Henderson couldn’t tell if he was asleep or awake. Since he’d stepped off the trail to take a shit in the jungle, everything had the gauzy quality of a dream. A bad dream. Neither of the pilots nor any of the flight attendants said anything to him to indicate that they thought he was acting funny, but then again, when you owned a Falcon 7X, you could expect a certain amount of discretion from your flight crew. At first, Henderson had felt guilty about spending more than $50 million to buy his own jet, plus another $27 million to customize it. It felt wasteful. But in the scheme of things, it just wasn’t that much money, and it was a lot easier to pay for it himself than to deal with the bullshit of doing it through the company. No matter that he’d founded the business, built it from the ground up to a market cap of more than $250 billion; once he’d gone public, he had to follow the rules. Not that he minded. Last year he’d been fourth on the list of wealthiest Americans, and with no wife, no kids, and no siblings, what the hell else was he going to do with his cash? Until recently he hadn’t given a shit about that sort of stuff, but he’d started the company when he was fifteen and had been going nonstop for more than thirty years. Now he wanted to spend some of his time and money not working. Until recently he’d just used one of the company’s jets, since all he did was business, but he figured if he was doing stuff for himself, one of the things he could do was buy his own plane. Frankly, though he’d been wildly successful for most of his adult life, he still thought it was cool that he could own one. He’d thoroughly enjoyed the process of customizing it, though he burned through five designers in the process, but the Falcon 7X was well worth the money he spent. The inside was gorgeous. At least, it was gorgeous when it wasn’t covered in spiders.
He was pretty sure it was a nightmare, but it was too close to what had happened in Peru for him to be sure. He’d spent the last morning in Peru on the toilet, but he’d been game for the hike through the jungle. You didn’t become the fourth-richest American without having the fortitude to fight through the squirts. But it was embarrassing. The guide, Miggie, had been cool about it, but for Henderson, having to keep stopping to shit in the greenery while the women and his bodyguard waited for him was kind of awkward. He wasn’t deluded. He wasn’t a bad-looking dude. A little heavy. A lot heavy. Okay, kind of fat, and obviously on the wrong side of forty, but if he’d been just a doctor or something, he’d have been able to have a perfectly decent-looking wife. With billions in the bank, however, he rated three super-hot models. That still didn’t make him feel any better about having to cope with diarrhea. He’d been trying to drink water and get some salt into his system, but it had been hard going with the heat and the elevation. He could have canceled the hike, could have done pretty much anything he liked and nobody would have said anything. The rules were different for people like him. Money, at least on the scale he had, changed things. But for Henderson, it didn’t change the fact that he didn’t like excuses. Didn’t like to hear excuses—“Own your mistakes and move on, or pack your shit and get out,” was one of the company’s mantras—and didn’t like to give them. But man, his stomach had been killing him.
He’d gone off the path for what must have been the fourth or fifth time, and he’d just finished wiping himself with some sort of foliage that he prayed fervently was nontoxic and was pulling up his pants when he heard the screaming. He took a dozen steps back toward the path, just close enough that he could see the guide being swallowed by a black tide. The three women clutched at one another and shrieked. His bodyguard turned to run but got tangled up in the women and fell to the ground with two of them. Henderson looked back to where the guide had been standing, but the man had disappeared. And then he saw the black wave wash over the body of the woman who was still standing. Tina. Her name was Tina.
There was screaming, but there was more than that. There was a rustling sound, a sort of clicking and flicking. It sounded both lush and creepy. The bodyguard lumbered to his feet, but there were patches of black over his back, his arms, on his head. Henderson couldn’t figure out what the patches were, but then he realized they were moving, splitting and swarming, re-forming on the bodyguard’s body no matter how much he swatted and brushed at himself. And then Henderson felt his stomach go liquid again, because from where he stood in the woods, even with the foliage fracturing his view, it looked as if the bodyguard’s face was melting, the skin sloughing off to show flesh and muscle and then bone. The man was still standing, screaming, thrashing at the air, at his head, at his body, but the blackness only grew more solid.
That had been enough for Henderson, and he turned and started to run. He had no idea where he was going, and with the thickness of the plants and the trees he couldn’t do anything other than crash blindly. He was sure he was moving at the speed of a slow walk, but however little speed he carried, he knew he needed to get out of there. At first, all he could hear was the sound of his breathing, the push and rattle of his hands and legs against branches and leaves, but then he heard the sound again, the clicking and flicking. If he thought he’d been moving hard before, he was desperate now. There was something sharp and then numbness on his ankle, a scrape on his arm that could have been a branch or could have been something worse. Henderson kept moving, swatting at his body, cursing and crying and barely able to stand. He tripped and rolled on the ground, knocking his elbow and waiting to be swallowed, but as he lay there, he realized that other than his ragged breath, the jungle was quiet.
He scratched at his arm, and then at the numbness on his ankle, his hand coming back with a smear of blood. Something tickled at the back of his neck and he swatted it, feeling something solid burst under his hand. He grabbed whatever it was and held it in front of his face.