‘Or stagnation.’
‘Pessimist.’
‘Fuzzy-minded pinko.’
Jake laughed. It sounded very loud in the silent tier forest.
‘I have to be optimistic, don’t I? But it’s more than wishful thinking. What I’m going to say will sound to you like classic schizophrenic paranoia, but the voices, the ones inside, I know whose they are.’
‘Don’t tell me it’s God, Jake.’
‘Hell no. It’s the voice of the Chaga.’ He held up his hands, begging time to explain. ‘Don’t “Jesus, Jake!” yet. You believed Peter Werther when he said he could hear the Chaga thinking to itself. Look at this place, what is it? A web of nodes and connections, a neural network, for Christ’s sake, on the macro and micro scales. Everything connects in here. Everything thinks. Do you know what the latest theory about the Crystal Monoliths is? They’re the Chaga’s primary memory storage system. Bevabytes of information stored holographically in a crystalline matrix. Hard drives the size of skyscrapers. Somehow I’m plugged into the system too. I’m the watekni on-line cyberpunk fantasy. Direct neural connection to the data net.’
‘Jesus, Jake.’
‘Don’t try to tell me it’s all a fantasy of a sick man who will make any deal with any devil to beat the Big 4, Gaby.’
‘I’m not going to, Jake.’ Now. She had to tell him now. She took a deep breath. ‘Jake, do you remember the day I came to your place, when I learned about you from the hospital files. I learned something else. All those people in Unit 12, all the HIV 4 sufferers who have been exposed to the Chaga: Jake, they’re all still alive. They should have died years ago – you told me, the thing kills in six months, tops – but these people are still alive. There’s something in here, in this place, this jungle, that stops HIV 4. That’s why you hear your voices; it’s working its way into you.’
Jake looked at Gaby. She could not read his expression. He got up from his high place and walked away through the dripping forest. Gaby called his name but he did not look back.
41
Gaby’s diary
Day Four
Contact.
M’zee has the senses of a hunting animal. We are on the high paths, moving through a thickening fog. M’zee stops, looks up, raises a finger and circles it. The Black Simbas unsling their weapons. Safety catches click off. We are not alone. M’zee takes point with the heavy machine gun they call m’toto: The Baby. Moran covers his right flank, Sugardaddy his left. I am behind Moran, Jake behind Sugardaddy, with orders that if anything happens, to get down, stay down, keep out of fields of fire and shoot anything that comes at you. Bushbaby and Rose back-mark. Rose lets Dog off his leash to run ahead.
Every few seconds we turn and check that the faces beside and behind us are the ones we saw last time. The fog grows thicker. My shorts and top are silver with dew, but I can feel the sweat running down my sides. My saturated pack feels like it weighs eighty tons. My blisters are bleeding into my boots. My calves are wrenched with cramp from yesterday’s climb. At any moment, two hands may reach out of the fog and take my head off with a monofilament garotte. I have never felt more afraid. I have never felt more alive.
When I used to go out with Private Pete the Soldier, I would parade my offended Political Correctness when he hoped that his unit would get transferred to Bosnia because he wanted to see some action. I understand him now. My God. This place is turning me into a War Bore.
M’zee holds up a hand. Dog is standing five feet in front of him, hackles raised, lip curled.
I am in cover before Moran can wave us down. I roll into a water-filled channel where two strands of branch twine over each other. Something oozes from under my thighs. I don’t think about it.
M’zee and Moran go forward. Dog trots after them. They disappear into fog. I lie in the cold water listening for gun fire. It doesn’t come. I grow chilled. It must come. It doesn’t. It feels like hours, down in the cold ditch. A rustle of movement. I roll onto my back, grabbing for the Magnum,
‘If I were your enemy, you would be dead now,’ Bushbaby says. ‘Get up. We are moving.’
On Jake’s signal I unholster the camcorder and follow him in.
We find them in a small amphitheatre of dwarf hand-trees. The men have been crucified on the white fingers of the hand-trees. The women have been hung by their heels. The bodies have been stripped. All have been killed by a single bullet in the head. The bodies have been mutilated. The men’s penises have been cut off and stuffed in the women’s mouths. The Chaga has started to claim the corpses. The men hang like images from Medieval plague crosses: high-relief crucifixes half-fused into the flesh of the hand-trees. Gaping mouths, eyes staring out of the melt of flesh and forest. The women’s trailing fingers have elongated into tendrils that weave seamlessly into the web of cables and branch fibres.
Flies, and things like green thistle-down, rise in clouds as Moran examines the dead. He finds a tattoo on the ball of the first woman’s shoulder: an outline of a cube, the sign of Sheik Mohammed Obeid’s Children of the Hajji Cartel. He reckons they have been dead for four or five hours. It looks like they were surprised setting up an ambush for us. They were undoubtedly killed after they were strung up.
My berserker adrenalin burn has gone cold in my blood. War sickens me. There is nothing glorious about it, nothing noble. Just cruel and sad. This is a terrible place to speak your last word, think your last thought, breathe your last breath and know absolutely that the last thing you will see is the figure standing over you with the gun.
I keep thinking back to a boy in my class at uni. We were never friends, our social circles did not intersect. I only got to know him by the manner of his death. He had the worst death I can imagine. He was into cave diving; which is insane at the best of times, let alone the suicidal solo dive he made against all advice into the flooded tunnels under the Marble Arch cave system. He didn’t even learn when the piece of grit jammed a valve and blew all his air supply away and he only just made it back to atmosphere. He was certain there was an undiscovered major cavern at the end of the narrow tunnel he had been squeezing through when he got into trouble. He went down the next day to find that cavern. He never came back. They reckon the same thing happened again, but he was too far along the pipe to make it back. He died alone, under miles of rock, in the cold and the dark, knowing his air was bubbling away, knowing that he wouldn’t make it, knowing that the last, the very last thing he would ever see would be his headlamp beam shining on limestone tunnel.
The body’s still down there. It’s too dangerous to recover it. In water that cold, that far from light, it could remain intact just about forever, floating trapped under those miles of rock.
I had nightmares for weeks after I heard how he had died. It’s the scariest story I know, because it’s true.
I think of those three men and two women, dying alone, helpless, where no one will ever find them, where no one will ever know, and a shaft of ice drives deep into my soul.
Before we leave them, M’zee pauses to rip out a tremendous fingers-in-mouth whistle and yell ‘Wa-chagga!’ at the top of his voice. As we advance, he repeats the call. Eventually I distinguish an answering whistle out of the forest sound-track of unearthly whoopings and chimings and twitterings. M’zee returns a long monotone blast; a complex twitter replies. We’ve given the passwords and crossed the firewall. What wrong note, what incorrect response, did those poor bastards back there give?