‘No, I won’t. Listen, it’s coming from just here, the other side of these branches – I’ll be back in a sec. Ben, give me the knife, so I can cut through the bush here.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Ben, under his breath but loud enough that Scott heard him. ‘I’m coming too, I’ll use the knife – hold on.’
Scott was torn: he didn’t want to lose track of the path – even if it wasn’t taking them back to the house, it was, at least, a travelled route. But, like Naya, he was curious about the source of the buzzing, and he didn’t want to somehow lose her and Ben if they wandered too far off. He made the call. ‘Mira, stay here with Carly – we’ll be right back,’ he said, gently walking her over to Carly. ‘Wait for me,’ he called, pushing into the trees.
‘Guys, hang on – this might not be the best idea!’ Carly’s voice was already disappearing behind them. ‘Can’t you just come back?’
As he shoved his way through the bushes, Scott thought Carly might be right: the growth here was thick and dense. He saw Ben ahead, slashing with the knife, trying to chop his way through the vines and branches in front of them – as sharp as it was, this would still be difficult work. ‘Guys, hold up,’ he said. ‘Let me go first – I can clear the way for us.’
‘Ah, yes, actually – if you don’t mind. It’s hard to push through some of this.’
Shoving his way past the two of them, taking the knife from Ben as he passed, Scott pressed forward, slashing at giant leaves and thick vines, twisting branches out of their way. With every step he took, he stopped to listen out for the buzzing noise, checking they were moving in the right direction. It was getting louder now, and the vultures were almost directly overhead – they must be close.
‘Ugh, do you smell that?’ said Naya from close to his shoulder.
Scott sniffed the air; and then it hit him too. Something acrid – pungent. Something rotting. He stopped in his tracks.‘OK, definitely a dead animal, then – it’s got to be more than just injured to give off that smell,’ said Scott. ‘Maybe we don’t actually need to see it, if it’s already—’
But as the words came out of his mouth, Scott realized it was too late. The buzzing was overwhelming now; there was no turning back. They’d happened upon whatever creature was producing the throng of insects, and the stink. He stumbled to a stop; Naya almost slammed into the back of him, would have done if he hadn’t thrust an arm behind him to stop her – to hold her back from what was lying on the ground in front of him. He looked down at his feet, took it in.
A combination of shock, terror and bile rose in Scott’s throat. And then a panic – an urgency –don’t let the others see.He turned around, blocked Ben and Naya’s path; realized, too late, that they’d seen what he’d seen – they’d caught sight of what was on the ground. The scream that erupted a millisecond later from Naya’s mouth was one of the most painful sounds Scott had ever heard: terror, horror, revulsion.
‘Oh my God, oh my God – what the fuck!’ Ben yelled. He crouched down to the floor, clamped his hands around his mouth. There were tears streaming down his face.
Scott squatted next to the thing on the ground in front of them. They’d been wrong: it wasn’t an animal. Or at least, not the kind they’d been imagining. He wanted to protect them from it – he wanted to stop them from seeing it. They shouldn’t have to look at this – at her. This would hurt them; it would scar them for life.
‘Don’t go any closer – Ben, Naya, please. Let’s go – turn around, and get out of here,’ he said.
‘It’s – is that – oh my God,’ said Naya, stumbling over herwords, turning around to retch into the ground. She’d almost said what he’d been thinking, but he’d fallen short: he couldn’t find the words.
Because how could he say it?
How could he say that the dead thing in front of them was human?
NAYA
Naya’s eyes could not take in what she was seeing – they couldn’t allow it. Nothing about it made sense; her brain refused to process the sight in front of her. She urged her mind to focus on the person lying on the jungle floor. Her natural instincts to feel for a pulse, to check if they were breathing – to try to save a life, using her training and experience to guide her – were as extinct as the human being on the ground. She doubted it would take a nursing qualification – not even so much as a two-day workplace first aid course – to deduce from the pallor of the corpse’s skin, the bloating that had started to take place, the way the rainforest’s creatures had already begun to pick at her flesh, that it was far too late for any of that.
She’d seen corpses before, of course she had. It was part of her job. It was a day-to-day occurrence, especially when she’d been working in geriatric care. Elderly people died all the time. It was sad – but it was natural. Sometimes people had terrible, grim deaths – diseases that strangled the life from their bodies over decades, or gradually shrank their brains to nothing. But often, these patients died surrounded by family, loved ones holding their hands, whispering last goodbyes, words of care and love.
Never – not once – had she witnessed anything that came close to this.
The dead woman was lying face upwards to the sky. Swarming above her head was a vast cloud of flying insects, and higher up, towards the top of some of the lush green trees, circling above their prey, were the vultures – impossibly large, their distinctive hook-shaped beaks hanging open as they surveyed the scene below.
Naya shuddered, before her attention was dragged away from the body. Someone was talking – one of them had managed to produce something more than the guttural sounds of shock and horror that had punctuated the past thirty seconds. It took her a moment to place it but then she realized it was Ben. His voice wobbled as it floated to her ears, as if it were coming from underwater.
‘Fuck – Naya, Scott, is that... it looks like... is that blood around her head? Do you guys see that?’
Naya’s eyes travelled slowly upwards, horror and dread making even the smallest movement feel like she was wading through treacle. She focused her stare on the woman’s head; she needed to look, unbearable as it was. A large, sticky-looking pool of red had oozed out from under her scalp, attracting even more buzzing insects.
‘I see it,’ said Naya, her skin crawling with fresh horror. It looked as though this wound was the cause of this poor woman’s death. But how did it happen? A terrible accident, perhaps?Or something more deliberate?
Naya’s eyes continued searching the scene, too transfixed to turn away, as much as the image horrified her. Covering the rain-soaked corpse was a smattering of damp, mulchy leaves, afew tangled vines and some slightly larger branches, all with fat droplets of rain stagnating in their grooves and trenches. More leaves and smaller branches, twigs, chunks of wood, lay to one side of her body, many of them trailing in the same direction – as though the wind from last night’s storm had blown them away and left them scattered around her.
But the vines and branches still on top of the body – the way they were layered on her chest and limbs, over her face – it looked as though it could have been deliberate. Naya wondered if there was any possible scenario where they could have appeared by themselves. Maybe this was the work of the rainforest’s creatures – but would even the most intelligent of mammals be capable of this? Or maybe – Naya sensed herself grasping at each possibility more desperately – she had placed them over herself before she died? The alternative – that this was someone’s attempts at hiding her, at covering their tracks – or perhaps at giving her a kind of natural burial out here under the watchful eyes of a thousand different species – was too brutal to contemplate.
Naya’s eyes moved up the length of the body. She couldn’t make out much of the woman’s face; so much of it was obscured by leaves and flies and the insects that had started to crawl over it. But she could see – underneath an extra thick concentration of the swarming bugs – something that snagged in her mind, beneath the dark red matted leaves at the top of her head.
Her hair.
