picture should be with the mouth open. The configuration of the teeth, the number of incisors, molars, and premolars in each quadrant would help her name the animal, or at least classify it.
But she withdrew her hand just inches before touching the mouth.
The epidemic at the logging camp.
Was the baggy facial skin a natural feature of this animal, or had it become disfigured by disease?
She’d heard of hemorrhagic fevers that made a victim’s flesh fall away from the bone, as though there were no connective tissue holding it there.
A medley of voices arose across the street, coming closer. It was too late to run off into the trees. Someone would spot her as she hobbled across the furrowed field.
Her remaining options were to hide or to try and explain herself to the driver, who obviously had some connection to the hunters, since he was carrying bushmeat. And it was a Sanderson truck, after all. Tall Guard’s machete loomed large in her memory.
There was only one place to hide.
Taking deep breaths, she unfurled a doubled-up section of the tarp in order to stretch some of it between her and the heap of slaughter.
She climbed back on the pile and covered up, then slowed her breathing and meditated until the stifling air under the plastic became a warm bath. The approaching voices and the forest sounds began to wash together in a gentle hum, and when the engine started, it harmonized with them.
She slept undisturbed until mid-afternoon, when the roar of many other motors and an infusion of blended exhausts announced the outskirts of the capital.
At a traffic light she disembarked, taking the blue tarp with her, dragging a few loose animal limbs off the truck bed. She wrapped the plastic around herself and, after promising an extra fifty euro to the driver of a nearby taxi, headed off to Avenue 9, the haven for backpackers visiting Prospérité.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
While Amy slept in her bloody berth on the logging truck, Hugh Sanderson ’s third eye told him he was rising through cumulus clouds. The sky above and below him vibrated in scotch-tweed patterns of turquoise and blood-orange. Scattered points within the matrix erupted into fractal blooms that snaked together and roared his ribcage into being. He felt his limbs telescope out, extend into the corners of infinity, then coil back and wrap around him to form a cocoon. He beheld a thousand physical forms into which he might metamorphose.
His other senses informed him with equal authority that he was lying in a ditch full of sluggishly flowing suds. The ditch lay between the forest’s edge and a line of parked logging trucks. Women were washing clothes at a raised plastic cistern twenty yards away, and the runoff had carved a channel straight to where he lay.
H e pulled himself out of the slop, shed his filthy clothes, and marched straight toward the crowd of women. They wordlessly made way and he rinsed himself off with the hose that lead down from the cistern. The enormity of what had just happened to him made embarrassment meaningless.
Naked and dripping, he crossed the line of trucks and headed for the foreman’s trailer. The sun and the distant sound of the concession’s few remaining chainsaws teamed up to inflict great physical pain upon him, but even this did not lower his spirits.
When he found the foreman, Sanderson demanded clothes and announced that he would presently be heading back into the forest. He had no idea why he should want to do this, but felt absolutely certain that he must.
* * *
Marcel was relieved to see the boss alive after desperate hours of searching. Soon Sanderson’s energy would give out and he could be put to bed. All Marcel needed to do now was keep him under control until then. He followed Sanderson up and down the trailer’s narrow interior, reaching for his elbow to lead him back to a seat, but Sanderson kept pulling away.
“Sir, please...the sick people who go into the forest. Those are