“So what are you saying?” Rivera said.
“If we let her go, how do we know she won’t talk? Hell, we can’t even tell her not to.”
He was right. What was it their contact had said? That Bahame could see through people’s eyes? Legends had roots in reality. Maybe people were so terrified of the man that even the ones who hated him told him everything they knew in hopes of working their way into his good graces.
“We could tie her to the tree and gag her,” another of his men said.
This was stupid. They were exposed and wasting time.
“Boss?”
“We can’t tie her to a tree. She’d die of thirst or an animal would get her.”
The man standing behind her silently unsheathed his knife. “She’s not going to last out here on her own anyway. We’d be doing her a favor.”
Rivera stood frozen for what he knew must have seemed like far too long to his men. Indecisiveness was not a particularly attractive quality in his profession.
The knee-jerk reaction was always to fall back on his training, but this kind of situation had never been dealt with in a way that meant anything when actually faced with contemplating ending the life of an innocent woman.
“We’re moving out,” he said, turning and starting in a direction that skirted the burned-out village. There would already be a lot of explaining to do in the unlikely event that he ever laid eyes on the Pearly Gates. Murdering helpless women wasn’t something he wanted to add to his list.
4
Dr. Sarie van Keuren threw a hand out, grimacing as her fingers closed over a branch covered in thorns. There had been no rain for weeks, and the dirt on the embankment she was scaling could barely hold her fifty-four kilos.
She ignored the blood running down her sweaty palm and hauled herself forward, fighting her way to the tripod-mounted video camera set up on the ridge.
She blew the dust from the lens and peered into the leafy bush it was trained on. Even under the glare of the African sun, it took her a few moments to find what she was looking for among the berries — an ant from a nearby colony.
Normally, members of this species were slim black ground dwellers. But this individual had been transformed by the invasion of a tiny parasite. Its abdomen had swollen and now gleamed bright red, perfectly mimicking the surrounding berries. Even worse, the parasite had infected the ant’s brain, compelling it to climb into the bush, clamp its jaws around a stalk, and stick its colorful abdomen in the air.
At first, it had fought to get free, six legs pulling mightily against the grip of its jaws. But now all its appendages appeared to be paralyzed — probably because its clever little invader was chewing through the nerves.
She glanced into the washed-out blue of the sky, looking for the birds the parasite was trying to attract. This particular nematode could breed only in avian guts and had no means of transportation of its own. A match made in heaven. Unless, of course, you were an ant.
Van Keuren sat, wrapping her arms around her knees in an effort to get as much of herself as possible into the shade of her oversized hat. Below, the dry landscape stretched endlessly in every direction. The only way she could be sure that the modern world even existed was her Land Cruiser, broken down at the base of the slope.
She tried to calculate how many species she’d discovered over the years but soon found her mind drifting back to the first. It had been twenty-five years ago this week that her father had come home with a slightly dented VCR and a box of tapes — an unheard-of luxury in the Namibian farming community where she grew up. She’d been barely eight at the time and was absolutely mesmerized by the children’s videos, sitting for hours examining every nuance, memorizing every line. After a while, though, they’d started to get boring and she’d dug into the box again, finding a worn copy of Alien beneath a flap at the bottom. Her father had insisted that it would give her nightmares, but she’d watched it anyway, transfixed by the creature that grabbed people’s faces and gestated inside them.
Who would have thought that a horror movie hiding in the bottom of a box would spark an obsession that would define her life? Thank God it hadn’t been a copy of Rocky. She’d probably be getting beat up in some ring right now.
The angle of the sun continued to dip, but that did nothing to diminish the temperature she guessed was creeping up on forty-five Celsius. Time to retreat back to the shade of her truck.
Down was easier, the loose dirt allowing for a semicontrolled standing slide to the bottom. Once back on solid ground, she dabbed a little water on a rag, looking in the side-view mirror as she unstuck the blond hair from her cheeks and wiped the dust and salt from around her mouth.
Her hat was large enough to border on sombrero but wasn’t enough to keep her skin from turning deep red and her nose from looking like it was molting. Despite her family tracing its history in Namibia back for generations, she was cursed with the smooth, fair skin her mother had taken such pride in.
Deciding it was hopeless, she reached into a cooler full of melted ice and pulled out the makings of a gin and tonic. A couple of prospectors had driven by six days ago and assured her that they’d tell the Toyota people in Windhoek that she was out there, but now she regretted refusing their offer of a ride out. Sometimes her single-mindedness could be a virtue, but mostly it just got her into trouble.
Sarie pressed her back against the vehicle and slid down the hot metal, settling in against the slightly cooler rear tire. She had no more than a day’s water left in her primary container, but there was a spring a few kilometers away. Her food stores were a bit better, but it didn’t really matter — she could live off the land pretty much indefinitely if she had to. The real problem was the gin. There were only a few centimeters left, and that was just unacceptable.
She frowned and sighed quietly. When the sun went down, she’d have to start walking out. It was probably two days to the road and another day of waiting around for someone to drive by. What had happened to the note she’d written herself to buy a satellite phone? Probably in the glove box with all the other unread reminders.
Halfway into her third drink, a distant shape began to form in the heat distortion. At first she just thought it was the alcohol, but soon it coalesced into an outline that was distinctly human. She reached back through the truck’s open door and pulled out her rifle, sighting through the scope at the approaching figure.
It was a boy of about sixteen with skin turned almost obsidian by a life spent outdoors. He was shoeless, wearing only a pair of khaki shorts and carrying a canvas sack over his bare shoulder.
She poured the last of her gin in celebration, sipping happily at the hot liquid as he drew nearer.
“Howzit!” she said when he came within earshot. “If you have an alternator in that sack, bru, then you’re my hero.”
He stopped in front of her, a look of confused concentration on his face. She tried Afrikaans with no more success and finally succeeded with the now very rusty Ndonga she’d learned from the people who had worked her family’s farm.
“Yes,” the boy responded, nodding wearily. “The car men in Windhoek gave it to my father and he told me to bring it here.”
She dug a Coke and some food from her sweltering cooler, handing it to him before crawling into the back of the vehicle for her tools. “Rest in the shade. With a little luck, we’ll be driving before dark.”
5