Hunt at World's End Read Online Free PDF Page B

geckos clinging to the trunks and branches in their path. Mouse deer whose heads didn’t reach higher than the tops of Gabriel’s boots fled before them through the underbrush. Clicking beetles scurried away into tiny holes amid the twisted roots.
    “Tell me if you see any tarantulas,” Noboru muttered.
    “Why?” Gabriel asked.
    “So I can get the hell away from them. I hate those damn things. Always have.”
    Gabriel tilted his flashlight down to shine it along the ground. No tarantulas in sight. “Remind me sometime to tell you what happened to me in Chile.”
    “Not if it involves a tarantula.”
    “Not a tarantula,” Gabriel said. “A whole nest of them. Chilean flame tarantulas.”
    Noboru shivered. “I never, ever want to hear that story.” He stopped suddenly and bent down, shining his flashlight at some thin branches poking out from a tree at knee level. “Hold on. Look at this.”
    Gabriel came over, adding his light to Noboru’s. “What have you got?”
    The branches were snapped, their bent tips all pointing in the same direction. Something heavy had passed—or been dragged—through them.
    “It’s too big to be from squirrels, too high for mouse deer,” Noboru said.
    “Monkeys?”
    “Too low. This was done by people.”
    Gabriel straightened and shone his flashlight in the direction the snapped branches pointed. The jungle seemed to stretch on forever, tree after tree, vine after vine, forming an impenetrable net of vegetation. After five days, the signs remaining of Joyce’s passage through the jungle would be few; that was more than enough time for rain and wildlife activity to conceal the trail. But there should still be some signs. It just meant they’d have to be that much more vigilant to spot them.
    Gabriel started walking again, following the direction of the broken branches. Several yards farther on, his flashlight beam located something at the mossy base of a thick tree.
    “There.” He hurried to the tree. More branches were snapped and bent like before, but this time there was also a piece of torn fabric stuck on the sharp end of a twig. Gabriel brushed aside a long-horned beetle that had made the cloth its bed and plucked it off the branch. It was filthy, covered in mud, but under the dirt he sawa tight weave and a blue and white pattern. It felt like cotton. “It’s clothing,” he said. “Piece of a shirt or a dress, maybe.”
    “Well, I can tell you we’re definitely not the first people to pass through here,” Noboru said, his voice low. He pointed his flashlight at the ground ahead of them. Past the tree, the vegetation had been trampled flat.
    They followed the trail deeper into the jungle. They passed whole tree trunks covered with swarms of ants and termites. Stick insects clung to nearby leaves and waited patiently for their chance to snatch up prey. Above their heads, an enormous tropical centipede with red mandibles and spiky legs sprouting like daggers from its segmented body crawled along a thick branch. Gabriel saw Noboru look away, disgusted, as they passed beneath it. It wasn’t just tarantulas, then. Gabriel was beginning to think the jungle was no place for him.
    Ahead, Gabriel could just make out a dim orange light flickering between the leaves, growing brighter as they moved along the trail. They proceeded cautiously. The path, he saw, came to an end at the edge of a wide clearing. Just shy of the edge, while they were still hidden by a screen of trees, Gabriel dropped to the jungle floor and pulled Noboru with him. They switched off their flashlights, hid behind a low barricade of fallen branches and took in the sight before them.
    Six tall wooden posts jutted from the ground around the perimeter of the clearing, forming a rough hexagon. Each post was topped with a shallow stone bowl of burning oil. These were the source of the flickering orange light they’d seen through the trees.
    At the far end of the clearing was a crude but fairly large hut