Page 29

He didn’t have the navigation skills of Carly or Scott, and he no longer had the knife to help quicken his progress; his best hope was to work his way along the path of the sun in the same direction – south, he was sure that was where the lodge had been in relation to the rainforest – and pray for the best.

Shit . Perhaps he should have stayed, confessed to everything, tried to explain himself.

No, it was too late for that. They’d never have believed me. They’ve all already turned against me.

Worse still was that the rainforest was beginning to play games with him; it was playing tricks on his brain. Every tree that he passed, every rock his feet stumbled over; it was like they were calling out to him, whispering his name, mocking him.

And now the vines and branches he was shoving through seemed to stick to every part of his body, to move after him, clinging onto his shoulders, his arms – as if the rainforest was coming alive now, and it was tormenting him.

It was talking to him; telling him it knew his secrets.

Sprawling tendrils wrapped around his wrists; every time he broke free of one, he felt another take its place.

It was like the jungle could see into the core of him – and Ben was afraid this place would find him sorely lacking.

You shouldn’t have come here, Ben.

You’re ours now.

You will never leave here.

Nothing looked familiar, and yet everything did. He couldn’t tell whether he’d seen this exact fallen trunk, this very same patch of clearing, this one goddamn branch, for the hundredth time – or whether he’d never seen them before in his life. Everything looked exactly, dizzyingly, the same .

Face it. You’re totally fucking lost.

He was an idiot; he had fucked up on so many levels. Setting aside the way he’d run off from the rest of the group – leaving behind the only person with a map – it was a mistake to even have come here in the first place.

What had he been thinking, honestly? Had he really needed to see Hannah, to talk to her, to get his damn closure that much?

Because of Hannah, his life had been half in ruins when he got on that plane at Austin.

But in coming here, all he’d succeeded in doing was destroying it even more – or possibly, he thought, with a lurch to his guts – finishing it, ending up as dead as Hannah on the jungle floor, dehydrated and exhausted and consumed by the creatures of the forest.

He closed his eyes as an image of her body flashed in front of them, felt his body shudder despite the relentless humidity.

He wished he hadn’t looked so closely at her face – her empty expression, her slack, gaping mouth, her flesh already being devoured by the jungle’s creatures.

She had been decaying, rotting, wasting away.

And the thing he couldn’t stop thinking about was how – in life, like the very last time he’d seen her – she was the most vibrant, animated, the most alive person he’d ever known.

It was nearly a year ago that he’d first met her.

He’d just started back on the programme, enforced for the second time by his manager after colleagues had commented on Ben’s agitated, hyped-up demeanour – he’d only been in rehab for two days.

He remembered that, because he’d been counting them down, Sunday, Monday, desperate to tick each date off of his calendar so he could get back to his life – and his Adderall, of course.

People didn’t get it, but ADHD meds, for someone without ADHD, well – it affected him like speed.

Except, these drugs were legal . Easy to get hold of without a prescription, if you knew the right people.

And Ben did – if there was one thing that growing up in a white trash trailer park just outside of Austin was good for, it was knowing the right people .

He’d been smarter than most of the guys he grew up with, though – their drug of choice was almost always meth, and half of them were in jail now or, at the very least, still living in the same trailers they grew up in.

Not like Ben, with his smart condo and his white-collar job and his crisp shirts.

He had made it – well, almost made it, he corrected himself, with the familiar surge of anger in his chest.

He had remembered that day, because it was the day Hannah arrived, and he’d never be able to forget how he’d felt when he met her.

As much as he might want to, especially now.

There’d been a sort of quiet buzz about the place that morning; whispers of a new arrival, a celebrity – some kind of influencer .

Ben had scoffed at the rumours – famous people in rehab was hardly a revelation, they’d been in and out of the place pretty much non-stop since he’d got there.

The last time he’d been in, he’d been in group therapy with an A-list actress who was known as much for her wholesome, healthy lifestyle as her on-screen performances.

She’d finally been forced to clean herself up when her partner found her passed out in a pool of blood, after she’d run out of veins in her arm and injected a needle into an artery on her thigh instead.

It no longer surprised him how good people were at hiding their true selves – in fact, not much shocked him at all.

So, when he met Hannah – when she took her seat across from him in the daily ten o’clock Narcotics Anonymous meeting – the feeling was unfamiliar.

He was surprised by her – by how different she was from what he’d expected.

But more than that: he was spellbound.

He’d never heard of her before – online spiritual communities weren’t exactly his thing – but immediately he wanted to know everything about her.

He wanted to be entrusted with her secrets.

It was powerful, this desire to know her – possess her, almost. She was gorgeous in that hippy, sun-kissed way, all lithe and supple, showing off gleaming bronzed legs as she sat tucked into the chair opposite him in her tight-fitting shorts.

His attraction to her was about so much more than the way she looked, though. There was an ease about her, a charm. She made everyone feel like they were special; like they were loved. Like she saw them.

He remembered the first thing she’d said to him, after the meeting was over. She came straight up to him, grabbed him by the hands and stared deep into his eyes, the blue of her irises dazzling him.

‘It was so good to hear you, Ben,’ she’d said softly, her gaze moving between his eyes and his mouth.

‘I felt every word of what you shared – I felt it in here .’ She’d taken his hands, then, and placed both of them close to her heart, above her left breast. And the heat that had spread throughout his chest, flooded his limbs and flushed his cheeks and yes, turned him on, got him hard and made him ache for her – it was stronger than any high he’d ever known.

Ben was snagged from his memories by a whirring, chopping sound – something motorized, something at odds with the relentless screams of the jungle’s creatures.

It took him a moment to locate the source – there was nothing in front of him or behind him. It was only when he looked up at the sky that he saw it. And when he did, his heart slammed against his ribs and battered at his chest like an animal in a cage.

Fuck yeah. It’s a chopper. The staff back at Hannah’s place must have sent out a search party for them. Thank God.

He needed to get its attention. ‘Hey there!’ he screamed, waving his arms frantically, jumping up and down as he did. ‘I’m down here! Help – HELP ME!’

The helicopter – a small one, probably only a few seats – was circling overhead. It was looking for something.

Has it come to rescue us?

He ran towards where it was hovering above, stumbling blindly through the thick vines, tripping once, twice, landing on his face on the wet ground.

He hauled himself up again, wiped the mulch from his eyes, spat wet leaves from his mouth, started running again, looking up as he went, feet pounding the sodden earth as fast as he could go.

No, no, no. The chopper, which had been looping up there so close to him a moment ago, was moving away. Whoever was flying it hadn’t seen him.

Why can’t they see me?

He let out a roar of rage and frustration. Of course they couldn’t see him – he could barely see himself in the near dark of the forest’s canopy. It would be impossible to make out anyone or anything from way up there, except, maybe, a fire or an area of flattened trees...

He paused, pondered for a moment. Were either of those things worth a try, in case it came back, or another one passed overhead?

Could he try to start a fire – or fell some trees, somehow, to make himself more visible?

No, no, don’t be so freaking dumb. He had no matches, no lighter – quitting smoking recently was another bad choice to add to the list, he thought wryly – and certainly nothing to chop down a giant tree with.

Besides, setting a fire in a rainforest was about as sure a way to cause his own death as getting stuck here for ever.

What do I have, then? Was there anything in his possession that could help him?

Ben stopped pushing through the trees, stopping at a small gap in the foliage, where he crouched to the ground and started pulling things out of his rucksack.

He was poorly equipped for this trip – practically, emotionally; in every way, let’s face it – but perhaps he’d missed something?

His hands grabbed hold of whatever they could find: a magazine, some lip balm, his empty water bottle.

They struck something slim, cylindrical and smooth.

My vape.

Ben plucked the e-cigarette out of his bag, lifted the tip to his lips, inhaled. Nothing came out; instead, the little blue light at the other end flashed at him: no charge left. Damn – now that he’d thought of the idea, he could really do with the hit of nicotine at the back of his throat.

Hang on a minute. This might be something he’d actually prepared for.

Ben turned back to his bag, sifted through the inside, this time with purpose.

He was looking for something: his portable charger – the battery pack worked with his phone, his tablet, his vape – pretty much anything, as long as he had the right cable.

And he knew he did, because he’d packed a small pouch full of them, one of the perks of working for a tech company – whipping from meeting to meeting, briefcase in one hand and a Starbucks in the other, needing a fully charged phone wherever he went.

Digging the right cable out of the zip-up pouch, he plugged his vape into the charger and perched on a tree trunk – sweeping it, first, for snakes and spiders – and waited for its light to turn green. It wouldn’t take long.

As he waited, he carried on turning over his dwindling options in his mind.

What else, what else? There had to be something else he could make use of.

A way out of this mess. Staring at the charger in his hand, a flash of something shot through his mind, but it was fast, too fast – it had gone as quick as it came.

What was that; what was it? Something to do with the charger. How it worked on anything. How he had a cable for pretty much any kind of tech – any tablets, any phones...

‘Oh my God,’ he said aloud, as the realization hit him.

The satellite phone. He’d been the last one to try to turn it on, hadn’t he? They’d tried again only a couple of hours ago – and then he’d shoved it back in his bag.

That meant it was still in there now. He dug inside the bag again, one of the side pockets this time, rifled through it until his hands closed over the phone’s solid, hefty bulk.

Shit . A flash of guilt ran through him; he’d run away from the others and left them, still lost out here, without the only possible means of contact – and all along, he’d had a potential way of charging it up, making it work again.

But if I can get it working and call for help – then I can get everyone out of here.

He would be the one to come to their rescue; they’d understand then that he’d not meant any of them harm. That his reason for being here – for doing everything he’d done – was nothing to do with them.

Ben stood up, whipped the vape off the end of the charging cable, examined the satellite phone’s charging port, let out a whoop of delight. It needed a cable with a USB connector – and he had one of those.

He found the right connector, plugged one end into his charging pack, the other into the phone. There was a knot of excitement in his stomach, a growing sense of hope.

This was going to fix everything.

He shrugged back into his backpack, took a deep breath, checked out the direction of the sun and started walking, one eye on the phone as he went.

Now all he had to do was wait.