Kalahari

by Jessica Khoury

  “Hush,” Dad murmured into my hair as he ran. “I’m here, Sissy Hati. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  I smiled into the dusty fabric of his shirt.

  They carried me into a building, a laboratory. They shut the doors, locked them, and shoved tables and cabinets against them. I wanted to help but I kept slipping away, as if this world were a dream I was trying to go back to. I smelled smoke, heavy and acrid, and thought of our ruined camp.

  “It won’t hold them for long,” Sam said. “They’ll shoot the locks and then shove their way through. How long before the rescue teams get here?”

  Rescue teams? Had Dad reached someone on the radio after all? I tried to ask, but it came out as a groan.

  “An hour at least,” replied Dad. His face sharpened and then blurred, his skin pale, sweat beading his brow. He looked like he was about to pass out.

  “Wake up, Sarah,” my dad said. “You have to tell us what to do. We’re here, at the lab. Now what? Sam?”

  “She only said the cure was here. She didn’t say what it was.”

  “Mr. Carmichael,” Avani said, “you’re bleeding! You can barely stand. We have to bandage that injury. Here, someone give me a shirt or something. Grab Sarah’s scarf. . . .”

  Their voices were like flashlight beams, probing the darkness of my mind. All the while, I huddled in the cold, shivering, not wanting them to find me, not wanting them to see. A terrible sense of shame overwhelmed me and I despaired that they would see what I had become. Metal and madness and mirrors, that’s all that I am.

  “Pyramids,” I murmured.

  “What?”

  “Never saw the pyramids.”

  “What’s the cure?” they asked. The word hammered at me. My heart picked it up and pounded it through my veins. Cure, cure, cure . . .

  It was like being buried alive and trying to dig myself free. I reached, I fought, I struggled to push aside the insanity. What is the cure?

  I knew what it was. I struggled to reach it. The answer was so high, out of reach. I stood on tiptoe and strained, strained. . . . I realized I was lifting my hands, stretching them toward the light above me. My wrist made of metal . . . My eyes latched onto the remnants of my tattoo, the one I’d gotten a month after Mom’s funeral, the one to commemorate her death and her last mission and her final words. The tattoo that summed up the single greatest tragedy of my life.

  The bees are a fail.

  That’s it. I have it.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Bee,” I whispered.

  “Be what?”

  “The bees . . .” I labored for breath. Was it in my throat now? Were my lungs petrifying too? “The bees are a fail . . . safe.”

  It had all come together when the word surfaced, hidden in Mom’s final words to me: My heart is with yours. Keep it safe.

  Fail. Safe.

  A thing put in place to handle the damage should a crisis arise. The mechanism that put the system on shutdown, to contain the problem before it could spread.

  That was what she’d been trying to write on her arm. At the very end, after Abramo’s bees had stung her within an inch of her life, she’d realized what the cure was and tried to write it down. She had died before she could finish the word. The bees are a fail-safe.

  “She always said,” I whispered, my eyes anchoring on Dad’s face, struggling to stay afloat, “nature had a way of taking care of itself, if only we would step aside. Like the baby kangaroo, Dad, remember?”

  He frowned. He didn’t get it.

  But someone else did.

  “Wait a minute,” said Avani. I couldn’t see her but I could hear the excitement tinting her words. “Bees. Their stings inject apitoxin into their victims.”

  For the first time, I think she had everyone’s full attention. I struggled to hold myself aloft from the roiling insanity that pulled at me.

  “Go on,” my father replied slowly.

  “Don’t you see?” she said, her voice rushing. “The apitoxin—the venom—contains a substance called melittin.”

  Silence and confusion. She exhaled noisily in frustration.

  “Melittin breaks down cells and is used to destroy tumors and infective bacteria or viruses. They’re even testing it against cancer. What if it works the same way against Metalcium, killing the cells like they were a tumor?”

  “You’re saying we should get some bees to sting her?” asked Sam doubtfully.

  “Yes,” she replied, but she sounded less sure.

  Yes, yes! I wanted to shout, but I was sinking again, my voice powerless. Just like the bees that killed Mom. She had been infected, just like the mice in the lab, and the bees knew it. They were a fail-safe, nature’s remedy standing by. I thought of how the birds all went silent when an infected animal appeared. They sensed the wrongness of Metalcium—and so did the bees, except the bees could actually do something about it.

  “Guys!” It was Miranda, shouting from some distance away. “They’re shooting at the door! Hurry!”

  Dimly, I could hear the shots ringing out, the ring of bullets on metal.

  “Kase,” said Sam, “take the guns. You and Miranda guard the door. If it starts to open, just shoot in warning, okay?”

  He handed over the two rifles, and Kase, pale but grim, nodded and dashed away.

  “But it’s winter,” said Dad, ignoring the gunfire. “The bees are all dormant.”

  Which is why they stopped bothering the scientists. Which is why poor Androcles roamed freely for so long. I didn’t know why I believed it so completely. I think it had to do with my strengthening insanity; what would have never seemed reasonable to me ordinarily now made perfect sense. Why not bees?

  “There’s some in the freezer,” said Sam. “We found a hive filled with them last time. They were still alive. That’s probably why Sarah wanted to come back here.”

  Yes! In the freezer! Hurry!

  “It’s no good!” said Avani. “They’re dead by now.”

  “Maybe not,” said Joey.

  In the silence that followed, I easily imagined them giving him incredulous looks. Tell them, I thought to him. Tell them what happens if you heat them up.

  “When I was a kid,” Joey said, “we used to catch bees by sucking them up with a vacuum hose, then stick them in the freezer for like an hour. Then we’d take them out and tie a string around them, and when they warmed up they buzzed around on the string. Like little flying pets. What? Don’t look at me like that! We let them go afterward! But don’t you see? Maybe we could get the bees to revive.”

  “It is possible,” said Dad.

  “We have to try it,” Sam said, his voice steely. “Someone get the bees.”

  “Hurry!” Kase yelled. “They’re pushing open the door!”

  “The burn pile is on the other side of the building,” said Avani. “I saw it when we drove up—the freezer is probably there. If the bees are inside, they might have escaped being burned. Check the back door. If it’s clear, one of us could sneak out there while they’re still at the front.”

  I heard a shot from inside the building, and then Kase warning the mercenaries to stay back.

  I drifted away again, falling into a memory that swirled around me like a living watercolor painting. Me, four years old, crying because I’d found a fat bumblebee lying in our freezer. My mom and I had been making homemade Popsicles, the kind where you pour juice into a cup and then put a stick in for it to freeze around. The bee must have crawled into the freezer while I left it open, then got shut up inside. It was in there for hours, and when I found it I was sure I’d killed it. I was upset because I knew bees were Mom’s favorite, and now I’d killed one. “No, look,” Mom said. She took it out and held it in the sun. After a few seconds, it began to buzz a little, then wobble, and then it suddenly zipped away, weaving a bit, but alive. My tears
turned into a smile of awe and wonder. For years, I was convinced my mom had brought it back to life all on her own, with some secret magic. Maybe it wasn’t a spell or some incantation she’d worked, but it had been magic all the same. Because she had taken something broken and made it fly. She had shown me that things lost could be found, and things dead could be reawakened if you believed hard enough.

  I knew no amount of wishing could bring my mom back physically, but I realized at that moment that she was there. I’d never felt her presence so strongly since she’d died. After all, it was her words that had led me to this revelation. It was her hand, lifting that little bee to the sunlight, that had pointed the way. In this, she was present, holding me up to the sun in the same way, in a way I thought had been lost.

  I clung to this with all my strength. It was the ledge that lifted me out of the flood. As long as I held on to it, I could breathe, I could see, I could make sense of what was happening.

  They’d found the container of bees, and more buried under them. Thousands of them. Probably an entire hive that the scientists had found, smoked into senselessness, and then frozen for later experimentation. Likely they were curious as to why the bees seemed to be targeting them, but had never gotten around to actually figuring out what it was. They’d been so intent on destroying the bees that were attacking them, they’d never realized they were destroying the very cure they sought.

  I’d heard of cases like this before, like with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—the most effective force at cleaning up the methane wasn’t humans, but a bacteria that emerged to break it down and digest it. Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—nature provides its own crisis managers, the same way the human body deploys certain types of cells to fight an invading virus. The bees were evidence of an intricate system, a system that rises up to defend itself when an alien invader appears.

  “I can’t believe it,” someone said. “They’re alive.”

  “The heat from the fire must have warmed them and woken them up.”

  “Angry little buzzers, aren’t they?”

  “Here, mates, hand them to me.”

  Dad pointed out that we’d have to limit the stings, because the particular bees we were working with was the notorious African honeybees, known also by another name: killer bees. They were responsible for many deaths all over the world, feared for their aggressive nature and tendency to swarm and sting whatever creature disturbed their hive. And they’d killed Mom. I could only guess that the venom from the bees, though powerful enough to counter the Metalcium, had been too much for her system. If it had been only a few bees, maybe she could have survived.

  None of us knew how the bee’s venom would work, and I think they all still doubted that it would work at all. But this was likely bigger than me. I was pretty sure Dad had touched me when he’d carried me inside. He wasn’t showing signs of it yet, but he would. Maybe for him it wasn’t too late. Maybe he could still reach a hospital and somewhere there would be an expert who would know what to do. For me, though? I doubted I had much longer. At the rate the Metalcium had spread and begun affecting my mind, I didn’t think I’d last more than a day. It was a strange and unsettling thought. I contemplated my death with detached curiosity, as if it were a odd thing I’d found on the ground. I couldn’t bear to bring it any closer, to consider what it really was.

  A dozen bees slipped out of the container when Sam cracked it open. They shot upward, around, zipping through the air in a fury. My heart began to sink; they seemed uninterested in me. What if I’d been wrong?

  “Help!” Miranda cried from the door.

  Dad stumbled to them, taking the gun from Miranda and popping a few shots through the crack of the door. He roared at the mercenaries to stay back, then he shoved the door shut again and yelled at Kase and Miranda to push more furniture against it. Joey ran to help them. I fought to stay conscious, watching Dad worriedly; he was breathing hard and leaning against the door as if it were the only thing holding him up. Was his injury worse than he was letting on? The first sting took me by surprise. I hadn’t noticed the one little bee that had, well, beelined for my exposed arm. I hissed through my teeth, wincing, and mutely shook my head at Sam’s look of concern.

  The first sting was quickly followed by others. The rest of the escaped bees converged on me, sinking their stingers into my arms. One of them escaped and buzzed away, harmless now that its stinger was lodged in my skin, or what was currently functioning as my skin.

  The others all bent low over my arm, watching to see . . . something. Anything. Dismay began to flood me as nothing happened. I’d nurtured hope like a small ember in my heart, and now it began to cool. I whimpered, all my defenses falling away. I am going to die.

  Then Avani breathed, “Look.”

  I held my hand up closer to my eyes, wishing I had a magnifying glass. But in a moment, I didn’t need one.

  The spots where the bees had stung were turning from silver to white. The Metalcium puckered around the stings, like tiny blisters, and then the affected area spread out. I began to whimper, then clamped my teeth over my lip as my hand began to burn.

  It wasn’t skin, I reminded myself. It wouldn’t necessarily react the same way. And it didn’t. It burned like acid corroding metal. The Metalcium began to bubble up, in just small areas around the stings at first, but then spreading as if the venom had created a chain reaction. Miranda turned away, looking ill.

  My other hand gripped the edge of the table so hard I thought my hand would petrify around the edge. My body was rigid, and Sam must have sensed then how much pain I was in.

  “What can I do?” he asked.

  I just shook my head and closed my eyes. I couldn’t watch anymore. All of my attention was focused on not screaming. If I had stuck my hand into the coals of a burning fire, it couldn’t have hurt any more than this. Someone pried open my mouth and shoved a roll of cloth between my teeth. It was one of Sam’s gloves. I bit down on it, tears bleeding from my eyes.

  The bee venom had caused some sort of chemical reaction with the Metalcium. It lashed up my arm and across my chest, singeing the plate of metal over my heart like a brand pressed into my skin. I opened my eyes long enough to see faint wisps of smoke rising from the metal as it whitened and shriveled. I heard a bloodcurdling scream rise and I looked around to see who it was, only to realize it was me. The glove had fallen from my mouth and my lips were stretched in an inhuman cry that could shatter glass.

  Then my voice cut off, blocked by pain.

  The door flew open. My dad stumbled back, his rifle still raised and Joey behind him, holding the other rifle. Abramo stood in the doorway, flanked by his men.

  “Drop your guns!” Abramo ordered. “It’s over, Carmichael.”

  “Look!” Dad cried, his body slumping as he struggled to stay on his feet. “She’s healing! It works—this cure, it works! Abramo, stop this! We can help you. Let us heal you!”

  Abramo’s eyes were already fixed on me. He looked shocked. His men seemed uneasy at seeing me in this state, and they backed away slightly.

  “She’s dying,” Abramo said.

  “No,” Dad replied fiercely. “The metal is being purged, that’s all. We can do the same for you—just put down the guns!”

  Abramo shook his head in that slow, mechanical way of his. All the while he stared at me over Dad’s shoulder, as if he didn’t even notice the rifle my father was pointing at him. Then suddenly he whirled in place, his eyes focused on something outside.

  “Hear that?” Dad asked. I could tell his voice was getting weaker. He was getting weaker. I forced my eyes to focus on him, noticed that he had bled through the scarf Avani had bound around his torso. “That’s the emergency teams. I reached the government and now they’re here. It’s over.”

  When Abramo turned back around, his eyes were empty. “Do you realize what you’ve done?” he whispered. “You
have made a failure of me.”

  “Let us help you,” Dad repeated. His voice broke with pain, and he dropped to his knees, using the rifle to brace himself. “Please . . .”

  “I can’t,” Abramo said simply, staring vacantly over Dad’s head. “It is better to die than fail them.”

  And then he put his revolver to his own temple and pulled the trigger.

  Shock rocketed through me. The world reeled out of balance. My eyes rolled backward and I fainted dead away.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I woke to feel nothing at all, as if I’d been disconnected entirely from my body and were nothing but a consciousness in the air. I wondered if I was dead, if this was what came after.

  Voices took shape around me, and then sights: the brown thatched roof, the lightbulb hanging from it, a dark blob that slowly materialized into a face. It was a stranger’s face, but a kind one. She smiled in that particularly bright and cheerful way that the Batswana have and spoke to me in clear English. The words passed right through me, without comprehension, but they seemed to be pleasant and I smiled back. My thoughts were clouded, as if my skull were packed with cotton, mercifully dampening my senses. I was aware only that my mouth felt incredibly dry. I wanted to ask for water. I couldn’t remember how.

  The woman was wearing a white medic’s uniform and blue latex gloves. She said something else, not to me but to someone across from her. I turned and there was Sam, nodding at her words. Then he looked down at me, and though he smiled, I could read deep concern in his eyes.

  What happened? I wanted to ask. Where am I?

  But they might have been speaking gibberish for all the sense I could make of their words. My sight blurred and faded, and I fell asleep again—into real sleep, not pain-induced unconsciousness. I slept deeper than I had in over a week, possibly since before Mom had died. I felt more refreshed when I opened my eyes than if I’d slept ten hours in a bed of silk. My head was clearer and though I still couldn’t feel much, I at least had a grasp on the world.