Jungle Land Read online

  PRAISE FOR BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH FROM SEVEN (THE SERIES)

  “Richly detailed and satisfying.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “A fantastic story that will capture the attention of young readers and keep them engaged until the last page…Highly Recommended.” —CM Magazine

  “Strikingly realistic.”

  —YALSA YA Galley Teen Review

  PRAISE FOR SLEEPER FROM THE SEVEN SEQUELS

  “Flashy, quick and fun.” —Quill & Quire

  “A fast-paced, enjoyable entrée to this mystery/adventure series.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “The setting is vibrant, and the thrills are a mile-a-minute…Highly Recommended.” —CM Magazine

  JUNGLE

  LAND

  ERIC WALTERS

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2016 Eric Walters

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Walters, Eric, 1957–, author

  Jungle land / Eric Walters.

  (The seven prequels)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-1149-2 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1150-8 (pdf).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1151-5 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8595.A598J86 2016 jC813'.54 C2016-900477-5

  C2016-900478-3

  First published in the United States, 2016

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933649

  Summary: In this middle-grade novel, DJ travels with his grandfather to Central America and ends up hunted by armed gunmen.

  Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Design by Teresa Bubela

  Cover photography by iStock.com

  Author photo by Sofia Kinachtchouk

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  www.orcabook.com

  19 18 17 16 • 4 3 2 1

  For Tampa—gone but not forgotten

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  I startled, and my head jerked up. I was suddenly fully awake, surrounded by blue sky and a few fluffy white clouds, sitting in the copilot seat of an airplane. On the sound system was Frank Sinatra—doing it “his way.”

  “Did you have a nice nap, DJ?” my grandfather asked.

  “I just sort of drifted off…sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I fell asleep myself for a bit.”

  I gasped. “You did!”

  He chuckled, and I realized he was joking.

  “Of course, this baby is equipped with autopilot, so I guess I could drift off for a while and we’d be none the worse for wear,” he said.

  “Still, I should have stayed awake to keep you company.”

  “It’s a long flight, and I think the purring of the engines can lull you to sleep,” he said.

  “Yeah, it’s very, um, restful.”

  What I didn’t say was that I was unnerved by yesterday’s flight—which had been very bumpy—and I hadn’t gotten too much sleep last night. We’d been in the air for most of yesterday, stopping first in Jacksonville, Florida, and then flying on to Cancun, Mexico, where we’d spent the night. We’d left Cancun early, and we’d been in the air now for almost five hours. It was a long way to Central America from Ontario.

  The little orange motion-sickness pill I took every time I flew didn’t help me stay awake. Despite the many times I’d been in the air with my grandfather, I still felt sick to my stomach every time. He didn’t know I got airsick. He didn’t know I took medication every time I flew with him. Only my mother knew. I thought my grandfather would be disappointed in me if he knew. My mother said he’d understand, but she still kept my secret.

  My grandfather loved flying—probably even more than I hated it. And because I loved being with him, I didn’t want him to know how I really felt about flying. I must have been a pretty good actor, because he didn’t seem to.

  “There’s not much to see out there right now,” Grandpa said.

  I looked out and down. Beneath us was the Pacific Ocean, glistening in the bright sunlight. I looked all around, trying to find a hint of land, but there was nothing on the horizon. That, of course, meant there was no place to land if there was an emergency. Thank goodness for twin engines.

  “I guess I should just take it as a compliment that you have such faith in my flying that you can go to sleep,” he said.

  “You know I have complete faith in you!” I said.

  That was no lie. My grandpa wasn’t just my grandpa. He wasn’t just somebody I loved. He was somebody I really, really liked and looked up to.

  He had been flying for over fifty years. He had flown combat missions in the war and had piloted little planes around the world before he settled down to run a successful import/export business. Of course, that had put him in the air all the time, and my mother told us stories about how much he was gone while she and her sisters were little.

  He’d had only daughters—four of them—and those daughters had had only sons—six of us. My mother joked that we were the sons he’d never had. And I guess he was sort of the father I’d lost.

  Grandpa owned his own plane. It was a four-seat, single-engine Cessna. Although it had a range of a thousand kilometers, he used it mainly for short flights—just for going for a spin, as he put it. I’d been up for dozens and dozens of spins. Logically, I knew that he was a great pilot and that the Cessna was one of the safest, most reliable planes in the world. Still, even the safest, most reliable planes with the best pilots did crash.

  He’d borrowed a Piper Chieftain from a friend for this trip. It was a lot bigger than Grandpa’s own plane and could seat eight people. It also had two engines. The odds of both engines on a plane dying were really, really small. I knew because I’d looked it up.

  I thought my grandfather would have been happier in his Cessna, but he had arranged to use this plane because it had more range, and we were going a long way. This time we weren’t just going for a spin. We were going on what he called a real flight.

  Flying all the way to Central America was more flight than I wanted, but it was all part of the adventure. This was much, much more than a flight. This was a special adventure my grandpa had arranged just for me and him. He had decided he was going to take each of his grandsons on a trip.

  Originally, it was going to happen when each of us turned sixteen, but Grandpa had decided that he was getting too old to wait that long. So here I was, not quite thirteen, the oldest of the grandsons, and the first to go on one of the adventures.

  “This is perfect weather,” he said. “The sky is clear and the flying flat.”

  That was his way of saying that we hadn’t been bumped or jostled. I was grateful. I hated turbulence, and we’d had nothing but turbulence the day before.

  “I know it’s going to worry your mother that w
e’ll be out of cell-phone range when we land and won’t be able to contact her,” Grandpa said.

  “She worries.”

  He chuckled. “She does worry, there’s no question about that. I was afraid she was going to be too worried to allow us this little adventure.”

  “She worries about me going to the store,” I said.

  “I guess I understand. I still worry about my girls even though they’re grown-ups with kids of their own.”

  Grandpa had raised his “girls” by himself. His wife, my grandmother, had died when the girls were young, and he’d had to care for them by himself. Maybe that was why he had been there so much after my father died—he knew how hard it was to be a single parent.

  His being around was probably why Grandpa was so much more than a grandpa to us. He was there all the time at games and school concerts and graduations. I liked that a lot. He was there for all the grandchildren, but I think maybe even more for me and my twin brother, Steve.

  And while I’d never say this out loud, especially to Steve, I thought maybe I was his favorite of all the grandkids. After all, I was the first grandchild, and I was the one named after him—David. DJ was just a family nickname that was shorthand for David Junior. And I thought maybe Steve was starting to realize as well that I was Grandpa’s favourite.

  I was the older twin brother—by fifteen minutes. I couldn’t believe how much of a difference those fifteen minutes made between us.

  Since technically I was the oldest, I was the first grandson to go on the trip. I knew Steve was mad about my going before him. Not that he had to say it. Twins naturally understand a lot of what the other is thinking or feeling without having to use words. So I could read him and he could read me. That we had in common. But not much more. At least, not now. It wasn’t always that way.

  My mother and I sometimes talked about it. She thought some of it had to do with the death of our father. When she first talked to me about that, I felt like she thought it was because Steve loved our dad more or missed him more than we did. But she helped me to understand that that wasn’t what she meant. Dad’s death had hit us all hard, but it had seemed to hit us differently. We all got sad, but then Steve got angry.

  He seemed to look for a reason to get annoyed or angry, to throw something or take offense. I think he would have objected to a dish of ice cream if it wasn’t his idea to have one. Me, I just felt like I had to grow up faster. Mom needed help because Dad wasn’t there anymore, and somebody had to help.

  And then the strangest thing happened. I got bigger. Not just bigger, like getting older, but bigger physically than Steve. So much bigger that people started to think I was a lot more than fifteen minutes older than him—more like a year or even two years older. I guess I could understand him being annoyed about it, but it wasn’t like it was my fault, and it wasn’t even like he was that small. He was twelve and looked like a twelve-year-old. People thought I was fourteen. Steve said I acted like I was forty.

  Grandpa was going to take all six of his grandchildren on these special trips, and he had to start somewhere, so why not start with the oldest—even if I was only the oldest by fifteen minutes? He’d already told Steve he was going to be second, and I assumed Bunny would be the last because he was the youngest. It was funny how Steve seemed resentful that I was going away first but actually didn’t seem that excited about going himself. That was so Steve.

  “There it is on the horizon,” Grandpa said.

  I looked forward over the nose of the plane and saw a line of green on the horizon, and behind that some browns and grays rising into the sky.

  “That’s Central America?” I asked.

  “That it is. Some people think it’s as close to the Garden of Eden as you can get.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think that wherever your family is, is the best place in the world.”

  That made me smile inside.

  He was always saying things like that, and I knew he meant it. Grandpa always seemed to know the right thing to say—not just to me, but to everybody. He once told me that the world was filled with mainly two types of people: friends and friends that I hadn’t met yet. Being out with him meant continually running into people he knew or talking to people he didn’t. I liked that. He was so comfortable around people, and when I was with him I felt the same way.

  “I need you to take the wheel for a minute,” Grandpa said.

  Before I could think to object, he pulled off his headset, got up and squeezed between the seats. I grabbed the yoke—the control device on an airplane—with both hands and held the plane steady. I knew he could have simply put it on autopilot—and I wished he had—but this was his way of showing faith in me. It was pretty cool to be a twelve-year-old who was actually flying a plane, and I was glad he trusted me, but it still was a bit scary.

  Not that I’d flown much, but I had spent a lot of time “flying” a flight simulator. Grandpa thought I did it because I wanted to be a pilot. But really, I wanted to know as much about flying as I could possibly know just in case I had to actually fly someday.

  He came back and settled into his seat again, but he didn’t take the yoke right away. He slipped his headphones back on.

  “It’s going to be great to see Juan again,” Grandpa said.

  “How long has it been?”

  “It’s been much longer than it should have been. Decades. We used to do business together.”

  “What sort of things did you import and export from Central America?”

  “All sorts of things. It’s a wonderful part of the world. You’ll soon see.”

  “Will your friend meet us at the airport?”

  “In a manner of speaking. The airport is his home.”

  “He lives at the airport?”

  Grandpa laughed. “His property has an airstrip.”

  “Wow, that must be some property.”

  “His house is very impressive. I just hope the runway is in good shape.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” I asked, suddenly feeling uneasy.

  “I don’t think it’s used that much these days, but no worries—I’ve landed there many times before,” Grandpa said.

  “You have?”

  “We did our shipping by air. Of course, that was a long, long time ago.”

  We made the coast, and beneath us the blue of the ocean was replaced by the houses and streets of a small city. We were so low that I could make out individual houses, cars and even people. There was a big open field, and on that patch of green a soccer game was going on.

  “Pull the nose up a bit. We need to gain some elevation to get over the mountains,” Grandpa said.

  I pulled back on the yoke, and we started to climb.

  “How much farther do we have to go?” I asked.

  “Less than twenty minutes. I guess I should take back the controls.” He put his hand on the yoke, and I removed mine.

  I looked out my window. Soon the city was replaced by a carpet of green. I couldn’t see any houses or roads or anything—wait, there was a little line of blue, a river, just peeking out through the trees off to the right.

  “There’s not much down there,” I said.

  “Actually, there is a lot right beneath us. This jungle has the greatest biodiversity of any place on the planet.”

  “Biodiversity?”

  “It is home to almost 500,000 different species, of which 300,000 are insects. There are over 1,200 types of butterflies and 8,000 species of moths. There are animal species found no place else in the world. It is home to almost 900 species of birds, including hummingbirds and the scarlet macaw, which is perhaps the most colorful and beautiful bird in the world.”

  “I’d like to see some of those.”

  “Juan will definitely take us for a tour of the jungle around his property.”

  “That would be great. But what I meant by nothing being down there was that I don’t see any towns or even a road.”

  “That’s beca
use there aren’t any roads. That city we just passed over is the nearest civilization and is about forty kilometers downstream from my friend’s property. His place is completely surrounded by jungle. Juan has always liked his privacy.”

  “So flying in is the only way?”

  “You could hike in, and the river is big enough for small boats. And there, on the horizon, is his house.”

  I rose slightly in my seat, scanning the jungle until I located the house. Even from this height and distance, it was obvious that it was big.

  Grandpa banked the plane so we would pass to the left of the house. It got bigger as we got closer. It was massive. Not just big, but tall and ornate. It had three towers that made it look like a castle.

  The property itself was huge too. I could tell where it started because it was surrounded by a wall that separated the green of the jungle from the green of the grounds.

  “If there’s nobody around, why does your friend need a fence?” I asked.

  “There are other things to keep out. There are over twenty species of venomous snakes, as well as jaguars in the jungle and caimans in the river just over to the one side.”

  I saw a few glimpses of blue showing through the green canopy of the jungle.

  “What’s a caiman?” I asked.

  “It’s sort of like a more vicious version of an alligator.”

  “I thought alligators were pretty vicious.”

  “They are, but caimans are worse. They seem to enjoy killing. Sometimes they kill things they don’t even eat. Not that jaguars are any better,” he said. “You’ve seen trained lions and tigers in circus acts, right?”

  “On TV.”

  “You’ll never see a trained-jaguar act. They are solitary killers with the most powerful jaws in the feline family. They can crush bone with their bite.”

  “I hope that fence is high,” I said.

  “It’s as high as it needs to be. I’m going to bank now to bring us in line with the runway for landing.”

  I looked harder. I still didn’t see a runway. Wait, there was a little strip of brown just outside the wall and off to one side. “Is that the runway?”