The Hatching (The Hatching #1)
Ezekiel Boone
For Sara and Sandy
PROLOGUE
Outside Manú National Park, Peru
The guide wanted to tell the group of Americans to shut up. Of course they weren’t seeing any animals: their constant complaining was driving them away. Only the birds remained, and even they seemed skittish. He was just a guide, however, so he said nothing.
There were five Americans. Three women and two men. The guide was interested in how they were paired off. It seemed unlikely that the fat man, Henderson, had all three women for himself. No matter how rich he was, shouldn’t two women at one time be enough? Perhaps the tall man had one? Perhaps not. As far as the guide could tell, the tall man was there to act as Henderson’s bodyguard and servant only. He and Henderson did not act like friends. The tall man carried the fat man’s water and snacks and did not let his eyes linger on any of the women. There was no question that he was in Henderson’s employ. As was the guide.
The guide sighed. He’d see how the women were portioned off at camp, he thought. In the meantime, he would do what he was paid for, which was lead them through the jungle and point out things that were supposed to impress them. Of course, they’d already done Machu Picchu, which always left tourists feeling as if they had seen everything Peru had to offer, and now there were no animals to show them. He glanced back at Henderson and decided it was time for another break. They’d had to stop every twenty minutes so that the rich man could run into the brush and move his bowels, and now the guide was worried Henderson might be overexerting himself.
It wasn’t that Henderson was grossly fat, but he was definitely large and clearly struggling to keep pace with the rest of the group. The tall man and the three women, though, were all in good shape. The women, in particular, all looked embarrassingly athletic and young, twenty or thirty years younger than Henderson. It was obvious the heat was getting to him. His face was red and he kept mopping at his forehead with a damp handkerchief. Henderson was older than the women, but looked too young for a heart attack. Still, the guide thought, it wouldn’t hurt to keep him well hydrated. After all, it had been made abundantly clear to the guide that if things went well, Henderson might be persuaded to make a sizable donation to the park and the scientists working there.
The day wasn’t any hotter than normal, but even though the group had come directly from Machu Picchu, they didn’t seem to understand that they were still at elevation. They weren’t actually inside Manú National Park, which they didn’t seem to understand either. The guide could have explained that they were technically allowed only in the larger biosphere area, and that the park itself was reserved for researchers, staff, and the indigenous Machiguenga, but all it would have done was disappoint them even more than they already were.
“Any chance we’ll see a lion, Miggie?” one of the women asked him.
The woman next to her, who looked as if she had come from one of the magazines that the guide had kept under his bed when he was a teenager, before he’d had access to the Internet, swung off her backpack and dropped it on the ground. “For God’s sake, Tina,” the woman said, shaking her head so that her hair swung around her face and her shoulders. The guide had trouble not staring down her scoop-neck shirt as she leaned over to unzip her bag and pull out a bottle of water. “We’re in Peru, not Africa. You’re going to make Miggie think that Americans are idiots. There aren’t any lions in Peru. We could see a jaguar, though.”
The guide had introduced himself as Miguel, but they had immediately taken to calling him Miggie, as if Miguel were just a suggestion. While he did not think all Americans were idiots—when he wasn’t leading expeditions of tourists on “eco treks,” he often worked with the scientists inside the park, most of them from American universities—he was beginning to think that, despite the presence of Henderson, who was by all accounts a genius, this particular group seemed to have more idiots than normal. They were not going to see a lion, and no matter what the woman said, they weren’t going to see a jaguar, either. Miguel had been working here for the tour company for nearly three years, and even he’d never seen a jaguar. Not that he was truly an expert. He had been born and raised in Lima, and the only reason he was there, instead of back in the city of more than eight million, was a girl. They’d gone to university together, and when she landed a plum job as a research assistant, he managed to squirm his way into helping out inside the park occasionally. Recently, though, things hadn’t been going so well; his girlfriend had seemed distracted when they’d been together, and Miguel had begun to suspect that she’d started sleeping with one of her coworkers.
He watched the Americans take water or little bars wrapped in plastic out of their backpacks, and then he walked a few paces farther down the path. He glanced back and saw the lion woman, Tina, smiling at him in such a way that he wondered if maybe that night, when Henderson went into his tent, she might be available for him. He’d had chances with tourists before, though the opportunity presented itself less often than he would have expected, and he’d always turned them down. But maybe tonight, if Tina offered, he wouldn’t say no. If his girlfriend was cheating on him, the least he could do was return the favor. Tina kept smiling at him, and it made him nervous.
He was made more nervous by the jungle, however. The first few months after he’d left Lima to come here he’d hated it, but mostly he was used to the closeness of it by now. The constant buzz of insects, the movement, the heat, and the life that seemed everywhere. It had all become background noise eventually, and until today, it had been a long time since he’d been scared to be in the jungle. Today was different, though. The background noise was gone. It was unsettling how quiet it was aside from the nattering of the group behind him. They had been complaining about the lack of animals, and if he had been honest with them—and he hadn’t, because that was not what a guide was paid to be—he would have told the group that he was bothered by it as well. Usually they would have seen more animals than they could have asked for: sloths, capybara, brocket, monkeys. God, they loved the monkeys. The tourists could never get enough monkeys. And insects, of course. They were usually everywhere, and when all else failed to keep the tourists entertained, Miguel, who had never been scared of spiders, would often pick one up on the end of a branch and surprise one of the women in the group with it. He loved the way they shrieked when he brought it close for them to see, and the way the men tried to pretend as though the spider didn’t bother them.