Free Tribesmen by Adam Cesare

Cynthia caught a quick whiff of cordite and lawn clippings.
    “That was warning shot,” Tito yelled out to her. “Come back or the next one is going to be in you.”
    She hesitated for a moment before crouching deeper into the cover of the grass and diving into the jungle at the other side. In the distance, she could hear curse words rendered in a myriad of languages. She ran deeper into the jungle.
    Then Tito said the words she was most afraid of:
    “Avanti! Go get after her!”
    There were footfalls and whooping in the distance. She didn’t know which direction she was running, her course altered by both her own frenzy and the twisting impediments of the jungle that she had to hop over and crawl under.
    The whooping morphed into a familiar laughter. Umberto, probably once again brandishing the machete.
    She had to hide or she could end up running in circles, or into the open terrain of the beach or airstrip. She would never be able to escape Umberto in a straight footrace. Even injured and half-blind, his stride was twice as long as hers.
    Some kind of animal leapt between the branches above her head and caused her to look up. Even in the daylight, the tall treetops were an impenetrable tangle of overlapping leaves, vines and moss. Up was her only option.
    Stifling a grunt of exertion, Cynthia shoved her hand into the nearest knot, praying there was not a snake or a bat inside. She swung her arm up to the lowest branch that looked like it would hold her weight and pulled with all her might.
    There were very few trees to climb back in Queens, but this made climbing the few trees there were a point of pride for all of the neighborhood kids. Out of all of them: Cynthia had been the best. Even though she was one of the smallest children, she compensated by being both quick and fearless. Having mixed-race parents probably helped, too: it gave little Cynthia something to prove to the all-white and all-black kids.
    So now she scrambled to the top of the tree, just as she had done when she was a child. She broke through the canopy and was temporarily blinded by the blazing late-morning sun. As she looked out over the jungle, Cynthia was glad that she made the climb. If she’d run a few hundred yards further, she would have been on the beach.
    The hooting resumed in the jungle below. Umberto was closer to her now, but from the sound of it he was unaccompanied. Denny was probably through reloading the camera by now, with Tito probably still holding Jacque at gunpoint. At least there had been no more gunshots, she thought. That probably meant that Jacque was still alive. Unless Umberto chopped him up into tiny pieces . She hated herself for the thought.
    She would not break down. She would not stop hoping or fighting.
    Wrapping her hand around the base of a large branch, she used one foot to break it off. A club to defend herself. The snap was muffled, but still loud enough that it was possible Umberto may have heard it below.
    She tried to swing the branch, keeping one arm around the tree for support. It wasn’t going to beat a machete, that was for sure, but it was better than nothing. It was smaller than a Louisville Slugger, but so jagged and pointed at the broken end that she contemplated for a moment whether it wouldn’t make a better spear than a club.
    The footsteps were close now. How had Umberto been able to track her path so closely? She felt herself go faint. Maybe he could smell her. Worse, maybe she had left some kind of trail for him to follow as she blundered through the foliage of the forest floor.
    Umberto had changed somehow. Maybe he’d tapped into something beyond his normal neuralgic capacity. Maybe whatever had made him crazy had upped his competency level. She held her breath as she listened to his approach. She wondered whether the leaves of her hiding-tree would be enough to conceal her, or whether her body would cast a big obvious shadow onto the pathway below.
    She gripped her makeshift bat as