David A. Poulsen's Young Adult Fiction 3-Book Bundle. David A. Poulsen
number of animals because of the water right close by. Although water didn’t seem to be something that was in real short supply in the jungle. We’d walked through lots of little puddles and pools.
The old man hadn’t been BS-ing. There actually was a path in this part of the jungle. It wasn’t very wide, and sometimes you had to duck your head, but it was a path.
Mr. Vinh caught up to us and went right by without saying anything. Took the lead again. I never found out what happened with him and the rice paddy lady after the old man and I got our butts out of there.
3
I’d had this piece of jungle figured right. It didn’t go for long, and pretty soon we were at the base of a hill. I’d lost track during our trek, but I figured this was the hill the old man had pointed to. Hill 453.
There were some trees and brush on the lower part of the hill, but it wasn’t nearly as dense as in the jungle. The old man spread one of the slickers on the ground and motioned for me to sit down. He pulled out the sandwiches — I’d almost forgotten about them — and passed them around. Mine was jam.
“Sorry, there’s no meat. I figured it would go bad in this heat, and we’d all get sick if we ate them.”
“Jam’s fine,” I said.
Mr. Vinh didn’t say anything, but he pretty much attacked his sandwich. And for the next twenty minutes we had this weird picnic, sitting on a slicker at the bottom of Hill 453. We polished off one entire canteen. All of us were thirsty.
After we finished eating, the old man dug out the briefcase again. This time he didn’t bother with the map. He mostly seemed interested in the photographs. He’d look at a photo, then at the hill, craning his head around like he was trying to get some sort of bearings. Mr. Vinh was mostly ignoring him. Kind of nodding off.
I watched, but I didn’t say anything.
“Okay, let’s go.” The old man stood up. He didn’t pick up the duffel bag this time. Just moved it over beside Mr. Vinh, who hadn’t moved a muscle except to unfasten the machete from his belt and hand it to the old man. It was obvious the old man and I were on our own from here on.
I wasn’t sure I liked that. Mr. Vinh knew his way around, that was clear. The old man hadn’t been here for forty years, couldn’t possibly remember. I was hoping he wouldn’t get us lost or up to our chins in quicksand or something. Is there quicksand in the jungle? Probably — right next to the unexploded ordnance.
He took the briefcase, and I grabbed the backpack and one canteen.
“Let’s go,” he said again.
We started across the lower face of the hill going up a bit of an incline as we walked. Okay, first of all, Hill 453 wasn’t really a hill. More like a mountain that hadn’t totally grown up.
I discovered this as the old man and I were working our way up the slope. It wasn’t too bad at first, not real steep and not tons of jungle growth. Neither of those lasted long. It got steep pretty fast, and at about the same time, it seemed like we were having to fight our way through major growth.
The old man stopped to catch his breath. Or maybe it was to let me catch my breath. “Triple canopy. That’s what you call jungle that’s got growth along the ground, at about head height and overhead as well. We’re in triple canopy here. Makes for hard going.”
Ya think?
A couple of times I lost sight of him but could still hear the swish-whack of the machete as he carved a path up the side of the hill.
It wasn’t long until I couldn’t see the sky at all. And a weird thing was happening. I was scared. Okay, maybe not scared but nervous. I still didn’t know what had happened here, but I had this strange feeling, like when you have the flu, and you’re hot, and then you’re cold. It just felt like this was a bad place.
I tried to stay behind the old man, but the truth is he could go up some places I couldn’t. Though the rain had stopped, the ground was muddy and slippery, and a couple of times I went down to my knees. There were some big palms to my right, and I figured I could use the leaves to pull myself up the slope.
I yelled. Loud. And jerked my hand off the first leaf. I was bleeding. The old man slid back down the hill to where I was and looked at my hand.
“You’re okay. It’ll bleed a bit, but it’s not poisonous or anything. I should have told you about those. Nipa palms. The leaves have sharp edges. But I guess you already figured that out.”
He pulled a not-very-clean piece of cloth out of a pocket and wrapped it around my hand. “This won’t stop the bleeding, but it should keep some of the mud out of the cut. The bleeding will stop on its own.”
He pointed to an area to our left. “It’s not quite as steep over there. We’ll go that way.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re doin’ good, Nate.”
For some reason I liked hearing him say that. I wasn’t at all sure I was doing good, but I wasn’t doing all that bad either. And I realized something. I hadn’t complained about anything, not really, for at least a couple of days. Ruining my image.
4
In the next half hour my guess was that we covered a hundred and fifty yards, maybe less. The only good part was that the old man was having as much trouble as I was. At least I didn’t look like a total jerk trying to get up that hill.
I’d pretty well forgotten about my hand, but the handkerchief had been a good idea. I lost count of the times I had my hands in the mud up to my wrists trying to get a little further up that slope.
I lost track of the old man again, this time for longer than the time before. Sometimes I could hear him, and I could see where he’d worked his way up the hill. I tried to follow as closely as I could his exact route. That whole unexploded shells thing had spooked me. I tried to look down too as I scrambled through the mud. But I wasn’t sure that I’d see anything even if it was there. It could be covered in mud. Or buried just far enough to be out of sight.
For most of this trip I’d been either bored or pissed off that I was there at all. That it was killing my well-planned summer. Now there was something else. There was danger here. An average of five people a day, the old man had said. And they probably weren’t scrambling through a battlefield on their hands and knees.
I called out a couple of times, but he didn’t answer. I wanted to stop. Every muscle was tired, and I was totally out of breath. Sweat was pouring out of me. And the old man wasn’t answering me.
Terrific.
I finally caught up, but only because he’d stopped. As I came up behind him, he was looking around. I couldn’t see that where we were looked any different from where we’d been twenty minutes earlier. And looking ahead, it didn’t look like the next twenty minutes would change much either.
But something was different. The old man was different. I flopped down on my side, propped myself on one elbow trying to catch my breath. I looked at him. He turned toward me, and what I saw scared me more than the idea of hidden exploding stuff.
His eyes were open wide, and he was making some kind of moaning noises. I was pretty sure he wasn’t seeing me even though I was five feet away at the most. I thought maybe he was having a heart attack or something. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. What I could do.
“Are you okay?”
He didn’t answer me. I tried to get up to where he was, but I kept slipping back. Finally I was able to get my feet against some rocks and push my way up beside him. Both of us were covered in mud.
He was on his belly now, his head barely off the ground, looking up the slope. I reached out and took his arm. He jumped and grabbed me by the shoulder. Hard. Scared the crap out of me. He was