Demons in the Jungle

Chapter 21

III: Guernica

"Saudade (Portuguese)

(n.) a deep, nostalgic and melancholic longing for something or someone, often accompanied with a denied fact that what one longs for will never come back."

- Online Dictionary

Chapter 21

"Oi, Tommy."

I stirred, but I couldn't open my eyes. My entire body felt too weak to move.

"Come on, Tommy boy, come out of the dark woods."

My eyes opened slowly, everything blurry before me. Feeling began to sink into my limbs, and my weight felt wrong. It took me several moments to realize I was looking at the world upside-down.

"Oh, there you are." A voice said, the nonspecific shape in front of me shifting slightly. "Welcome back to the world of the living, Tommy."

I blinked, trying to move, but I couldn't. My hands were bound and hung low, past my head. My feet were bound too, and I assumed I was hanging by them. In the tradition of the Chawe Islands, I had been strung up.

"You've gotta hand it to the people of Nepal." Amy said, coming into focus before my eyes. He held my kukri in one hand, turning it over as he examined it casually. "They designed one hell of a blade here. A real fuckin' mix of art and purpose." He smirked around the cigar in his teeth and looked up at me. "It's an honor to get gutted by a blade like this, mate. Like getting stabbed with rare elephant tusk or something."

He sighed, beginning to pace in front of me. As the world flooded back into me, I realized it was raining, big and heavy droplets striking me, the mud around me. I turned my head, and to my left, I saw another pair of men, Kokowai men, hanging, dead, beginning to decompose. To my right was more of the same. One of the corpses had fallen to the ground, though the rotted legs remained, the body crumpled around it, flies buzzing overhead. I was in an old Kokowai death pit.

"You remember how I said, maybe you were born to come to the jungle, Tommy?" Amy asked casually. "I think maybe I was wrong. The jungle wasn't too much for you, mate. You were too much for the jungle." He turned now and stepped close to me, eyeing me carefully. "You took this hostile world and you turned it upside-down. I awoke something in you, Tommy. Under that spoiled bullshit exterior...all the money and first-world class...I exposed a demon." He laughed lightly as he stepped back. "Do you remember, when you were way up in the skies, flying like a fucking bird, with your pretty-boy friends and your pretty-boy money? Do you think those friends want to know the man who the jungle has stirred up? What kind of man do you think you are now, Tommy?" He asked, staring at me very seriously. "I shouldn't have brought you here. My island...it's reached out and infected the synapses in your brain. It does that, you know. Makes them all go dark, one by one. The one for rationality, gone. The one for morals, gone. The one for your sanity...that's right, gone. All of it got switched off...until only the demon remained." He shook his head. "Now it's too late for you. You've been here too long. No man like that can go back to the light of civilization, mate."

I blinked, opening my mouth and trying to speak. My voice came out in a ragged near-whisper.

"Fuck you." I hissed. "I beat you. That's the kind of man I am."

Amy pouted, holding the deadly blade with two fingers on the handle and the other thumb on the tip of the blade. "It sure don't look that way from here, Tommy." He said. "I'm afraid I have some bad news. The deal's off."

He turned around, gesturing to the jungle around him. "You stirred up the natives. Got them moving in on the southern island. This fire you've started...Jesus, Tommy, look at all that."