“You never saw him again?”
“Before or since.”
“Great,” Bugsy said.
Thomas Marion Douglas leaned forward, shaping Ellen’s face into a smoky glower that Bugsy recognized from the covers of classic rock albums. “The thing was, we weren’t afraid of death, man. We embraced it. We became free, and everything around us was transformed by our power. After us, nothing was the same. Nothing.”
“Two words,” Bugsy said.
The Lizard King lifted his chin, accepting the implicit dare.
“Britney Spears,” Bugsy said, and then while the Thomas Marion Douglas looked confused, he lifted the towel from Ellen’s neck and returned her to herself.
“Well,” she said. “That could have been more useful.”
“We’ve got Sunflower to work with, at least.”
“Couldn’t have been more than eight or nine million girls called that in sixty-nine,” Ellen said.
“It’s something,” he said. Then, looking at the limp towel in his hand, “So that guy was the edgy, dangerous sex symbol of a generation, huh?”
“Apparently so,” Ellen said.
“Guess you had to be there.”
Kawi Airfield
Tanzania
The plane had creaked as Wally stepped aboard, the suspension visibly sagging. Jerusha eyed the rust-spotted and patched fuselage with suspicion. “How old is this plane?” she asked Finch.
He grinned. “Ah, this crate’s as old as me, and just as mean,” he said. “She’s a Cessna 206, made in 1964-a good year, all around. We’re both perfectly serviceable, lady, if you catch my drift.” He winked one tiny eye at her, and his glance drifted down the length of her body.
“Can it carry Wally?”
“Your metal man, you mean? Sure. How much can the bloke weigh?”
She said nothing, but climbed into the plane and took one of the four seats in the cabin, in front of a pile of boxes and crates lashed in with webbing and straps. Finch climbed into the pilot’s seat, and the propeller on the plane’s nose spun into invisibility as the engine coughed, sputtered, and roared. They clattered down the dirt runway, bouncing as Jerusha held tightly to the seat arms. As the plane finally lifted into the air and began to climb, Jerusha could see the sapphire water of the Zanzibar Strait, and off the horizon, the distance-blued green hump of the island itself. Below, the port city spread out, revealing all of its complexity and life.
“Where’s Mount Kilimanjaro?” Wally asked, shouting against the roar of the plane’s engine as they lifted from the airstrip, wings dipping left as Finch set them on a westerly course. “That’s in Tanzania too, right?”
Finch snorted. He pointed out the right window of the aircraft. “Kilimanjaro’s that way about six hundred kilometers: north, not west.”
“Nuts,” Wally said. He looked disappointed.
“Maybe on the way back we can make a detour,” Jerusha told him. “With Lucien.”
Wally brightened a little. “That’d be swell,” he said. “I hope we can.”
“So do I,” she told him, but the churning of her stomach belied her confidence.
As they slid westward under the high sun, the shadow of the plane below moved initially across well-greened land, but as they moved farther from the coast, the landscape below became more arid, tan earth dotted with the green of occasional stands of trees and brush, interrupted at intervals by the winding paths of streams. An hour or so into the flight, the ground began to rise and crinkle underneath them, steep green-clad mountains and deep valleys sliding underneath their wings. “Mongoro Region,” Finch called out, pointing down. “Beautiful, if you like mountains.”
Jerusha nodded. Staring down, she realized that it would have taken long days to cross Tanzania by car as she’d first planned, following the winding, rough roads carved into this wild land. The mountains eventually drifted off behind them, and they were flying over flat savannah plain. Finch pointed out herds of wildebeest, and buzzed low above elephants and giraffes. Wally was entranced, staring out the windows of the cabin and pointing.
In the late afternoon, Finch set the plane down near a small village. “Delivery,” he said, jerking a thumb back toward the crates. “We’ll be spending the night here…”
The village-a Masai boma, according to Finch-was a collection of mud-brick adobe huts. The children hung behind the adults at first, staring at Wally mostly. By the time they’d off-loaded the plane, the kids had overcome their shyness: they darted out to tap Wally’s metallic skin and dart away again, coming back to hit him harder and laugh at the sound. They plucked at Jerusha’s clothes too, but it was Wally who intrigued them, and Wally seemed to enjoy their attention. He’d make false lunges toward them, roaring when they ran away shrieking and enduring their pestering. He showed them Lucien’s picture, telling them (in English that they couldn’t understand) how he was going to visit Lucien, who was his friend. One of them kicked a soccer ball in Wally’s direction, and he booted it high and long, the children exclaiming and shouting as they ran after it.
Jerusha watched, laughing with them. She reached into her seed pack and found an orange seed; she let it drop, drawing on the life within so that in a few minutes an orange tree had bloomed, with ripe fruit hanging on the branches.
The village smelled of orange rinds that night.
Special Camp Mulele
Guit District, South Sudan
The Caliphate of Arabia
“Hey!” Tom shouted. “Hey! Knock that shit off!”
The two ignored him. One was the stocky kid Leucrotta, the other the Lagos guttersnipe with the Brit accent, Charles Abidemi, the one called the Wrecker, or sometimes ASBO, after some incomprehensible Limey bullshit.
Tom already knew who started it. Poor skinny Charlie wouldn’t start shit with anybody, although he might make your Austin Mini explode a one-kilogram chunk matter at a time once he got clear of you. But Leucrotta was your typical adolescent male: a dick with legs. Which, given that he was an ace, was a very dangerous dick indeed.
Tom hauled Leucrotta off by the collar of his outsized Simba Brigade camo blouse just as it quit being outsized anymore. As a giant hyena-form chest exploded all the buttons off the front and blew out the sleeves, Tom tossed the rampaging were-beast up just far enough to transfer his grip from a collar that had just turned into a ribbon to bristly scruff.
“What the hell is wrong with you little shits? Don’t you know there’s a revolution on?” Tom spoke French. After spending six or seven years in the Congo, he could speak it just about as well as he chose to. He found that slangy with a deliberately nasty americain accent usually had the best effect. It wasn’t like anybody was going to mouth off to him about his bad pronunciation. Not twice.
Of course, then he had to repeat it in his native tongue. Son of an Igbo soldier who immediately abandoned his Yoruba mum in a Lagos slum, Charlie had spent most of his short, miserable life in a housing estate in a not-so-trendy part of the London suburb of Brixton, getting his narrow ass kicked by Pakistani Muslim gangs, poor white gangs, Yardie gangs, and gangs of England-born blacks who despised immigrant Africans. He understood nothing but English. When the Limeys deported them Charlie’s single mother hauled him back to Lagos, which got promptly overrun by the Simba Brigades. She’d jumped at the chance to sell her troublesome son to Alicia Nshombo’s recruiters for a couple hundred bucks. But he wasn’t the fucking problem.
As if to prove the point Leucrotta snapped at Tom. Only his ace reflexes let Tom shove him out to arm’s length as drooling black jaws clacked shut. They’d have taken his face off as cleanly as any sad-sack Egyptian tanker’s, Uber -ace or no. “You little fuck,” he shouted. “Try that shit on me? You need to cool off, man.” And he flicked the four hundred pounds of spotted furious monster a casual two hundred yards through the air with a flip of his wrist. Trailing a howl of despair, Leucrotta landed in the middle of a swamp channel with a colossal brown splash.
About half th
e couple dozen kids hanging around by the tents broke out clapping. Tom gave them a sour smile and stomped off to confront the supposed authority figures who had made themselves oh-so-scarce during the dustup.
The special-unit camp, set well apart from the rest of the PPA army in the Bahr al-Ghazal and surrounded with coils of razor tape that glittered evilly in the white-hot sun, was as depressing a patch of perpetually soggy alkali clay, barbed-wire scrub, sorry-ass grass, and hyperactive mosquitoes as Tom had encountered in all his years spent knocking around the very least desirable real estate in the whole Third World. What the hell possessed me to take my day off in fucking Brazil, anyway? he asked himself furiously. Next time I’m going to goddamn Greenland.
The adult supervisors on duty stood aside in a clump: four surly overfed Congolese nurses from the National Health Service and a pair of Leopard Men commandos in their spotted cammies. All wore web belts with Tasers and Mace prominently displayed. The commandos wore holsters with 9mm SIG P226 handguns, too.
“What the fuck?” Tom said, spreading his hands palm up. “That asshole Leucrotta is throwing his weight around. You can’t be dumb enough not to know how that’s gonna fly: either he’s gonna waste somebody or somebody’s gonna waste him. Either way the People’s Paradise loses a valuable asset. You need to keep these kids in line. They’re freaked out and pissed off. They’re gonna tear each other apart without Siraj having to lift his little finger!”
“They are like animals anyway,” one of the nurses said. “Let them settle their pecking order themselves.”
“At least exercise some adult moral guidance,” he said in exasperation. “Try persuasion. Lead by example.”
“If the great leader will show us the way,” the shorter of the Leopard Men, Achille, said.
Tom walked two steps back into the sun. Then he swung back around and jabbed a finger at the handlers. “All right. I’ll do that. I’ll do that little thing. Hey, kids. Listen up.”
Back came Leucrotta from his bath, human, slouching, and squelching. Tom favored him with a hot blue glare.
“Got control of yourself now, Fido?”
The boy glared. “Uh-huh.”
“If you ever pull shit like that again with me I’ll take you up for a nice little visit to orbit. For about five minutes. Do you understand? Say yes.”
“Oui,” said Leucrotta sullenly.
Tom nodded. “Smart answer. Let’s hope that means you’re getting smart.” He turned to the others. They stared at him wide-eyed. He saw awe on some faces and dread on others, but no hint of hostility. That was a relief; some of them could threaten even him. I’m Hell’s scoutmaster, here, he thought. Fuck me. He drew a deep breath. “All right. Just what are we doing here in the middle of the nastiest swamp God never made? Can anybody tell me that?”
“We’re helping liberate the oppressed people of the South Sudan,” a boy said.
“Yeah,” Tom said, nodding. “That’s the official line, isn’t it? And hey, that’s true. That is what you’re doing. Don’t forget it. And what else?”
“We’re trying to keep from dying.” The speaker was a stick-thin girl in ridiculously baggy Simba BDUs. She was about thirteen, extremely dark-skinned and threatening to become pretty one day. Her hair was cut short to her head. Despite strict embargoes on “unnecessary” personal possessions she sported a pair of huge red plastic hoop earrings and matching glasses with big round lenses.
“You show some respect to your betters, little freak,” bellowed the stoutest of the Health Service matrons, a slab-faced woman with wire glasses named Monique.
Tom opened his mouth to invite Monique to butt the hell out. Before he could speak, inky Darkness began to dance around the skinny girl like black flames, then leaped suddenly toward the matron. Screeching, she turned and fled as her fellow matrons stampeded out of the way.
“Now, that wasn’t nice, was it, Candace?” Tom asked.
The Darkness shot her nonexistent hips and stuck out her underlip in a cute prepubescent pout. “We’re not here to be nice, non? And anyway, she oppresses us. Or are we not meant to share in the Liberation?”
Candace Sessou was a bright and sassy teenybopper girl from a middle-class neighborhood of the city of Kinkala, near the former Brazzaville part of Kongoville in the southwest of what had been the Republic of the Congo before Nshombo and Tom liberated it. He was constantly surprised she’d survived to make it out of the labs alive. She had a problem with authority.
So did Tom.
“You are,” he told the group. “The Revolution is for everybody. It’s about liberating everybody. The people of the world. The people of the South Sudan. You.”
The handlers shot him barbed looks, as if he were giving the children license to eat them all alive. None of them had the guts to say anything. They were bullies, all of them. But he couldn’t very well let the kid aces go all Lord of the Flies on them, either. Time to try getting their twisted little minds right.
“But the Revolution is all about discipline, too,” he told the children. “About putting aside your selfish little ego trips and squabbles. See, the way the Man keeps the people down is divide and conquer. So what you need to do is pull together. Do your parts for the Revolution, for all the other kids suffering oppression around the world, and most of all, for each other. Can you dig it?”
“Yeah!” They shot to their feet, throwing their little fists up in the air on skinny arms.
“That’s the spirit. That’s my brothers and sisters. The Man can’t stand against commitment like that. You kids will save the world!” He let them soak that up. Then he said, “Now listen up. We got a job to do. And this time you kids are gonna make all the adults in the world sit up and take notice.”
8
Thursday,
December 3
Near Lake Tanganyika
Tanzania
The Cessna Bobbed and weaved through the air, tossing them violently from side to side. Wally clenched the seat in front of him so hard that the metal frame dented. Finch grinned back at them from the pilot’s seat, his stubby rhino ears twitching. Whenever he glanced at Jerusha, his gaze seemed to drift down to her chest and linger there. At least she’d worn an athletic support bra. “Bit of a rough ride, eh?” he said. “But we’re almost there.”
The turbulence grew brutal, and Finch paid more attention to the plane than to Jerusha. They skirted purple-grey thunderheads tossing lightning down toward the savannah and occasionally passed through rain showers. Tanzania glided slowly underneath them, and finally ahead, Jerusha could see an immense stretch of blue water. Finch spoke over a crackling radio as he circled the aircraft as they neared the lake’s shore. “We’re setting down there,” he said, pointing to a tiny airfield.
Ten minutes later, in a cloud of brown dust, they were down and taxiing up to a long Quonset hut. Finch cut the motor-the silence was deafening, the roar still echoing in Jerusha’s ears. Finch opened the doors and gestured. The air outside was sweltering and humid; she could see the orange spots beginning to dot Wally’s skin again. Huge mountains loomed to the east, but Jerusha could glimpse the lake to the west, beyond the buildings of the town. “Welcome to Kasoge,” Finch said.
There was a squad of a half-dozen soldiers leaning against the hut. As Jerusha stepped from the plane, they began to saunter over toward them. When Wally followed her, they stopped. One of them snapped something, and the muzzles of their rifles suddenly came up.
“Hang on now, mates,” Finch called out, his hands lifted and open. Jerusha followed his example, but Wally only raised an eyebrow. Deliberately, he stepped in front of Jerusha. The gesture was touching, but it meant she couldn’t see. She moved around him. Finch was talking to the soldiers in what Jerusha assumed was Kiswahili.
Their voices were loud and strident at first, and Jerusha’s hand drifted to her seed belt, her fingers curling around kudzu seeds. A quick toss, and she could entangle them…
She took a step to Wally’s side. The sold
iers were still staring at them, but their weapons had dropped back to their sides. Finch was still talking, waving his hands. “I need your passports,” he said. Jerusha handed them to him.
The squad’s officer glanced through the documents, finally passing them back to Finch. The soldiers went back to the hut, conversing among themselves and still watching them. “Those blokes are looking for PPA incursions, or for refugees from there,” Finch told them. “I told them we’d come from Dar es Salaam, not the Congo. I told them you had no interest in the PPA. I think they believe me.” He sniffed, the horn on his snout tossing. “So-was that true?”
Jerusha didn’t answer; Wally just shrugged. If there were soldiers patrolling the shores of Tanganyika, they were going to have to be very careful. “If Wally and I would like to take a boat ride on the lake tomorrow,” she said to Finch, “would you be able to negotiate that for us? We could pay you…”
“Boat ride, eh?” Finch scowled, tiny ears fluttering while he fixed Wally and Jerusha with a scowl. “A nice, leisurely sightseeing ride?”
“Yep. That’s right,” said Wally. “Sightseeing.”
Behind him, Jerusha sighed.
Finch scratched at the base of his horn with one long, blackened fingernail. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. He narrowed his little eyes, taking a long, hard look at Wally and Jerusha. He seemed to spend more time looking at Jerusha. His gaze was a little less angry when he looked at her, too; he never seemed to have much to say to Wally.
“Well, I expect that since you’re just a pair of innocent tourists with no interest in the People’s Paradise of Africa you’ll not know that the border between Tanzania and the PPA runs straight down the middle of the lake.” Finch hacked up something dark and wet. He spat it in the dirt, adding, “And you do not want to find yourselves on the wrong side of that line.”
Jerusha said, quietly, “What would happen if we did? What would we find? Just out of curiosity.”
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