The Amazon - Part 4
Amazon Rainforest, Brazil
August 26 2032
Night was falling. Firefighting operations were over. The blazes, now unchecked, were growing. Across the horizon was billowing smoke and an intensifying ambient orange glow set in front of a dimming sun.
“All teams, check in,” Alveraz radioed from the passenger seat of a UNIRO jeep, racing through one of the makeshift roads that had been built to fight the fires. Lieutenant Lacey was driving the all-terrain vehicle.
“Captain Schuler. Wildfire Firefighting Squadron 1, checking in,” came the first response. “Almost to camp. No more than ten minutes away.”
“Captain Parnell. Wildfire Firefighting Squadron 2, checking in. We’re twenty minutes out.”
“Captain Chow. Makeshift Roadway and Runway Construction Squadron 2, checking in. Sixteen minutes out.”
“Good,” Alveraz said. “My own squadron and what’s left of Major Defoe’s is only five minutes away from base camp.”
“Any luck with reaching Red’s squadron?” asked Captain Chow.
“We still haven’t been able to reach anyone at base camp…” Alveraz sighed heavily. “We’re preparing for the worst. We will radio when we’ve arrived. Everyone stay sharp.”
“Backup is on the way, right, Alveraz?” radioed Captain Parnell.
“Yes,” she affirmed. “But it won’t be here for another ninety minutes at least. We are on our own until then.”
A groan from behind made Alveraz look over her shoulder. One of Defoe’s men, wounded from the gun battle thirty minutes earlier, was on a stretcher in the open bed of the jeep being tended to by her own team’s medic.
“How’s he doing, Voelcker?” she asked.
“He’s lost a lot of blood, captain,” the medic responded, shaking his head. “I’ve managed to stop the bleeding but if he doesn’t get more…” Voelcker trailed off, feeling he had given enough of an explanation about the inevitable.
“Just keep doing what you can,” Alveraz encouraged, turning back around. “Camp will have what he needs.”
“There are eighty-seven of us out here,” Lacey said as she spun the wheel to make a sharp turn, the vehicles LED headlights barely penetrating through the still intact brush surrounding the road. “All together we’d put up a pretty good fight against these guys, don’t you think? I mean… I know they have guns and all and we don’t but, we’ve got other means of defense.”
“Always the optimist,” Alveraz grinned as the jeep hit a bump in the road, knocking its occupants about. “Eighty-seven is a lot, lieutenant. But we have something that gives us even better chances than our numbers… Our brains. Anyone of us is a thousand times smarter than anyone of these guys. When we return to base camp we’ll turn it into a booby trapped fortress.”
“A full blast of water from one of our fire hoses could kill a man,” Voelcker said from the back.
“That’s right,” Alveraz agreed. “We’ve got enough water stored at camp in the tanks to last us a good while. Don’t worry guys, no matter what happens we’ll put up a fight. People have got to learn to stop fucking with UNIRO.”
“Amen,” Voelcker said with a fiery grit under his breath.
The convoy of six vehicles behind Alveraz’s rounded the last bend before their campsite and drove into a large clearing, coming to a stop side by side. Each vehicle’s powerful head and bar lights shown into the darkened UNIRO encampment, a collection of white shipping containers held up off the ground with blue outriggers and connected together with gangways covered by flexible black seals, like those found between passenger railcars. A solar farm connected to a battery storage system generated and maintained electrical power but to Alveraz’s suspicion it appeared to be completely out.
“Captain,” Lacey pointed, “look up there.”
Alveraz followed Lacey’s finger to the camp’s communications antenna. It was bent and smashed about two-thirds the way up its fifty-five foot height.
“That’s bad.” Voelcker muttered. “We won’t be able to send any long range transmissions without that antenna.”
“We had a whole other squadron staged here…” Lacey said anxiously.
“Command Support Squadron 4, do you read?” Alveraz radioed, starring into the unlit camp.
Nothing. The woods just echoed with the sound of insects, animals and whistling leaves blown about by the breeze. The sun had almost set but down where they were at the forest floor, hidden under the canopy, it was already almost completely black.
Alveraz calmly repeated her call. “Command Support Squadron 4, do you read?”
“Everyone stay in your vehicles,” Lieutenant Lacey said into her earpiece, looking through her window at the idling jeep beside them to their right. “Contact has not yet been made.”
“Captain Red,” Alveraz hailed again, “do you copy?”
Nothing. A stronger breeze began, moving the darkened branches and their leaves into a murmur of creaking and snapping.
“Alveraz to all UNIRO personnel. We are at base camp. Contact has not been made with Red’s squadron. The camp has lost power and the communications antenna appears damaged. We are parked 200 feet to the south of the main command containers. Rendezvous with us. I want everyone to stay together upon arrival. Do not approach the camp unless told otherwise.”
Just then a convoy of three heavy duty fire trucks emerged from the tree line on the opposite side of the camp. “Wildfire Firefighting Squadron 1 has arrived,” Captain Schuler radioed, relief abounding in her voice. “We’re coming over to you.”
“Good to see you, Maria,” Alveraz said into her earpiece. “We can use those trucks. They can take bullets… To a point.”
“Captain Alveraz,” radioed one of Defoe’s men from another jeep. “Surveillance drone is showing a number of small pocket fires have started since we began making our trip here. I swear they weren’t even there twenty minutes ago.”
“Position?” Alveraz asked.
“Downwind of us, ma’am,” the rescue officer said. “About four miles away, due west across a six mile long line stretching north to south. Winds are increasing and they are going to drive these fires straight for us. I’d say we only have thirty minutes before this camp is completely engulfed in flames.”
“Cowards,” Alveraz hissed. “They won’t even do it themselves.”
“That was probably your fault, captain,” Lacey smirked, overhearing the transmission. “You scared them… Besides, personally I’d prefer to face fire instead of guns.”
“I’d prefer to face the fire too,” Alveraz nodded, looking at Lacey. “Do you know why?”
“Why?” Lacey asked.
“Because we’re damn good at stopping it,” the captain smiled.
A deep, blood curtailing male scream ricocheted across the camp, freezing everyone in place. Alveraz, Lacey, and Voelcker looked to their right in the direction of the cry that imbued agony and torture. Their vision was only met with a pitch black forest along the camp’s eastern perimeter.
“Captain Alveraz,” radioed Lieutenant Gallagher from two vehicles over, Defoe’s squadrons second in command. “What the hell was that?” he anxiously asked.
Another scream, even more desperate sounding than the first, echoed helplessly from the same spot.
“Okay,” Lacey shivered, her chest painfully tightening as the air in the jeep seemed to freeze, “I’m not going to lie… I’m scared out of my mind right now.”
“Hold it together, lieutenant,” Alveraz eased, a stoic look on her face, staring through the passenger door window.
The scream turned into a long moan, and then, “Help me, please!” a man yelled. “Help! It hurts, it huuuuurts!”
Captain Schuler’s team and their three fire trucks pulled around to Alveraz’s left and stopped perpendicular to her own convoy’s vehicles with their headlights facing the direction of the ghostly shrieks.
“Schuler,” Alveraz radioed, “you hear that?”
“Wish I hadn’t,” Schuler responded from inside the cab of the first truck a few feet in front of the hood of Alveraz’s jeep.
“Aim your searchlight along the camp’s eastern tree line,” Alveraz instructed, not taking her eyes off the darkness. “Someone is there…”
“Heeeeelp!” the voice screamed again, fear tearing into it. “Please!” the man desperately sobbed. “Kill me! Kill me! Just kill me!”
“Oh God,” Voelcker shuttered.
Using a joystick inside the cab, Schuler rotated a large searchlight fixed atop of the truck’s water tank at its midsection towards the tree line. She briefly hesitated turning the light on, frightened of what it may reveal. With a deep breath, the captain flipped the necessary switch. A narrow bluish-white beam of intense light burst forward, illuminating a scene the on looking UNIRO personnel could have only unwilling dreamt in their worst of nightmares.
“Jesus Christ,” Schuler mumbled in grizzly shock over the radio.
Lacey covered her mouth, utterly disturbed by what she was seeing to the point where she thought she may vomit. “Oh no…” she trembled.
Alveraz balled her fist, anger and horror taking root in her bones.
Captain Red, leader of the base camp’s missing squadron, was crucified on a tree, hands and feet nailed in place, his white uniform soaked in dripping red blood.
Cover Photo Credit: João Barbosa on Unsplash