20. Chapter 17 – Marley #3
The words were soft, uttered toward the trees instead of to me, but at once I understood. He needed to contribute. He didn’t know how. The quiet admission was a plea for purpose.
Sighing, I blew out my lips in a raspberry, like the kindergartner I apparently was.
“Tell you what,” I said slowly, placing the suitcase down on the ground beside me. “See those trees over there?” He straightened as I pointed to the few fruit trees I’d seen, about fifteen feet away. “How’s your eyesight? Could you direct me to where the best fruit is from here?”
Ambrose squinted at the area. Shrugging one shoulder and immediately wincing—okay, maybe he was as dumb as a meathead—he nodded. “I’m from California, I can find a ripe avocado.”
“Great!” I peeled back the foliage of the large fern on my way into the dense jungle and took my first step into the trees.
Curse these stupid shoes and impractical shorts. My legs were already getting scratched to shit by some unseen thorny thing on the underside of the leaves, and my heels dug into the inclined ground like miniature spikes.
My gaze should have stayed on the fruit trees in front of me, but I stayed focused on the ground cover, wary of slithering crawlers. I had little experience with snakes before moving to South America, and I didn’t want any. Indiana Jones and I were twins in that regard.
Something skittered in the dried leaves.
Fuck, it was a snake, I was sure of it. Scrambling to get away from the creature, the thick exposed tree roots tripped me up faster than running from a jaguar.
Stumbling, I blindly caught myself on the rough bark of another tree, and jumped back as if it had burned me.
“To your left, Marley,” Ambrose called with an irritated huff. “You’re not going to find any fruit on the ground.”
Biting my tongue so hard I could taste the iron, I rolled my eyes to the top of the several meter tall trees, remembering snakes, like Kaa in the Jungle Book, loved to climb trees.
“Thanks, great tip!” I called back, inching slower toward the fruit trees, dropping my gaze to what was directly in front of me to stifle the perfectly rational fear.
I’d survived a plane crash and a jaguar attack—surely Mother Nature wouldn’t take me out with a serpent just for fun? When death finally called my name, hang me by my thumbs, bleed me by my fingernails—anything but that.
Cold sweat dripped down my spine into Madman’s T-shirt. Surviving the wilderness hadn’t included snakes.
A rustle at my feet made me leap out of my skin. I swallowed the high-pitched scream in my throat as every muscle in my body tensed to the point of pain, only to see a large, speckled rodent come out from behind the fern.
Something warm brushed against my back. I whirled around, ready to defend what was left of my life, only to see Ambrose’s wide eyes staring back at me. He dropped the hand that had just touched me and clenched it into a fist at his side.
“Jesus, Marley, are you okay? You’re as white as your shirt.”
Says the man who was also as white as my shirt and was really shitty at following directions. I could feel the heat of his body, just an inch away from mine, and the scent of something citrusy clinging to his skin.
My heartbeat slowly rushed out of my ears as my body recognized we weren’t under a snake attack, which gave me strength to glare at the insufferable meathead.
“Why are you in here?” I hissed, stepping only slightly back from his close proximity. “Ambrose, do you want to fucking die?”
“Forgive me for thinking you were in trouble, oh supreme leader.” He scoffed and the honey in his irises cooled to brown in the shade of the trees. “I’m fucking here now, so let’s get this over with.”
He shuffled past me, carrying a small plastic bag—had that come from his pocket?—and tramped through the underbrush, clearly suicidal.
“Here.” He stopped in front of the largest avocado tree in the cluster,
The trees were tall, much taller now that we were beneath them, but heavy with their bounty. Ambrose gingerly reached just beyond his head to pull at the fruit by twisting it from its stem. There weren’t many ripe ones, but it would be enough to feed each of us for the day.
Gaze raking over the ground in front of me and barely satisfied with the lack of slithering, I stepped up beside him and wordlessly took the bag from his hand, holding it open for him.
He was clearly biting the inside of his cheek to hide his pain as he moved. What was this guy’s deal?
“You’re a stubborn ass,” I grumbled as we worked together in the stifling jungle heat, his distracting citrusy scent clinging to the air.
“And you’re really bad at insults,” he retorted, placing the final avocado in the bag. He gestured toward the riverbed behind us. “Get moving, Captain. And try not to trip this time.”
“Try not to bleed out from your bandages, you insufferable meathead,” I shot back, my anger enough to mask my snake fear while I stalked back the fifteen feet to the riverbed in record time.
“You already used that one,” he said tauntingly from behind me.
A shrill feminine scream pierced through the thick air, and my quick footfalls turned into a run as I stumbled toward the source of the sound. Ambrose was close behind me.
When I rounded the river bend, I found Tessa and Brooks surrounding Vanessa kneeling at the base of a tall tree holding her hand in front of her at an awkward angle. The outline of three six-inch needle-width spikes stuck out from her palm.
Chunga spikes. Fuck.
“What happened?” I demanded, kneeling at her feet to examine her hand. They hadn’t just pierced the skin. They’d embedded deep within the tissue.
“She fell,” Tessa gasped as her friend continued to scream. “She tripped and tried to use the tree to break her fall. What the hell are those things?”
“Chunga spikes,” I responded grimly. “Madman,” I called out behind me. “Can you bring me the first-aid kit?”
An instant later, he was by my side, carrying the bulky plastic box. I opened it and sighed at the meager materials we’d already half-used.
“Vanessa, I’m going to need you to stop screaming, okay? I’m going to remove these spikes and bandage you up, but I need you to calm down.”
I drew her palm into my hand to inspect it as our shocked passenger closed her lips but continued to issue guttural noises behind them.
“A chunga palm is that tree over there.” Pointing at the large, looming palm tree with one hand, I pulled out the pair of stainless-steel tweezers with the other.
“It has a tall stem, and fruit at the top similar to a coconut palm, but see those spikes all over the bottom half? Those are more dangerous than a lot of other things out here. They’re laced with bacteria and fungi.
If it's between falling on your face or a chunga palm, choose your face every time, okay?”
Gripping one spike between the tweezers, I yanked it upward, ignoring Vanessa’s cry. I inspected the wound. When satisfied nothing remained underneath the skin, I pulled out the second and third in quick succession.
Tessa wrapped her arms around Vanessa from behind and soothed her as I reached for the antiseptic wipes. Ripping off one tab, I first cleaned my hands and then used another to clean her wounds seeping with thin rivulets of blood.
My fingers hovered over the tiny tube of antibiotic cream. Danny’s and Ambrose’s injuries were far more severe, and our antibiotic cream was in very short supply. We were only a few days from rescue.
Playing God was my least favorite part of survival, but maximizing our chances had to be my priority. An infection through the bloodstream might take days to appear, but by then, we’d be rescued, and she’d have received proper medical attention.
What if she’d been infected with a fungus? The antibiotics wouldn’t work, and we’d have wasted a valuable resource. What if she was one of the lucky ones who never got infected at all?
As if of their own accord, my fingers bypassed the ointment and landed on the medical tape instead. The cuts were cleaned, the clear liquid of lymph fluid already working its magic to seal the skin. It was a risk I had to take.
Wrapping the gauze around her hand, I secured it with medical tape and let it go. Her screams had become soft sniffles as I worked, and the numbness in her eyes had returned.
This poor woman was going to need a full mental assessment when we made it back to Brazil. She shifted closer into Tessa’s hold, and for the first time, I caught the wistful look of love in Tessa’s eyes as her gaze lingered on her friend’s face.
They were lovers—not platonic at all. My heart felt like a lead weight in my chest as I imagined losing someone I loved like this—in the jungle, helpless and scared.
Packing away the first-aid kit, I offered a weak smile and prayed I’d made the right choice.