Whirlwind

by David Klass

  I am not led out with nine other cell mates to burn another forest. They take me alone.

  They march me beneath a hole in the ceiling and yank on a chain. The slightly brownish water that cascades down is lukewarm but I don’t complain. It’s the first shower I’ve had in a long time. They give me a bar of soap, and watch me all the time I clean myself, perhaps to make sure I don’t have a weapon hidden.

  After I towel off, they toss me clean shorts and sandals. Clearly I’m about to be presented to someone of enough consequence that they don’t want to offend him by ushering me in filthy and stinky.

  I have a pretty good idea who I’m about to meet, and it scares me. On the other hand, I’ve sat in the dank cell long enough. If it is Colonel Aranha, I have a few very pointed questions I want to ask him about P.J. and Gisco.

  And then we’re on the move again. A fast march through endless corridors. The guards prod me along, their guns always at the ready. The colonel didn’t squander much money on decor. The walls are unpainted, the lights dim, the thick iron bars on doors and windows are rusted.

  Faces watch me from between those bars as we hurry past. Women. Children. They don’t cry out—they seem silenced by a complete and crushing sense of hopelessness.

  We climb steep stairs to a new level. Cells in better condition. Most of them are empty, doors yawning open, awaiting their next occupant. They’re small and windowless—isolation cells. Every now and then we pass a locked door, and hear screams or moans from inside. The few prisoners on this sequestered ward seem to have been driven insane by the colonel’s special brand of hospitality.

  The guards all look human—there’s no sign of Dark Army cyborgs or chimeras. I guess Colonel Aranha has gone to such trouble setting up his impersonation of a Brazilian Army officer that he doesn’t want any ghouls from the future to risk exposing his charade.

  We come to the end of the corridor. One door, all by itself. Something familiar about it.

  I’ve seen it before. In a dream.

  The door slowly swings open. I glance inside.

  There’s P.J.! Standing in the center of the room. Arms shackled above her head. Head lolling to one side, almost on her shoulder. She’s facing toward me, but she doesn’t react at all. Then I see that she’s blindfolded.

  “P.J.!” I shout.

  Her head moves quickly. Jerks up. Her mouth opens wide to scream, but her words come out softly, more of a prayer than a plea. It’s as if she’s afraid of believing that she’s heard what she’s heard, and that I’m really here. “Jack? Jack Danielson?”

  I take a few running steps toward her before three burly guards grab me. Together they must weigh more than six hundred pounds, but they can’t hold me back. I drag them forward like a tackling sled. “P.J., it’s me. I’ve come for you!”

  And now she believes. I know it because her voice is no longer a prayer. It’s a full-throttle wail of desperation. “Jjjaaaaaccckkkk!”

  I’m just outside the door, dragging what feels like the Brazilian national rugby team. They’re holding my feet, pinning my knees, clinging with their full weight to my arms and shoulders, but they still can’t stop me. For a moment I’m sure I’m going to drag them all right into that cell. Then something soft and foul-smelling is clamped over my face. A towel. Soaked in a noxious chemical.

  The acrid smell crawls into my nose and mouth. My knees go weak. I surge forward one final time and then I fall, and as the blackness covers me, I hear P.J.’s voice bellowing out a very reasonable request: “Save me!”

  45

  Snow—a thick blizzard of it, billowing in the wind. Someone is watching me keenly from beneath the white drifts. Two glinting black eyes study me with tremendous concentration and intelligence. I feel dizzy and can’t think clearly, but I sense deep down that something is terribly wrong. Then I recall the isolation cell and P.J.’s desperate scream, and I try to struggle to my feet. Strong hands grip me tightly and a soft, musical voice commands: “Don’t move.”

  It’s a voice used to being obeyed, and I find myself sitting back down and trying to focus my blurry vision and clouded thoughts. It’s not a blizzard, but rather a man with flowing white hair. He’s wearing glasses with thick black frames and surgical gloves and tending to me like a skilled doctor. I smell disinfectant. There’s an orange flame as he lights something and holds it under my nose. “Breathe through your nose and exhale out your mouth.”

  I inhale and the bitter stench makes me cough from the pit of my stomach. Almost instantly my vision sharpens, and the fog clouding my thoughts dissipates. I look back with curiosity and undisguised hatred at the old man who just revived me.

  “Old” is a misleading adjective for him. It suggests weakness and degeneration, but the army officer standing before me shows no traces of decay or infirmity. He looks enough like his son for me to recognize him. But Dargon was handsome and leonine—he had a dashing movie-star quality, and he dressed the part. This man has no need to show off. With his white hair, in his black-frame eyeglasses, with shelves of books all around him, he looks like a librarian on steroids.

  And then there are his eyes. Not quite human eyes. Some basic soft, warm-blooded mammalian quality is missing. They’re the empty eyes of a predator without the slightest glimmer of a soul. Cold. Merciless. Spidery.

  “I am Colonel Aranha,” the musical voice says. “But then, I see you’ve already figured that out. You recover quickly, my young friend. You remind me quite a bit of your father. You have his strength, and his determination. I hope for your sake you have more wisdom.”

  This would probably be a good time for me to try to exercise self-control, but I hear myself growl back, “And you remind me of your son. You have his cruelty and his arrogance. I remember that arrogance especially well—it was flashing in his eyes the last time I saw him, just before I threw him into a volcano.”

  At the mention of his son’s death, the colonel tenses. I have the feeling he may lash out at me, but instead he gives me a tight-lipped smile. “Brave words from a young mouth. But we have much to talk about and little time. Where shall we start?”

  “What did you do to Gisco?” I demand.

  “It’s not a name I’m familiar with.”

  “My dog.”

  “Ah, yes. A most interesting specimen of canine. After many questions were asked and few were answered, and I started to lose my patience, he had the audacity to open up his mind and take me on. Imagine a chess match, played violently and on many levels simultaneously. How courageous of him to challenge me, knowing who I was.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “I returned him to his true form, his essence. He was a dog who had learned too many tricks. So I made sure he won’t jump through those fancy hoops again. Now he eats. He barks. He lifts a leg and urinates. It’s enough.”

  “It’s not enough. He was my friend, and he’s worth ten of you.”

  “Your loyalty to him speaks well for you,” the colonel says. “But then it was loyalty that brought you here. If I’m not mistaken, you came to save a damsel in distress.”

  I look back into those glittering, soulless eyes. “You know exactly why I’m here. You arranged it so that door would swing open and I would see P.J. It’s probably a negotiating trick—you want me to know that she’s at your mercy. Well, get this—if you hurt her, I’ll kill you.”

  “Don’t ever threaten me,” he responds quickly. “I have already hurt her, and I will again if I so please …”

  I jump at him and throw the best kick of my life. Eko, who taught me martial arts on the Outer Banks, would be proud of this kick. It comes at lightning speed, snapped out straight from a horizontal position, the ball of my foot rocketing toward his chin.

  He reacts with a level of speed beyond what humans are capable of. Catches my ankle in midair. Holds it there, in a viselike grip, so that I’m doing a standing split.

  His head flashes forward, to my sandaled foot, held immobile. I see the glint of white teet
h, or are they a spider’s fangs? Then I feel a hot flash of pain that makes me cry out. As I twist and turn to try to end the agony I hear bones crunching.

  Then he releases me and I fall to the floor and stare uncomprehendingly at my right foot. It’s not just bloody, it looks different. Slowly I realize that he’s just gnawed off my little toe.

  46

  I roll around on the floor in agony, blood flowing. It feels like my whole leg is on fire. The pain almost makes me pass out.

  Colonel Aranha watches me writhe. A spot of my blood gleams on his right cheek, and he wipes it off with a white handkerchief. “We’ll have to try again,” he says finally. “It’s imperative that we talk. Let me give you something for the pain.”

  He walks to what looks like a fisherman’s tackle box, and returns with a bottle of bright green liquid. When he bends toward me I pull back and clench my fists. “Don’t be a fool,” he says. “If I wanted to harm you further, you must know now that you couldn’t stop me.”

  I let him squirt some of the green liquid on me. The blood immediately clots and the painful throbbing lessens. In seconds my whole foot goes completely numb. “Better?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “Shall we try again? Perhaps we jumped into things too quickly the first time around. Let’s go a little slower. If I’m not mistaken, this is your first visit to the Amazon. Impressive, isn’t it?”

  I can’t believe a man who just bit off one of my toes wants to exchange polite banter. I look up at him and demand through gritted teeth, “If you find it so damn impressive, why are you destroying it?”

  “I’m not destroying anything,” he assures me. “I’m just the facilitator. Would you like to see how it works?”

  I don’t bother to answer. He’s like Dargon—so used to being obeyed that his whims have the force of royal edicts.

  Suddenly, cottony green holographic images flash across the floor from wall to wall, like a 3-D shag carpet. It’s a miniature of the rain forest, complete with rivers and mountains. “Mato Grosso and Pará states,” he tells me. “Virgin rain forest. All I’m doing is opening it up by encouraging the building of a few thousand roads.”

  “Roads to where?” I ask.

  “Mahogany trees,” he answers. “If loggers spot a valuable tree, they’ll cut a road for miles so that it can be dragged out. Once those roads are cut, the forest can be developed. Other loggers will pour in to harvest the less valuable hardwoods. The more that’s cut, the more becomes available. The animals will be hunted for bush meat. The land will be cleared for farming. So the whole trick is getting loggers to cut that first road.”

  “How much money do you bribe them with?”

  “I don’t have to offer them anything but information,” he explains. “Their greed does the rest. Mahogany is the ‘green gold’ of the Amazon. A single tree can be worth thousands of dollars. But even the tallest trees can be hidden beneath the jungle canopy. So I designed the technology to pinpoint them by their chemical fingerprints. Would you like to see every mahogany tree in the Amazon?”

  Suddenly red dots start flecking the green carpet, and each time one appears there’s a PING sound. It becomes a rising crescendo of PINGs as hundreds and then thousands of the red dots appear, alone and grouped in clusters. “This is what I give the loggers,” the colonel says. “They build the roads. And the roads open up the forest.”

  “Loggers chasing mahogany didn’t have anything to do with the trees your guards made us burn down,” I tell him.

  The colonel grins. Ernesto was right—he does have a sense of humor, albeit a sick one. “I thought you might find that little outing interesting. It’s incumbent on a warden to make sure his prisoners get enough recreation,” he says. “You must have run quite fast to survive.”

  I remember sprinting through the black clouds of smoke, fleeing for my life. “It was beautiful, pristine forest, filled with life. Why did you make us burn it?”

  “There are a few misguided heroes in our government who can’t be bribed or threatened,” he explains. “They’ve set vast tracts of land aside for the Indians, and sometimes even I can’t get at them. Torching the trees ends the argument. Once the forest is gone, the Indians retreat. And I can bring in foreign investors to plant soy. A few cans of gasoline is all it takes to develop the most sheltered parts of the forest.”

  “You’re not interested in developing anything,” I almost growl at him. “You just want to ruin it all.”

  “How easy it must be for a brash young American to make that accusation,” he answers. “Tell me, what corner of the United States, from Alaska to the Everglades, was sacred when America was transforming itself into the richest industrial nation in the world?”

  I think back to what I know of American environmental history over the last two centuries and I can’t find a good answer. From the near extinction of the buffalo to acid rain, from the bad farming techniques that led to the Dust Bowl to the Exxon Valdez spill, I know our own record of preserving natural beauty is not a distinguished one.

  He reads my face and smiles. “Did China or Russia show any restraint in developing their own resources? Does Chernobyl ring a bell? Or the damage being done to Siberia and the Russian Arctic by the oil industry? Do you know the harm the Three Gorges Dam is inflicting on Chinese wildlife? Why should the Amazon be any different? It’s not a treasure that the whole world owns—it’s the possession of a striving nation. And we have the right and the duty to develop it to feed our children and take our place among the powerful nations of the world.”

  I can’t argue history with him: he has deeper knowledge and a far more sweeping vantage point. So I make it personal. “Cut the crap. You’re no Brazilian patriot, interested in feeding the poor. You’re the leader of the Dark Army. I struck a blow against you when I used Firestorm to save the oceans. So you’re trying to poison the future by ruining the lungs of the planet.”

  His face darkens threateningly, like the sky before a tropical storm. “Okay, to use your charming phrase, let’s cut the crap. I can imagine what Dannite lies you’ve been fed. So you’re pure and wholesome children of God, while we’re Dark Army abominations who don’t even deserve the spark of life? I find your father’s definitions narrow and very self-serving, and I have news for you both.”

  He steps toward me and flexes his muscles, and his shirt shreds and pops off him. His eyes are glowing now—his superhuman intelligence coupled with his subhuman vitality makes him seem at once near-divine and at the same time bestial and despicably loathsome. “You have no idea the misery you caused among my faithful when you used Firestorm,” he hisses. “Seven hundred years of bitter warfare reversed by one ignorant boy. My loyal followers—tens of millions of life-forms with just as much right to the planet as anyone else—suddenly in full retreat, pushed to the brink. You healed the earth, but in so doing you doomed all those who were designed or bred to flourish in its decay. We will not yield the future.”

  He picks me off the ground and slams me against a wall again and again, so hard that it feels like my spine will crack. I try to fight back, but I’m helpless in his grasp. “You foolishly turned the future to light, and now I am switching it back to darkness. All will be as it was. Your father and his Caretaker whelps will melt away in the unfiltered radiation of the sun, they will choke in the sludge of dark oceans, blow away in the howling winds, and be battered down by ice storms. My minions will live on and multiply. That is the fate I decree for the earth. And only one man can possibly stop me. Where is he?”

  His hand slides to my throat. He’s pinning me to the wall in a choke hold that will kill me in seconds. I gasp and gag as his fiery orange eyes bore in on me.

  He eases up, so that a tiny puff of air threads its way into my lungs. “Where is that cowardly shaman?” he demands again. “I know that’s why you are here. Tell me where he is or you will die the most agonizing death imaginable. And for no reason at all, because I’ll find him eventually on my own. Tell me and you’r
e free to go. Where is that accursed trickster? Where is Kidah?”

  I look back into his cold, merciless eyes and whisper, “I can’t possibly tell you … because I don’t know. But you’re wrong, I’m not here for Kidah. I came for P.J.”

  For a moment, I’m certain he will strangle me. As I start to black out, he lets me sink to the floor and lie there gasping.

  I don’t see him make a signal, but three of his uniformed henchmen hurry in. He motions for them to take me away, and they hoist me to my feet.

  He looks at me for a second, eye to eye. “You’re a brave boy,” he whispers. “Your father is a courageous man, too. But everyone has a limit. Once you see the death I have in store for you, you’ll tell me everything.”

  47

  My numb right foot won’t support weight and the three guards don’t seem inclined to carry me, so they just drag me roughly along corridors and down steep flights of steps.

  As we move through the gloom, my guards grow nervous. They’re tough-looking men with scars, who have plainly dished out and received their share of punishment, but with every step we take they become increasingly agitated. Frightened. “Terrified” would not be too strong a word.

  My imagination runs wild picturing what is waiting at the end of this labyrinth. Is it some high-tech torture from the future, or will it be something more primitive?

  I recall Dargon and his great white sharks. As we traverse a gloomy corridor I try to imagine what fearsome Amazon denizens his deranged dad may keep as house pets.

  A circular black door becomes visible—it looks like the entry hatch to a submarine. At the sight of it my three guards slow till they’re almost walking backward. They begin arguing in whispers, till the burliest of them stops and utters a gruff command. The two smaller guards lead me unhappily onward.

  I smell something salty. Decaying leaves? Brackish water? It leaves a slight tangy taste on my tongue.