“She can dance with Sherlock,” Savich said. He was sitting on Sherlock’s blanket, licking chocolate from his fingers.
“Sherlock, you okay now?”
“I’m a lot better than you are, Laura. Is the pain bad?”
“I can control it. I’m forced to lie here and watch Mac eat one of my candy bars. It’s tough. My mouth is watering. If I had the strength, I’d rip it out of his mouth.”
I broke off a little piece and put it in her mouth. She closed her eyes in bliss and chewed.
I counted. We had five more candy bars. We needed to find some fruit besides the mangoes. I thought bananas should be all over the place, but I hadn’t seen any. I’d seen a small anteater scraping along on the floor, and I tried to imagine baking him over a fire. I said, “Everyone, keep your eyes open for some edible stuff, probably fruit, that we can pull off a tree, peel, and eat, okay?”
“We might as well start on the mangoes,” Savich said, as he began peeling mangoes and handing them out. “Nice and ripe. Eat up.”
“I’ve got matches,” Sherlock said, mango juice dripping off her chin. “When we stop this afternoon, we’ll build a fire. It’ll keep the creepy things away.”
“I know all about how to do that,” Laura said. “I spent lots of my childhood at campgrounds being ordered around by Dad and an older brother. I’ve seen some birch and beech trees. Even some oak. That’s hard wood, good for burning in a fire.”
Sherlock crawled over to Laura. “I’ve got another strip of shirt. Let me braid your hair, it’s kind of all over the place.”
I watched Sherlock try to make a French braid of Laura’s long, very matted hair. She smoothed out most of the tangles and picked away half a dozen insects. The best I could say about the result was that her hair was away from her face.
“How is it?” Laura asked.
“You’re gorgeous. Sherlock’s got a real talent with hair, particularly really long hair like yours.” I dabbed a piece of wet shirt over Laura’s mouth to get rid of the sticky mango juice. I could just imagine how all the flying critters would love that stuff.
She smiled and closed her eyes.
I got to my feet and stretched. I packed everything up, then lifted Laura into my arms. I was used to her weight now. It felt good. I looked all around me, carefully. Nothing lethal in sight, man or beast.
Sherlock, thank God, was walking on her own. She kept up with Savich, right on his heels, carrying the first-aid kit and an AK-47. “Sleep, Laura,” I said. “I won’t tell any bad jokes to keep you up.”
“That’s good, Mac,” she said against my shoulder. Her voice was weaker.
We kept moving. Laura seemed lighter than she had just an hour before. It was as if she were fading away, slowly, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to stop it. Except find help.
Savich kept up a steady stride, chopping away the undergrowth ahead of us. We saw very little but we heard scurrying sounds all around us.
Suddenly we heard screaming and barking sounds, high above us. A family of spider monkeys, about ten of them, were jumping up and down, rattling branches. Savich got hit in the middle of his back with a shriveled piece of brown fruit we couldn’t identify. They hurled other vegetation and small branches down at us, but nothing that hurt us. I hurried and got a thick, sharp-edged leaf in my face for my trouble. They weren’t afraid of us, just pissed that we were in their territory. Once we had moved sufficiently on, they ignored us.
When the rain came in the middle of the afternoon, hot, thick sheets of rain, I would have given two of my candy bars for a big umbrella. Then we discovered that parts of the canopy overhead were so thick, we were able to stay relatively dry if we stayed in the right spots. I covered Laura as best I could. Steam rose off the ground when the deluge finally stopped. The humidity didn’t lessen, it just wasn’t liquid anymore. Steam rose from our clothes again.