fiction #3- "soucouyant" part 3.

i wondered as i dove into this process of serialising my short stories, if i'd like them better broken into 'chapters', how hard it'd be to segment them, and if i'd find a way to make the 'chapters' even close to the same length.
i still don't know.
oh well, here's 'chapter 3'. enjoy.

"At first it was real quiet. No news, no rumours – so little information about how things going that we couldn’t even enjoy some speculative small talk. We was assuming it was because they had to be working non-stop trying to finish their research before the mosquitoes finish them.
But instead of them studying the frogs for a few weeks and running back home to publish like we expect, all of a sudden we start to hear whispers from Loango. No details at first, just whispers that something wrong. Then it was something wrong with one of the foreign science boys. When the word hit, one of them disappear.
Everybody on ground level start talking about what this mean – how it will affect our reputation, what it will do to tourism on our end, what the scientists’ home countries will say, how we shoulda never let them go up there in the first place.
Of course, the government saying everything fine, their guards all around the area “protecting the ecosystem”, but still we hearing one gone, and the rest torn between looking for him and doing what they come for. And now the rumours start with a vengeance: the other scientists say they refuse to worry because maybe he sneaking in some solo research so he could be the first to publish anything based on the expedition; they say they not staying on this godforsaken mountain in some middle-of-nowhere island, even for a unique species; they want more guides while they up there; they coming down right away; they can’t make up their minds what they doing...
The back-and-forth went on until finally we hear the scientists taking shifts, trying to look for the missing one and continue researching. Some more days pass without seeing him, and it looking like something wrong for real – then they find him out in the bush beyond the camp.
They couldn’t tell what happened to him. They say he look like somebody drip-dry him from the inside, then wring him out. So the government send some local doctors and police up El Tucuche to check it out. At first, they try to keep it quiet, but you know how talk could spread. They rush back down even faster than the government send them up. They see the body and know one time what happened. He was shrivel up like a salt prune, and when they check for what they was hoping they wouldn’t find, it was there."

walk good.