Amazonia

Lauren replaced the receiver and crossed to the child. “Honey, what are you doing up? You should be in bed.”

“I couldn’t find you.”

She knelt before the girl. “What’s wrong? Did you have another scary dream?” The first few nights here, Jessie had awoken with nightmares, triggered by the quarantine and the strange environment. But the child had seemed to adjust rapidly, making friends with several of the other kids.

“My tummy hurts,” she said, her eyes sheening with threatening tears.

“Oh, honey, that’s what you get for eating ice cream so late.” Lauren reached out and pulled the girl into a hug. “Why don’t I get you a glass of water, and we’ll get you tucked back into—”

Lauren’s voice died as she realized how warm the child was. She reached a palm to Jessie’s forehead. “Oh, God,” she mumbled under her breath.

The child was burning up.

2:31 A.M.

AMAZON JUNGLE

Louis stood by his tent as Jacques strode up from the river. His lieutenant carried something wrapped in a sodden blanket under his arms. Whatever it was, it appeared no larger than a watermelon.

“Doctor,” the Maroon tribesman said stiffly.

“Jacques, what did you discover?” He had sent the man and two others to investigate the explosion that had occurred just after midnight. The noise had woken his own camp mere minutes after they had settled in for the night. Earlier, at sunset, Louis had learned of the discovery of the Indian shabano and the fate of the villagers. Then hours later the explosion…

What was going on over there?

“Sir, the village has been incinerated…as has much of the surrounding forest. We could not get too close due to the remaining fires. Maybe by morning.”

“And the other team?”

Jacques glanced to his toes. “Gone, sir. I dropped Malachim and Toady ashore to scout after them.”

Louis clenched a fist and cursed his overconfidence. After the successful abduction of one of their soldiers, he had grown complacent with his prey. But now this! One of his team’s trackers must have been spotted. Now that the fox had been alerted to the hounds, Louis’s mission was far more complicated. “Gather the other men. If the Rangers are running from us, we don’t want them to get too far away.”

“Yes, sir. But, Doctor, I’m not sure the others are fleeing from us.”

“What makes you think that?”

“As we paddled up to the fire zone, we saw a body float out from a side stream.”

“A body?” Louis feared it was his mole, dispatched and sent downriver as a message.

Jacques unrolled the sodden blanket in his arms and dropped its content to the leafed floor of the jungle. It was a human head. “We found it floating near the remains.”

Frowning, Louis knelt and examined the head, what little there was of it. The face had been all but chewed away, but from the shaved scalp, it was clearly one of the Rangers.

“The body was the same,” Jacques said, “gnawed to the bone.”

Louis glanced up. “What happened to him?”

“Piranhas, I’d say, from the bite wounds.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty damn sure.” Jacques fingered the scarred half of his nose, reminding Louis that, as a boy, his lieutenant had had intimate experience with the voracious river predators.

“Did they feed on him after he was dead?”

Jacques shrugged. “If he wasn’t, I pity the poor bastard.”

Louis climbed to his feet. He stared out toward the river. “What the hell is happening out there?”

Ten

Escape

AUGUST 14, 3:12 A.M.

AMAZON JUNGLE

Atop the island knoll, Nate stood with the other civilians, ringed by the Ranger team, which was now down to eight members. One for each of the civilians, Nate thought, like personal bodyguards.

“How about using another of your napalm bombs to clear a path through the buggers?” Frank asked, standing near Captain Waxman. “Roll it down the slope, then duck for cover.”

“We’d all be dead. If the heat blast didn’t fry us, then we’d be pinned down between a burning forest and the poisonous bastards.”

Frank sighed, staring out into the dark forests. “How about your grenades? We could lob them in series, creating a swath through them.”

Waxman frowned. “It’d be risky to deploy them so close to us, and no guarantee that it would kill enough of the bastards among all these tree trunks. I say we hold the hill, try to last until daybreak.”

Frank crossed his arms, little pleased with this plan.

Around the knoll, occasional fiery blasts from the flamethrowers ignited the night as Corporal Okamoto and Private Carrera maintained sentry posts on either slope. Though it had been half an hour since sighting one of them, the beasts were still out there. The surrounding forests had gone deathly quiet, no monkey calls, no bird-song. Even the insects seemed to have died down to a whispery buzz and whine. But beyond the reach of their flashlights, the leaves still rustled as unseen lurkers crept through the underbrush.

Night scopes focused on the surrounding waters revealed creatures still hopping into and out of the stream. Nathan’s earlier assessment seemed to be accurate. The creatures, gill-breathers, needed to return to the waters occasionally to revive themselves.

Nearby, Manny knelt in the leaf-strewn dirt, working by flashlight. Kelly and Kouwe stood behind his shoulder. Earlier, Manny had risked his life to dash into the forest’s fringe to collect one of the beasts stunned by a blast of flame. Though partially charbroiled, it was a decent specimen. The creature was about a foot long from the tip of its tail to its razor-toothed mouth. Large black eyes protruded, giving it a nearly 360-degree view of its surroundings. Strong articulated limbs ended in webbed and suckered toes almost as long as the body itself.

As the others watched, Manny was performing a rapid dissection. The Brazilian biologist worked deftly with a scalpel and forceps from Kelly’s med kit.

“This thing is amazing,” Manny finally mumbled.

Nate joined Kelly and Kouwe as the biologist explained.

“It’s clearly some form of chimera. An amalgam of more than one species.”

“How so?” Kelly asked.

Manny shifted aside and pointed with his thumb forceps. “Nathan was right. Though its skin is not scaled like a fish, it definitely has the breathing system of an aquatic species. Gills, no lungs. But its legs—notice the banding on the skin—are definitely amphibious. The striping pattern is very characteristic of Phobobates trivittatus, the striped poison-dart frog, the largest and most toxic member of the frog family.”