by Greg Keyes
“He’s an asshole,” she said. “I asked him to quietly check something out, and two days later it’s on the front page. He never even tried to warn me—I checked. Anyway, it’s hard to call anyone, given the shape the network is in. It was a miracle I got through to Uncle Hamm.” She closed her eyes. “Ten missed calls from him. I knew it wasn’t going to be good, but damn. I was going to see them at Christmas. What the hell am I going to do at Christmas?”
“They don’t live here?”
She shook her head. “They’re on the other coast, in the DC area. My dad is an engineer and Mom is…” She stopped, started again. “Dad was an engineer. Mom was an art teacher. Renee was going to graduate high school. Jack was only eight.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks again, and her countenance was that of utter devastation. He had seen it so many times he had once joked that it just bored him now.
Do you feel anything?
He really didn’t know.
“You have other family?” he asked, more to be polite now.
“I have cousins I’m not very close to,” she said. “My grandfather on my mom’s side, maybe. Uncle Hamm didn’t know if he was okay or not. And Uncle Hamm.”
“Well, that’s something.”
She shook her head. “What if they die, too?”
She glanced over at him.
“What about you? Do you have anyone? A wife?”
“No,” he said. “I haven’t even tried. There really isn’t anyone.”
He put his palms on his thighs and pushed himself to standing.
“I think,” he said, “I shall take a walk.”
She nodded and looked down. Then she started weeping again.
He sighed. “Would you like to come with me?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I was alone with this all night. I don’t think I can take being alone any longer.”
“There’s always ‘C’ hut,” he pointed out.
“Right. Get all buddy-buddy with the guys who were maybe going to put bullets in our brains. No thanks.”
The fog had retreated for the afternoon, and the sky above was a clear, bright blue. Clancy’s words hung with him, and he imagined Corbin placing the barrel of a gun to her head.
He remembered another man, a mercenary.
“What are you thinking about?” Clancy asked.
“I am certain you don’t want to know,” he said. He glanced up at the trees. “You were right, by the way. They are quite beautiful.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “It’s kind of weird that the park is so empty. Usually when I came here, there were people everywhere. Now…” She frowned. “What if everyone dies, Malakai?” she asked. “What if nothing stops this disease?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It is strange. I haven’t thought about it.”
“You don’t think much about the future, do you?”
“Not so much,” he admitted. “Thinking about things that aren’t yet real can distract you from the man who is about to kill you.”
“I guess when you join the army at twelve, you can start thinking like that.” She turned to him. “I mean, have you always been fighting?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “When I joined Simba, they were almost done already. We killed so many people, more than the other side, perhaps. Just people, going about their lives, with no interest in political matters. There was no sympathy for us in the countryside…”
He stopped and looked at her.
“Why is this of interest to you?” he asked. “My life? The things I’ve done?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess because you’re the first person I hate and like at the same time. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand you and I don’t understand myself any better, I guess. And I don’t want to think about me right now. I guess I keep hoping you’ll say something to tip me one way or the other, so I don’t have these mixed feelings.”
He took a few more steps. Then he shrugged.
“The other guys were also stronger,” he said. “The Belgians eventually came in, and the US, as well. Once again my uncle spirited me away. We couldn’t go home—it was too dangerous, and there was nothing to go home to. So we went to Burundi. We started poaching chimpanzees.”
“I thought chimps were too close to people to eat,” she said.
“So my mother believed,” he said. “Others did not think so. But we were trying to catch them alive, to sell to westerners. It was there in Burundi I met my wife.”
“I thought you said—”
“Well, I don’t, now,” he told her.
“Oh.”
* * *
He met Solange when he was seventeen. She was of the Tutsi tribe, and her family had a small cattle ranch in the hills. He and his uncle did day labor for her father. He and Solange began meeting in a place with a waterfall and a small pool. She was fifteen to his seventeen, small, dark-skinned for a Tutsi. Beautiful to his eyes. Some other young men said her face was too round and her mouth too wide, but those were the things that made her appealing to him.
They talked a great deal, and over time there was some fondling and kissing, but she was very Christian, and although he knew he might press her to have sex, he also knew she would regret it, and he wanted her to have no regrets. He felt as if she was a wind coming through him that would blow away the past and bring him a new future.
Her parents didn’t dislike him, but he knew that they would never let him marry her if he could not come up with a bride price—which he would never make watching cows and mending fences.
“We’ll hunt chimps,” his uncle said. “I know a man who knows a man—we can get a good price.”
And like that, they went back into the poaching business.
The first morning of the hunt found them in the deep hills, waking around the remains of a fire. Besides his uncle and himself there were two other men, Patrick and Emery, both of whom had hunted chimps before. Malakai wasn’t particularly happy with that—he didn’t know the men that well. Still, the cage they had with them was heavy enough empty. It would be good to have more men to carry it when it was full of apes.
They ate a cold breakfast of boiled cornmeal and then started out to where Patrick insisted that chimps could be found. Chimpanzees, it turned out, were far easier to find than gorillas. They often used human trails, and their sign was everywhere. And they were noisy.
They caught up to a troop in an upland basin. Patrick was the first to spot one, but by the time he did, the chimps already knew they were there, and were making quite a bit of noise.
“Walk forward slowly,” Patrick said. “Try not to seem threatening. We’re looking for a little one, a baby. Those are easiest to carry and to sell. No one wants an old buck.”
Malaki kept his weapon down as they moved into the trees. The chimps were scampering all around them, now, and some of the bigger ones were starting to make him nervous—coming too close, making aggressive movements. He tried to count them, but it was hard because they kept moving. He figured there were about twenty.
“There we go,” his uncle murmured. He pointed ahead, to where a baby clung to its mother. When the mother saw them, she clambered into the low branches of a tree. One of the big males started screeching even louder as they approached.
His uncle had the net ready, and moved slowly toward the chimp and her baby. When he was close enough, he tossed the net.
The little chimp nimbly dodged it, hopping onto the mother’s back. Simultaneously one of the big apes leapt right up into Uncle’s face.
Patrick’s rifle roared, and the chimp pitched back. The other chimps screamed and retreated, but as soon as the men started toward the juvenile again, they came back with a vengeance. The mother, on the other hand, backed off, letting the rest of the troop defend her.
A big one dropped down right in front of Malakai, and for a moment he was arrested by its gaze—not so much angry as panicked, a look he had seen on plenty of human faces. It snapped at him with its teeth,
and without putting a thought into it Malakai shot the beast. It screeched and bounded back, pawing at the wound.
Then Patrick shot the mother.
She tumbled off of her perch and thudded to the ground. The baby managed to jump free, but it immediately leapt down and crouched behind her. She wasn’t dead, yet; she reached back and took the baby in her arms, still trying to defend it as she scooted away on the jungle floor.
They were forced to kill fifteen chimps before the troop finally backed off enough for them to retrieve the baby. It was still clinging to the mother. Malakai remembered the mother looking up at him, with the dimming light in her eyes.
He aimed his gun and sent her permanently out of the bright world. They put the baby in the cage and cut some saplings to help them carry it. Then they started back down from the hills.
Three days later he had his bride price, and the next week he and Solange were married. He spent the next couple of years poaching chimpanzees to support them, and the little boy they soon had.
His beautiful boy.
* * *
He and Clancy were walking back toward the camp by the time he finished the story.
“What did you name him,” she asked, “the boy?”
“Joseph,” he said. “After his mother’s father. He looked like her.”
They were interrupted by the sound of trucks moving up the road. A moment later the first of them arrived, and began disgorging National Guard troops.
“I wonder what that’s about,” Clancy said.
“I would be surprised if it was anything good,” Malakai replied. Then he swore under his breath. For a Humvee pulled up next to the first truck, and out stepped Trumann Phillips.
Phillips saw the two of them and waved them over. Malakai and Clancy met him in the center of the compound.
“Can you find them again?” he asked. “The apes?”
Malakai stared at him for a moment. Something had happened. Phillips was back in charge.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose so. I have some better ideas about how to do it now.”
“The mayor wants them captured?” Clancy said, then added, “He said we were free to go.”
“He wants us to proceed as planned,” Phillips said. “And you are free to go if you wish, but I need you. I wasn’t at liberty to tell you this before, but now it’s all out in the open, and you might as well know. Gen Sys is responsible for the virus, and the apes have it. We need captive apes to try and find a cure. That’s what this has been about, all along. What it’s still about.”
Malakai considered that. What he really wanted was to be quit of the whole matter. It still stank like a rotting elephant carcass.
“I’ll help,” Clancy said. Her voice was a little funny, and she had a distant look in her eyes.
“That’s excellent,” Phillips said. “And you, Mr. Youmans?”
“Sure,” he said, trying to hide his reluctance. “I’ll help finish this.”
21
David watched the television, trying to keep his eyes open. He reached for the glass of water by the bed, but accidentally knocked it to the floor.
After sending the article he’d fallen asleep, and now he came in and out of consciousness. He felt hot one moment, and freezing the next. He wasn’t always sure what was happening, and had turned the television on to give himself something on which to focus.
But it wasn’t helping. If anything, what he saw there made it worse.
He fumbled with the phone again, to try and call Sage, but the line was still dead.
The images on the screen blurred into each other—scenes of fire and chaos, soldiers, mobs of people trampling over one another. It took him a little while to realize that was he was seeing wasn’t local, but scenes of rioting and looting in Paris, London, Rome, Shanghai. A nuclear plant melting down in Byelorussia because it was understaffed. It seemed to go on for a long time. He closed his eyes again, feeling the heartbeat in his side, the liquid fire in his veins.
He most have dozed, because when he woke next, it was to an epidemiologist talking about the characteristics of the virus, how valuable it had been to discover that it had begun as a form of gene therapy, because now they knew it had been engineered specifically to overcome the human immune system.
David felt a flutter of elation. He had finally written something worth writing. Something important. He really owed Clancy big time.
Clancy, he thought. What’s happened to her? The email she’d sent, supposedly in secret, hadn’t been private at all. He knew that now. Someone had found out about it—and tried to kill him, very nearly doing so.
They still may succeed, he mused. But if they had tried to kill him, had they killed Clancy, as well? Had he killed her, by publishing the article?
He continued watching. The scene switched instead to a fire, raging out of control. It was a quarantine center, and another case of arson by the organization identified on the screen as ‘Alpha/Omega.’
As he stared at the flames, he felt the cloud coming back over his brain. He reached for the water again, and remembered that he had knocked it over.
The images on the television hazed together, and then dimmed into darkness.
* * *
Malakai studied the map.
“This isn’t going to work,” he told Phillips. “Not as it stands.”
“Why not?” Philips demanded.
“You’re encircling the entire area, then contracting, hoping to force them all to a common point, where you can launch a concentrated strike.”
“Exactly,” Philips replied.
“It looks fine on a flat piece of paper, but there’s a vertical dimension to this. They can go over your line.”
“If they try, then we’ll make it rain monkeys,” Phillips said. “Shoot them out of the trees. Some may not survive the fall, but we can’t afford to be too precious.”
“Beautiful,” Malakai said. “But you’ll need three times the ground forces you have to make that work—because you have no way to know where they will try to punch through your line. They’ll find your weakest point, and exploit it.”
“There are only so many National Guard to go around,” Phillips noted. “We’re lucky the governor gave us anything, considering the shit that’s going on down in Los Angeles.”
“Then my point remains.”
“Okay, then,” Phillips snapped, “What do you suggest?”
“How many helicopters do you have?”
* * *
Later, trying to get some sleep, Malakai thought about Hans, the mercenary he had met in Uganda. He was in his thirties at that time, and the mercenary was older by two decades. They were in a camp near the Rwandan border, drinking Scotch, just as he and Clancy had done not so long ago.
And just as it had the other night, whisky loosened tongues.
Hans became a little maudlin, started talking about how horrifying the business could be. Malakai had agreed with him, but in fact nothing Hans had said made any impact on him. As far as Malakai was concerned, the man was just making whinging sounds. Being a mercenary was just a job. You did what you were supposed to do, you got paid, and you moved on.
Don’t you feel anything? Clancy had asked.
“There was this one village,” Hans said, his voice getting sloppy. “East of Butembo. Tiny place. It was during that whole Simba mess back in the sixties. My first job, actually. Had this real hard-ass Afrikaner boss. He told us to kill everybody. He said if we left anybody alive we would be fired, without pay.
“I doubt any of the villagers even knew what Simba was, or what communism was, or anything like that. And there we were, just shooting them. I remember this one little girl, she didn’t have a clue. But I couldn’t shoot, you know? I couldn’t. And then this kid, this skinny kid, runs up from behind me and jumps on my back. And I just—I just freaked out, you know? The next thing I knew I was hitting him in the face with the butt of my rifle, hitting him and hitting him.”
Hans rubbed his r
ed face, then took another drink.
“Jean-Francis,” Malakai murmured.
“What?” Hans said.
“Jean-Francis,” Malakai repeated. “You know those Congolese—they’re all named Jean-Francis.”
“Right,” Hans said, tossing him a strange look. “Yeah. It’s just…” He stared at his drink.
“I guess shit happens, especially in this business,” he said.
“I guess it does,” Malakai said. He looked at Hans, and wondered if he should kill him. But when he wasn’t drinking, Hans was one of their best fighters. They were going to need him. And besides, it would be hard to do it without someone noticing, and then he would likely be executed himself. What would be the point of that?
Hans, as it happened, was killed two weeks later by a land mine. Malakai didn’t feel anything then, either.
* * *
He heard a soft knock on his door, and wasn’t too surprised to discover it was Clancy. She had what remained of the Scotch with her.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Should we finish it?”
“Sure,” he said. I’ll play Hans again, tell you all of my sad stories.
But she didn’t ask him to tell stories. She talked about her own life, about growing up, about her family, as if she was trying to get it all straight in her head. Eventually, though, she got quiet, and he thought she was going to leave. Instead she smiled wistfully.
“The first ape I ever saw was an orangutan,” she said. “My dad was working in Malaysia, and Mom and I went for a visit. I guess I was about seven, because Renee wasn’t born yet. We went to this place where they take orangs that have been captive or injured, and rehabilitate them back into the wild. Sort of a halfway house.
“We were on this sort of boardwalk, raised above the jungle floor. There was a feeding platform built up around a tree, and when feeding time came, the orangs came in from everywhere. And this one just dropped down next to us, and he looked right at me. We were no further apart than you and I are now. And I saw… Well, there was somebody in there, behind those eyes. A mind, and a heart, and a soul. A person. Not ‘almost human,’ but completely orangutan. Perfect the way he was. Except then I noticed he was missing an arm. I was told later that he’d touched an electric fence, and it basically set him on fire.”