Mutation Read online

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s so funny?”

  “If that’s Raul’s problem, it’s not going to go away when he meets Wolfe. Wolfe appears to be completely capable of going anywhere by himself.”

  “I’d forgotten that you’ve met him.”

  “Briefly,” Jake answered. “Aboard his research ship.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Nice enough. Big guy with a black beard. I heard he’s missing a leg, but you wouldn’t know it to see him walk. I think he and Laurel are together. At least that’s the impression I got.”

  “Did he say anything about cryptozoology?”

  “You mean Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. Why would he? We talked about his sister and brother-in-law.”

  “Sylvia and Timothy O’Hara.”

  “Right.”

  “Did you know that Wolfe’s a cryptozoologist?”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you believe in that stuff?”

  “It’s fringe science to be sure, but the rumor is that Dr. Wolfe has made some astounding discoveries, most of which he keeps to himself, which is admirable and unusual for any biologist. When we make a discovery, we can’t wait to get it out there.”

  “Publish or perish,” Jake said.

  “Exactly. But this doesn’t seem to apply to Dr. Wolfe.”

  “Or my dad,” Jake added. As far as he knew, Doc hadn’t finished writing up his elephant research from a few years earlier.

  “You’ve got that right,” Flanna agreed. “He’d much rather be in the field making discoveries than in front of a computer screen writing about them.”

  “Do you think there are cryptids out there?”

  “There are certainly a lot of undiscovered animals. Scientists find hundreds of new species every year. Most of them are insects of course, but there are always a handful of mammals among the newbies. But not mega-vertebrates, which are Dr. Wolfe’s area of interest. The world has been mapped by satellite, but it hasn’t been fully explored. Your dad and Laurel are headed to one of those unexplored areas right now.”

  * * *

  Laurel and Doc were at a complete standstill. They had been hacking their way west with machetes all day, making pretty good progress until they’d run into a river that wasn’t on their map or GPS.

  Doc rechecked his GPS for the sixth time, shaking his head. “This river isn’t supposed to be here.”

  “And yet here it is,” Laurel said. She looked up at the canopy. For as far as she could see, the tree branches on both shores touched in the middle of the river. “What are the chances of this river being completely covered for its entire course?” she asked.

  “I would have said completely zero until we stumbled into this obstacle,” Doc answered. “I’ve searched a two-hundred-mile radius on the map and GPS, and this river doesn’t show up anywhere. It’s deep and has a significant flow. It has to dump into the Amazon, but I don’t see where.”

  “Maybe it goes underground,” Laurel said.

  “Maybe,” Doc said. “But I’m beginning to think I misinterpreted his map. It’s hard to believe he would forget that we had to cross a major river. It must be fifty yards across here.”

  The “he” Doc was referring to was the indigenous man who had approached their camp in the middle of the night a few days earlier. Using sign language, the man had suggested that he’d seen Sylvia and Timothy O’Hara. He had drawn a crude map in the dirt near the fire before disappearing back into the dark forest.

  “I should have just followed him into the forest,” Doc said.

  “Why didn’t you?” Laurel asked.

  “I was exhausted. I’d been out doing a survey for nearly two weeks. If I hadn’t returned to the jaguar preserve first, Flanna would have sent the Brazilian army out after me. And then there was the map. Why would he have drawn it for me if he wanted me to go with him right then? I might have misunderstood, but it seemed pretty clear at the time that he didn’t want me to follow him.”

  Doc pulled out the map he had transcribed to paper and showed it to her. “Up to this point, all the landmarks have been spot on. There’s supposed to be a swampy area due south, which according to this map would be on the other side of the river. Can you swim?”

  “Like a dolphin.”

  “Well, I swim like a stone. If we crossed here, my bloated corpse would end up in the Atlantic. I think we should head upriver and find a narrower place to cross.” Doc unsheathed his machete and started hacking his way upriver.

  Laurel followed at a distance so she didn’t get hit with the blade or the debris. Doc was an enthusiastic bushwhacker, but he needed to pace himself. It was late afternoon, the temperature was in the upper nineties, and the humidity was close to a hundred percent. Doc was strong, but Laurel gave him about forty-five minutes before he collapsed. He lasted an hour and ten minutes, or two and a half miles. When he finally stopped, he was drenched in sweat and out of breath, as if he’d been swimming in the river against the current.

  “Hot,” he wheezed.

  She handed him a water bottle. He drank the entire bottle without taking it away from his lips. She gave him a second. He finished half of it, then walked over to the river and put his head underwater for about twenty seconds. He shook the water out of his hair and said, “I’m good to go.”

  “If you keep going like that, you’re not going to get anywhere.” Laurel held her hand out. “Mind if I give it a shot? We won’t get there as fast, but at least we’ll both get there.”

  “Wherever we’re going,” Doc said, handing her the machete. Before she started, she took a sharpening steel out of her pack.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Doc said.

  Laurel Lee quickly swept the steel back and forth a dozen times across the nicked blade. Then she handed back the machete, along with the steel. “Keep the machete sheathed. I’ll use mine until it goes dull, then I’ll switch with you. Have you ever used a steel?”

  “Not while I’m walking.”

  Laurel smiled. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” She started walking and swinging her machete. “For me, the trick to doing this all day long is to use my voice,” she said. “If I can talk without getting breathless, I know I’m moving at the proper pace….”

  She kept this banter up as she hacked her way through the dense cover growing along the river, switching machetes with Doc when needed. After a couple of hours, Laurel stopped to get a drink of water and switch machetes again.

  “Want me to take over?” Doc asked.

  “You can if you want, but I’m fine.”

  Doc looked across the river. “Not much change.” He looked at his watch. “It’ll be dark soon. I’ll take over until we find a place to set up camp.”

  An hour later he came to a stop. “Listen,” he said, out of breath, sweating.

  Laurel closed her eyes and listened. “Waterfall?”

  “Either that or rapids.” He took the fresh machete and redoubled his efforts. Forty-five minutes later, they broke out of the tangle onto a football-stadium-sized pool of fast water fed by a sixty-foot waterfall.

  Doc stuck the machete into the soft sand along the shore and pulled out his GPS. “This pool isn’t here,” he said.

  Laurel understood GPS technology, and at times had actually used it, but she didn’t have a lot of faith in it, and this was a good example of why. She walked down to the edge of the pool and peered through the mist to get a closer look at the falls. She could see how the satellite might have missed it. The tree branches above the falls were touching in the middle of the stream.

  Doc joined her. “It’s stunning, isn’t it? If I could find a navigable way to the Amazon, I think I’d move our base camp here.” He looked up at the falls. “We won’t have time to get to the top before dark.’’

  “We could do some island hopping to get across,” Laurel suggested.

  �
�The water’s pretty fast in between. We’d have to rope across so we don’t get washed away. But is that the right move? Did our friend cross here? And if he did, how did he manage it without ropes?”

  “Vine ropes?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Let’s look around.”

  They didn’t find any vine ropes, but they did find footprints in the sand leading to the waterfall.

  “They’re fresh,” Doc said.

  Laurel squatted down for a closer look. “Bare feet,” she said. “Splayed toes. Typical indigenous print. I’d say there are at least three people.”

  The prints ended at the base of a pile of giant moss-covered boulders running down the right side of the waterfall.

  “You game?” Laurel asked.

  Doc looked up at the sky through a small opening in the canopy. “We’ll have to hurry before we lose our light.”

  It took them more than an hour to clamber over the slippery rocks, which came to an abrupt end about halfway up the waterfall. A sheer wall towered above them. This close to it, they couldn’t see the top in the waning light.

  “We could climb it,” Doc said. “But not without proper gear.”

  “Do you think our barefoot friends climbed the wall?”

  Doc shook his head. “A monkey couldn’t climb that wall without climbing gear.” He got out his headlamp and slipped it over his forehead. “We’ll rope down, make camp, and take another look at the wall in the morning. I just need to find a place to anchor the … Wait a second …” Doc squatted down and shined his headlamp on the ground.

  The footprints had reappeared, then disappeared into a crevice in the rock wall. Doc shined his light into the narrow opening. “Tight squeeze, but it looks deep. You up for some spelunking?”

  The opening had been created by the separation of two massive rocks. Laurel wriggled into the crevice sideways. Doc followed, but it was a much tighter squeeze for him. The fissure led to a good-sized cave behind the roaring waterfall. The sandy ground before them was covered with footprints. In the center of the cave were the remains of a campfire.

  Laurel felt the ashes. “Warm.”

  They followed the prints to the far side of the cave, where they found another fissure, shorter than the first, but wider.

  “Great place to spend the night away from biting insects and venomous snakes,” Laurel said.

  “Good point,” Doc said. “But I think we should keep moving. They can’t be that far ahead.”

  They crossed the river that wasn’t there.

  * * *

  “Almost done,” Flanna said.

  Jake was lying on a camp cot in one of the huts. His face was covered with a surgical drape to keep the gash sterile, which was ridiculous because Flanna had numbed the area around the gash with a concoction she had put together from rain forest plants. Whatever the numbing agent was, it wasn’t working. It felt like she was using a tent spike to stitch the wound.

  Flanna removed the surgical drape with a dramatic flourish and gave him a smile. “You are back to your handsome self.”

  “Is my forehead on fire?”

  Flanna blew on it. “Sorry about that. It’s out now.”

  “Ha.”

  Flanna handed him a mirror. Jake had looked at the gash just before lying down and had thought he’d have to wear his hair like Harry Potter to cover up the jagged wound. Now there was nothing more than a thin red line that would probably disappear in a couple of weeks.

  “Where are the stitches?”

  Flanna laughed and held up a small tube. “I’m not much of a seamstress so I used surgical glue. Better known as superglue, but this is the sterile variety. I’m going to put a bandage on to protect it, but you’ll need to change it several times a day because of the humidity. I’d take it off while you’re sleeping or just sitting around to let the wound air out.”

  As she applied the bandage, they heard a jet roar overhead.

  “Wolfe’s supplies,” Flanna said.

  Jake looked past her through the hut’s open doorway. Ana Mika, Travis Wolfe’s journalist friend, and Buck Johnson, one of the biologists at the preserve, were standing in the center of the small clearing staring up at the darkening sky. Raul stepped out of the forest and joined them. They hadn’t seen him since they’d returned to camp.

  “What’s Wolfe dropping in?” Jake asked. “We have enough supplies to last us for months.”

  “Ana said he was dropping in a cage, which Wolfe wants us to assemble before he gets here tomorrow.”

  “A cage for what?”

  “She said Wolfe was bringing in a couple of dinosaurs.”

  Jake laughed. “Ana’s a little strange.”

  “You’ve got that right. Although I do like her, in spite of her odd sense of humor.”

  Jake and Flanna joined the others in the clearing in time to see the second supply chute deploy. Ana was looking down at the smartphone thing she called a Gizmo. When she and Laurel had arrived at camp the night before, they’d asked all of them to put on tracking tags. Buck had been reluctant to comply, but they’d talked him into it by pointing out that if Sylvia and Timothy O’Hara had been wearing them, they would have been found within minutes of the helicopter crash that had resulted in their disappearance.

  “I take it that the supply canisters have tracking tags,” Jake said.

  Ana nodded. “I have locations on both of them. The farthest is about a quarter mile away.” She pointed. “The second is a hundred yards east.”

  “Hung up in the canopy no doubt,” Flanna said.

  “No doubt,” Ana agreed. “We’ll have to cut them down and haul them back.”

  Flanna looked up at the sky through the small clearing. “If we hurry, we should be able to get them cut them down and hauled back to camp before it gets dark.”

  Jake looked at Ana. “A dinosaur cage, huh?”

  “That’s right,” Ana answered.

  Jake laughed and followed Flanna into the woods.

  Marty was out of his seat, leaning across Grace and looking out the tiny window at the city lights of Manaus, Brazil. “Smog,” he said.

  “Smoke,” Grace corrected.

  “Same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  Marty was glad she was bickering with him. He’d missed that.

  They were on their final approach to the Eduardo Gomes International Airport.

  “Manaus is a lot bigger than I thought,” he said.

  “Two million people,” Grace said. “The city was built on rubber.”

  “Huh?”

  “Rubber for things like tires. The rain forest used to be the only place on earth where rubber trees grow. The rubber barons made millions and millions of dollars. They were so rich they sent their laundry to Europe to be washed, then had it shipped back to them.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  Grace shook her head.

  “I have to admit, your annoying factoids are sometimes interesting,” Marty said. “So this is where rubber comes from.”

  Grace shook her head again. “Not anymore. A Brit by the name of Henry Wickham smuggled rubber tree seeds out of Brazil in 1876. The British set up rubber plantations in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Africa that eventually put the Manaus rubber barons out of business.”

  “No more dirty underwear to Europe,” Marty said.

  “Exactly. Manaus fell on hard times, but it managed to survive by knocking down the rain forest for timber, harvesting Brazil nuts, making soap, refining oil, and manufacturing cell phones.”

  “Buckle up,” Phil announced over the intercom.

  Marty sat back down, craning his neck to peer out the window. “How about switching seats?”

  “Forget it,” Grace said, buckling her belt.

  Begrudgingly, Marty buckled up, too.

  “Now that I have you trapped,” Grace said, “I’ve been meaning to ask about my mom’s trunk.”

  Back at Lake Télé in the Congo a few months earlier, Marty an
d Grace had found Rose Wolfe’s trunk in the Skyhouse, Rose and Travis’s former home there. Grace hadn’t had the courage to open the trunk herself, so she’d asked Marty to go through it for her, hoping there was something in it that would shed light on Rose’s relationship with her father, Noah Blackwood. As Rose was dying, she’d made Wolfe promise to keep Grace away from Blackwood, and Grace wanted to know why.

  “I didn’t find anything useful,” Marty said. “There were photos of Wolfe and your mom, pressed plants, daily logs of their search for Mokélé-mbembé, plans for the Skyhouse, photographs of tracks and animal poop. Nothing about Noah Blackwood or your mom’s past. I’m not sure what you thought we’d find. It’s obvious that your mom wanted to keep you away from Blackwood because he’s a homicidal maniac.”

  “What about the Moleskines?” Grace asked. “There were dozens of them.”

  “You might find some of the journals interesting,” Marty said. “But I didn’t. They were filled with poems, observations about Lake Télé, sketches of animals, and stuff about you when you were a baby.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “I don’t know,” Marty said. “She was afraid you were going to toddle off and get yourself killed. They had to tie you up like a dog on a long leash. Apparently, you had a constipation problem. I was kind of interested in that.”

  “Be serious!” Grace scolded.

  “I am being serious. WTMI. There was a bunch of mushy stuff about Wolfe and her. It’s no wonder she didn’t want him to get his hands on the Moleskines. She was really over the top in the romance department. I had to skim most of it.” He leaned over, picked up his pack, and opened the flap. “I didn’t have time to read these two, so I brought them along in case we bumped into each other.”

  He pulled them out. They didn’t look like Moleskines. They looked like small dictionaries. They were swollen to three times their normal thickness. Grace took one and almost gagged.

  “What happened to them?”

  “They got a little wet.”

  “They stink!”

  “I fell into a moat!” Marty complained. “I could have broken my back. Lucky I had the pack on to cushion my fall.”

  “That doesn’t explain the smell.”

  Marty sniffed the second Moleskine and his eyes started to water. “Rhino pee,” he said.