Deadfall: Agent 21 by Chris Ryan Page B

and had steamed up slightly.
    ‘I don’t think it will. It doesn’t want a fight any more than we do. Don’t drink the water till I’ve checked a few metres upstream for dead animals.’
    Raf started walking carefully towards the stream. Zak was reluctant to follow – the roar of the leopard was still echoing in his ears and he could still see those sharp teeth in his mind – but his throat was parched; he needed water. A minute later, when Raf had announced it safe, he was kneeling by the river bank, filling his cupped hands with cool water and glugging it back.
    He had just swallowed his third mouthful of water when he felt a sharp pain in the side of his abdomen. ‘
Ouch!
’ he hissed. His fingers felt towardsthe location of the pain. There was a bulge beneath his shirt, the size of a golf ball.
    Gingerly, he lifted the shirt up.
    It looked like a slug, only bigger. And it was clamped fast to his skin! As Zak lifted his shirt a bit higher, he realized that although it was the biggest, it wasn’t the only one. There were eight more of these slug-like creatures, each the size of his thumbnail, suckered onto his skin.
    ‘Er, Gabs,’ he said quietly. The other three were all bending down and drinking. ‘
Gabs!
’
    She looked over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed and she stood up. ‘OK, sweetie,’ she said. ‘Try not to panic. They’re leeches. They probably attached themselves to you when you brushed past them in the bush.’
    Malcolm was looking at Zak’s abdomen with wide eyes. He scrambled to raise his own shirt and a look of relief passed his face when he saw nothing, but then he frowned. Bending down, he rolled up his right trouser leg. Sure enough, four or five of the revolting little beasts had stuck themselves to his skin. He whimpered and tried to pull one of them off. It wouldn’t shift. ‘Get off!’ he shouted. ‘
Get them off me!’
    ‘Leave it,’ Gabs said sharply. ‘They’ll fall off by themselves when they’ve drunk enough blood.’
    Malcolm turned white.
    ‘She’s right, mate,’ Raf added. ‘They’re not as bad as they look. I saw one in Borneo once, had eight big teeth and feeds off the mucus up your nose . . .’
    ‘
Raf!
’ Gabs said. ‘That’s
not
helpful. Seriously, Malcolm, we’ve probably all got them. They’ll have fallen off by nightfall.’ She pointed at the especially large leech on Zak’s side. ‘But that’s a bull leech. It’ll get three times bigger than that if we let it, and could hurt a lot. We need to deal with it.’
    Zak felt a bit faint as he nodded and lowered his shirt over the bull leech. ‘How?’ he asked.
    ‘We’ll burn it off. But let’s find somewhere to make camp first. It’ll be dark in a couple of hours and it’ll take us that long to make a shelter.’ She turned to Raf. ‘We should get away from the water before feeding time.’
    Raf nodded and, wordlessly, led them back up the way they’d come.
    Zak felt as though his whole body was crawling with creatures as they navigated from tree notch to tree notch, and he could see that Malcolm, up ahead, was trembling. The patch of skin where the bull leech was sucking his blood throbbed painfully. He resisted touching it through his shirt to see how fat it was getting.
    Keep your mind on the jungle
, he told himself asthey continued to trek.
Don’t let your concentration lapse
.
    Twenty minutes passed before Raf stopped again. They found themselves in a small clearing, about five metres by five. The canopy overhead was still thick, but the ground was fairly clear. The trees all around were covered with large palm leaves. ‘Wait here,’ Raf said, before disappearing into the jungle again. He returned a couple of minutes later. ‘Cruz’s path is about thirty metres away,’ he said. ‘We’re still on the ridge line, so water can’t run down towards us.’ He bent over, scraped some leaves away from a patch of ground and touched the earth. ‘Dry,’ he said. ‘We’ll be OK