Georgia turned right onto a residential street. “I am going to my home. My madre and padre live with me, and I’m sure they are worried. You are welcome to come.”
With no cell phone service and no vehicle, Peter couldn’t afford to say no. “Georgia?” He waited for her to glance at him before continuing. “You recognized me. You know who I am, so you know I’m not some mad wanker.”
“Perhaps you are not aware, Mr. Wooley, but some people think you actually are loco.”
Peter hesitated only briefly. “Well, you can trust me when I say it isn’t safe here. You need to leave. And take your madre and padre with you. And yes, I’d like to ride with you if you don’t mind. But we need to leave immediately.”
Georgia pulled into the driveway of a nice orange-stucco home landscaped with expensive-looking palms and other tropical trees. She turned the car off. “Personally, Mr. Wooley, since I saw you on television almost a year ago, I have not believed you to be loco. Honestly, I was smitten with you. You were so sure of yourself, about to reveal the secret of the century. And then a month later, fantastic new technology and medical breakthroughs mysteriously appear on the web. Turns out the secret was real. And now here you are. By some miracle you are sitting in my car.” She looked him in the eye. “I trust you.”
This was a bit more than the response Peter had expected, but it would do. “Good. We need to get your folks into the car and leave now.”
She opened her door. “My madre and padre don’t do anything quickly.”
Georgia’s parents appeared to be in their sixties, and they didn’t speak much English, although they did recognize Peter when she introduced him. They immediately took notice of his injuries and his burned and bloodied hospital clothes. They spoke rapid Spanish to Georgia, and she explained that they were offering Peter bandages, ointments, and a change of clothes. He turned these down, insisting there was no time. They had to leave now. This resulted in more talking as Georgia tried to explain the situation.
Peter chewed his lip and paced the floor. He heard rumbling from outside and went to the front window. Two tan military trucks were approaching. They rolled past Georgia’s house and stopped at the end of the block. Men in camo fatigues ran up to several houses on the far side of the street and pounded on the doors.
He realized Georgia and her parents were at his side, looking out.
The first soldier got no answer, and he jogged to the next house. The second soldier found someone at home. He entered the house. Seconds later he came back out and led two people to one of the trucks and helped them get in the back.
“Are they evacuating everyone?” Georgia asked.
“If they’re not, they should be,” Peter said. It also occurred to him that they might be systematically checking for people who were already transforming. “Regardless, they’ll be at your door next.” One of the soldiers was already crossing the street, coming toward them.
Georgia turned to her parents and spoke in Spanish. They listened with eyes wide.
The soldier pounded on the door. Georgia spoke again to her parents, obviously trying to calm them. She straightened her shoulders, put her chin up, and opened the door.
The husky bloke stepped into the house before she had a chance to speak. He said, “Señora, estamos haciendo una evacuación obligatoria de Salinas. ¿Cuántas personas están en la cas—”
The man had been scanning the room as he spoke, but he stopped when he spotted Peter. He nearly stumbled stepping back through the open door. “¡Infectado!” He screamed. Through the window, Peter saw other soldiers jump from the trucks and run to the house. Seconds later he was staring at the muzzles of four military assault rifles.
At that point, the first man seemed to remember something, pulled a paper surgical mask from his pocket, and awkwardly put it over his face, looping the elastic straps behind his ears while still holding his weapon. The other three then put on their own masks.
“¡Tírate al suelo!” said the soldier who had seen Peter first.
Peter raised his hands. “I don’t want any trouble.”
The man switched to English. “Sir, stay where you are.” He looked at Georgia and her parents. “This man is infected! Have you had physical contact with him?”
“I’m not infected,” Peter said as calmly as he could. “I can explain my appearance.”
One of the men yelled something to someone outside while the first man asked Georgia again if they’d had physical contact.
Georgia said, “No, we have not touched him. Don’t you know who this is? It is Peter Wooley.”
The man gave her a blank stare.
“Peter Wooley! Kembalimo? The Lamotelokhai?”
The soldiers looked at Peter. He could only see their eyes, but they didn’t seem impressed.
“No contact?” The first man asked. “You have made no contact?”
“No!” Georgia repeated. “I gave him a ride in my car.” She hesitated for a moment. “And I let him use my cell phone.” She nodded toward her parents. “But my madre and padre have not had any contact with him.”
The men looked at each other and rapidly exchanged excited words. One of them turned to Georgia’s parents. “You two, follow me.”
They stared at him.
He said, “Vamos afuera.”
They looked at each other and then followed him outside.
“Where are you taking them?” Georgia asked.
The first soldier said, “For their safety we are evacuating them with the others. We will evacuate you two as well, but first it must be determined that you are not infected.”
“We’re not infected,” Peter said. “If we were, we would have transformed by now. It happens almost immediately.”
“We’ve been ordered to carry out a specific protocol, sir.”
Peter grumbled. “We all need to leave this area, including you blokes. I’ve seen what’s happening, and it’s spreading. We can’t be here when the creatures start showing up.”
The man’s brows furrowed. “Creatures?”
Peter clenched his teeth. There wasn’t time to explain. As he started to plead with the man again, he heard a diesel truck trundling up the street, stopping in front of Georgia’s house with a hiss of released air brake pressure.
The three soldiers who were still at the door saw the truck, nodded at each other, and then circled around Peter and Georgia, leveling their guns at them.
“Outside,” the first man ordered.
Peter started to protest, but Georgia put her hand on his arm. “Let’s do what they ask. They’re obviously as frightened as we are.”
They walked to the street. The truck was a large semi, but the connected trailer was not a typical freight box. It was something Peter had seen once before, at a traveling carnival in Brisbane. The trailer had eight windowless doors along the side, and he assumed there were eight more on the other side. It was called a bunkhouse trailer, typically used as sleeping quarters for mobile workers.
The soldiers guided them to the front end of the trailer. One of the men extracted folded steel staircases that had been tucked beneath the first two doors. He stepped up and opened the first door and then the second.
The first soldier said, “Inside. Each of you.”
“You must be kidding,” Peter said. “Why?”
“We are isolating anyone who might be infected. This is what we had available. When it is clear that you are not infected, you will be evacuated with everyone else and released. The other way we can be sure you are not a threat is to shoot you.”
Peter looked at the trailer. The metal doors seemed solid enough. He and Georgia might be safer in those bunk rooms than out in the open. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.
“¡Diablo! ¿Qué son esos?” It was one of the soldiers. He was shading his eyes and looking to the sky.
Peter looked. His first thought was that they were seabirds, perhaps frigatebirds. But they were too large, and the heads weren’t right. Suddenly he real
ized he was looking at flying reptiles—at least four that he could see. His gut clenched up.
He turned to the first soldier. “It’s already here. I don’t think there’s a bloody thing you can do to stop it. Anyone who can’t be evacuated needs to stay inside, maybe even close themselves in a closet.”
The soldier gazed at him, though it was hard to read his expression with the mask over his nose and mouth. He opened his mouth to say something, but then multiple reports from semiautomatic weapons sounded from somewhere nearby, perhaps the next street over. Suddenly the soldiers were all business.
“In the trailer, each of you!” the man shouted.
“I’ll get in,” Peter said. “But please allow my friend to evacuate with her parents.”
The soldier hoisted his assault rifle and fired it into the air, startling everyone, including the other soldiers. He glared at Peter. “Inside!”
“Please! We’re going,” Georgia said. “But I want to be in the same room with Mr. Wooley. I’m claustrophobic. Without someone to talk to, the small space will make me loca.”
The man nodded.
Georgia and Peter climbed the three steps to the door nearest the front of the trailer. Georgia turned. “You will evacuate my madre and padre, no?”
“We’re doing it now, Señora. Close the door.”
Peter followed Georgia in and pulled the door shut. Inside the room it was completely dark. One of the soldiers could be heard stepping up to the door and then jiggling the handle, perhaps locking it with a key or padlock. Peter ran his hand over the wall beside the door until he found a switch. He flipped it, and a dim ceiling light came on. Above the door was a black plastic rectangle that appeared to be covering a window. He reached up and slid the panel to the side, allowing more light in. He then slid the panel of plexiglass underneath, leaving only a fine screen. The room was small, about three meters by two meters, nearly half of which was occupied by a bunk with two stacked beds. The beds had thin mattresses but no other bedding. The room was cool, no doubt due to an air conditioning unit powered by the truck’s diesel engine, which was still running.
Georgia sighed and sat down on the lower bunk. A truck rumbled past outside.
“That must be the truck your parents are in,” Peter said. “They’ll be taken to a safe place.”
She nodded but did not seem comforted by this.
Outside, a man started speaking with a megaphone. They listened for a moment, and then Georgia said, “They are telling people to stay in their houses.”
The room shook, and the trailer began to move. But seconds later it came to an abrupt stop, causing Peter to hit his shoulder on the top bed frame. The man with the megaphone had stopped talking. People were shouting, and then one man’s voice rose above the rest. “¡Ayuda! ¡Mátelo! ¡Alguien mátelo!” This was followed by three gunshots in rapid succession.
“What’s happening?” Georgia said. She stood up beside Peter, but all they could do was stare at the locked door. Peter wanted to look through the window above the door, but the bunks and the two storage cabinets in the room were all fastened to the walls, and there was nothing else he could stand on.
A few seconds of relative calm followed the gunshots. But then everything erupted into chaos. There were more screams and nonstop shooting. Something that sounded like a body thudded into the side of the trailer and shook the entire rig. An inhuman screech rose above the melee, followed by several more that sounded like they were answering the first. A droning hum, faint at first, gradually increased, as if a swarm of bees were approaching. The humming became so loud that it nearly drowned out the other sounds, and then even more screams and gunshots erupted.
“¡Qué horror!” Georgia said. “¡Mamá and Papá!”
“They will be okay,” Peter said, trying to sound confident. “Their truck left before this started.”
Something hit the screen above the door. Peter looked. A winged insect—a wasp—was now crawling about on the outside of the screen. The thing was enormous, no less than five inches long, and it had a glossy red and black exoskeleton. It began chewing the screen, cutting and scratching, which was audible even above the chaos beyond.
Peter rushed over and slid the plexiglass panel shut and then slid the black plastic panel over that. He stepped back and sat on the lower bunk. Georgia sat down next to him. They stared at the door, unable to see what was happening and unable to ignore the horrific sounds.
Gradually the human shouts and screams diminished, and then were silent. Instead, they only heard an occasional bellow, or a screech, or a trill. And they heard sounds that were beyond their ability to describe. At one point something moved across the top of the trailer, not scuttling or running, but instead dragging or slithering. It then moved down the trailer’s wall and was gone.
Chapter Twenty
Quentin trudged down a treacherously muddy slope, wishing he had brought a cap to keep the rain out of his eyes. Lindsey walked in front of him, and by her side was the tree kangaroo she had named Rusty. The creature would occasionally hop off and disappear on some unknown mission, but it would always return to her side.
Quentin was trying to see Lindsey’s newfound relationship with the mbolop from her perspective. It clearly delighted her. In fact, she seemed almost intoxicated by the strangely intimate connection. Should he be happy for her? After all, it could represent a new horizon in the evolution of humankind, orchestrated by the Lamotelokhai. Or perhaps it was simply a mistake, a random exploit of an individual tree kangaroo. Either way, Quentin couldn’t help but feel some anxiety—perhaps even jealousy—over the odd symbiosis between the creature and his wife.
He wrestled with these discomforting thoughts as their group gradually covered the remaining miles to the hanging village. They arrived while the sun’s morning rays still penetrated the canopy at a low angle. Eight months before, they had been brought to this village and held captive until Bobby had shown he could communicate with the Lamotelokhai. The area hadn’t changed much since then. The tree huts were still nearly invisible to anyone walking by on the forest floor. Not that anyone ever did, other than the occasional far-ranging hunter from another Papuan tribe. And according to Samuel, such unfortunate hunters were routinely killed for their unwitting mistake. To say that Sinanie’s tribe valued their privacy was an understatement.
Not surprisingly, no villagers were waiting on the ground to welcome them. Sinanie and Samuel led them directly to the base of the largest tree in the area, a tree Quentin remembered all too well.
Sinanie cupped a hand around his mouth and called out a single word, “Yebun!”
Quentin gazed up at the tree’s dense canopy. Only a trained eye could see the hut and the six connecting tunnels radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel. A slight commotion shook the foliage, and seconds later a thin, coiled rope appeared, spiraling in slow motion as it fell. The rope reached its full length just before hitting the ground, dancing back and forth from its momentum.
Quentin and Lindsey frowned at each other. They had known this was coming, but they both had admitted they would be perfectly content never climbing one of these damn things again. It was a rope ladder, or yebun, 150 feet long, made with the silk from spiders Samuel had bred for this purpose. The yebun was basically one continuous rope, thin as a child’s pinky finger, with loops woven into it every two feet or so. The loops were rigid so they would stay open, allowing climbers to insert their feet. The villagers would typically climb them one person at a time to reduce the risk of snapping the rope. Quentin still had both feet on the ground, yet the thought of the rope snapping made his stomach lurch.
Without glancing at them or saying a word, Sinanie started climbing.
Lindsey said what Quentin was thinking. “Samuel, we’re really in a hurry to find Addison. Perhaps we can forego the visit to the treehouse?”
Samuel tilted his head toward the rope ladder. “My dear Lindsey, has it been so long that you have lost your arboreal fortitude?” T
he corners of his mouth indicated a slight smile, a rare thing for Samuel.
“Most humans stopped living in trees millions of years ago,” she replied.
“That is an interesting supposition I would like to discuss when time allows it. For the present, however, we should ascend to the hut so that we may rest and eat. In addition, you may be interested to witness what my indigene hosts have been doing in the central hut.” Samuel waited for the rope to stop shaking, indicating Sinanie had reached the hut. He then held one hand toward the rope and bowed, inviting Lindsey to go first. It was a strange gesture for a man dressed only in a skin loincloth and a vest made of spider silk.
Resigned to the inevitable, Quentin and Lindsey shed their packs and removed their hiking shoes to make the climb easier.
Minutes later Lindsey reached the top of the ladder, and Quentin started climbing. Before he was halfway up, he had found his rhythm and was making quick but cautious work of it. When he began entering the lower canopy foliage, he looked down. Samuel was far below, appearing very small and pacing back and forth as if he were thinking about something.
Quentin kept climbing, passing through at least ten yards of dense foliage before arriving at the opening in the hut’s floor. The rope was fastened to a limb that was part of the hut’s ceiling, making it easy for him to climb though the opening and step off onto the floor.
The walls and ceiling hadn’t changed much in eight months, even though they consisted partly of living vines. One exception was that the hole in the ceiling where Addison had once entered with the intent of killing everyone had grown shut. Like all the huts and tunnels of the village, this one was suspended from the tree branches rather than resting upon them. The tribe lived, quite literally, in a hanging village. In the center of the hut was its most prominent feature, a thick trunk rising up through the floor and out the ceiling. It forked into two branches at chest height. The Lamotelokhai had existed there for years, molded to the trunk like a massive lump of clay, until the day Bobby had asked it to change its shape so it could walk to civilization. To Quentin’s dismay, Bobby had asked it to change into the shape of Addison.
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