“Like I said,” Leon lit up and sucked on his pipe, usually reserved for his bed time ritual or the occasional relaxing fireside conversation. Natty wasn’t sure how this conversation qualified as soothing but… “Pity anyone who enters the Amazon jungle these days with anything but an utmost respect for the wildlife.”
***
Gustavo handed the scarlet macaw a sliver of mango through the bamboo cage. The truck was littered with exotic animals. Green tree boas. Yellow pit vipers. Toucans. Cotingas. Jabiru storks. You name it. A decent bounty for just one trip. He was remiss to throw a tarp over the flatbed, preferring to take in the rainbow of colors through the bamboo cages.
Guia and Hamidi were just cinching down the last of the lines now on the other side of the truck to make sure the cages didn’t go bouncing off in transit. He heard some squawking coming from their side that didn’t sound like the birds. So he went over to investigate.
“The damn thing bit me,” Guia complained, sucking her finger.
“Well, how would you feel if someone ripped you out of your home, threw you in a cage, with not a thought to your children left to starve or fend for themselves?” Gustavo said.
“Frigging bleeding hearts are the worst.”
“He gets paid more than the rest of us, the more animal rights bitching he does,” Hamidi said. “Maybe we should take a lesson from that.”
“Maybe you should,” Gustavo said, beaming a knowing smile at them.
Hamidi was doctoring the cut in his arm from a toucan which had damn near severed an artery. Gua, still not finished giving the rainbow-colored capybara—which shouldn’t exist, by the way; no one had seen one before—who knew how much the thing would fetch?—a piece of her mind, she rattled its cage and cursed at it in Portuguese. They were supposed to be speaking in Quechua in case they were overheard. That way the authorities would be heading the wrong direction, toward Peru, and chasing down the wrong black market animal smuggling trails.
Guia was a sight to behold in shorn jean shorts and hiking boots half way up to her knees and a thin cotton cami made see-through now that she was drenched in sweat and it was clinging to her. Her sucking her finger to keep it from bleeding wasn’t doing anything to tone down Gustavo’s fantasies of what she could do sucking on some of his appendages. One in particular. He couldn’t wait to hop back in the cabin of the truck with Hamidi on the passenger side with his thick frame squeezing Guia up between them.
Gustavo let out a yelp, turning to see the baby jaguar that had scratched his arm, determined to get at him again with another swipe of his paw. “Good thing we have the muzzles on the dangerous ones lashed closed, the way these guys like their space.” He was expecting a “no shit!” or a smart-assed, “Maybe we should do the same with the rest of them.”
He looked up to see where his audience had gone. He should have looked down. They were lying spasming on the ground, and frothing at the mouth. “Guys, stop playing. We’ve got to get going. I don’t want to be carting these creatures down river in the light of day. Not all our public officials are corrupt enough to look the other way.” He glanced up at the creosote torches, wondering how long they would hold out in the rain. Then returned his attention to his incorrigible cohorts.
Their convulsing and frothing at the mouth stopped. At least they were finished playing. Such was the price of teaming up with a pair of teenagers. Next trip out, he was definitely saddling up with some older guys. They might have been slower and more inclined to make him do the heavy lifting, but at least there’d be none of this nonsense. He kicked Gua in the ribs. “Enough playing, I said. It wasn’t funny to begin with. And, by the way, those animals couldn’t carry rabies if they wanted to.”
He grabbed one of the torches from its holster in one of the posts along the flatbed of the truck and checked their eyes. Both Gua’s and Hamidi’s were milky white. It was hard to fake that.
“Guys?” he said, noticing the fear creeping into his voice and into his muscles. He was turning to stone or the proverbial pillar of salt without any of the biblical intervention.
The torsos of his fallen comrades swelled up as if from gas, as if he were watching them through time-lapse photography, and exploded all over him. He gasped at the noxious smell coming from inside them. It burned his lungs. Seared his eyes. His vision had become blurry.
It was only then that he realized that whatever had gotten them had gotten him. He was buckling at the knees. And then he was down on the ground convulsing violently. He had sense enough still to realize that if the bite hadn’t killed him, then simply breathing the air of the two corpses would have. Because he stopped convulsing, never even got to froth at the mouth. All because the secondary effects of the plague were even more fast-acting than the primary effects. Just how communicable was this thing?
As he lay there on the ground, he saw feet approaching him in the light of the spilled torch. His vision was too blurry to make out much, but at least one of the feet had a blue and gold macaw tattooed to it. The bird men!
He heard them unlashing the cages and releasing the animals. The last sounds he discerned before the darkness claimed him were the animals’ jubilant cries of freedom.
***
“I wonder why, when I picked up those colorful lizards, I wasn’t harmed,” Laney said.
Leon made an “I’m pondering it face.” “If these Ubuku are trafficking with the spirit world, taking their cues from timeless entities and nature spirits, maybe for their poisons to work on you, you have to be sufficiently unenlightened.”
“Yeah, right,” she said.
He shrugged. “There’s also the possibility that they haven’t gotten around to making every pretty thing deadly yet. Just give them time.”
“The Ubuku are territorial and expansive, absorbing other tribes into themselves,” Satellite continued after making a throat clearing sound to get everyone’s attention back on him. He read to the enthralled faces about the campfire. The fire produced little heat in the drizzling rain, which was hardly needed in any case. The flames’ refusal to go out under the pelting raindrops was more a comforting, symbolic act of defiance it was easy to identify with. “Not even the Yanomami, the most respected and fiercest of all fighters in the region, have been able to stand up to them.”
“Lovely.” Leon considered the implications, studying the forest about him. Not sure what to think of “the birds.” Were they really just birds, or were they bird men? And if they were “just feathered friends” would they mind their distance if Leon and his people minded theirs? He wasn’t looking forward to a tropical rainforest take on Hitchcock’s The Birds. “I don’t think the fun and games is quite over yet, kids, but I’d say we’ve been put on notice.”
“So, we’re gonna wait till morning to kill these guys, right?” Ajax said. “Give the nanococktail a chance to brew inside us?”
Leon gazed up from staring at his forearm which he’d been flexing and relaxing by making fists to test the nanites inside him. So far all he was feeling was pins and needles, like someone had released an army of ants inside him and tasked them with biting down on his nerves. If he wasn’t used to what their medical nano did to them during healing, he’d be good and panicked by now. “Yes, Ajax, you get the rest of the night to summon your courage. Assuming the nanites don’t kill us first.”
Natty was pacing and nail-biting, as before. “Just so we’re clear, we’re still the good guys in this story, right? I mean, speaking as the card-carrying social liberal with more save-the-world environmental patents than God, I feel I should tell you, the Ubuku have pretty much humbled me with their efforts to protect the rainforest.”
Leon smiled. “They humbled you? I have to admit I’m feeling friendlier towards them already.” He took another puff and tapped out his pipe. “Think of it this way, Natty, we’re just helping them to take their forestry management to the next level.” He patted him on the back and said, “Now get some sleep. War at the crack of dawn can be quite invigorating
, but it’s best done on a good night’s sleep.”
TWENTY-TWO
When morning broke it was not the thought of pending war that woke them. It was the red howler monkeys. Their individual cries were similar to the sound a large branch on an old tree makes as it falls to the axe, or to gravity. Almost as if the forest was being razed by beavers or loggers. Soon the birdcalls crescendoed, as well, as the birds fought to be heard over the monkeys. And the frogs over the birds. Every species wanted attention by day, and sound was how many had been evolutionarily designed to procure it. By night the same drama played out, only between the locusts and the countless other insects. With the horned and bellowing frogs filling in the bass section of the orchestra. The jingling rattles of the rattlesnakes providing the percussion.
Cassandra noted that eating was not foremost on her mind for once. Natty’s latest nanites did not require constant refueling and a ravenous appetite to keep up with them. The other soldiers, lacking her history, might not appreciate this finer point, but she certainly did. Especially in character as Laney; it was much harder to slip away into the jungle to constantly refuel to avoid drawing attention to herself.
***
By late morning, they’d tracked the witch doctor down. No small thanks owed to all the chanting and ritualistic drumming going on around them right now. It carried across the jungle further than the cries of the macaws. Leon gestured for his men to fan out.
The flock of natives was bowing to the old man seated in the throne chair and to his son and daughter standing to either side. Each bow from the throng taking them deeper into the trance.
Sacrifices were being made to the tribal leaders in the form of captured natives from other tribes, thrown into the quicksand pit before the exalted ones. Their victims flailed and screamed and begged to be rescued, presumably; it wasn’t like anyone in Leon’s party spoke their languages. No two natives costumed and painted the same, suggesting no two victims had been kidnapped from the same tribe. More likely they were handed over willingly by the other tribal leaders rather than face the bird clan out in the open. No sooner than one victim disappeared into the pit before the great ones than another sacrificial victim was offered up.
“Jacko! Jacko!” they chanted. The old man pressed his palms together in prayer formation and bowed to them to accept the latest offering of human sacrifice. As soon as that body was thrown in the pit another was dragged to the front of the throng.
“Panno! Panno!” they chanted. This time the old man’s son, big and muscular, put his hands together in mock prayer, smiled, and bowed to accept the sacrificial offering.
When it came time for the natives to chant, “Mudra, Mudra,” the old man’s daughter performed her part of the ritual as her father and brother had done before her.
“At least we finally get to put the faces to the names they’ve been chanting through the night,” Ajax said. “Wish I could say I was imagining worse.” He pulled his rifle clip. “Why does Santa Claus have such a big sack?” Checked the bullets. “He only comes once a year.” He reattached the clip before moving to a better position, clearly doing his best to throw off stress faster than his assault weapon could discharge bullets.
Natty noticed that while the birdmen took their body tattooing cues from the colorful birds of the Amazon, the triple threat clearly took their body tattooing cues from the predatory hawks and eagles, much higher up the food chain. Mudra bore the markings of the Ornate Hawk Eagle. While Panno chose the feathering and colors of the Harpy Eagle. And Jacko, the Great Horned Owl. All three sported the yellow eyes of each of the birds. Natty had read about meditations and esoteric dietary practices to change eye color of tribes long since lost to time who wanted yellow cobra eyes in veneration of their most revered creature.
It took him a second, but Natty recognized Mudra as their captive from earlier. She must have switched her body markings so as to hide her true importance to the tribal unit. Something being infused with nano would have allowed her to do quite easily.
“So his people don’t know,” Natty whispered into Leon’s ear. “They think their ability to come back from the dead is on account of the voodoo magic of the old man and his son and daughter.”
“That would be my guess,” Leon said. “How else they gonna retain control over virtual gods?”
Something in Leon’s tone. Natty decided to take a guess at what was going on with him and volunteered, “I like to think there’s a genius in each of us, only cultural conditioning and the psy-ops games of corporate goons, who want to keep us in check for the same reason, keeps us from seeing it. Maybe if we accepted the full truth about ourselves, we’d see that it went beyond genius. We’d stop surrendering our power to some god outside of ourselves, and see that He resides inside of us. And each of us is the temple of the Lord.”
Leon turned to face Natty. “That’s generous of you.”
“Is it? I’ve seen what you and your people could do, even before I shot you up with nano.”
“Well, thanks for that, anyway.” Leon returned his attention to the problem at hand.
“You think I laid on the religious symbolism a bit too thick?”
“Definitely. But then again, you had to sell it, you know? You should see me throw myself into character to get these guys to do anything but scratch their own asses.”
“Are we bonding?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
“What now?”
“I’ll be damned if I know.”
“Think less like a soldier and more like me, you know, more creative.”
Leon threw him a nasty look but relaxed out of it, deciding he was right. And nodded.
DeWitt, the king of false bravado, dropped down beside Leon on his other flank. “Yeah, I got this.” Leon turned to DeWitt with an “Oh, really?” look on his face. “On second thought, you got this. I wouldn’t want to steal your thunder.”
Right before Natty’s eyes, Leon dissolved into a nano cloud of black dust and took to the sky.
“Is that you breathing easy and crying tears of relief, DeWitt?” Natty asked.
“Nah, nah. Sometimes my sense of self-sacrifice moves even me to tears.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Poor, guy, it was just his turn to play the hero, you know?”
Affecting the local weather patterns overhead, Leon rained acid down on the natives. Now the bird men didn’t have to throw their captives in the quicksand pits. They burned and melted alive beneath the acid rain. The bird men stood back, laughing, jumping up and down, and cheering their great ones. It was just more proof of the old man’s and his son’s and daughter’s powers. A growing chant rose among the Ubuku who watched the triple threat dissolve the sacrificial victims wherever they stood into a puddle of blood and guts.
The expressions on the old man and his son and daughter told another story.
Jacko’s daughter walked across the quicksand pit as if she could just as easily walk on water. Stood at its midpoint. And pointed. In the direction of Leon’s entourage on the ridge above them. It didn’t seem to matter that the bushes obscuring her view were lending the good guys more than adequate cover.
“Great,” Natty said to Laney by his side, watching Mudra’s finger pointing straight at them. “And we’re the only two who didn’t receive the injection.”
“Your reasoning was pretty sound at the time,” Laney said.
“That if something went wrong with the prototypes, someone had to be of sound enough mind to know what to do? That rationale? Forgive me if it just seems a little lame right now.”
The war cries of the village leaders in the circle focused the attention of the others on the ridge line.
In the next moment the throng about the triple threat was dispersing like cockroaches under a light.
But by then DeWitt was materializing to step on the land mines he’d placed earlier, when he was in the disguise of one of the natives. He rode the concussion wave of one mine to the other, dematerializing and t
hen rematerializing again just in time to continue his game of hopscotch. He was actually frustrated when the fleeing, panicked natives started stepping on the rest of the land minds for him. They were spoiling his scientific investigations into the effects of exploding arsenal on the human body infused with the latest generation of nano.
The bird men DeWitt managed to blow to hell, they weren’t coming back together as before. Courtesy of the raincloud overhead. Leon, in the guise of the raincloud, continued to tweak his formulas to interfere with the nano men’s reagglutinating abilities. Between his lightning strikes, and raining yellow, green, and purple in turn—each a different nano-neutralizing chemical formulation that only his people had any resistance to—few were getting up. And Leon’s thunder smacks, for the few Ubuku natives who managed to pull themselves together, sent sonic booms to shatter them all over again. Thus the battlefield was won before the fight ever started.
The old man and his son and daughter fled into the woods, the two children helping the old man to move faster than he could on his own. Natty noticed all three of them disappeared from plain sight even before reaching the tree line. “Did you see that?” he said to Laney. “Maybe the foot soldiers only have one or another power, but I’m guessing the triple threat has them all.”
“So The Invisible Woman was playing possum more than we knew,” Laney said. “Letting herself get captured all too easily.”
“You can’t beat a woman for cunning and treachery and man eating, soul-sucking…”
“We promised to set aside talk about our relationship for later, remember?”
“Sorry,” he said, reining himself in.
Leon rematerialized at the center of the quicksand pit. Whistled for his people, who all flocked around him, as able to walk on quicksand as the best of the bird men. “That just leaves the mop up operation, boys. Even a few of these guys walking around is a few too many.” The group nodded and disbursed in search of their prey.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 19