The Edge

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.

    We all smelled very ripe.

    I eased Laura onto her feet, holding her upright against me.

    "Can you imagine what a cold shower would feel like, Mac?" she asked.

    "Right now," I said, and closed my eyes briefly, "it would be on my top-ten list. Maybe top three. I want you in that cold shower with me, Laura, laughing and fit again."

    She didn't say anything and that scared me. We kept going.

    Now, to add to the impenetrable undergrowth in front of us, the ground was mud. The nicely packed clay was slippery and wet through to a depth of a good six inches. Mud covered us to our knees. It made walking as hard as sucking one of our limes through a straw. I nearly fell once. It was Sherlock who steadied me.

    Sweat poured off us. Savich was grunting with each swing of the machete. Monkeys and birds shrieked and howled above us. We couldn't see even one of them. The racket was nearly deafening at times.

    Just when I wanted to stop, go down on my knees, and never move again, I saw butterflies sporting the most amazing colors-reds, yellows, greens. I just pointed at them. One followed us a good distance, gliding beside my face, wide-winged, the brightest blue imaginable, its wings rimmed with solid black. When the butterflies disappeared, taking their beauty with them, I realized we'd moved at least another twenty feet west. The rain forest was deadly, horrific, and those butterflies were the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.

    Sherlock spotted two coral snakes. She came to a stop and just stared two feet to her left into some undergrowth. There was no way a coral snake could go unnoticed. The vivid orange-and-white stripes slithered away from us and into deeper cover.

    I checked to see that everyone's boots were tightly laced up, the ends of their pants firmly tucked inside the boots. It was hard to tell with all the mud covering everything. At least we didn't have any mud on our skin. Talk about itching. But no insects could get inside, and no snakes. I noticed bites on the backs of my hands. No hope for it.

    Survival, I thought. We just had to survive. We didn't hear any helicopters for the rest of the afternoon, or the noise of any other humans. It was just the four of us, alone in this living oven.

    "Hot damn," Savich shouted. "Look what I found. Ripe bananas, to go with our mangoes. Now the Baby Ruths can be our dessert."

    We also found some pipas, a green coconut you can crack open and drink out of. Since Sherlock had taken one of those huge leaves and fashioned it into a funnel to catch rainwater during the downpour, both the empty water bottles were full again. We picked half a dozen pipas just in case.

    I was doing the hacking now, Savich carrying Laura. I said over my shoulder, after I'd had to whack a welter of green intertwined leaves three times to get them apart, "I wonder if they found Molinas, the bastard. Maybe they didn't. Maybe a coral snake got him. Or maybe he's still lying there with insects crawling all over him."

    "Or maybe," Savich said, "this Del Cabrizo character was so angry that we escaped, he killed him."

    I didn't want to think about what could happen to Molinas's daughter.

    We stopped to make camp when we came to another small clearing. When we stepped into the sunlight, we saw a flock of wild turkeys running through the deep grass to the other side. They disappeared into the forest. It was late in the afternoon, time to stop anyway.

    Laura was getting weaker. It required too much energy for her to talk. I gave her more antibiotics, more aspirin, and two more pain pills. There were only four left. She didn't have a fever, and the bandages looked clean, but she was getting weaker.

    Sherlock swept our small