The soft wet earth of the rainforest swallowed Terrence with ease, the dirt giving way readily. The old man got a shallow grave, but he got one all the same, and by the time they were finished night had fallen.

The moon punched through the canopy above in a million different spots, diffusing and bathing the rainforest in its pale white glow. Jimmy took point as they resumed the trail, though whatever it was they were following wasn't trying to hide its tracks anymore. Still, Jimmy was taking it slow. The Ghindaring, or the Guwin-gan, or the Yaut-way or whatever wasn’t the only thing that could kill you in this forest.

Jimmy was evidently moving too slow for Jocko, who broke ranks to stride ahead. Jimmy hated the man more than maybe any other person he'd ever met. It was as if Jocko's every decision was calculated to make Jimmy hate him more. He was a perfect combination of pig-headed entitlement, idiocy and arrogance.

And when Jocko pushed forward a third time, Jimmy knew he had to say something or else he'd finally snap. I'll shoot Fred first, he thought, because Fred will never let me get away with killing a gub. And then I'll put a round in Jocko's back, just above the kidney. I'll drop him to the ground and take his shotgun away. With Terry and Fred dead, John'll probably leave. I'll have to shoo the kid away. And then I'll drag Jocko back to the river, and let the crocs eat him one piece at a time.

"You don't know this fuckin' bush, gub," Jimmy growled when he finished daydreaming. He walked to catch up to Jocko again. "You keep stepping in front of me, and someone's gonna get killed."

"That's why we're here, isn't it?" Jocko sneered in reply, oblivious to the threat. "To get someone killed. That's why we're all here."

John spoke up quickly, sensing the impending conflict. "We're here to capture some old Austrian cunt's slaves," he said matter-of-factly.

Jocko, still out in front, took some time to process the words. "He's Dutch," he eventually replied.

"What?" John asked, shaking his head.

"My father is Dutch, not Austrian," Jocko said coldly. As if the distinction mattered.

"Dutch, Austrian, all the same to me," Jimmy interjected as he caught up to Jocko, grabbing the gub's arm with one hand, and brandishing his knife in the other. "This is the last time I'll tell you. If you step in front of me again, I'll gut you."

Jocko's face, already pale in the moonlight, went paler still when he saw the knife. Jimmy yanked hard on the white cunt's arm to pull him back into line, and held eye contact as he resumed point. Jimmy sheathed his knife without looking away. Satisfied that the message had been sent, he finally looked back towards the path.

Just in time to see the small vine tripwire draped across it.

Jimmy's bare feet felt the vine pull tense as he stood on it, and the feet felt the vine go slack as the trap triggered. He was too late to catch himself. Off to his left, the vine's breaking set a branch in motion, and Jimmy waited for the inevitable to occur. Spikes, he imagined, are the common charge in a trap like this one, and he waited for the pointed bits of wood to punch through him. Instead, a pile of leaves slapped into his face.

For the briefest moment, he felt a surge of confused relief.

And then his face began to burn like it had been lit on fire. Not a campfire, or a branding iron sear, but the sort of heat he'd seen when, back at the boarding school, little Benji had fallen and tipped a pot of boiling hot lard on himself. Benji's skin had sloughed off in chunks, like it had turned to melted lard itself, and Jimmy's hands instinctively flew up to his face to hold the skin on. It wasn't moving. It didn't seem to be on fire at all.

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Yet the agony increased. Where Jimmy's hands touched, the fire intensified tenfold, but in mere moments the rest of his face was in just as much pain. His muscles tensed, radiating out from his head, down through his body. One of the muscles in Jimmy’s neck tore as his body involuntarily spasmed, but it made no difference. He couldn't feel it over the overwhelming torture washing across his face.

Jimmy had suffered at the boarding school, he had seen suffering all his life, but he had no point of reference for what was happening to him now. Each passing moment, the pain seemed to increase further. And yet each of those moments seemed to last an eternity to him.

He could feel his mind expanding as the pain took on a life of its own. Not a man of mathematics, he conceived of and formed a complex understanding of infinity. Jimmy, his only formal education in the wide array of corporal punishments the Catholic school system had invented, independently devised a theory of cardinality as it applied to the infinite, and he found himself categorising and enumerating his infinite torment in sets in an effort to still tell time.

In his burgeoning madness, Jimmy realised that it was his skin that was betraying him now. He didn't want to keep it on there, like Benji. Instead, he wanted it off. Needed it off. Jimmy’s nails dug into his scalp, trying to find their way in below the skin. One index finger managed and, in his haste, Jimmy ripped his hands down his face, gouging a channel deep through his forehead. The pain of it didn't register at all, and it did nothing to dull the still-raging inferno on his face. Jimmy had a revelation. His plant-struck right eye wasn't affixed as firmly to his face as his skin.

John had watched as Jimmy stepped on the vine trap, got slapped in the face by some leaves and then collapsed to the ground screaming. All of it happened in less than an instant, and in another instant Jimmy started clawing huge strips of flesh off his own face. John knew immediately what was wrong.

"What the fuck is going on?" Frederick shouted from the rear of the pack, towing Anna behind him.

"Guwin-gan," Anna said, her words garbled as she tried to talk through a swollen face and missing teeth. Frederick's hand balled to a fist and Anna flinched, but she stood herself back up again after a second.

"Shut the fuck up, bitch!" Frederick yelled over Jimmy's screaming. "What is it?"

"Gympie Gympie," John howled as he used a stick to poke the booby trap's charge of plant matter. He didn't know it for certain, but he knew plants like it existed out here and it would explain the reaction.

"If that's another monster, I'm fucking done with this place," Frederick growled.

"It's the suicide plant," Jocko said, his voice distant with the realisation of how close he'd come to it. "We had a Kanaka top himself after touching it."

Frederick shook his head in disbelief. "Get the fuck outta here. There's no such thing."

David was knelt down next to Jimmy, trapping one of the screaming man's arms between his legs. He had the other arm pinned, and he was spreading a mixture of mud and spit on Jimmy's face. It did nothing to stop the screaming. Blood streaked from Jimmy's face where he'd clawed at it. His right eyeball was bloodshot red and hanging half from its socket: the plant had struck him with his eye open there, it seemed, and Jimmy had tried to relieve himself of the pain.

Jimmy's head flopped back on the ground as he screamed and thrashed, the muscles in his neck wrecked. John knelt down beside David. He grabbed David's hand and stopped him from spreading more mud. "It's too damp here, mate," John said at a volume only he and David could hear. "There's no sun. It won't dry for hours."

David looked up at John and swallowed hard. "What the fuck do we do then? We can't leave him like this."

John slid his knife from its sheath with his other hand and he perched over Jimmy's torso. "We won't," he said to David, and he slid the blade deep into Jimmy's chest, deftly dodging the ribs and finding his heart. John found Jimmy's eyes as the knife pierced the beating muscle, and his mouth twitched in a half grin as the barefoot tracker's spirit left his body.

The bush was quiet again. Silent. Dead. John looked up at his posse, all of them staring at him. "Yaut-way don't set traps," he said, angry. "It's just the blackbird trying to slow us down."

John gathered some sticks, careful not to touch the trap, and he piled them into a hasty fire next to Jimmy's corpse.

"You gonna bury your man?" Frederick said grimly.

"Not gonna let the Kanaka slow us down, so we'll have to wait to bury him." John said flatly as he lit the fire. Scavengers all over avoided fires. Jimmy's corpse would decompose, and some bugs'd get him, but the lizards and birds would steer clear of the fire. The wood he'd used should burn for a good 18 hours. "When we come back."

Anna scoffed, a piteous noise, and then she spoke. "You won't."