further away from the fire and into the inky blackness of night.
Jacque made a jerky motion, as if he were jumping over a small hurtle. He thinks jumping is going to save him . The thought amused Tito as he leveled the weapon. Now was as close as he was ever going to be.
He exhaled and took two more long strides. On the third step, he squeezed the trigger.
As the ground gave way underneath him.
The well. The fucking well.
It was a primitive hole in the ground with no real covering, and no warning that it was there. There didn’t have to be. All the villagers had probably warned their children often not to play near it.
Tito heard his own yelp as his gut slammed into the far side of the hole, crumbling the dirt around the edge and knocking the breath out of him. As his feet kept falling, he threw out his arms in a desperate attempt to grab a hold of the edge.
He balled his hands into a fist, and the gun went off again, jumping out of his hand and onto the dirt at the mouth of the hole. Both elbows crashed against the edge, his hands flailing, fingers ripping at the ground, trying to pull him back on to solid ground.
Struggling caused more harm than good. Tito snapped off the fingernail on his left index finger.
Then plummeted into claustrophobic darkness.
Chapter 22
Umberto
From the beach, through his good eye, Umberto could see the faintest corona of light as it stretched across the watery horizon.
The coming dawn made him wonder how long he had been out in the jungle, looking for the girl.
At one point in the night he had heard something, but the movement seemed to come from all directions at once. So by the time he mustered the energy he needed for pursuit, popping a pill down his dry throat and rushing off into the foliage, the night was again at rest.
When he heard the gunshot, he was preparing to give up the search, collapse into the sand and let the sunrise warm him. His bare feet were numb from running. Last night, he’d taken off his boots and used the laces to affix the boar head to the top of his own. The rest of his body was numb from the fistfuls of uppers and downers marinating with the bits of makeup girl-flesh in his stomach.
Running made the mixture in his stomach slosh around like a caged animal, but it didn’t exactly make him sick.
Umberto couldn’t believe he ate so much. At first he was just rolling the meat around in his mouth, but then he decided that when the footage was played back in a theater—three stories tall, just mouthing the blood and guts wasn’t going to read as authentic. So he’d swallowed some, then a bit more.
The people pressing against his mind urged him on with every bite and lick.
Tito was the only one with a gun. Tito was never going to leave the comfort of the village. Thus Umberto concluded that the gunshot had to have come from the village. At a full sprint, the assemblage of huts and fishing nets was still a minimum of ten minutes from the beach.
A second shot, closer but still far, rang out through the woods and quickened his footfalls. Umberto bounded over fallen trees and through a number of deep mud puddles that could have just as easily been quicksand.
He wasn’t running because he wanted to protect the cameraman and director—he could give a shit—but to protect the project. Umberto had already given up so much over the last two days (not only out of his schedule, but possibly out of his soul): he intended on collecting the fame that he had been promised.
How long since you’ve slept? a familiar voice asked at the back of his mind, he almost didn’t recognize it at first. It had been so long since he had heard his own voice in his head.
It had been a long time since he’d been asleep. The last time had been on the plane. It did not feel like it had been that much time, but it was.
As suddenly as it had arrived, the voice of reason departed. The now-familiar chorus of the island raised its voice until there was no more of Umberto
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