Free Do-Gooder by j. leigh bailey Page B

moving it enough so one eye and part of his forehead were visible. One swollen eye and a patch of bruised forehead.
    “What did they do to you?”
    “After they knocked you out and I couldn’t give them the information they were looking for, they hit me too.”
    “I thought they were going to shoot you.” The admission escaped through my thick throat. The terror of that moment, even knowing it hadn’t happened, still made me want to throw up.
    “So did I.”
    “Why didn’t they?”
    “No idea.”
    “Did you ever figure out what they were looking for? Canisters? Canisters of what?”
    “I have no idea.” He sounded as disturbed by his lack of knowledge as I was. He closed his swollen eye and relaxed.
    “Henry?”
    “Yeah?”
    “How badly are you hurt?”
    He sighed, sending the curtain of hair fluttering again. “Just a bump on my head and the eye. Is it black yet?”
    “It’s still at that puffy reddish-purple stage, but it shows potential to be a damn good shiner.”
    “Nice.”
    “Shut up back there.”
    For the first time I realized if we were tied up in the back of the Range Rover—a moving Range Rover—it meant someone drove. Which meant there was nothing separating the front of the Range Rover from the cargo area. The backseats had been folded down to give Henry and me enough room to lay out, even if we had to lay diagonally in the space to keep from having to curl around each other to fit. I looked up to the front seats and saw two bald heads, one white, one black. The barrel of an assault rifle poked out above the seat back. The black man turned in his seat and glared at us. “Be quiet or I’ll gag you.” The freakiest thing about him—even freakier than the gun—was the complete absence of expression or emotion in both his face and his voice.
    Another lurch of the vehicle sent me rolling into Henry. Instead of rolling away from him, I stayed where I was, head resting on his shoulder. I should have moved, of course, but the contact, the connection, was the only thing keeping me from losing my mind completely. Henry looked at me through his swollen eye, the other still hidden from view, and rested his forehead against mine.
    Terror jolted and sizzled through my body, so sleep was out of the question. Despite that, we stayed silent, closed our eyes, and waited. What else was there to do?

Chapter 9
     
     
    I DIDN’T know how much time passed. It felt like hours but was probably a lot less. It wasn’t too early, though. The sun glowed red over the top of the rain forest when the Range Rover stopped. My expensive shoes squished in two inches of mud when I scrambled out of the vehicle’s cargo area. We were deep in the heart of the jungle. We could have been on the set for a movie adaptation of Heart of Darkness . Tall trees, weighed down with dark green leaves, created dense shadows on the forest floor. Bushes that looked like ferns on steroids spread their feathered arms, filling the space between trees. Moss and fungus draped from branches and vines and carpeted everything. It smelled of green and rot. I expected the foliage to swallow me and everyone else in the area.
    “We are certainly in one of the dark places of the earth,” I said. Henry looked a question at me. I shrugged. My lit teacher would have been impressed.
    Long shadows from towering trees covered the narrow paths surrounding a small block of buildings. Rotting piles of lumber and ancient, rusted cutting equipment littered the clearing. It looked like the place had been used for some kind of lumber processing once upon a time, but it had obviously been a while. The jungle had done its best to reclaim the area, and the big main building—the size of a grocery store—crumbled at the corners. Smaller buildings, barely huts, were positioned in a row behind the larger building. Looking around, it really seemed like the structures had been randomly dropped in the middle of a rain forest. No wonder the Range Rover had lurched