The great stampede began. Within minutes my lungs were close to bursting, each exhalation like fire across my throat. I was falling farther and farther back in the herd — back where the sick and the young were running.
I started to cry. Decided I wouldn't be shot in the back. I plunged to a halt, and whirled to face them. There were two jeeps bouncing and jouncing across the veldt. In one a man stood upright, one foot balanced on the dashboard, the other in the seat, and his knee locked against the back of the car seat for support. There was a rifle at his shoulder. He called out something, and the jeep began to slow. My skin was crawling, looking for cover. Tears and snot gouged slimy trails through my dust encrusted face.
There was the ear-splitting crack of gun fire. The shooter in the jeep flung away his rifle, his arms wind-milled, and he collapsed backwards off the jeep. I looked around wildly. It was a silly reaction, but I suddenly realized that I was patting myself all over my chest as if to ascertain I really wasn't shot.
My pursuers spun their jeeps in tight U-turns, and began to haul ass out of there. There were two more shots, and another guy in the first jeep and one in the second jerked from the impact. There was the gnashing and grinding of gears, the squeak from too old brakes, and a mud and dust covered Mercedes truck pulled up next to me.
"He's not on the endangered list, Mosi, guess we should have let 'em shoot him," said J.D. "And now you've gone and killed that guy." J.D. shook his head piously, and tisked.
There was a flash of ivory in ebony as Mosi grinned at me, tossed up his rifle, and caught it by the barrel. He slid the rifle into the truck, and then maneuvered himself back through the window. When he thrust his arm back out he was holding a wad of Kleenex.
I blew my nose, wiped the moisture from my face. The kleenex was mud-caked trash in my hands. "How … how…." I stammered.
"One of our scout planes spotted the vehicles. We figured poachers, and came out to check," Mosi said.
It suddenly all struck me as hilarious, and I began to whoop with laughter. They were staring at me, J.D. with some consternation, and Mosi with fatherly understanding.
"No, no poachers," I finally managed to gasp out. "'Cause somebody just declared open season on jokers."
***
The tie up of this sordid little story took only a day. Mosi and J.D. got me back to Nairobi. The solution in the pipette proved to be AIDS-infected human serum. The posse saddled up, and headed out to Kilango, only to find Faneuil and Margaret had already split.
Of the three gunmen who were shot, two were dead, and all the survivor could tell us was that he had been hired by Faneuil to torch the clinic and kill me.
Two men had been assigned to head the medical investigation; Pan Rudo, a doctor with the World Health Organization, and Philip Baron von Herzenhagen of the Red Cross. Rudo was an elderly, elegant man with an almost terrifying brilliance. Herzenhagen was a fat, blond white guy who looked like a stuffed tomato after a few hours in the African sun. It was Herzenhagen who had the bad taste to ask me how I felt — after all, I'd been "administering vaccinations to the children of Kilango for months. Infecting them with AIDS. Inadvertently … of course." As if that little addendum made it all okay. He ended the interrogation with the solicitous suggestion that I might want to seek counseling, but the show of concern didn't fool me. He had wanted to make me fed bad. I eyed him, and said in a level voice, "I bet you wet the bed, set fires, and tortured animals when you were a kid." I then turned my back on him, and walked out. I remember there was a little choke of sound from Rudo. Whether laughter or outrage I never knew. As for Herzenhagen, I never saw him again until he waltzed across my television screen as a special advisor to the Vice-President in charge of eradicating jokers on the Rox. It seemed a perfect role for him.
The Kenyan authorities and I searched through Faneuil's and Margaret's personal effects seeking some explanation for the horror they had perpetrated. We found none. I really hadn't expected to.
The cops tried to see if I could shed any light on the motive. After all, this man was a doctor. All I could tell them is that doctors are people too with the same hates and fears and biases as the rest of our tribe. And unfortunately, the list of healers who had turned to murder is a long and honored one. Faneuil had been a psychopathic bigot — end of story.
Still, it bothers me how he got out of Kenya. Out of Africa. He must have had help in high places. Which scares me, and sometimes keeps me awake at night. Memories of a young boy with a sweet voice also return to haunt me occasionally. In 1990 Jonathan wrote to tell me Daudi had died. And all I could think was that I'd killed him. It was Tachyon, or rather his example, who helped me get past it. I looked at him, and remembered how guilt had nearly destroyed his life.
I have a lot of people left to heal. I'm not going to blow it on guilt. Yes, I have been an unwitting accomplice to Faneuil's murders, but my conscience is clean. I just wonder if the same can be said for Faneuil — wherever he hides?
Yes, I'm afraid it can. The world has said it's okay to hate us. Maybe next they'll say it's okay to kill us. Faneuil is just waiting for vindication. He's sleeping the sleep of the righteous.
The Ashes of Memory
3
Hannah threw the transcripts down on Malcolm's desk. "I want Harris fired, Malcolm. I want his ass out the door."
Her fury had been building all day, though Hannah wondered if her ire was because Harris hadn't done his job or because his failure had dumped the task on her. But if Dr. Finn's tale had not been enough, listening to the depositions of the fire victims under his care had fueled the inward anger.
Jokers or not, no one deserved what they'd gone through.
Harris missed being on the receiving end of Hannah's wrath: he was out when she returned to the office not long after noon, and the fury had gone to glowing embers under the work awaiting her. The initial lab report had been on her desk, confirming that traces of jet fuel had been found in the remnants of the basement plants; the materials in the delayed fuse were still being checked. Dr. Sheets's autopsy reports came in the late afternoon: nothing unusual there other than the bizarre variety of forms among the dead: CO levels in the blood and tissue samples indicated that most had died from smoke inhalation long before the flames reached them.
Hannah had requested a database check on convicted and suspected pyros in the city; the list was depressingly long. Aces like Jumping Jack Flash she discarded — there'd been nothing to suggest a wild card power had been involved in the fire. Those who were still incarcerated or already in jail, those who never torched occupied buildings, and those who had never indicated any wild card antipathy she moved to the bottom of the list. There were still a dozen names left in the priority category. She'd decided to take Arnold Simpson, another of the agents, and interrogate the first one — a Kevin Ramblur, a street gang kid with the nickname of Flashfire who, it was suspected, had been responsible for snatching lone jokers from the street and setting them afire — when the floor clerk brought in Harris's transcripts.
"Pete said to give you these, and that he'd talk with you in the morning," the clerk said. "He had a doctor's appointment."
Harris had given her a long litany of "not available for deposition" and sketchy logs. They were garbage; utterly useless even if she hadn't already known that all of them were outright lies. That had fanned the dull anger back into rage, and Hannah stalked down to Malcolm's office rehearsing her first words.
"I'm not kidding, Malcolm. This is either incompetence, deliberate sabotaging of my case, or both."