Slowly, the panicky feeling ebbed, leaving only aches and pains in its place. He watched the retreating crocodile. The post-adrenaline crash left him giddy.
Well, gosh, get a load of that, he thought. Just like Tarzan!
Wally pounded his chest with both fists. The jungle echoed with his best imitation of Johnny Weissmuller.
But the post-adrenaline crash hit him hard. Almost before the last echoes of his triumphant yell had faded away, his eyelids became too heavy for him to lift. Heavier than the boat, heavier even than the crocodile. The need for sleep defeated him before he could towel off.
Something bumped his neck. A loud clink snapped him out of a deep nap some time later. The ghostly little girl stood over him, a ten-inch knife clutched in her tiny fist.
Bahr al-Ghazal Region
The Sudd, South Sudan
The Caliphate of Arabia
The Ghazi commando shrieked wildly as Ayiyi, clinging to his back, plunged his fangs into his shoulder through the tail of his green-and-white checked keffiyeh. The boy face above the spider body gleamed with Christmas glee.
“That’s the way, man!” Tom shouted. The camp grew flames, whipping like pale yellow and orange banners in the merciless sun. A Ghazi jumped from behind a blazing BMP-3, aiming a stubby AKSU carbine at Tom’s face. Tom plucked it from his hands and tied the barrel in a knot, shattering the synthetic forestock. Then he handed it back. “I know it’s trite, man, but sometimes the old ways are best.”
The dude had balls, Tom had to give him that. Rather than accept the useless steel pretzel back he batted it away and fired a brutal sidekick into Tom’s solar plexus.
Tom had already bent his body at the center to bring the rim of his rib cage protectively over the vulnerable nerve junction. He took a step back. “Tae kwon do, huh? Nice shot. Try this on for size.” He drove a palm-heel strike into the center of the man’s chest. The commando’s eyeballs popped clear of their sockets. Juice squirted from his nose and mouth and ears as his rib cage flexed clear to his spine, squishing heart and lungs and liver and other incidentals. The Ghazi flew up and away, flopping like a rag doll, to slam against the radar dish of the armored barge that had dropped the elite mechanized recon squadron here on the west flank of the Simba Brigades.
Tom’s kid aces, augmented by two were-leopards and a squad of non-shape-shifting Leopard Man commandos, were raising adequate hell among the cars and crews. Tom wanted the barge. Blowing up and sinking it would look really cool for the cameras. Hei-lian and her crew were squatting ass-deep in a nasty stagnant pool a quarter mile away, capturing the action through the papyrus shoots.
It would’ve been easier, of course, to zap the barge before it off-loaded the squadron, but Doc Prez wanted his new aces showcased in action, showing the world how not just every ethnic group but every age group of the People’s Paradise was stepping up to fight imperialism.
Tom raced toward the papyrus screen at the water’s edge. Without pause he dove in. Drawing in a deep breath he willed himself to change even before his outstretched fingertips touched the roiled brown syrupy surface.
Then he floundered, his belly scraping bottom. What the fuck? he wondered in amazement. I’m supposed to be a fucking super-dolphin now!
Another voice, deep and sonorous, said clearly in his mind: You are unworthy. I care nothing for these land dwellers. Your madness endangers the creatures of the sea as well. I go, and wish you only failure.
The words were French, with a Québécois accent. He had never heard that cold, contemptuous voice before. As the Radical. But in memories from his hated hippie predecessor he recalled hearing it from his own altered mouth . . .
In his befuddlement Tom ran out of air and broke through gasping ten yards from shore. A gunner on the barge’s superstructure spotted him. A 12.7-millimeter heavy machine gun opened up like Doom with a stutter, throwing up really enormous jets of water around him.
He sucked deep breath and dove. The water deepened rapidly. Despite its weight of armor, the Caliphate barge had a shallow draught for river work, especially relieved of a hundred tons of armored car. Tom had plenty of clearance to swim beneath to the other beam. He may not have a dolphin’s torpedo speed, but he still swam with more than human strength in arms and chest.
When he broke the surface of the water there wasn’t a face in sight on the barge’s starboard side. Everybody’s attention was fixed on the battle the other way, no doubt looking for the shattered body of the PPA’s unmistakable field marshal and general rock star of World Revolution, the Radical.
He laughed. Laughing, he rose. He could have scuttled the vessel with a single blinding lance of white light. Instead he stretched out his hand. “Burn, baby, burn!” he shouted, and rained down fire from the sky.
Noel Matthews’s Apartment
Manhattan, New York
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not looking to start a revolution. But somebody’s got to step up to the plate because governments have failed. We live in the freakin’ twenty-first century, and here we are with people starving, and armies fighting in the Sudan, and for what? Oil? National pride? We could achieve wonders, hell, make that miracles—end hunger, travel to the stars, have perfect privacy and total freedom, but we’ve got to get out of the trees. We’ve got to tamp down the monkey brain. . . .
Noel leaned back from the computer screen. The rant continued for several more pages, but he had read enough to have a sense of the writer. An idealist, but angry and cynical. I can work with that.
Working from the handle provided by Broadcast, Noel had determined that the Signal on Port 950 was really Robert Cumming, age twenty-three. He lived in Chicago, Illinois, and he was a joker. He avoided almost all human contact, but he still had to eat.
Noel checked his watch. The groceries were about to be delivered to 865 Lake Shore Drive, apartment 723.
People’s Palace
Kongoville, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
He was still freaked out when he stalked into the war room of the Nshombos’ new vanity palace in K-ville, a great gleaming concrete iceberg, a true city within a city, if still a bit raw. The air-conditioning inside was like a frigid river flowing outward. Tom still welcomed it after the stinking sauna heat of the Sudd, and the diesel-reeking heat of K-ville. But it raised goosebumps on his arms.
That fucker, he raged. He stole Aquarius from me. He lessened me. Long ago, when his enemy ran around in a purple Uncle Sam suit calling himself “Captain Trips,” he invoked his “friends” by taking unique decoctions of psychoactive chemicals, each and every one devised by Meadows in hopes of invoking him. The man who called himself Tom Weathers now. The Radical.
At last Mark Meadows got his way. And Tom had had things his way ever since. But it had come at a cost: Tom didn’t dare use any kind of drug more mind-warping than coffee or chocolate. No pot. No booze. Not even antihistamines. Because anything that altered Tom’s consciousness risked snapping his mind and body back into the long dark prison of Meadows’s subconscious.
But the only way of reclaiming the surly shape-shifting Canuck who called himself Cetus Dauphine was to re-create the drugs that Meadows used to invoke him. Tom felt sick certainty that wouldn’t work, either: no formulation his enemy had ever tried had sufficed to bring back Starshine after he “died,” or martial-arts goddess Moonchild once she retired from the world in horror at taking a human life. And while Tom had access to many of his predecessor’s memories, he lacked Mark’s biochemical genius. He couldn’t even try.
“Oh, Tom,” Alicia Nshombo said, rising as he came through the automatic sliding door. Video screens covered the walls of the room beyond, showing moving scenes of battle in the Sudd, of Congo-basin forest, of everyday life in K-ville. “I am so glad you are back.”
Dr. Nshombo sat behind a vast gleaming black African blackwood desk. As usual the President-for-Life’s face showed no more reaction than the desktop.
“The United Nations has offered
to broker a peace conference between ourselves and the Caliphate of Arabia,” Nshombo said gravely. If he was capable of talking any other way Tom had never heard.
“So? Fuck ’em.”
Alicia uttered a little gasp and pressed fingers to her mouth. She’d reacted the same way the thousand other times she’d heard Tom use such language. “Tom, cher,” she said. “Please don’t take such a tone with my brother. You need each other so much.”
Dr. Nshombo wasn’t one to mouth meaningless phrases. He went on as if Tom had not spoken. “I have decided it is in our best interests to participate. I mean to send our foremost jurist, Dr. Apollinaire Okimba, as our representative. He enjoys an impeccable reputation on the world stage. His participation will play well, as our clever young friend the Chinese colonel would say.”
“You’re shitting me,” said Tom. “You’re not actually gonna negotiate with this fat imperialist Allah freak?”
“Our representative will deliver to Siraj our ultimatum: either he withdraws his support from the genocidal aggressors in South Sudan and pulls back his armies, or we shall destroy those armies, depose him, and liberate the suffering people of the Middle East from the chains of a brutal superstition. There will be no negotiation.”
Tom could only stare at his old comrade. “Yeah, well, that will play well, I’m sure.”
Dr. Nshombo’s brows twitched a millimeter closer together. It was the equivalent of a normal man throwing a rage fit. But Alicia’s mouth crumpled, pursed between plump cheeks, and her eyes got dewy behind her bat-wing glasses at Tom’s rudeness. “But Tom,” she said, “if the Arab gives in, the war will end.”
“Siraj won’t give in. It’d mean crawling home on his belly. And the U-fucking-N? Those Committee fuckers helped protect Bahir when he kidnapped my daughter!” He was half standing and all shouting.
Nshombo faced him impassively. “The Revolution must come before your petty desires for vengeance, Tom, but I am not unmindful of the wrong you suffered.” Then he actually smiled. “It is not my intention to send Dr. Okimba to the Paris peace conference at all.”
“No?” Tom goggled.
Dr. Nshombo began to laugh.
Robert Cumming’s Apartment
Chicago, Illinois
One hundred dollars simplified the negotiation with the delivery boy. Noel stood in front of the apartment door, set down one sack, and rang the bell. He idly noticed that the sacks contained mostly pasta Meals in a Sack, bags of potato and tortilla chips, and several different kinds of cookies.
He expected a behemoth to answer the door. What actually stood framed in the doorway once it was opened was an incredibly tall and incredibly thin monochrome joker. Despite his youth, his hair was grey, his eyes were grey, and his skin was greyer. “You’re not Chuck,” Cumming said.
“No.”
“What do you want?”
Noel was pleased. He hated people who didn’t get to the heart of a matter, and instead wasted time asking, “Who are you?” and “How did you get here?” or “How did you get the groceries?”
“I’m the man who’s going to give you the opportunity to change the world,” Noel said.
Wednesday,
December 16
In the Jungle, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Rusty, I need you. We should never have split up. I can’t do this. I can’t.
But there was no choice. She’d already lost one of her charges to the jungle, and she worried about Rusty, about where he was and who might be after him. The despair threatened to overwhelm her: they might both be dead soon, Wally lost in the jungle somewhere, and her with these children who clung to her as if she were their only hope.
She kept the kids crawling forward as long as they could during the daylight hours, and huddled together with them around a small fire at night, when the sounds of the jungle surrounded them and their imaginations jumped at every noise. She fed them from the food her seed pouch could produce—strangely, to Jerusha, it seemed the jungle wasn’t the best place to forage and find food. You are their only hope. She could nearly hear Rusty saying it. Cripes, Jerusha, you’re all they have. You gotta do this.
So she would: without much hope, without much optimism. Because going forward was the only path she had. Because they would all die if she gave up now.
They came across a village one day. With some trepidation, Jerusha sent Cesar into the village to inquire about a telephone. She had the children wait well away while she crept closer in case Cesar ran into trouble. She carried one of the automatic weapons with her, though she knew it would be her last choice—her hand stayed near the seed pouch.
But Cesar came back safely, shaking his head. “No telephone,” he said. “They say the lines are all cut down around here. There are no phones. You have to go all the way to Kalemi, they told me. There maybe they have phones.” He shrugged. “It’s a long walk to Kalemi. But we can get there.” She almost laughed at his confidence, wishing she were as sure as he was.
Late that afternoon, they came to a river. Jerusha wasn’t certain whether this was the Lukuga looping across their path, or some other stream, but there it was: a slow-moving brown ribbon in the green landscape, a hundred yards across.
Jerusha muttered under her breath, checking the compass. Yes, east was that way, across the river; yes, the current was moving north. She looked to her right. Upstream, the river curved ominously to the west before becoming lost in the trees and brush and the high understory of the jungle. She could turn south and follow the river, hoping it would curve east again soon and allow them to continue toward the lake.
Or they could try to cross. Here.
She hesitated. She wanted to cry, to break down and let the fears run their course, but she couldn’t. The children crowded around her as they always did when they stopped. She could feel their hands clutching at her, their voices calling.
“Let’s all rest for a bit,” she told them, and the kids dropped gratefully to the ground. They pressed next to her and each other as she sat, snuggling up to her in a mass of dusky skin and ragged clothes.
Waikili did not sit. On the outside of the rough circle around her, he turned slowly with his blind eyes as if seeing a vision. “Bibbi Jerusha,” he said. “They awful close.”
Jerusha sighed. She turned, looking back over her shoulder into the green expanse behind them, imagining she could see motion there in the green twilight. “All right,” she said, “then we have to go across.”
“But Bibbi Jerusha,” Naadir said, her skin pulsing bright even in the sunlight. “I can’t swim!”
Others echoed the cry: Abagbe, Gamila, Chaga, Hafiz . . .
“We’re going to walk across,” she told them. “You just have to trust me.”
The seeds in her pouch were dwindling, but there were still several kudzu seeds, and she’d stripped the seed pods from some of the local vines she’d found as they’d walked. She walked to where the banks of the river seemed to be closest together, dropping several seeds there a few feet apart from each other. The vines erupted from the ground, and she directed their growth as if it were a symphony, weaving the tendrils in and out from themselves so that they formed a tight mat that slid down the shallow bank and out into the water, the tendrils writhing and curling as they grew, the roots digging deeper into the earth and the base of the vines thickening. The children watched, shouting and laughing as the mat—three or four feet wide now—slid across the river pushed by the growth behind it, the current tugging it downstream.
Gardener shot quick tendrils out from the front of the improvised bridge, letting them shoot forward until they reached ground on the other side and wrapped themselves tightly to the trees there, lifting the bridge out of the water so that it rained droplets down into the river. She sent more tendrils out to strengthen the structure, to stabilize it with forearm-thick vines. It took minutes and it tired her tremendously. “Go on,” she said to Cesar when it was finished. “Start getting them across.?
??
Cesar gulped audibly, but he stepped onto the vines. They gave way under his weight, creaking and sagging. He took another step. Another—and then he was out over the water. He bent his knees, pushing at the bridge; bouncing. It nearly reached the river’s surface at the middle of the span but it held, and Cesar grinned at Jerusha. “Très bon,” he said. He gestured to the children, and they started across, four of them carrying the stretcher with Eason.
“Waikili?” Jerusha asked. He was still staring with his featureless face back the way they’d come.
“Soon,” he answered. “Not long now.” He shivered, visibly, and his hands went to his head. “It hurts to hear them,” he said. “It hurts.”
Jerusha went to him, crouching down to cradle the boy in her arms. She glanced back over her shoulder to watch the children crossing the river. Cesar was already across and Eason’s stretcher were almost there, the rest following, some helping those who couldn’t walk over easily themselves or were too frightened to step onto the vines. “Hurry!” Jerusha called to them. “Rapidement!” She picked up Waikili and ushered the remaining children onto the bridge.
Holding Waikili, she started across the span herself. The vines gave more than she expected under her weight, and she slowed her pace so that the children ahead could reach the other side before she dragged the vines down too much, handing Waikili to Cesar, who had come back to help her. “Get him across,” she said. “Now!”
She heard the warning shouts even as she reached the three-quarter mark, even as Cesar and Waikili reached the other side. “Bibbi Jerusha! Behind you!”
Carefully, watching her feet on the tapestry of vines, she half turned. A group of perhaps a half-dozen people had emerged from the jungle on the far bank: PPA soldiers, accompanied by a man in a leopard fez and two small boys. One of the children was taller and more muscular, with large eyes; the other was smaller and emaciated, ribs showing starkly under stretched skin. They were no older than the children she was shepherding.