ood runs out southwest of Santarém. The crew is weak, starving, light-headed. Happy, chattering monkeys are everywhere, mocking them. So Strickland starts firing. Monkeys fall like aguaje fruit, and men gasp in horror. This annoys Strickland. He advances against a gut-shot monkey, machete raised. The soft-furred animal curls into a woeful ball, its hands pressed over its sobbing face. It is like a child. Like Timmy or Tammy. This is like slaughtering children. He flashes back to Korea. The children, the women. Is this what he’s become? The surviving monkeys scream in sorrow, and the sound pins into his skull. He turns away and attacks a tree with the machete until it spits white wood.

Other men gather the bodies and drop them in boiling water. Don’t they hear the monkeys screaming? Strickland scoops up moss, plugs his ears with it. It doesn’t help. The screaming, the screaming. Dinner is rubbery gray balls of monkey gristle. He doesn’t deserve to eat but does anyway. The screaming, the screaming.

The wet season, whatever the fuck they call it, sniffs them out. The cloudburst is hot, like offal splatter. Henríquez quits trying to wipe steam from his glasses. He walks blind. He is blind, thinks Strickland. Blind to believe he could head up this expedition. Henríquez, who’s never fought a war. Henríquez, who can’t hear the monkeys’ screams. The screams, Strickland realizes, are just like those of the villagers in Korea. As terrible as these sounds are, they tell Strickland what to do.

There’s no need to incite a coup. Attrition does the job. A candirú spine fish, agitated by driving rain, darts up the first mate’s urethra while he’s pissing into the river. Three men take him to the nearest town and are never seen again. The next day, the Peruvian engineer wakes up spotted with purple punctures. A vampire bat. He and a friend are superstitious. They’re gone. Weeks later, a torn mosquito net leads to one of the índios bravos being bitten to death, blanketed in tracuá ants. Finally, the Mexican bosun, best pal to Henríquez, is struck in the throat by a bright green papagaio viper. Seconds later, blood spurts from every pore of his body. There’s no hope for him. General Hoyt taught Strickland just where to put the Beretta, right at the base of the bosun’s skull, so that death comes quick.

Then they are five. With guides, seven. Henríquez hides belowdecks, filling his logbook with daymare transcripts. His straw hat, once so crisp, has collapsed into its new role as bedpan. Strickland visits and chuckles at the captain’s erratic mumbling.

“Are you motivated?” Strickland asks him. “Are you motivated?”

No one asks Richard Strickland about his motivation. Until now, he didn’t have an answer. Never gave a shit about Deus Brânquia, that’s for sure. Now there’s nothing in the world he wants more. Deus Brânquia has done something to him, changed him in ways he suspects can’t be reversed. He’ll capture it with what’s left of the Josefina crew—aren’t they vestigios now, too? Then it’s home, finally home, for whatever it’s still worth. He masturbates under a torrid rain, above a nest of baby snakes, picturing silent, tidy sex with Lainie. Two dry bodies shifting like blocks of wood on a boundless veldt of tight, white sheets. He’ll make it back there. He will. He’ll do what the monkeys say, and then it will all be over.