Her heart stopped. She couldn't see if it was her mother or the monkeys he was attacking, but there was so much blood. Far too much. With another vicious kick, she sent another monkey sprawling on the ground, giving her a glimpse of her mother's body. She squeezed the trigger over and over, emptying the magazine into Capa, running forward as she shot him, knowing it was already too late. She slapped the second magazine into place.
Simultaneously, Gary shot, his bullets entering the porter from the side, spinning him around. Uncaring that she was running into a blaze of gunfire, Riley rushed forward, kicking and punching and even shooting the monkeys to get to her mother. Capa went down hard, the machete flying from his hand. Gary continued to shoot the primates surrounding her mother.
Riley pushed aside the brush and stopped abruptly, her mouth wide open, an agonized scream nearly shredding her vocal cords. She stared into the brush with absolute horror and shock filling her. She wasn't even certain what she was seeing, comprehension impossible. For one moment, it looked as if she'd stumbled on a massacre. Her mind tried to tell her that everything soaking into the ground and brush was from monkeys, but her body had gone into some kind of shock, almost numb, frozen and somewhere deep inside she knew, she just couldn't accept the truth. There was so much blood. She couldn't see flesh, only strips of cloth and hair. She forced her body to move forward, bile rising.
"No, Riley." Arms came around her, preventing her from moving. Hands covered hers, removing the Glock. "Come away from here. There's nothing you can do and there's no need to see this." Gary's voice was extremely gentle, coming from a long distance away.
The world faded in and out. Her stomach lurched and she tried to turn her head, to look away from the mangled body, but it was impossible. The blood was so dark. Curly hair lay on the ground, strands and tufts across fronds of fern, matted and muddy red. She saw fingers and part of a hand. Strips of clothing covered in blood. There wasn't a place in a five-foot radius that wasn't soaked red. It was impossible to tell what lay in that dark dense foliage.
She was aware of the sudden silence in the rain forest. No sound at all. No drone of insects. No gunfire. No shouting. The buzzing in her head was gone, to be replaced by her silent screams of protest. The world around her receded and then sharply focused, only to recede again.
"Riley," Gary spoke in her ear, his voice calm and firm. "You have to come with me now. Looking at her isn't going to help."
His hands urged her frozen body to move, to take steps, but she had no control, the shaking, the anger, the grief welling up like a volcano, from deep beneath the shivering ground, straight through her body, until her heart wanted to stop beating and her lungs refused to work.
She tried to tell Gary she couldn't breathe, couldn't draw in air. The scent of blood was too heavy, permeating the entire area. He simply lifted her off her feet and began to stride away. She caught a glimpse of Capa, the porter, lying in his own pool of blood, the machete a few inches from his hand. His body was intact, although all life had run out of him onto the ground.
A sob escaped and she gripped Gary's arm hard, her only reality in a world gone mad. Annabel murdered in such a savage way was unthinkable. Her mind just refused to process, but her body was wholly aware and reacting with shutting down. She wasn't certain she could have stood on her own if her life depended on it. Gary allowed her to sink into the carpet of vegetation, a short distance away from the site of her mother's murder.
She was aware of her traveling companions on some level, actors in a play. Their slow reactions. Turning heads. Mouths open with shock. The bodies of dead monkeys were scattered like litter across the ground, adding to the macabre scene. Everything around her blurred, and it took a moment to realize her eyes were swimming with tears.
The monkeys that hadn't suddenly taken to the trees appeared as confused as she felt, wandering in circles, as if they'd lost all direction. On the edge of her vision, she saw the three guides picking themselves off the ground, all disheveled and streaked with blood from the attacks of the woolly monkeys. The three brothers ignored the scattered primates and looked uneasily toward the rain forest and the two bodies that lay just out of their sight. They whispered to one another in low, hushed voices, before making up their minds to see what had transpired.
Jubal moved out into the open to face them, his clothes torn from the vicious, concentrated attack, showing evidence he'd tried to get back to Annabel and was stopped just as Riley had been. The three guides hesitated, but continued slowly forward, craning their necks, hands gripping weapons.
Dr. Henry Patton picked himself up gingerly from the ground and hurried over to help one of his students, Marty Shepherd, up. The man appeared to be in tears, almost hysterical, slapping at Patton and fighting when Todd Dillon rushed over to aid him as well. Marty was pulled to his feet, but instantly sank back to the ground with the other two men bending solicitously over him.
Riley rocked herself back and forth, trying to take in that her mother had been murdered just feet from her. She looked down at the rich dirt, thick from hundreds-thousands-of years of vegetation, of death and rebirth. Above her head, the sky darkened subtly. She glanced up as she dropped her hands and buried them deep in the layers of black dirt. Clouds swirled ominously overhead, forming towers rising high. The wind stirred her hair, even there, under the stillness of the canopy, while the branches of the trees emerging from the canopy whipped back and forth in a frenzy of activity.
She took a breath and let it out. A long keening moan escaped from her throat. At the sound, the remaining monkeys took to the trees, the mourning notes following them through the rain forest. Instead of moving up the mountain, the troop of woolly monkeys moved away from their natural home high up in the cloud forest.
Don Weston and Mack Shelton stumbled back into sight. Both had run when the monkeys had descended. Neither appeared to have a scratch. They'd made it far enough away from the battle to evade the onslaught of the primates. They both appeared shaken.
"What the hell happened here?" Don demanded, surveying his scratched and bloody companions as well as the furry bodies on the ground. "I thought monkeys were the least of our worries."
Miguel turned to look at him over his shoulder. "Monkeys do not attack men."
"I got news for you, genius," Don responded with a shuddering snort. "They just did. Do they have rabies?" He actually stepped back away from the others and swept his arm across Mack's body to prevent him from getting any closer to the others.
Jubal sighed. "They don't have rabies, Don, but we have to disinfect every single scratch before anyone gets an infection. Marty, I need you and Todd to get busy doing that. Start with yourselves. The medical kits are in the packs. Once you make certain both of you have covered every scratch, use the antibiotics and then split up and help the others."
Riley heard him from a distance. She even knew what he was doing, taking charge, bolstering the two shaken students, giving them something active to do in order to help them recover. She couldn't move a muscle. There was no recovering. She felt numb, beyond comprehension. Her mind struggled to understand, and on some level she knew she was in shock, but she couldn't pull herself together.
She dug her fingers into the soil, the only thing real she could hold on to. Dragging two fistfuls out of the earth, she closed her fingers tight around the dirt and just let herself cry. Tears ran down her face, obscuring her vision, falling into the soil, but she could hear the others coming out of their shock, moving around, doing as Jubal instructed.
Jorge, Fernando and Hector, three of the four remaining porters, all cousins, approached Jubal hesitantly from the left side, careful to keep an even pace with the guides who were confronting Jubal straight on.
Ben Charger moved in behind them, deliberately making noise so they were very aware of his presence. Across from the porters, closing in on Jubal, was the fourth porter, Raul. Gary followed him at an easy pace, but, like Ben, making it known he was right behind the porter. He carried his weapon openly.
Miguel stopped in front of Jubal. "Who is hurt?"
"Not hurt, dead," Jubal corrected. "Your porter murdered Annabel. What's left of her is in those bushes over there." He nodded toward the dense foliage but didn't take his eyes from Miguel or step back.
Miguel's gaze followed the direction of Jubal's nod. He swallowed hard and took a step toward the darkened brush. "What about Capa? Where is he?"
"He's dead, too," Jubal answered, his voice grim, a warning inflection in his voice. "We were too late to stop him."
Silence once again descended, the news clearly shocking everyone. The men looked at one another. Miguel nodded and led the way to the bloody brush. His brothers followed him silently. The porters skirted around Jubal, who turned to face them all. Ben and Gary flanked them from either side, clearly not trusting what their reaction to the death of their cousin would be.