She opened the first aid kit quickly and frantically searched around for painkillers.
“Sydney, are you coming?” she heard Brandon call off in the distance.
“Just a minute, asshole,” she muttered. There were gauze bandages, alcoholic wipes, even nickel-plated scissors but no aspirin.
“Fuck.” Now her head was really killing her, but she knew she had to get out there. Not like my future depends on this or anything, she thought.
She pressed the button inside the trunk for the door to automatically close and began making her way to where Ramsay stood scanning the surroundings, the revolver held closely at his side. Brandon was already there, loading a chip into the injector.
“Do you see any others?” she asked as she got closer.
“No,” Ramsay said, doing a final sweep. “She must’ve been hunting alone. They do that from time to time.”
On the ground before her lay a tranquilized lioness. Ramsay had spotted her when they were tracking a zeal of zebras. He’d immediately grabbed the rifle and climbed through the sunroof, a rare look of genuine excitement on his face. Sydney and Brandon had initially been confused, then they’d managed to spot the predator as she slinked towards the herbivores about fifty feet away from a stray zebra. Through her binoculars, Sydney had watched as the huntress wheeled around when the dart hit her, looking everywhere to spot the attacker. She’d then turned her head towards the Land Rover and stared at them before finally lying down, her initial commotion having scared off the zebras.
“Damn, it’s hot out here,” she murmured, massaging her temples.
“Same as yesterday, really,” Ramsay said, adjusting his aviators.
That was strange. She was sure it was warmer. It had to be. She felt buffeted on all sides by sweltering heat, feeling it seep through her pores at the same time as a second fire threatened to explode inside her head.
Brandon crouched beside the lioness and felt around the base of the neck, moving the injector in with his other hand. Her mind in a daze, the only thing Sydney could concentrate on was the creature itself. The entire rest of the world seemed to fall away save for the animal. As she stared at the five-and-a-half-foot long predator, all she could think of were the eviscerated wildebeest from the day before and the imprints on the ground. She glanced at one of the lioness’s front paws; it looked similar enough, she guessed.
Sydney watched Brandon finish up with the implant and realized Ramsay was looking at her. “Are you alright?” he asked.
“Just a little under the weather. I’ll be fine.”
“Hold on,” he said, coming closer. He put the base of his wrist to her forehead. “You need to see a nurse. We’re going back.”
“Going back?” Brandon said, looking almost angry. “We can’t go back just because of her!”
“I’ll drop her off with the nurse, then we can come back out later,” Ramsay explained calmly.
“Good,” Brandon grunted. “I don’t want her to hold us back.”
Had she been feeling even slightly better, she probably would have asked what the fuck was wrong with him today but she could barely concentrate with the searing heat inside her skull.
Ramsay led them back to the vehicle. Why the hell is it so hot out here? she thought. Ninety had to be an underestimate; there was no way it wasn’t at least a hundred degrees today. The sun shot beams of heat directly down onto her and the air felt thick with humidity.
Somehow she managed to climb back into her seat and do up the seatbelt. The windows were rolled down and cool wind blew across her face. It made her feel better, but only for a moment until she realized something.
Most of the heat was coming from within her.
It seemed to take forever to get back. After they’d parked in front of the garage, Ramsay walked her across the front patio by the pool and through the forest towards the veterinary building. Even in her fevered state, she realized this was the first time she was seeing it properly. It was a new-looking postmodern structure, rectangularly shaped with large glass pane windows. It seemed to be roughly half the size of the lodge.
Ramsay led her along a paved trail towards two steel doors beneath a sign with dark lettering that read: SANSCORP LABORATORIES – SIMBA KISHINDO.
“This is very official-looking,” she muttered in a daze.
“Some very expensive research goes on here,” Ramsay explained. The doors retracted as they approached.
Inside, the colors of the walls were white and blue and everything had a sanitized, clean atmosphere. There were two hallways and Ramsay took her down the one to the left towards a door marked RITA GRAVES.
He opened it without knocking. The nurse was sitting behind a small desk, looking something over on an iPad. She looked up as they walked in and flashed an insincere smile.
“What’s the problem?”
“I don’t feel well,” Sydney mumbled, putting a hand to her head.
“She’s got a fever,” Ramsay elaborated. “A bad one.”
“Let’s see how bad it is,” Graves said, retrieving a thermometer from her desk and standing up. She placed it in Sydney’s ear, waited for the beep, then glanced at the display. Her expression turned sour. “Thirty-nine point six. Not good.”
Sydney feebly tugged at Ramsay’s arm. “What’s that in Fahrenheit?”
“Over a hundred and three,” Graves said, putting on latex gloves and pulling a sheet of paper across an exam table at the back of the room. “I’ve seen worse, but we better check her out just in case.” She turned around and patted the paper. “Sit here.”
Sydney ambled over and managed to pull herself up, realizing that her muscles felt sorer than earlier. The nurse grabbed an otoscope from its charging station on her desk and turned back to her. “Open wide,” she said.
Sydney opened her mouth as Graves shone the light around the back of her throat. “I don’t see any inflammation.” She checked Sydney’s ears next. “Seems normal.”
She turned back to the desk to return the otoscope. Ramsay was leaning against the wall, his arms folded. “Where do you feel it?” Graves asked.
“My head hurts,” she said, massaging her temples.
“How so?”
“Like it’s burning… Sorry, I don’t know how to describe it exactly.”
“Anything else?” Graves asked.
“My muscles are aching all over.”
“As in arms, legs, abdomen…”
She nodded.
“And when did you first start having these symptoms?”
“This morning, when I woke up.”
The nurse bit her lip, thinking. “You took your medication today?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She eyed Sydney quizzically. “But this isn’t malaria. The only thing I can think of with the muscle pain and fever would be Dengue.”
But I had a shot for that,” she said feebly, rubbing her eye with the back of her wrist.
“Exactly. So, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to give you a fever reducer and you’re going to take the rest of the afternoon off.”
Sydney had no objections to that.
Graves gave her two aspirin and Ramsay brought in a paper cup of water for her to take them with. As he escorted her back to the building’s entrance, a thought flashed through her mind amidst the pain of her fever. It was something she’d overheard Jones say the night before about this place. Something about there being things here that she wasn’t allowed to see.
RECOVERY
Sydney reclined on a lawn chair in a shady area of the patio beneath the balcony. Her eyes registered words on the pages of the novel in her lap, but her brain was still too frazzled to piece together the meanings of each paragraph. Sighing, she put the book down yet again and looked out at the pool.
The painkillers had worked, but she still felt sore and unimaginably tired. The first thing she’d done when she got back to her room was to take a cold shower and nap for several hours. She’d missed lunch
during that time but had no appetite anyway, so she didn’t mind.
Knowing that if she slept more she’d never get to sleep tonight, Sydney decided to take up reading by the pool for some fresh air. She was now wearing shorts and a t-shirt; her flip flops sat on the patio beside her.
“Not feeling well, are we?” Andy’s voice said behind her.
“Never better,” she said, forcing a smile. “What day is it?”
“July fifteenth.”
“I meant the day of the week.”
“Wednesday. We got here Monday afternoon, remember?”
“Right,” she said, rubbing her eyes.
“Seriously though, are you alright?”
“I think I just need to stay lying down for a bit.”
“Mind if I pull up a chair?”
“Go for it.”
Andy brought a nearby lawn chair closer, then sat down and folded his hands in his lap. “Sorry if I haven’t been talking to you as much lately. I was hoping you’d make some new friends.” He grinned. “Foolish, I know. How’s Brandon?”
“He seemed pretty nice yesterday and I don’t know what happened, but today he was a total douchebag.”
Andy stared out at the pool. “You’ve always had a great effect on people.”
“If my brain didn’t feel like it was going to melt, I’d punch you on the arm.”
“I’ll consider myself punched.” He grinned again and she rolled her eyes. “Hey, maybe he’s just not feeling well either.”
“I think it was more than just that. I mean, it came out of nowhere. It was a complete personality whiplash.”
“Maybe he’ll be better tomorrow.”
“I hope,” she said.
“Any idea what you’ve come down with?”
“Not a clue. I had every vaccination under the sun. The nurse said she didn’t know what to make of it.”
“What are your symptoms?”
“It’s weird,” Sydney said. “I’ve got no sore throat, no cough or anything like that, but I had a one hundred and three-degree fever and there’s this dull pain throughout my entire body.”
Andy scratched his chin. “Sounds like a party. And you just started feeling like this today?”
“This morning, yeah.”
“Did you come into contact with anything contaminated recently? Maybe you ate something?”
“No and my stomach feels fine. Maybe it’s just a side effect of the vaccines.” She rubbed her forehead. “Anyway, enough of that. How’s the analytic stuff going? Is Courtney tolerable?”
“You know, she’s really not that bad. She just comes off as a bit bossy sometimes.” He thought for a moment. “Do you mind if I say something?”
She shrugged. “I’m too fried to protest.”
Andy said, “I’ve noticed something about you. You tend to have a lot of assumptions about people and a lot of assumptions about what people think of you. The only way to break those assumptions is to actually get to know them, and by that process allow them to get to know you.”
“You sound like my mother.”
He held up his hands. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.”
“Okay Mr. Life Coach, at what point do we hold hands and dance to ‘Kumbaya’ off into the sunset?”
He smiled and shook his head. “I can’t think of any other way to say it. Anyway, you’re sick and we should probably talk about something else.”
“No, you do have a point.”
For the past three years, Andy had been like a brother to her. She felt like she could talk to him about anything – and she had. He’d sat through countless hours of her blabbing about everything from her family to her academics to her social life. And through it all, he would nod along and give advice when he deemed it necessary. She wasn’t the only person he did this with. Everyone in their circle of friends expected him to go into psychiatry one day.
The problem was that his input lacked one thing: he didn’t understand why she didn’t put herself out there more. Interaction was a skill that had never come naturally to her. It had taken her until university to feel like she was an accepted member of a friend group. When she’d tried to open up to people in high school, it only exposed her awkwardness and made her an easy target for mockery.
Now, she was happy with the group of friends she had and she’d rather hang out with them or stay in her room and read. If someone asked her if she could live the rest of her life in a private paradise, away from the complexities and bullshit of day-to-day life, she would’ve told them her answer in a heartbeat.
“You know,” she said, looking around. “I think Sans has the right idea.”
“About what? Patio design?”
“No, about his lifestyle.”
“The backyard isn’t too shabby, I’ll give him that,” he said, gesturing out to the savanna.
“But I mean, he doesn’t have to put up with so much of the crap we do. He talks on a video camera with people halfway around the world for several hours, works in his office just like he would have to in a city or anywhere else, but they can’t touch him out here. He has amazing facilities and the opportunity to do what he loves all the time. I mean, why do you think he never leaves?”
Andy frowned. “I don’t know. I definitely enjoy a good vacation once in a while, but if you don’t go through the real world most of the time, how can you truly appreciate what it means to get away from it all? I mean, you can’t call it a retreat if you have nothing to retreat from.”
“Then you call it home,” she said.
He looked at her. “We all need to get out of the house from time to time. Otherwise you’ll go mad from cabin fever.”
She thought for a moment and decided to change the subject. “So, what do you do with the data analysis again?”
“We review the information the implants send us to monitor and map the species’ movement patterns. It’s interesting, Sans has these little emitters in the ground around the perimeters of the reserve and if anything gets near them, the implant will zap them. Keeps his cloned creatures away from the rest of the lot without having to build a fence. He said this was less disruptive to the environment.”
“But can’t other animals still wander in?” she asked.
“I guess, but he didn’t mention it being an issue.”
“We saw something weird yesterday during our tagging op. There were all these wildebeest mauled and eaten, spread out over a short area. It didn’t seem like any animal behavior I’d ever heard of before. Ramsay told us it must’ve been lions and didn’t seem too concerned about it.”
“That doesn’t sound like normal lions.”
The images of the gory scene came flooding back to her mind. The blood on the grass, the entrails all over the ground, the rotting stench of–
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Could there have been a pathogen in the carcasses? One that could have been transmitted through the air, maybe?”
“I’m not sure I follow you. Why would the wildebeest have had a virus?”
“What if that’s how I got sick? It’s the only unusual thing I came into contact with yesterday. The killings don’t match any normal animal behavior. So, what if some lions or something got infected with a weird new strain of a virus, like rabies.”
“Now you think you have rabies?” Andy said, raising an eyebrow.
“No, not exactly, but… What if a group of infected animals killed those wildebeest? It explains the unusual circumstances and the lion-like imprints we found at the scene.”
“It doesn’t explain why you’re not frothing at the mouth and trying to eat my face off.”
“Okay, so maybe it’s not rabies.”
“And that doesn’t make sense how it would be transmitted through the air.”
Sydney thought for a moment, trying to remember if she’d accidentally touched something yesterday. No, she realized, I didn’t get within five feet of the bodies. Then it hit her.
“The flies!
There were flies buzzing around. I think one of them bit me.” It would also explain why Ramsay wasn’t showing any symptoms: he’d gone back to the car first and might not have been bitten. She’d have to see if Brandon was truly fighting something off or if there was another explanation for his sudden change in behavior. He had been near the carcasses for longer too.
“Most viruses don’t jump species,” Andy said.
“Rabies does.”
“We just agreed this wasn’t rabies.”
“Maybe it’s something similar. Or maybe it can’t fully cross species but in humans it causes a fever and muscle soreness for a few days, and in lions it makes them–”
“Commit mass murder?”
She shrugged. “The animal equivalent.”
Andy sighed. “Sydney, this is all very fun but I think there’s a simpler explanation for all this.”
“And that is?”
“You’re just experiencing a side-effect of the vaccines. They affect everyone differently. Keep relaxing, get a good night’s sleep, and you’ll probably feel better tomorrow. If not, then surely in a few days.”
“But what about the dead wildebeest?” she said.
“I don’t know, but if Ramsay doesn’t seem worried about it than I wouldn’t be either.”
She leaned back in her chair. “I guess not.”
“Nature is a strange thing. Just when we think we have it nailed down, some outlier data throws everything off. We can make generalizations about animal behavior, but just like people, there are going to be rogues and exceptions.”
She looked out at the shimmering heat off in the prairies and said nothing, knowing he was right.
She was given more aspirin around four and by dinner, she had enough of an appetite to eat a hamburger. After that, she’d actually felt she had the mental capacity to read again and spent a few hours in the library. Satisfied, she returned to her room around ten.
Nurse Graves had checked her out again after she was finished eating and gave her two more pills to take before bed. Sydney’s fever was holding around a hundred now, which wasn’t great, but compared to earlier felt lightyears better.
Safari: A Technothriller Page 5