The jungle woke before Alex did. A symphony of hoots, chirps, shrieks, and rustles echoed through the dense green walls around him. The kind of chaos that reminded you were somewhere alive and dangerous. Somewhere where humans didn't belong.
He blinked against the shaft of sunlight piercing through the canopy. His body ached like a wrecked machine—his back stiff from sleeping on a patch of roots, his right leg throbbing where the bruising had spread from the crash. Still, he was alive.
And that meant something.
Alex sat up slowly, looking around. The fire he'd lit the night before had burned to cold gray ash, its smoke long gone. The crashed remnants of Flight 779 were several hundred meters behind him now. He had decided to distance himself from the wreckage—too exposed, too loud. Last night's jaguar encounter had proved that the smell of blood and twisted metal was an open invitation to every predator in the forest.
Including human ones.
He took a long breath. In. Out. Then he reached for the crude map he'd started sketching in his notebook. Just lines and markers—landmarks he remembered. The ravine. The forked banyan tree. The direction of the sun. He wasn't lost, but he wasn't found either.
He checked the small radio again, rotating the dial with slow precision.
"Mayday… Flight 779… plane crash… coordinates unknown…"
Static.
Again.
"Still nothing." He sighed. The last thread connecting him to the outside world was silent.
A twig snapped behind him.
He froze.
The hair on the back of his neck rose as he turned, knife in hand.
A blur of gold and black lunged from the underbrush.
The jaguar.
But this time, it wasn't curious. It was angry. Hungry. Territorial.
Alex barely got his arm up in time, the weight of the animal slamming into him like a truck. He rolled with the momentum, dirt exploding into the air as he hit the ground. Claws ripped across his shoulder. He screamed—raw and primal—and slashed upward with the knife.
The blade met fur and flesh. A yowl rang out as the jaguar recoiled, bleeding from a deep gash on its flank.
Alex scrambled back, his heart pounding so loud he couldn't hear himself think. The cat circled, limping slightly, its eyes locked onto him. Not retreating. Not giving up.
He knew he couldn't outrun it.
So he made himself big. Loud.
He stood tall, arms raised, shouting.
"Get back! I'm not your prey!"
The jaguar snarled, hesitated… and then turned. Slowly. With deliberate grace, it melted back into the green, vanishing like a ghost.
Alex collapsed to his knees.
That was too close.
He spent the next hour cleaning and binding the claw marks with strips from his shirt and iodine from the first aid kit. The pain was sharp, but the adrenaline made it manageable.
Once the bleeding stopped, he packed what remained of his gear and moved westward. He needed water, higher ground, and hopefully—some sign of Ian.
The memory of Ian still haunted him. The last he saw of his friend was a bloody seat, torn open during the crash. No body. No sign. Just the faint hope that maybe, somehow, Ian had survived and wandered into the jungle like he had.
Alex wasn't giving up on him. Not yet.
By late afternoon, he stumbled upon a stream. Shallow, clean, flowing over smooth stones.
He drank carefully, filled his canteen, and rinsed the dried blood from his arms. But as he knelt there, something in the mud caught his eye.
A footprint.
Not his. Larger. Heavier.
And fresh.
Alex followed it upstream, carefully now. Slower. More silent.
The track led him through dense foliage until the trees began to thin. And there, just ahead, he saw them.
Three men.
Camo-clad. Armed with hunting rifles. Standing beside a small fire.
Alex crouched low in the brush, barely breathing. These weren't rescuers. These were professionals—but not the kind who came to help.
Poachers.
One of them laughed, tossing what looked like a piece of plane debris into the fire.
"Idiots should've stayed in the air."
Alex's blood ran cold.
They'd found the crash site. And they weren't just here to scavenge.
He backed away carefully—then stepped on a branch.
Snap.
"Did you hear that?" one of the men said.
"Over there!"
They raised their rifles.
Alex ran.
Bullets tore through the trees, barking bark and leaves into the air. He ducked under a low branch, leapt over a log, slid down a muddy slope. The sounds of pursuit followed—men cursing, shouting, crashing through the brush.
He didn't look back.
Instead, he ran toward a thicket of vines and twisted roots—places a rifle couldn't follow easily.
And then the jungle screamed.
Birds burst into the sky. Monkeys howled in every direction.
Then came the attackers.
They didn't come for Alex.
They came for the hunters.
Baboons. Dozens of them. Black-faced and furious. They dropped from the canopy like a wave of muscle and teeth, tearing into the hunters with shocking coordination.
Alex stopped, panting, hidden behind a tree.
The forest was fighting back.
One poacher went down under a pile of shrieking, clawing bodies. Another fired wildly into the branches before disappearing into the undergrowth, screaming.
The last man turned and ran, vanishing into the deeper trees.
And just like that, it was quiet again.
The baboons didn't follow Alex.
They didn't even look at him.
As if they knew.
That night, Alex built a small shelter beneath the roots of a fallen tree, his body still shaking. His mind replayed the scene over and over.
Why hadn't the animals attacked him?
Why were they protecting the jungle?
And what was the jungle hiding?
As he drifted into uneasy sleep, he dreamed of symbols.
Spirals carved in stone.
Eyes glowing from the treetops.
A voice whispering in a language he didn't know—but understood.
"Protect the heart."
He woke in a cold sweat.
The jungle was silent again.
Too silent.
He wasn't alone anymore.