Майкл Крайтон – Jurassic Park / Парк Юрского периода (страница 2)
She bent to perform mouth-to-mouth, but Manuel grabbed her shoulder fiercely, pulling her back. “No,” he said. “The hupia will cross over.”
“Manuel, for God’s sake!”
“No.” He stared at her fiercely. “No. You do not understand these things.”
Bobbie looked at the body on the ground and realized that it didn’t matter; the boy was dead. Manuel called for the men, who came back into the room and took the body away. Ed appeared, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, muttering, “I’m sure you did all you could,” and then she watched as the men took the body away, back to the helicopter, and it lifted thunderously up into the sky.
“It is better,” Manuel said.
Bobbie was thinking about the boy’s hands. They had been covered with cuts and bruises, in the characteristic pattern of defense wounds. She was quite sure he had not died in a construction accident; he had been attacked, and he had held up his bands against his attacker. “Where is this island they’ve come from?” she asked.
“In the ocean. Perhaps a hundred, hundred and twenty miles offshore,”
“Pretty far for a resort,” she said.
Manuel watched the helicopter. “I hope they never come back.”
Well, she thought, at least she had pictures. But when she turned back to the table, she saw that her camera was gone.
The rain finally stopped later that night. Alone in the bedroom behind the clinic, Bobbie thumbed through her Spanish dictionary. The boy had said “raptor,” and, despite Manuel’s protests, she suspected it was a Spanish word. Sure enough, she found it in her dictionary. It meant “ravisher” or “abductor.”
That gave her pause. The sense of the word was suspiciously close to the meaning of hupia. Of course she did not believe in the superstition. And no ghost had cut those hands. What had the boy been trying to tell her?
Bobbie looked at the stars. The whole scene was quiet, so normal, she felt foolish to talk of vampires and kidnapped babies.
FIRST EPISODE
Mike Bowman drove the Land Rover through the Cabo Blanco Biological Reserve, on the west coast of Costa Rica. According to the guidebooks, Cabo Blanco was unspoiled wilderness, almost a paradise.
They had come to Costa Rica for a two-week holiday.
The Land Rover bounced in a pothole, splashing mud. Seated beside him, Ellen said, “Mike, are you sure this is the right road? We haven’t seen any other people for hours.”
“Darling, you wanted a deserted beach,” he said, “and that’s what you’re going to get.”
Ellen shook her head doubtfully. “I hope you’re right.”
“Yeah, Dad, I hope you’re right,” said Tina from the back seat. She was eight years old.
“Trust me, I’m right.” He drove in silence a moment. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Look at that view. It’s beautiful.”
The road began to descend, and Mike Bowman concentrated on driving. Suddenly a small black shape flashed across the road and Tina shrieked, “Look! Look!” Then it was gone, into the jungle.
“What was it?” Ellen asked. “A monkey?”
“Maybe a squirrel monkey,” Bowman said.
“Can I count it?” Tina said. She was keeping a list of all the animals she had seen on her trip, as a project for school.
“I don’t know,” Mike said doubtfully.
Tina consulted the pictures in the guidebook. “I don’t think it was a squirrel monkey,” she said. “I think it was just another howler.” They had seen several howler monkeys already on their trip, “Hey,” she said, more brightly. “According to this book, ‘the beaches of Cabo Blanco are full of wildlife, including howler monkeys, three-toed sloths, and coatimundis[1]. You think we’ll see a three-toed sloth, Dad?”
“I bet we do.”
The road sloped downward through the jungle, toward the ocean.
Mike Bowman felt like a hero when they finally reached the beach: two miles of white sand, utterly deserted. He parked the Land Rover in the shade of the palm trees and got out the box lunches. Ellen changed into her bathing suit; Tina was already running down the beach: “I’m going to see if there’s a sloth.”
Ellen Bowman looked around at the beach, and the trees. “You think she’s all right?”
“Honey, there’s nobody here for miles,” Mike said.
“What about snakes?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mike Bowman said. “There are no snakes on a beach.”
“Well, there might be…”
“Honey,” he said firmly. “Snakes are cold-blooded. They’re reptiles. They can’t control their body temperature. It’s ninety degrees on that sand. If a snake came out, it’d be cooked. Believe me. There are no snakes on the beach. Let her go. Let her have a good time.”
Tina ran until she was exhausted and then she looked back toward her parents and the car, to see how far she had come. She wanted to stay right here, and maybe see a sloth. Tina sat in the sand under the shade of palm trees and noticed many bird tracks in the sand. Costa Rica was famous for its birds. The guidebooks said there were three times as many birds in Costa Rica as in all of America and Canada.
In the sand, some of the three-toed bird tracks were small, and so faint they could hardly be seen. Other tracks were large, and cut deeper in the sand. Tina was looking idly at the tracks when she heard a chirping, followed by a rustling in the mangrove thicket.
Did sloths make a chirping sound? Tina didn’t think so, but she wasn’t sure. The chirping was probably some ocean bird. She waited quietly, not moving, hearing the rustling again, and finally she saw the source of the sounds. A few yards away, a lizard emerged from the mangrove roots and looked at her.
Tina held her breath. A new animal for her list! The lizard stood up on its hind legs, balancing on its thick tail, and stared at her. Standing like that, it was almost a foot tall, dark green with brown stripes along its back. Its tiny front legs ended in little lizard fingers that wiggled in the air. The lizard cocked its head as it looked at her.
Tina thought it was cute. Sort of like a big salamander. The lizard wasn’t frightened. It came toward her, walking upright on its hind legs. It was hardly bigger than a chicken, and like a chicken it bobbed its head as it walked. She noticed that the lizard left three-toed tracks that looked exactly like bird tracks. The lizard came closer to Tina. She kept her body still, not wanting to frighten the little animal. She was amazed that it would come so close. This lizard was probably tame. Slowly, Tina extended her hand, palm open.
The lizard paused, cocked his head, and chirped. And then, without warning, the lizard jumped up onto her outstretched hand. Tina could feel its little toes pinching the skin of her palm, and she felt the surprising weight of the animal’s body pressing her arm down.
And then the lizard scrambled up her arm, toward her face.
“I just wish I could see her,” Ellen Bowman said. “That’s all. Just see her.”
“I’m sure she’s fine.”
“I just wish I could see her, is all,” Ellen repeated.
Then, from down the beach they heard their daughter’s voice. She was screaming.
“I think she is quite comfortable now,” Dr. Cruz said, and lowered the plastic flap of the oxygen tent around Tina as she slept. Mike Bowman sat beside the bed, close to his daughter. Chnica Santa Maria, the modern hospital in Puntarenas, was spotless and efficient.
But, even so, Mike Bowman felt nervous. His only daughter was ill, and they were far from home.
When Mike had first reached Tina, she was screaming hysterically. Her whole left arm was bloody, covered with small bites, each the size of a thumbprint. And there were flecks of sticky foam on her arm, like a foamy saliva.
He carried her back down the beach to the car. Almost immediately her arm began to redden and swell. Mike couldn’t forget the drive back to civilization while his daughter screamed in fear and pain, and her arm grew more bloated and red. By the time they reached the hospital, the swelling had spread to her neck, and then Tina began to have trouble breathing.
“She’ll be all right now?” Ellen said, staring through the plastic oxygen tent.
“I believe so,” Dr. Cruz said. “I have given her another dose of steroids, and her breathing is much easier.”
Mike Bowman said, “About those bites…”
“We have no identification yet,” the doctor said. “I myself haven’t seen bites like that before. But you’ll notice they are disappearing. It’s already quite difficult to make them out. Fortunately I have taken photographs for reference. And I have washed her arm to collect some samples of the sticky saliva – one for analysis here, a second to send to the labs in San Jose, and the third we will keep frozen in case it is needed. Do you have the picture she made?”
“Yes,” Mike Bowman said. He handed the doctor the sketch that Tina had drawn, in response to questions from the admitting officials.
“This is the animal that bit her?” Dr. Cruz said, looking at the picture.
“Yes,” Mike Bowman said. “She said it was a green lizard, the size of a chicken or a crow.”
“I don’t know of such a lizard,” the doctor said. “She has drawn it standing on its hind legs…”
“That’s right,” Mike Bowman said. “She said it walked on its hind legs.”
Dr. Cruz frowned. He stared at the picture a while longer.