Into the Jungle (ARC) Read online

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  In this pulse-pounding thriller from the author of the “haunting, twisting thrill-ride” (Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author) The River at Night, a young woman leaves behind everything she knows to take on the jungle of Bolivia, but her excursion abroad quickly turns into a fight for her life.

  Nineteen-year-old Lily Bushwold thought she’d found the antidote to endless foster care and group homes: a teaching job in Cochabamba, Bolivia. As soon as she could steal enough cash for the plane, she was on it.

  When the gig falls through and Lily stays in Bolivia, she finds bonding with other broke, rudderless girls at the local youth hostel isn’t the life she wants either. Hustling and world-weary already, crazy love finds her in the form she least expects: Omar, a savvy, handsome local man who’d abandoned his life as a hunter in Ayachero—a remote jungle village—to try his hand at city life.

  When Omar learns that a jaguar has killed his four-year-old nephew in Ayachero, he gives Lily a choice: Stay alone in the unforgiving city, or travel to the last in a string of ever-more-isolated river towns in the jungles of Bolivia. Thirty-foot anaconda? Puppy-sized spiders? Vengeful shamans with unspeakable powers? Love-struck Lily is oblivious. She follows Omar to this ruthless new world of lawless poachers, bullheaded missionaries, and desperate indigenous tribes driven to the brink of extinction. To survive, Lily must navigate the jungle—its wonders as well as its terrors—using only her wits and resilience.

  Primal, gripping, and terrifying, Into the Jungle features Erica Ferencik’s signature “visceral, white-knuckle” (Entertainment Weekly) prose that will sink its fangs into you and not let go.

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  Erica Ferencik is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Boston University. Her work has appeared in Salon and The Boston Globe, as well as on National Public Radio. Find out more on her website EricaFerencik.com and follow her on Twitter @EricaFerencik. She is the author of The River at Night and Into the Jungle.

  Dear Reader:

  For me, finding a story worth telling is like falling in love. All the gears in my head and heart go click-click-click, and I know I’m doomed to do nothing else but live inside this idea for the foreseeable future.

  That’s exactly what happened when my friend Pamela told me the story of her time in the Bolivian Amazon. A troubled foster kid, she made her way at age sixteen to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where she fell for a local man, married him, and followed him to his ancestral home, the remotest in a series of remote river villages in the Amazon rainforest. No roads, no electricity, no running water. Just a crescent of land carved out of wild jungle. Pit vipers snapped and hissed in the manioc gardens; electric eels as long as limousines coiled in the river; jaguars slinked in the shadows. She didn’t return to America until she was twenty-six years old.

  How compelling is that?

  I immediately immersed myself in learning about the Amazon jungle: its people, plants, and animals, its devastating history and present-day threats. I read books, watched films, conducted countless interviews, then spent July 2017 traveling in the Bolivian Amazon. I needed to delve into the jungle—see it, hear it, taste it, feel it, understand it as much as a visitor could. It did not disappoint. This is a primordial forest of staggering size and complexity, much of it untouched by the modern world, a place so strange, beautiful, and frightening there were moments I had to remind myself I was still on planet Earth.

  My other task was to make this story my own, to bring to the reader a taste of the terror and wonder of this still-magical place. I hope I have lived up to the challenge, and that you enjoy your trip Into the Jungle.

  Sincerely,

  Erica Ferencik

  BOOKS BY ERICA FERENCIK

  The River at Night

  For George

  A shaman is not a shaman until she brings back her gifts.

  —Source unknown

  PROLOGUE

  It was past midnight, some lonely, small hour of the morning. Naked, I dropped to my knees at the shore. Moonlight glowed on the mist that roamed and drifted just above the glistening black river. I lifted a gourd full of river water and poured it over my hugely pregnant body, not caring what—or who—was watching or crawling toward me from the steaming jungle that loomed behind me. I would have done anything—was doing anything—for relief from the heat that was driving me half out of my mind, crushing me like a giant hand. I took bites of hot, sharp air. Waited for any sort of breeze. Filled the gourd again and again, drenched myself, gasping.

  But the moment the water flowed off my flesh, I stippled again with sweat. My breasts glowed golden in the starlight, my nipples like sprung plugs, belly swollen drum tight, unrecognizable as my own. I squeezed my eyes shut—even my eyelids were sweating—trying to picture the beloved face of this child’s father, Omar, out hunting for game so we could survive. Frogs croaked with a bulbous sound, breaking off abruptly as if there were a conductor among them.

  Throwing the calabash aside, I pushed myself to my feet, stumbling up the short walk on hardened dirt to our hut. It had been three weeks since Omar and rest of the hunters had been gone, weeks in which my belly exploded with growth. I felt the jungle wanting life, life craving more life, and I felt just one more obscene part of it; like the strangler figs choking the trees, this baby was taking me over, tapping every ounce of my strength.

  Back in the gloom of the hut, I lifted the mosquito netting that draped our thin mattress, making sure the metal cans the legs of the bed stood in were brimming with kerosene. On the one night I hadn’t filled them, I woke to a five-inch translucent-green scorpion on the back of my hand, its spiral tail quivering and stuttering. My screams brought the Ayacheran women in, rubbing their eyes and laughing at me as they batted it off with a broom. Afterward they wandered back to their huts, slurring in sleepy Spanish, their children scuffing back to their beds.

  I crawled onto my back on the thin mat, inhaling the smell of burning cecropia wood that sifted through the grates of our clay oven, picturing the wild boar’s head that lay sizzling in its bed of embers, eyes empty black holes, tusks twisting skyward in frozen torment.

  Lying so very still, I thought about the delicacy of everything that lives, how this fine mesh suspended over me—so easily torn—was the only thing between me and every vicious flying insect, every creeping beast. I thought of the parts of America I missed: Dairy Queen, the movies, candy bars, Cheerios, malls, scented soap, libraries, fall leaves, snow; things Omar had never seen, had no interest in seeing.

  To calm myself, I closed my eyes and conjured a blizzard. In my mind, snow swirled down a mountain pass, sugaring the pines until the winds picked up and piles drifted against houses and barns, painting everything with the same white brush. I cracked open my mouth to taste the cold flakes on my lips and tongue; I swear the thought cooled me. I fell off into this heaven until I felt a presence near my feet.

/>   Something silky slid across my ankles, followed by a heavy, heated weight over my toes. Solid warmth oozed under my calves.

  Still half-asleep, I got to my elbows and looked down my body at the wide, trapezoidal head of a python, neon green with flecks of yellow around her cleft mouth. As if suspended by some mad puppet maker, she hovered at eye level, swaying hypnotically. My eyes followed hers back and forth, my head doing this little dip along with her. I didn’t scream because even as I watched, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.

  I couldn’t tell if she was real.

  She encircled my ankles. Pellet eyes locked on mine, her head made its way up the length of my body as she languidly wreathed herself around my legs and oh dear God—why, I don’t know—but I didn’t feel like struggling. She had me. I could feel her eggs, solid lumps just under the satin of her white belly. The meat of her was soft and blood warm; I couldn’t take my eyes off the grace of her as she coiled her ever thicker body around my knees now, wrapped herself around my thighs, pelvis, groin. Head swinging, unsupported, she opened her mouth. Her vermilion tongue snapped out, forked end flickering. She blew her sultry breath on me and said aahhhhhhhhh.

  Each time I exhaled, she cinched tighter; she knew me. It was intimate, sensual; she melted into me, compressed me, made me smaller. I could feel her reading my muscles, mapping the suck and hush of blood in my veins; planning every bone she would snap and crush, the iridescent diamonds of her flesh whisper-dry, and I didn’t care if she kept going, it just felt so good, but one more turn and she would encase my belly.

  I need to do something now, I thought. Now. This is my baby; if I can’t care about myself, I must care for this child. Omar’s child.

  Her breath singed my face with all the sweetness of decay, as I thought, Come on, Lily, this is happening, do something. I remembered Omar telling me snakes smell their prey with their tongue; hers snapped in and out, ever faster, sniffing my fecundity. My ripeness seemed to enrage her. Quickly she looped herself once more around my belly, squeezing tight as if to pop me like a balloon, head raised in ecstasy.

  * * *

  I woke the next morning—the first day of the fourth week Omar had been gone—to the shrieks of macaws, their cries so heart-wrenching it felt like the end of the world every single day. Of course it had all been a dream; still, I couldn’t explain why my body ached, or the bruises that throbbed on my thighs. From the doorway of our hut I watched a vulture swing up and down over the river, dark as a pendulum against the pale blue sky.

  I was beginning to give up.

  And then I heard his voice.

  The relief was chemical; his voice among the others down by the boats made something break and re-form in my chest. I was desperate to run to the shore, but dizziness overwhelmed me and I had to sit and wait for it to pass.

  He crashed into the hut, arms and chest still streaked with mud and blood from the hunt. He threw his arms around me and pulled me to my feet, stroking my hair, crying. Why was he crying?

  “Lily, you’re alive. Thank God, thank God,” he sobbed. “Are you all right? Tell me you are, tell me the baby’s okay.” His wide, strong hands read my belly.

  Stunned with relief, I couldn’t speak as parts of myself glued back together with the knowledge he was alive.

  “I killed a python last night,” he said. “I had to. He was hunting me.”

  His eyes searched my face like there was something I should know about this.

  “Lily, they mate for life. They come after your mate when you kill theirs. They hold grudges. It’s a spirit thing, they travel in other worlds.”

  I told him about her crushing weight, her breathtaking power, the bright green scales hissing across my flesh, the wonder and terror of her visit. He listened closely, nodding, serious, his handsome face a map of exhaustion and relief. As the words tumbled out of my mouth, I felt myself giving in; believing, finally, that everything in this place was magical and connected, that nothing here was happenstance. That my and our child’s life depended on opening my eyes and heart to this new world.

  ONE

  COCHABAMBA, BOLIVIA

  – MARCH 2010 –

  “What do you mean, you don’t know how to steal?” I asked my two new besties who sat next to me on the hard plastic seat of the ancient, shock-less bus.

  For me, thieving was a life skill, like lying my way out of a jam, or taking off at the first sign of trouble. Most nineteen-year-olds bum around Europe a month or two, then scoot back home to college like good boys and girls. Well, fuck that. I was a half-starved, high-strung wild child who lived out of a backpack, homeless since I was thirteen, obsessed with Spanish-speaking countries, animals, and the jungle. I was also a desperately lonely, cocky-yet-petrified infant. In the space of a minute I could drown in self-pity for what I thought I’d missed—a real family—then toss that aside to satisfy a rabid curiosity for the world and everything in it. That second part may have been what saved me in the end.

  On my right, seventeen-year-old Britta from Austria gazed out the open window, taciturn, dreamy, dark hair blowing back from her pale face. “I stole something once,” she said. “Mints. From a restaurant.”

  Molly, a tall, talky American from Seattle, grinned and leaned in to her with a bony shoulder. “News flash: those are free.” A ghost of a pedicure clung to her dusty feet in beat-up sandals, just flecks of red polish on every other toenail.

  Britta shrugged. “I took more than one.”

  Molly and I howled with laughter. “Mint stealer! They’re gonna lock you up, girl.”

  Below us, the narrow, one-way street buzzed with lawless vitality and frenetic energy. Small European cars blew past stop signs with only a warning honk, pausing barely long enough for a withered Bolivian woman to yank a stubborn lama across the cobblestones. Young men on motorcycles cut between cars, even zoomed across sidewalks. These weren’t the downtown Boston streets I knew that zipped up at night with crusty Brahmin efficiency; this was raw, stinky chaos, life out loud with all its mess, sprawl and noise, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

  We three groaned each time we slammed into a pothole, tailbones bruised and aching. Laughing with fear and exhilaration, we clung to the windowsills, the seats in front of us, or each other as the cigar-chomping driver took every turn too hard and too fast. Pop music blared from the bus’s tinny speakers. Diesel gassed us through the open windows. Chickens squawked and scattered across the road as we blasted by.

  We bulleted around one last corner, the bus practically coasting on its left side wheels as we turned onto a flagstone courtyard. I relished the feel of my switchblade cool against my thigh, nestled in the long pockets of my baggy shorts, my beloved backpack clutched under one bony arm. With one last belch of black smoke, the bus ground to a stop near a small farmacia tucked between rows of vegetable stands.

  “This is it,” I said, jumping to my feet. “Let’s go.”

  “Okay, chiquita,” Molly said, tumbling out her side of the seat. “We’re going, we’re going.”

  We squinted into the afternoon sun’s last rays as they sliced across the plaza, the towers of a looming seventeenth-century church casting cold black shadows across us. We wove our way through a sea of people, past shopkeepers hawking jewelry, clothing, blankets, and cheap knickknacks, their stores squeezed into impossibly thin corridors between crumbling stone buildings, the usual stew of fear, pride, and excitement that preceded a heist—big or small—churning in my stomach. Everywhere the sweetish whiff of rotting vegetables mixed with a low note of sizzling meat, a smell that—those days—only ratcheted up the pain in my gut.

  Britta pulled up short at a stall where a young girl was flipping fried corn cakes filled with melting cheese. She scouted around in her bag for some change.

  “Come on, Brit,” I said. “Later.” Never rob a store on a full stomach: seriously, did I really need to explain this?


  “But I’m starving.”

  “Not now.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Just because you never eat.”

  I tugged the straps of my backpack tighter across my shoulders. Pitiful as the contents were, I always had food, whether stolen or bought. Ziplock bags of dusty peanuts, half-melted candy bars, sad old apples, stale M&M’s, anything I could get my hands on. The truth was, I was always hungry; it was just a matter of degree. Growing up with seven other foster kids had me well acquainted with a chronic emptiness in my gut.

  I glanced around nervously. “We’ll get something after, okay?” As used to copping things as I was, it had only just occurred to me that the punishment here might be a lot less lenient than in the States. Would it be actual jail time? Hard labor? And how in fuck would I get myself out with barely a boliviano to my name?

  Grumbling, Britta zipped her sweatshirt to her chin with a shiver and joined Molly and me as we huddled outside the pharmacy. “So, Molly, you’ve stolen things before?” she asked.

  Molly gave me a sly look. “Of course.”

  “What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever stolen?”

  “A boyfriend.”

  “Good to know.” Britta laughed, then turned to me. “Lily? Biggest thing?”

  “As in size? Or worth?”

  She laughed and shook her head. “Size.”

  “A turkey. For Thanksgiving.”

  “Did you get caught?”

  “Nope.”

  Molly whistled, impressed, but back on task as she glanced apprehensively at the drug store. “So, how is this going to go—?”

  “We go in,” I said. “We’re super friendly. Smile and say hola. You know that much Spanish, right?” I pulled out a beat-up map from my backpack and handed it to Molly. “Just do what we talked about. We’ll be fine.”