“No?” Tom goggled.
Dr. Nshombo began to laugh.
Robert Cumming’s Apartment
Chicago, Illinois
One hundred dollars simplified the negotiation with the delivery boy. Noel stood in front of the apartment door, set down one sack, and rang the bell. He idly noticed that the sacks contained mostly pasta Meals in a Sack, bags of potato and tortilla chips, and several different kinds of cookies.
He expected a behemoth to answer the door. What actually stood framed in the doorway once it was opened was an incredibly tall and incredibly thin monochrome joker. Despite his youth, his hair was grey, his eyes were grey, and his skin was greyer. “You’re not Chuck,” Cumming said.
“No.”
“What do you want?”
Noel was pleased. He hated people who didn’t get to the heart of a matter, and instead wasted time asking, “Who are you?” and “How did you get here?” or “How did you get the groceries?”
“I’m the man who’s going to give you the opportunity to change the world,” Noel said.
21
Wednesday,
December 16
In the Jungle, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Rusty, I need you. We should never have split up. I can’t do this. I can’t.
But there was no choice. She’d already lost one of her charges to the jungle, and she worried about Rusty, about where he was and who might be after him. The despair threatened to overwhelm her: they might both be dead soon, Wally lost in the jungle somewhere, and her with these children who clung to her as if she were their only hope.
She kept the kids crawling forward as long as they could during the daylight hours, and huddled together with them around a small fire at night, when the sounds of the jungle surrounded them and their imaginations jumped at every noise. She fed them from the food her seed pouch could produce-strangely, to Jerusha, it seemed the jungle wasn’t the best place to forage and find food. You are their only hope. She could nearly hear Rusty saying it. Cripes, Jerusha, you’re all they have. You gotta do this.
So she would: without much hope, without much optimism. Because going forward was the only path she had. Because they would all die if she gave up now.
They came across a village one day. With some trepidation, Jerusha sent Cesar into the village to inquire about a telephone. She had the children wait well away while she crept closer in case Cesar ran into trouble. She carried one of the automatic weapons with her, though she knew it would be her last choice-her hand stayed near the seed pouch.
But Cesar came back safely, shaking his head. “No telephone,” he said. “They say the lines are all cut down around here. There are no phones. You have to go all the way to Kalemi, they told me. There maybe they have phones.” He shrugged. “It’s a long walk to Kalemi. But we can get there.” She almost laughed at his confidence, wishing she were as sure as he was.
Late that afternoon, they came to a river. Jerusha wasn’t certain whether this was the Lukuga looping across their path, or some other stream, but there it was: a slow-moving brown ribbon in the green landscape, a hundred yards across.
Jerusha muttered under her breath, checking the compass. Yes, east was that way, across the river; yes, the current was moving north. She looked to her right. Upstream, the river curved ominously to the west before becoming lost in the trees and brush and the high understory of the jungle. She could turn south and follow the river, hoping it would curve east again soon and allow them to continue toward the lake.
Or they could try to cross. Here.
She hesitated. She wanted to cry, to break down and let the fears run their course, but she couldn’t. The children crowded around her as they always did when they stopped. She could feel their hands clutching at her, their voices calling.
“Let’s all rest for a bit,” she told them, and the kids dropped gratefully to the ground. They pressed next to her and each other as she sat, snuggling up to her in a mass of dusky skin and ragged clothes.
Waikili did not sit. On the outside of the rough circle around her, he turned slowly with his blind eyes as if seeing a vision. “Bibbi Jerusha,” he said. “They awful close.”
Jerusha sighed. She turned, looking back over her shoulder into the green expanse behind them, imagining she could see motion there in the green twilight. “All right,” she said, “then we have to go across.”
“But Bibbi Jerusha,” Naadir said, her skin pulsing bright even in the sunlight. “I can’t swim!”
Others echoed the cry: Abagbe, Gamila, Chaga, Hafiz…
“We’re going to walk across,” she told them. “You just have to trust me.”
The seeds in her pouch were dwindling, but there were still several kudzu seeds, and she’d stripped the seed pods from some of the local vines she’d found as they’d walked. She walked to where the banks of the river seemed to be closest together, dropping several seeds there a few feet apart from each other. The vines erupted from the ground, and she directed their growth as if it were a symphony, weaving the tendrils in and out from themselves so that they formed a tight mat that slid down the shallow bank and out into the water, the tendrils writhing and curling as they grew, the roots digging deeper into the earth and the base of the vines thickening. The children watched, shouting and laughing as the mat-three or four feet wide now-slid across the river pushed by the growth behind it, the current tugging it downstream.
Gardener shot quick tendrils out from the front of the improvised bridge, letting them shoot forward until they reached ground on the other side and wrapped themselves tightly to the trees there, lifting the bridge out of the water so that it rained droplets down into the river. She sent more tendrils out to strengthen the structure, to stabilize it with forearm-thick vines. It took minutes and it tired her tremendously. “Go on,” she said to Cesar when it was finished. “Start getting them across.”
Cesar gulped audibly, but he stepped onto the vines. They gave way under his weight, creaking and sagging. He took another step. Another-and then he was out over the water. He bent his knees, pushing at the bridge; bouncing. It nearly reached the river’s surface at the middle of the span but it held, and Cesar grinned at Jerusha. “Tres bon,” he said. He gestured to the children, and they started across, four of them carrying the stretcher with Eason.
“Waikili?” Jerusha asked. He was still staring with his featureless face back the way they’d come.
“Soon,” he answered. “Not long now.” He shivered, visibly, and his hands went to his head. “It hurts to hear them,” he said. “It hurts.”
Jerusha went to him, crouching down to cradle the boy in her arms. She glanced back over her shoulder to watch the children crossing the river. Cesar was already across and Eason’s stretcher were almost there, the rest following, some helping those who couldn’t walk over easily themselves or were too frightened to step onto the vines. “Hurry!” Jerusha called to them. “Rapidement!” She picked up Waikili and ushered the remaining children onto the bridge.
Holding Waikili, she started across the span herself. The vines gave more than she expected under her weight, and she slowed her pace so that the children ahead could reach the other side before she dragged the vines down too much, handing Waikili to Cesar, who had come back to help her. “Get him across,” she said. “Now!”
She heard the warning shouts even as she reached the three-quarter mark, even as Cesar and Waikili reached the other side. “Bibbi Jerusha! Behind you!”
Carefully, watching her feet on the tapestry of vines, she half turned. A group of perhaps a half-dozen people had emerged from the jungle on the far bank: PPA soldiers, accompanied by a man in a leopard fez and two small boys. One of the children was taller and more muscular, with large eyes; the other was smaller and emaciated, ribs showing starkly under stretched skin. They were no older than the children she was shepherding.