But then, it wasn’t like he’d had a refreshing night’s sleep. At Raf’s insistence, they’d pulled the corpses of Cruz’s flight team out of their aircraft, and dragged them a good thirty metres away to the edge of the rainforest. ‘It’s fresh meat,’ Raf had said bluntly. ‘We don’t want to stay too close to it.’ The four of them had then spent the remaining couple of hours of darkness in the protection of the aircraft’s cabin. Zak found himself in the pilot’s seat, and his skin recoiled from a patch of sticky wetness by the headrest. His few moments of sleep were haunted by images of overturning aircraft and African boys with scarred faces chasing him down jungle pathways. He woke feeling like he hadn’t slept at all. Malcolm was still sleeping in the seat behind him. He was nursing his wounded elbow as he slept. The rag that bound the wound was soaked in blood and a couple of flies buzzed around it. Zak tried to shoo them away, but the flies ignored him. Raf and Gabs were already up and about, so he slipped out of the cabin to join them in the clearing.
