Chapter 37 – Helping Hands
"Oh my god I'm never getting out of this jungle!" Kenzi had to shout to be heard over the roar of golf ball sized raindrops striking the leaves above.
"Don't be so dramatic." Bo swung her machete to try and clear a path. The knife slipped from her grip, nearly robbing Hale of a crucial piece of anatomy and lodging itself two inches deep in a tree.
"Hey, watch it Edward Scissorhands." Hale yanked the knife out and handed it back to the Succubus. "I'm not looking to get neutered on this trip, thanks."
"Seriously chicas, we've been hauling ass through this festering shit box for three years. Three years!" Kenzi screamed dramatically at the sky, getting a mouthful of rainwater for her trouble.
"It's been three days, knob." Bo watched as Kenzi struggled to free her foot from eight inch deep mud. Finally Dyson took pity and lifted her up by the armpits, her hiking boots making a loud squelch sound as they emerged from the muck.
The team was making terrible time.
"Yep, I'm going to die here." Kenzi slipped and slid as she tried and failed at walking on her own again. "I'm gonna get stuck in this shit, and starve to death, and no one will recognize my adorable sexy corpse because it'll be covered head to toe in JUNGLE GUNK!"
"That's what happens when you go trekking in the rainy season," Ciara said with a laugh. "Besides, some people pay thousands of dollars for mud treatments."
Hale scoffed. "Yeah, it's all good if you're lying on a table getting it slowly and sensuously rubbed on your back by a sexy Russian samodiva named Svetlana."
"And using mud that isn't filled with worms the size of snakes." Dyson picked an earthworm of his pant leg, and tossed it, quite accidentally, at Kenzi. She screamed and tried to dodge, but her feet were lodged in the mud. After some impressive arm windmills, she landed face down on the ground.
"Thskmgrwstdmlfffgh!" She screamed. Dyson, apologizing profusely, lifted her out of the quagmire.
"What was that little mama?" Hale grinned. "Couldn't hear you with all the gunk in your mouth."
Kenzi spat a chunk of mud onto the jungle floor. "I said: This. Is. The. Worst. Day. Of. My. Life." She kicked at the ground for emphasis.
Slipped.
And fell flat on her back.
Unfortunately for Lauren, she heard none of this. She was several hundred yards ahead, frantically searching for the path to the Okahange Ruins. There hadn't been much of a trail to begin with, and what little HAD been there was now completely waterlogged. And it was getting dark. If she didn't figure this out soon, they'd be forced to set up camp in the middle of nowhere, in a downpour. Heck with the tents, they'd need a raft.
"At least we won't have to worry about giant spiders," she said to herself, bending down so that her eyes were mere inches from the jungle floor. "Spiders wouldn't be stupid enough to come out in this storm." Thunder cracked overhead. "Nothing would be stupid enough to come out in this storm."
Bo scooped a handful of water from a bucket-sized leaf, and finished wiping off Kenzi's face. "This had better make my skin silky smooth," Kenzi huffed.
"Sorry for tossing a worm at you." Dyson stuck out his hand. "Apology accepted?"
"I only accept apologies in the form of piggy back rides." She scooped up a hunk of much and flung it at Dyson's face. It hit his nose with a satisfying thwack. "Retribution, and piggy back rides."
He wiped his face with the back of his hand. "Yeah, I guess I deserved that. Come on up, human."
"Yay!" She leaped onto his back with enough force to nearly knock the wind out of him. When he got his breath back, he looked at the sky.
"You guys realize this is nothing, right? Hale, do you remember the El Nino of 1533?"
"Aw man, don't remind me. I was a mercenary with Atahualpa in Peru that year. I still say the Inca would've kicked Pizarro's white ass if all their supply llamas hadn't got stuck in the mud. You wanna talk about embarrassing – the greatest empire in the Americas getting wiped out by some puny Spanish dude and his band of army rejects. All because of some freaky ass weather."
"Supply llamas?" Kenzi mouthed at Bo. Bo simply shrugged.
"I would have traded you in a heartbeat." Ciara sighed. "I was still in England that year. Henry the Eighth? Catharine of Aragon? Anne Boleyn? Draaaaaaamaaaaa."
Thunder cracked overhead, and the team instinctively ducked. Bo didn't think it was possible, but the rain seemed to be coming down harder now. She squinted through the deluge, searching for Lauren. It had been almost an hour since she'd seen her…or it could have been only a few minutes. The jungle was doing weird things to her perception of time. Or maybe it was just that a mere second away from Lauren felt like five endless years. And even after Lauren's sudden and unexplained evolution into a Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger, Bo didn't like the idea of her girlfriend being alone in this place.
Lauren threw her hands up in disgust. The path was gone, she couldn't see ten feet in front of her face, and between her clothes and her pack she seemed to have picked up fifty pounds of water weight. Her compass was waterlogged, and she couldn't see the sky through the trees to tell where the sun was in order to orient herself…not that she'd have been able to see it through the clouds anyway. All she knew is that it was nearly sunset, they had covered 13 miles, and the ruins were somewhere to the west. They HAD to be close.
As Lauren stared at the sky and hoped for a flash of inspiration, she saw a flash of lightning instead. It illuminated the canopy 400 feet above.
…400 feet above…
"That's it!" Lauren snapped her fingers. She tossed her backpack next to a tree trunk, and positioned herself under the lowest branch she could find. She stuck her arms in the air. There was at least twenty feet between the branch and her outstretched fingertips. "What I wouldn't give for a pair of Air Jordans right now." She squatted once, twice, three times to gain momentum. "Or a trampoline."
"In three, two, one…HURGHMF!" She leaped into the sky, arms flailing. Somehow she managed to wrap three fingertips around the tree, without slipping. And somehow she managed to use only those three fingertips to haul her entire 5'6" frame up and onto the branch. "HAHA! Superman, eat your heart out!" She shouted in triumph as she straddled the four-inch-thick tree limb, peering at the jungle floor below. She flexed her fingers and realized, with a wry grin, that she'd have to be much more careful with Bo from now on.
Lauren stood up, balancing carefully on the thin branch, searching for her next target. If she couldn't see where she was going from the ground then, well, maybe she could spot the ruins from the sky.
"I am sorry for the worm. And for the way I've treated you." Dyson hiked Kenzi up higher on his back. She was using residual mud from her sleeves to paint smiley faces on Dyson's cheeks. "I know I can be a grump sometimes, but I'm a decent guy."
"Grump? I believe the word you're searching for is dick bucket."
"Fine, I'm a dick bucket."
"Bucket o'dicks."
"Yeah, that too."
"Agent double oh dick bucket."
"I get the idea." Dyson winced as she traced his eyebrows with her muddy finger. "But I'm actually glad you're here."
Kenzi grinned. "Awww, Wolfenstein! Does that mean you appreciate my awesomely awesome contributions to the Doc Squad?"
"I don't know about that. But the entertainment value is priceless. I've never seen anyone who can pratfall like you."
Kenzi's grin morphed into a sneer. She said nothing, but slid both hands down her mud-covered shirt and ran them, slowly, through Dyson's thick hair.
"I know your anger comes from a place of love." Dyson joked.
After refueling both palms with ammo, she reared back and slapped his cheeks, as hard as she could. Mud dripped from his 'stache.
"Yep." He wiped mud from his eye. "That's what I call love."
Lauren heaved herself onto the top branch and poked her head above the leaves. After days of wandering through veritable canyons of vegetation, suddenly she had a 360 degree view over the treetops; the rainforest stretched for miles and miles in every direction. Somehow, she fought back the overwhelming urge to proclaim to every critter and creepy crawly in the Congo that she was, in fact, "The King of the Woooooooorllllld".
It took every ounce of self-control to keep from doing it. But a woman had to have some self-respect, even if she did have the special edition of Titanic on Blu Ray. And even if one of her formative adolescent experiences was watching…and rewatching…and rewatching a naked Kate Winslet on a couch.
Lauren shook her head to clear out that random thought, and looked to the roiling storm clouds overhead. She frowned. Meteorology wasn't her specialty, but she had done plenty of research on the Congo before her first trip. And although it wasn't uncommon for massive rainstorms to dump inches at a time, such severe thunder and lightning were extremely unusual in this part of the world.
As if on cue, a bolt of lightning struck a treetop several hundred feet to her left. And as it lit up the grey sky, she thought she saw a shadow, just at the corner of her eye. But when she spun around to face it, it was gone. She waited, not moving a muscle, and in less than a minute another bolt of lightning shot across the sky. This time she was SURE she saw something. When she closed her eyes, the negative afterimage was still visible in her overstimulated retinal photoreceptors.
It looked like a man wearing a bowler hat.
"Oh get it together Lewis," she admonished herself. She was open to all sorts of weirdness, but a bowler hatted dude on top of a tree in the middle of the jungle was a bridge too far. It was probably just a monkey or something. She rolled her eyes at herself, and lifted a pair of binoculars from around her neck, and pointed them in the direction she thought was west.
"The ruins have to be around here somewhere." She fiddled with the focus. It was hard to make anything out, or distinguish one tree from another tree. She panned left until, quite suddenly, there were no trees at all. Nothing but empty space…and a solitary stone tower struggling to emerge from an overgrowth of vines.
She suffered a mild cardiopulmonary arrhythmia.
Aka, her heart skipped a beat.
"Holy crap, we made it!" She pumped a fist, grinning ear to ear. Just wait until she got back down and told the rest of the team…they were only a quarter mile away! They could be there in less than ten minutes! She shuffled back toward the tree trunk, anxious to be off, and studied the branches between her and the ground, 400 feet below.
She scratched her head. "Now how the heck am I supposed to get down there?"
"Allow me to help you."
Lauren nearly jumped out of her skin as an unfamiliar voice hissed the words in her ear. She felt two small hands on her back and, before she even knew what was happening, she was plummeting 400 feet to the jungle floor.
"Lauren, where are you?" Bo muttered. She was really starting to worry now. "Lauren!" She cupped her hands and shouted. Nothing.
"I'm sure she's fine." Ciara patted Bo on the shoulder. "If I know Lauren, she likely became distracted cataloging some new species of Congolese fungus."
"Wow. Science. Fun." Kenzi rolled her eyes.
"That's why Lauren and me are so tight, ya know." Hale elbowed the human.
"Why's that?"
"Because I'm such a fun guy. Get it? Fun guy? Fungi?"
The team groaned in unison.
"Screw y'all, the Doc would have laughed her ass off at that joke." Hale waved an arm dismissively. Bo managed a small grin, but it was gone almost as soon as it appeared.
"Lauren!" She shouted again, to no avail.
Ciara decided that a distraction was in order. "Bo, did I ever tell you how Lauren and I met?"
Bo shook her head 'no', though she was barely listening.
"Well, it was four years ago. I was in town for the Toronto Film Festival. My boyfriend at the time was the star of this pretentious little indie movie – a terrible, terrible film about two depressed stock traders. The entire movie took place inside a men's public bathroom."
"Was it called Glory Hole?" Kenzi asked. "I'm pretty sure I've seen that one. Or was that 'Glory Hole II'…"
Ciara chose to ignore the human. "After the premiere, the Boy Toy and I went to an after party at a nightclub that belonged to a creepy little mesmer named Vex. It wasn't exactly my scene – a little S&M for my taste – but it was popular with the Fae VIPs at the time. And who doesn't like to crack the whip every now and then?"
Hale let out a loud gulp, which he sincerely hoped no one else heard.
"There we are, in the middle of a hot, sweaty, sexy dance club and who do I see standing at the edge of the crowd, clipboard and pen in hand, but the Ash's new human doctor, Lauren Lewis. I didn't know a thing about her, and I'm not the type to just sit back and wonder, so I sent the Boy Toy to the bar to get us some drinks and decided to introduce myself. She was concentrating so hard on that clipboard that I had to tap her on the shoulder four times before I got her attention. And when I asked her what she was doing, she told me she was working on a 'Sociological Observation of the Courtship Rituals of North American Fae'."
"I asked her what she'd learnt so far. She responded that Fae seemed to be more direct with their interests than humans."
"And what did you say?" Bo asked.
"Nothing. I just leaned over and gave her a long, hot kiss on the lips." Ciara grinned as Bo's jaw dropped. "And she blinked once or twice, cleared her throat, and all she said was 'Thank you for contributing to my study'." Ciara laughed out loud. "She had no interest in me whatsoever. But that wasn't the end of it. Boy Toy saw me snogging her and he choked on his martini olive. He couldn't breathe, and he passed out in the middle of the dance floor."
"Lauren had to fight through an army of stomping Barong before she could reach him. She discovered fairly quickly that normal CPR would be useless…Boy Toy was a Gunakadeit. A Sea Fae. So she rolls him over, takes her pen, shoves it into his gills and blows as hard as she can. He coughs, out pops the olive with so much force that it stuck to the ceiling where, I'm told, it remains in ossified form to this very day. I haven't talked to the Boy Toy since, but Lauren and I became fast, and regrettably platonic, friends."
Bo shook her head. "I'm sorry Ciara, you lost me at the part where you were making out with her. I didn't hear a darn thing after that."
"The important thing is that Lauren can take care of others and she can take care of herself. Just give her some time to figure out where we're going and…wait." Ciara kneeled down next to a tree. "Isn't this Lauren's backpack?"
Bo snatched the bag from Ciara, trying not to panic. "If this is Lauren's bag, then where's…"
THUMP. Bo felt the air rush past as something hit the ground not three feet behind her. She spun around. Her knees gave out from under her, her breath rushed from her body like she'd been punched in the stomach, and her eyes beheld the most terrible sight she could possibly imagine.
"LAUREN!"