Titanoboa by Victor Methos

Author:Victor Methos [Victor Methos]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781499181449
Amazon: 1499181442
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2014-04-17T07:00:00+00:00

22

After driving to the edge of the city, Riki parked, and Mark sat in the car while she stepped outside to find a bathroom. She walked with her face buried in her phone toward some nearby shops. Mark got out of the car and sat on the hood. The jungle air this far from the ocean was hot and wet. The humidity could reach upwards of seventy percent, the highest ever recorded in the jungle allegedly over a hundred percent. Enough to soak clothing while sitting still and doing nothing.

Headlights bobbed up and down on the dirt road before they pulled onto the paved streets. The road was the only path through the jungle, but just to the center. Someone going inside would have to turn around and come out the same way, or at least that’s what he’d heard. The jungle was boiling, dark, and—something Mark probably wouldn’t admit to anyone else—creepy as all hell. He had never been more than half a mile in.

Two Jeeps, both a green camouflage color as if they were in Vietnam or something, rolled to a stop in front of him. Steven Russert jumped out of the lead jeep and ambled over. He didn’t say anything but hopped up onto the hood of Riki’s car. He looked up at the sky.

“Damn beautiful,” Steven said. “Never grow old of this.”

“It has its charms.”

Steven smiled. “You don’t trust me, do you?”

“I don’t know you.”

“Well, you can trust me. I don’t have any ulterior motives. I want to kill some snakes and make my bosses happy. That’s it.”

Mark looked over at the shops to see if Riki had finished yet but didn’t see her. “This must be pretty profitable to go through all this for some snakes.”

“Oil, man. Ain’t that much of it left in the world. The competition’s gonna keep getting worse, until finally we’re fighting wars openly for the last little bit left. That’s where we’re headed.”

“Maybe.” Mark leaned back on his hands. “So, let me ask you, have you seen one of these snakes?”

“Hell, I did better than that. I was almost eaten by one. It wrapped around my ankle and started going up my leg.”

“How big was it?”

“It was dark, couldn’t really see, but big. Really big.”

Riki returned, but she didn’t seem to notice the Jeeps. Her face was still down over her phone. “So what happens when you kill some of these snakes?”

“Well, we’re gonna have to kill a whole lot of them. Enough so that our workers are left alone. Then when that happens, they can go back to extracting the oil underneath this island.”

“And when the oil’s gone?”

“When the oil’s gone, the jobs will be gone, too. The island will go through a depression, and people’ll starve. But it’ll just go back to this size eventually.”

“You’re pretty calm about destroying an island.”

“Hey, brother, I told you, you could trust me. I’ll always be straight with you.” He jumped off the car. “You ready to go?”

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