legs.”

”My G.o.d, Campos! What do you want? You can't get away with this!” she yelled back defiantly.

”You know what I want, you wh.o.r.e!” he snapped. ”And what if you do not turn up when the rain stops?

They will suspect, but they will notknow. Do you not remember where you are? Your friends come at our invitation and leave at our demand, and if they reject our story of your disappearance, they can do nothing. We are already on the wanted lists of a dozen countries. Your only hope is to do what I say and pretend you like it. If you convinceme, then maybe, just maybe, I will let you live!”

He pushed her back against the tree and grabbed with his free hand for her rain-soaked khaki safari s.h.i.+rt, the other hand still holding the pistol, now pointed at her abdomen.

”Why? You're gonna kill me anyway. Youmust !And we both know it.”

He grinned evilly. ”Perhaps the rain will stop. Perhaps then they will hear us, no? You can never tell.”

And, with that, he ripped the s.h.i.+rt, almost literally tearing it off her.

She closed her eyes and sank down, resigned now to her fate at the hands of this monster. She waited and waited, and nothing came.

Finally she opened her eyes and frowned, then her eyes grew wide in amazement.

Juan Campos had collapsed in a heap and was lying there facedown, more in the rain than out of it. The pistol had fallen from his hand, and she moved painfully to re-trieve it, not comprehending what sudden miracle had saved her. Gus? But where was he? A falling branch? It didn't look like anything like that.

And then, only a few meters beyond, she saw shapes. She was so shaken that for a moment she imagined they were Gus's Martians or some other kind of creatures from the crater, and theydid look like nothing on Earth. Their faces were tattooed with elaborate designs, with great ear-rings of wood or bone. Small, dark, and threatening in their own right, each figure held a small blowpipe in its hand, eyes wide but fearfully flinching with the sound of each small explosion.

She made a movement for the pistol, and the pipes went up. She stopped, backed away into the tree, and the pipes came down. Primitive, yes, like out of someNational Geographic special, but they knew what guns could do.

Terry tried to think of how to say ”friend” in every lan-guage that she knew, but only English and Spanish came to mind. She tried them, but only blank stares were returned.

And then, as dramatically as it had started, the rain stopped, as if someone had turned off a faucet.

Quickly, almost without sound, a trio of the primitives moved in toward Juan Campos's body, first turning him over, then going through his clothing with a thief's skill.

Inanely, Terry could only think, If only I had a camera here! What a story this would make!

With sudden amazement coming over her, she realized that the three stripping Campos were all girls-no, women, and, from the look of them, ones that had already lived rough lives. Their faces and bodies were decorated with well-worn designs, and they wore that primitive jewelry but not a st.i.tch of clothing. Their black hair was long but ob-viously not without attention; it was shoulder-length on some, waist-length on others, and trimmed at the ends. Nor was it matted or tangled; much attention was clearly paid to keeping it groomed. Their awareness of how things con-nected on the clothing and of the gun and its purpose showed some knowledge, but everything about them said that they, if not ignorant of anything beyond the Stone Age, rejected all such things totally.

Theywere, however, thorough, and before two minutes had pa.s.sed they had extracted from Campos's body an in-credible a.s.sortment of weaponry, from two more small pis-tols to an a.s.sortment of knives and other instruments of violence. One of the women in the rear brought up a thick tray of woven straw, onto which all the weapons were care-fully placed. By the time they were through, Campos was nude, his clothing put in a heap, and signs of various wounds and scars could be seen all over the man's body.

Clearly his life hadn't always been one of idleness and ease.

Terry heard noises to her left and looked over to see several more of the women with a very frightened Dr. Lori Sutton in tow and others dragging another form which the newswoman recognized. ”Oh, my G.o.d!Gus !”

She started to go to the cameraman, but for the first time, one of the women made a sound, saying sharply and men-acingly,”Azat!”

Blowguns went up, and Terry got the message. When Lori saw Terry's torn s.h.i.+rt and Campos on the ground nearby, she gasped, instantly putting two and two together. The scientist reached the newswoman and whis-pered, ”Did he . . . ?”

”No. They stopped him. If they hadn't-”

”Azat! Azat!”came the menacing protest again. Gus by now was also stripped, and they gestured that the two women were to strip as well. Clearly they trusted n.o.body, not here.

Oh, G.o.d! The d.a.m.ned bugs are already eating me alive as it is! Lori thought, but she was too frightened not to comply.

”Guza! Guza!”the seeming leader said, pointing, indica-ting that they were to move toward the rest of the primi-tives, who still had their blowguns trained on the captives.They're not going to give us back our clothes and equip-ment! Lori thought with sudden panic, but there wasn't much else to do, and she didn't want to argue, not right now.

They went back into the forest, and the tender feet of the two civilized women were soon feeling bruised and cut by the rough forest floor, compounded by insect bites that the natives seemed to just ignore.

They're taking us away, away from the base camp!Terry thought in panic. The rest of the news team would search, of course, but what chance did anyone have of finding them in the natives' jungle, even if it had just recently undergone ma.s.sive alterations?

It seemed like a very long march, but hardly hours con-sidering that dawn had not yet broken. Finally they reached what the two women first thought was a village but which, on closer inspection, appeared more to be a temporary camp rather than a permanent settlement.

Terry's curiosity competed with her fear, and she won-dered if these women had been here when the meteor had hit. There were signs of debris about, a number of recently fallen trees and the remains of a crude stone fire pit that had apparently blown over. A camp fire burned in the wreckage, giving the whole area an eerie, flickering glow. On one side of the camp several women were lying on thick gra.s.s mats, and they had what looked like dried mud and leaves over parts of their bodies, some secured with vines.

At least one showed signs of singed hair and had the natural bandages over part of her face and one eye.

Yes, they'd been here during impact. It was a wonder any of them had survived unscathed, let alone so many, and it was equally wondrous that any of them could still hear.

The two captive women were taken near the fire, al-though they hardly needed the extra heat, and with signs were ordered to sit. It was mostly mud there, thanks to the runoff from the rainstorm.

To their surprise, they saw the bodies of the two men be-ing dragged into the camp, bound with vine ropes.Then they aren't dead! both thought almost at once, for why bind dead bodies? Some sort of paralyzing drug, then, rather than a lethal poison. Terry was happy that Gus wasn't a ca-sualty, after all, but couldn't help wondering with a little bit of satisfaction what Campos would be like as the captive of a tribe of female savages.

Now what?they both wondered. Neither had any experi-ence with anything like this, but it wasn't hard to think of movies, television shows, and books that told of the savage nature of the jungle people of the upper Amazon. And if they were taken far into the jungle before searchers could find them, what hope would there ever be of escape?

Amazonia

SHE WAS NOT OLD, SHE WAS ANCIENT, ALTHOUGH SHE NOlonger possessed the word to express it. The People be-lieved that she was the daughter of a G.o.ddess and almost wors.h.i.+ped her, and after all this time she could no longer recall her own origin.

She sensed that in the distant past she'd been many things, but it was increasingly difficult to remember much of it. Shedid know somehow that the longer time pa.s.sed and the more she remained in any one place, the more her memory faded, leaving only the present and immediate past. But the present and immediate past were such a long stretch of existence that she knew somehow that she was coming to a point where memories were falling into a deep and bottomless pit beyond recall. Some of the knowledge useful to the People remained, but it seemed now to come from nowhere, accepted as readily as magic, without ques-tion as to its origin but rather taken for granted as some di-vine gift. Vast periods of time pa.s.sed when she never even thought of the Past, or that there hadbeen a past, even in her dreams. She didn't mind; in fact, she felt better for it, slept more soundly for it. The present was enough. It was sufficient.

The language of the People was simple and pragmatic; they had all the words that were necessary for them and could express any concepts that were relevant to their sim-ple but demanding lives, but there was no subtlety to it, no multiple meanings, no indirectness. There were also no words for lying, deceit, dishonesty, or most other sins, nor was there a word for property or any great concept of it.

Although there were spirits everywhere-not just in the sky but in the trees, the rocks, the water, the animals, even the wind-who were prayed to in the context of a view of the cosmos both simple and complete, they had no names, only attributes and powers. The names of the People were also simple and generally descriptive: Little Flower, Big Nose, Soft Wind. They had named her Alama long ago, which meant ”spirit mother.”

She had used no other tongue for so long that she re-called no other. Like the rest of her forgotten past, she had no need of another.

Even time was different here, for the climate never changed, and the only temporal reference, beyond the pa.s.s-ing of day and night, was the births, aging, and eventual deaths of the others. She had tried on occasion to figure out how long she had been with the People by generations, but she kept going back and back so far that all the faces and personalities blurred together in her mind. She did remem-ber vaguely coming across an immense river in a very large canoe powered by the Spirit of the Wind, with huge, ugly men dressed in bright cloth and metal, with four-legged an-imals that they rode. She recalled that sometime afterward she had been beaten and whipped by some of those men and had fled into the jungle, but even that was a blur now, fading and soon to disappear with the rest of the past.