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.”