PREVIOUS CHAPTER
Zip’s left leg was broken. It was purple and lumpy and when he woke up the first thing he did was suck air through his teeth and sit up to try and touch it. That’s when we realized he had a broken rib, too, because as fast as he’d sat up, he flapped back down again.
“Zip!”
“Oh, fuck,” he said. “My ribs —”
We unzipped his jacket and pulled up his shirt to get a look. His chest was a patchwork of blue and black bruises where the spider’s leg had connected.
“My leg,” he said. “Oh, fuck, guys, I’m dead. I’m so fucking dead.”
Li glared and grabbed his shoulder.
“Shut up, moron. You’re going to be fine.”
“We’re twelve days deep,” said Zip. “You can’t get me out.”
“Yes we can.”
“You’ll just get yourselves killed.”
“You can walk.”
“My leg’s busted, Li. I can’t fucking walk.”
“We’ll make crutches.”
The skin of Zip’s face was drawn tight over his cheek bones. It made me uncomfortable to look at him. Instead I scanned the canopy and the trees around us, trying to seem like I was keeping watch.
“I’m not letting you die,” said Li. “We did not go in after you just to let you fucking DIE!”
“Tetris,” said Zip, “you gotta take care of Chomper, okay? Can you promise me that? Go to my sister’s place and get Chomper, and take care of him for me?”
I dug at the grime lodged under my fingernails. I had dirt and dried insect blood everywhere — caking my arms, getting into the corners of my eyes, lining the creases in my palms — but it was thickest in the crevices under my nails.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t care if I have to carry you over my shoulder the whole way, man. We’re not leaving you out here, period.”
Zip closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the branch.
“I should be dead right now,” he said.
“Yeah, you’re welcome,” said Li. “We fought King Kong for you, home boy.”
Zip moaned.
We gave him a few ibuprofen capsules.
“You need a splint,” said Li.
“I need a lot of things,” said Zip.
Li and I gathered some sticks and put a splint together with wire and nylon rope. I kept having to suppress a cold swell of hopelessness. This was bad. This was really, really bad. We wrapped the leg with bandages to try and keep the swelling down, and then we put the splint on.
“Fixed,” I said, and Zip almost smiled.
Night came quickly. I dreamed I was back at my brother’s funeral, the casket open, but instead of Todd it was Zip lying stone-faced inside. A second Zip stood beside me, examining his own corpse with an undertaker’s eye.
“Top-notch embalming,” said the living Zip. “Looks just like I’m sleeping.”
In the morning Zip’s eyes seemed to have receded back into his skull, and his teeth were permanently clenched together, but he’d regained a bit of his normal cheer.
“If we get out of here, I’m going to ask for a bright pink cast,” he said.
“I’ll sign it,” I said.
“So will all the ladies.”
Li raised an eyebrow.
“You think the cast being pink is going to help you pick up chicks?”
“The color doesn’t matter,” said Zip. “They’ll be sold as soon as they find out how I broke it.”
Zip leaned on me as we trudged along. I had to hunch so that he could put his arm around my neck. The posture made my back sore, but I couldn’t imagine complaining, considering the pain Zip was in.
Not since my earliest days as a ranger had I felt so vulnerable on the forest floor. If something jumped out at us, I’d have to swing Zip up and across my shoulders in a fireman’s carry and try to make a run for it. The pressure on Li was tremendous, too, because she had to keep watch all by herself.
Still, if anybody was up to the task, it was Li. All day long she threaded us through obstacles, around ravines, past trap doors and sink holes, never saying a word.
It was slow going. We pushed hard, but it felt like wading through Jello pudding, and after three days we’d only made two days of progress.
“This is going to take forever,” observed Zip as we settled in for the third evening. “I’m too slow. We’re going to run out of food.”
“So we skip dinners,” said Li as if it wasn’t a problem. “Starting tonight. Eat breakfast and lunch like normal, but no dinner. The food will last.”
We went to sleep with our stomachs pinching. In the morning, the breakfast bars and fruit gel packets hardly seemed like a meal. I wished for a stack of pancakes and six strips of bacon. And McDonalds hash browns, the kind I ate on road trips as a kid. All of it hot and steaming on a shining clean platter in front of me.
On the fourth day we crossed paths with a herd of pill bugs. We hauled ass into a tree and watched them pass.
Forest pill bugs had the bulk and personality of terrestrial cattle. They grazed on whatever vegetation they passed, and wouldn’t hurt you unless you went to spectacular lengths to piss them off. If a predator showed up, they’d curl into armored balls and scatter like a handful of flung marbles.
I looked over at Zip to see if he was enjoying the break. He leaned against the trunk of the tree with his eyes closed. His face was linen-white and drawn.
“You doing okay there?” I asked.
Zip remained silent.
“Looks like it’s time for more ibuprofen,” said Li.
“Can a guy get some morphine already?” asked Zip.
“No,” snapped Li, compressing the edges of her mouth.
Zip looked like he was settling in for a nap. Li scooted closer to me and whispered in my ear.
“You think he's getting an infection?”
"No," I said, "But every step he takes, the broken bone edges are grinding on each other."
I made my hands into fists and rubbed the knuckles against each other to demonstrate.
"That's why I want to save the morphine. It's going to get worse," Li said.
Her face was grimy and smeared. It was also painfully beautiful. I wanted to cradle her head with my hands and put my thumbs on her cheeks and wipe away the dirt. I wanted to kiss her on her tight-pressed lips. She was right there! Zip was half-asleep. I could do it. Lean in and kiss her. I wanted…
I whipped my head away. No. What the fuck was that?
Zip. Zip was dying. This was not the time to entertain ridiculous fantasies. Anyway, Li had made it abundantly clear that she wasn't interested in me. I knew I had to stamp that feeling down, throw it down a mineshaft and bury it with concrete.
"What?" asked Li.
"Nothing," I said.
Below, the pillbugs stripped the forest floor clean, their mouth parts milling industriously.
Five nights later I had a dream that I was back at my dad’s house in Indianapolis, sipping a glass of lemonade on the porch. Hollywood was there too. He sprawled on a lawn chair with a hat pulled low over his eyes. Only his jaw moved, grinding away at a lump of bubble gum.
The sky hung low and red and wide and empty. No clouds, no sun, just a dull, uniform red, the color of congealing blood.
“You should listen to him, you know,” said Hollywood, chewing his gum.
“Listen to who?” I asked, peering up at the red sky.
Then a giant scorpion began to clamber over the white picket fence and I wrenched myself awake before I could see any more.
My sleeping bag was sticky with sweat. I tried to chase the nightmare away by filling my head with memories of home: bright summer days at the court by the pool, heat radiating pleasantly off the blacktop, the rubber-and-leather smell of the basketball transferring to my palms. On my feet: shockingly clean white Nikes with soft, fat laces.
Clean shoes sounded amazing. Socks, too. We’d reached the stage of the expedition when rotating between three pairs of socks no longer kept them remotely fresh. Grime had infiltrated every corner and crevice of my body, causing a perpetual, slow-burning itch. I would have traded half my expedition payout for a shower.
Sleep, when it returned, was torn jagged by rapid-fire dreams in which I ran or climbed or flew, fleeing something I was afraid to turn and glimpse.
The next morning was dim and gloomy. Nobody felt like talking. We downed our food bars mechanically and continued the grueling trek, obsessively checking our compasses to make sure we were heading as close to due east as possible.
Zip pulled further and further into himself. I held him up and pushed him along, and his legs moved, but his mind was miles away. He never asked for painkillers, so we kept an eye on his jaw, and when he clenched it harder than usual we knew it was time to administer another dose.
Around lunch we came across the body of a subway snake.
Enormous snakes like these came up to scavenge on the forest floor at night. This one must have thrashed furiously when it died, because a wide swath around its corpse was scraped clear of vegetation. Its ridged body curved and rolled out of sight like a levee tracing the edge of a tortuous river. The tip of the tail might have been half a mile away.
The snake’s mouth gaped, a cave bristling with serrated teeth, the heavy jaw dislocated. Jettisoned from the mouth, in a puddle of snake vomit, was the half-digested corpse of a giant blue frog. Even for an animal as large as the snake, the toxin coating the frog’s skin would have been lethal in minutes.
The three of us stood, transfixed, imagining the snake in motion. Thousands of tons of scales and muscle, rippling in tune. It must have downed a mountain of meat every day. How else could it keep its ravenous bulk of flesh satisfied?
“What a shame,” said Li.
I was surprised to find that I agreed. Out of nothingness this gigantic creature had grown, a universe of trillions and trillions of cells, over decades, maybe even centuries, and the whole system collapsed one day because it took a bite out of the wrong frog. Now scavengers would clean it down to the bone in a matter of weeks. A shining white skeleton would be all that remained, and soon the forest would swallow that too.
The snake’s skin swelled and we stumbled back, fearing that breath had returned to its fearsome lungs. Then the bulge wriggled, and a centipede burst its head through the thick, scaly skin, sniffing the air with its antennae. Out of the gap poured an odor so foul that I felt my breakfast begin to rise up my throat in response.
“Oh, God,” I said.
As we hastened to leave, I saw that the skin was wriggling all down the side of the snake. The scavengers were already hard at work.
A few days later, late in the afternoon, as the forest began to dim, we heard a woman scream.
“Don’t go chasing after that, now,” said Li.
I smiled. “I believe that’s the first joke anybody’s told in a week.”
Zip chuckled through his teeth. “Face it, guys,” he said. His voice was quiet and gravelly. “I’m the funny one. Without me you’re boring.”
“Well, yeah,” said Li. “Why do you think we’re trying so hard to save you?”
That night it rained and rained. In the morning Zip moaned and refused to move when we shook him. We checked his splint and saw that the wrappings were soaked through with blood. As we unwrapped his leg, a sickening smell assaulted us. A broken spear of bone had punctured the skin of his calf. The whole area was yellow and red and humming with infection.
We slathered the wound with antiseptics and bandaged it carefully. While Li put together a stretcher, I managed to get Zip to swallow some antibiotics, along with a few gulps of water.
Off we went, with Zip strapped to the stretcher between us, four or five days from shore.
If we were lucky, we could make it there in three.
NEXT CHAPTER
Zip’s left leg was broken. It was purple and lumpy and when he woke up the first thing he did was suck air through his teeth and sit up to try and touch it. That’s when we realized he had a broken rib, too, because as fast as he’d sat up, he flapped back down again.
“Zip!”
“Oh, fuck,” he said. “My ribs —”
We unzipped his jacket and pulled up his shirt to get a look. His chest was a patchwork of blue and black bruises where the spider’s leg had connected.
“My leg,” he said. “Oh, fuck, guys, I’m dead. I’m so fucking dead.”
Li glared and grabbed his shoulder.
“Shut up, moron. You’re going to be fine.”
“We’re twelve days deep,” said Zip. “You can’t get me out.”
“Yes we can.”
“You’ll just get yourselves killed.”
“You can walk.”
“My leg’s busted, Li. I can’t fucking walk.”
“We’ll make crutches.”
The skin of Zip’s face was drawn tight over his cheek bones. It made me uncomfortable to look at him. Instead I scanned the canopy and the trees around us, trying to seem like I was keeping watch.
“I’m not letting you die,” said Li. “We did not go in after you just to let you fucking DIE!”
“Tetris,” said Zip, “you gotta take care of Chomper, okay? Can you promise me that? Go to my sister’s place and get Chomper, and take care of him for me?”
I dug at the grime lodged under my fingernails. I had dirt and dried insect blood everywhere — caking my arms, getting into the corners of my eyes, lining the creases in my palms — but it was thickest in the crevices under my nails.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t care if I have to carry you over my shoulder the whole way, man. We’re not leaving you out here, period.”
Zip closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the branch.
“I should be dead right now,” he said.
“Yeah, you’re welcome,” said Li. “We fought King Kong for you, home boy.”
Zip moaned.
We gave him a few ibuprofen capsules.
“You need a splint,” said Li.
“I need a lot of things,” said Zip.
Li and I gathered some sticks and put a splint together with wire and nylon rope. I kept having to suppress a cold swell of hopelessness. This was bad. This was really, really bad. We wrapped the leg with bandages to try and keep the swelling down, and then we put the splint on.
“Fixed,” I said, and Zip almost smiled.
Night came quickly. I dreamed I was back at my brother’s funeral, the casket open, but instead of Todd it was Zip lying stone-faced inside. A second Zip stood beside me, examining his own corpse with an undertaker’s eye.
“Top-notch embalming,” said the living Zip. “Looks just like I’m sleeping.”
In the morning Zip’s eyes seemed to have receded back into his skull, and his teeth were permanently clenched together, but he’d regained a bit of his normal cheer.
“If we get out of here, I’m going to ask for a bright pink cast,” he said.
“I’ll sign it,” I said.
“So will all the ladies.”
Li raised an eyebrow.
“You think the cast being pink is going to help you pick up chicks?”
“The color doesn’t matter,” said Zip. “They’ll be sold as soon as they find out how I broke it.”
Zip leaned on me as we trudged along. I had to hunch so that he could put his arm around my neck. The posture made my back sore, but I couldn’t imagine complaining, considering the pain Zip was in.
Not since my earliest days as a ranger had I felt so vulnerable on the forest floor. If something jumped out at us, I’d have to swing Zip up and across my shoulders in a fireman’s carry and try to make a run for it. The pressure on Li was tremendous, too, because she had to keep watch all by herself.
Still, if anybody was up to the task, it was Li. All day long she threaded us through obstacles, around ravines, past trap doors and sink holes, never saying a word.
It was slow going. We pushed hard, but it felt like wading through Jello pudding, and after three days we’d only made two days of progress.
“This is going to take forever,” observed Zip as we settled in for the third evening. “I’m too slow. We’re going to run out of food.”
“So we skip dinners,” said Li as if it wasn’t a problem. “Starting tonight. Eat breakfast and lunch like normal, but no dinner. The food will last.”
We went to sleep with our stomachs pinching. In the morning, the breakfast bars and fruit gel packets hardly seemed like a meal. I wished for a stack of pancakes and six strips of bacon. And McDonalds hash browns, the kind I ate on road trips as a kid. All of it hot and steaming on a shining clean platter in front of me.
On the fourth day we crossed paths with a herd of pill bugs. We hauled ass into a tree and watched them pass.
Forest pill bugs had the bulk and personality of terrestrial cattle. They grazed on whatever vegetation they passed, and wouldn’t hurt you unless you went to spectacular lengths to piss them off. If a predator showed up, they’d curl into armored balls and scatter like a handful of flung marbles.
I looked over at Zip to see if he was enjoying the break. He leaned against the trunk of the tree with his eyes closed. His face was linen-white and drawn.
“You doing okay there?” I asked.
Zip remained silent.
“Looks like it’s time for more ibuprofen,” said Li.
“Can a guy get some morphine already?” asked Zip.
“No,” snapped Li, compressing the edges of her mouth.
Zip looked like he was settling in for a nap. Li scooted closer to me and whispered in my ear.
“You think he's getting an infection?”
"No," I said, "But every step he takes, the broken bone edges are grinding on each other."
I made my hands into fists and rubbed the knuckles against each other to demonstrate.
"That's why I want to save the morphine. It's going to get worse," Li said.
Her face was grimy and smeared. It was also painfully beautiful. I wanted to cradle her head with my hands and put my thumbs on her cheeks and wipe away the dirt. I wanted to kiss her on her tight-pressed lips. She was right there! Zip was half-asleep. I could do it. Lean in and kiss her. I wanted…
I whipped my head away. No. What the fuck was that?
Zip. Zip was dying. This was not the time to entertain ridiculous fantasies. Anyway, Li had made it abundantly clear that she wasn't interested in me. I knew I had to stamp that feeling down, throw it down a mineshaft and bury it with concrete.
"What?" asked Li.
"Nothing," I said.
Below, the pillbugs stripped the forest floor clean, their mouth parts milling industriously.
Five nights later I had a dream that I was back at my dad’s house in Indianapolis, sipping a glass of lemonade on the porch. Hollywood was there too. He sprawled on a lawn chair with a hat pulled low over his eyes. Only his jaw moved, grinding away at a lump of bubble gum.
The sky hung low and red and wide and empty. No clouds, no sun, just a dull, uniform red, the color of congealing blood.
“You should listen to him, you know,” said Hollywood, chewing his gum.
“Listen to who?” I asked, peering up at the red sky.
Then a giant scorpion began to clamber over the white picket fence and I wrenched myself awake before I could see any more.
My sleeping bag was sticky with sweat. I tried to chase the nightmare away by filling my head with memories of home: bright summer days at the court by the pool, heat radiating pleasantly off the blacktop, the rubber-and-leather smell of the basketball transferring to my palms. On my feet: shockingly clean white Nikes with soft, fat laces.
Clean shoes sounded amazing. Socks, too. We’d reached the stage of the expedition when rotating between three pairs of socks no longer kept them remotely fresh. Grime had infiltrated every corner and crevice of my body, causing a perpetual, slow-burning itch. I would have traded half my expedition payout for a shower.
Sleep, when it returned, was torn jagged by rapid-fire dreams in which I ran or climbed or flew, fleeing something I was afraid to turn and glimpse.
The next morning was dim and gloomy. Nobody felt like talking. We downed our food bars mechanically and continued the grueling trek, obsessively checking our compasses to make sure we were heading as close to due east as possible.
Zip pulled further and further into himself. I held him up and pushed him along, and his legs moved, but his mind was miles away. He never asked for painkillers, so we kept an eye on his jaw, and when he clenched it harder than usual we knew it was time to administer another dose.
Around lunch we came across the body of a subway snake.
Enormous snakes like these came up to scavenge on the forest floor at night. This one must have thrashed furiously when it died, because a wide swath around its corpse was scraped clear of vegetation. Its ridged body curved and rolled out of sight like a levee tracing the edge of a tortuous river. The tip of the tail might have been half a mile away.
The snake’s mouth gaped, a cave bristling with serrated teeth, the heavy jaw dislocated. Jettisoned from the mouth, in a puddle of snake vomit, was the half-digested corpse of a giant blue frog. Even for an animal as large as the snake, the toxin coating the frog’s skin would have been lethal in minutes.
The three of us stood, transfixed, imagining the snake in motion. Thousands of tons of scales and muscle, rippling in tune. It must have downed a mountain of meat every day. How else could it keep its ravenous bulk of flesh satisfied?
“What a shame,” said Li.
I was surprised to find that I agreed. Out of nothingness this gigantic creature had grown, a universe of trillions and trillions of cells, over decades, maybe even centuries, and the whole system collapsed one day because it took a bite out of the wrong frog. Now scavengers would clean it down to the bone in a matter of weeks. A shining white skeleton would be all that remained, and soon the forest would swallow that too.
The snake’s skin swelled and we stumbled back, fearing that breath had returned to its fearsome lungs. Then the bulge wriggled, and a centipede burst its head through the thick, scaly skin, sniffing the air with its antennae. Out of the gap poured an odor so foul that I felt my breakfast begin to rise up my throat in response.
“Oh, God,” I said.
As we hastened to leave, I saw that the skin was wriggling all down the side of the snake. The scavengers were already hard at work.
A few days later, late in the afternoon, as the forest began to dim, we heard a woman scream.
“Don’t go chasing after that, now,” said Li.
I smiled. “I believe that’s the first joke anybody’s told in a week.”
Zip chuckled through his teeth. “Face it, guys,” he said. His voice was quiet and gravelly. “I’m the funny one. Without me you’re boring.”
“Well, yeah,” said Li. “Why do you think we’re trying so hard to save you?”
That night it rained and rained. In the morning Zip moaned and refused to move when we shook him. We checked his splint and saw that the wrappings were soaked through with blood. As we unwrapped his leg, a sickening smell assaulted us. A broken spear of bone had punctured the skin of his calf. The whole area was yellow and red and humming with infection.
We slathered the wound with antiseptics and bandaged it carefully. While Li put together a stretcher, I managed to get Zip to swallow some antibiotics, along with a few gulps of water.
Off we went, with Zip strapped to the stretcher between us, four or five days from shore.
If we were lucky, we could make it there in three.
NEXT CHAPTER