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sudden burst of energy, Josh jerked upright, pulling himself back to full consciousness. He rose, stepping out of the bushes where he’d dragged himself, exhausted, a few hours before.
    His mind emptied of all thought, all emotion and sensation. Josh didn’t, couldn’t, think. He couldn’t even feel the presence of his toes or legs or arms. He simply floated in a void, a vacuum within a vacuum.
    And then he felt his legs stinging.
    His toes were wet and cold. His ankles felt heavy with fluid. He’d wrenched his right knee, and it throbbed. His right thigh felt like it had been punched by one of the trees he’d run into. His sides burned, as if physically on fire. His right lower rib ached, the pain growing, then easing, with each breath. The muscles at the side of his lower chest—the external oblique anterolateral abdominal muscles, a name he knew because he’d torn them in high school playing lacrosse—sent sharp bolts of pain shrieking across the ribs. His right arm felt numb, his shoulder senseless, his fingers cramped stiff. His neck was wrenched to one side. His jaw had locked closed, his back molars grinding against each other.
    Oh, God, I’m alive?
    What the hell do I do now?

    It was light, either just before or just after dawn. The clouds and thick jungle to the east obscured the sun, making it hard to tell.
    Josh pushed himself backward, trying to raise himself into a seated position. His hands slipped into mud and he fell backward, dropping into the water behind him. Caught entirely by surprise—he hadn’t thought he was anywhere this close to the creek—he fell below the surface. He rolled and pushed himself up, gulping the air.
    Up. Get up. Move. See what’s really hurt.
    He rose, then stepped to a small apron of smooth stones at the edge of the stream. The water was calm here, the current very gentle. He looked behind him and saw that the stream had flooded a wide area, a nook between two low hills on the ridge. The area didn’t look familiar, which might mean it was north of their camp. Or it could mean simply that his brain was too scrambled to remember passing it.
    Rubbing his thighs with his hands, Josh looked around, belatedly searching the area for his pursuers. Who were they?
    Thieves was the only possible answer, and yet it seemed impossible that anyone would want to rob a scientific expedition. Foolhardy, too—the Vietnamese government had endorsed the project, and even sent two soldiers along with the guides.
    Thieves were a rarity in Vietnam, and this wasn’t supposed to be a dangerous area: Dr. Renaldo had said the soldiers were along not as protection, but so the Vietnamese could justify the fee they took from the UN’s grant for administration. “The price of doing business,” said the scientist philosophically before they left Hanoi.
    So if it was so safe, who had come and killed most of his expedition?
    The Vietnamese themselves? It made no sense.
    But then, who would kill an Iowa farm family in a murder apparently patterned after the In Cold Blood killings decades before?
    Looking for logic from human beings was illogical and often futile. Josh knew that by heart.
    There was a knot in his stomach. He was hungry. He tried to remember what Kerry, the flora specialist, had told him about some of the plants. He’d been far more interested in the curve of her hips and the way her small breasts poked at the light muslin shirt than in the nutritional value of the local grasses and brush.
    The nearby bushes were thick with green and pink berries. Josh
reached for a bunch of the pink ones, then stopped. They might be poison, or simply unripe.
    He could wait, he decided. He wasn’t that hungry.
    Josh began walking along the bank of the flooded stream, following the ripples in the water as it moved downstream.
    Was it the right direction? He reasoned that as long as he moved downhill, he would be heading toward people,