Over the crackle of gunfire, Wally heard the whir of machinery. A soldier on the barge cranked a hand winch, nervously winding up the anchor line while peering over his shoulder at Wally’s advance.
“Oh, no you don’t, pal.” Wally reached the barge. Two soldiers stood over him. They fired on his head, shoulders, and arms from a few feet away.
It hurt. In spite of his best efforts, rust had pitted his skin everywhere. He felt new trickles of warm blood on his back and neck.
Wally snapped off a length of wooden guardrail. He swung it like a bat, sweeping the soldier’s legs out from under them. They thudded to the deck. Wally heaved himself onto the barge, then stomped them both. They didn’t get up.
That’s for Lucien.
A low snarl sounded above and behind him. Before Wally could turn, the leopard tackled him. It landed on his back, raking its claws through vulnerable rust spots.
Wally screamed in pain. He reached backward, grabbed the giant cat by the scruff of the neck, and tore chucks out of his own back when he pulled it off him. He swung the leopard through a full two-seventy, smashing it upside down on the deck with tooth-rattling impact. Wally brought the segment of rail down on its throat, hard enough to puncture the deck, fixing the transformed Leopard Man in place.
That’s for everyone else.
Time to end this, before the PPA folks realized they could hurt him. He needed to clean his wounds. Wally hoped they’d had enough time to send an SOS.
The rest of the crew abandoned ship when he tore his way into the cabin. He smashed everything that looked even vaguely scientific, especially all the glassware.
Then he punched through the planking and dropped into the hold beneath the deck. The hull itself was wood, but a series of riblike spars ran the length of the barge to give the hull its shape. And those were metal. Wally disintegrated them two at a time, one in each hand.
The hull pulled apart. Water gushed up through the seams. The barge listed to port, then crumpled, then sank. But not before Wally salvaged two fuel canisters.
When he lugged them back to his motorboat, he found Ghost standing on the riverbank. Openly staring at him with a strange expression on her face. She didn’t back away as he approached, and she didn’t threaten him with the knife handle. Wally paused. They stared at each other.
“My name’s Wally,” he said.
Ghost hesitated before she receded into the jungle.
On the Congo River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
“We could take you all the way there,” Gaetan said. “But it will take much more time. And the closer we get to Kisangani the more dangerous the river is.”
“You were paid a ridiculous amount of money for our passage,” Michelle said.
It was raining and she, Kengo, and Gaetan were hunkered down in the cabin. Joey was huddled under the poncho on the back bench of the boat.
“It would take many more days to reach Kisangani on the river,” Gaetan replied. “I have a friend who is a pilot. He flies out of a small airstrip not far from here. He owes me a favor and I am certain he will give you a good price to take you there.”
Faster was better. Her dreams were now filled only with the urgent need to get to Adesina. And the feeling didn’t fade when she woke up. It itched and burned in her mind. It was almost as bad as the fire in her veins after her coma. The farther upriver north they went, the worse the sensation. They were going in the right direction.
“Fine,” she said. “But we better get a decent deal.”
In the Jungle, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
The landscape was steep and furrowed; Jerusha often felt they were making more progress vertically than horizontally. It rained at least once a day, but the rain never seemed to reach them. The canopy of the jungle merely dripped continuously, and the air below was ferociously hot, humid, and still. They forded a few more creeks and small rivers rushing through the valleys, though thankfully none of them were as wide or deep as the one they’d crossed before. The rest breaks became more frequent-the exhaustion of scrambling up the verdant slopes and helping the children who couldn’t help themselves took much from all of them. The children were increasingly hungry and the fruit and vegetable seeds in her pouch were nearly exhausted.
She worried that the pursuit of them might mean that Rusty… no. She wouldn’t think that. She wouldn’t.
Waikili seemed nervous. His blind, blank face seemed to survey the jungle around them. “Those two children?” Jerusha whispered to him, so that none of the others would hear.
Waikili nodded. “They’re out there,” he whispered back. “And the one moves so fast… Leucrotta is his name.”
“How can you know that?”
“I know. He wants to eat us.”
Jerusha kept them moving all through the day, and pushed them even through the twilight. The sun was already down, the trees little more than darker lines in a grey murk. The kids were strung out in a long column as they clambered along a ridge. Jerusha was already looking for a spot to halt for the night, some small shelter.
A wailing cry came from the rear of the line, a shrill of terror too abruptly cut off and followed by shrieks and shouts from the other children. “Cesar!” Jerusha shouted and the boy unshouldered his weapon as they ran back toward the sound, Jerusha unsnapping the covers of her seed-belt pouches.
Naadir, the child with glowing skin, was there as well, the shadows of the other children streaming away from her, near the stretcher that carried Eason. But it wasn’t Eason that was the problem. He gaped like the others from the stretcher, pointing with a trembling finger. “Bibbi Jerusha,” he said. “It was awful…”
She pushed through the children. In the greenish illumination of Naadir’s skin, she could see one of the older boys, Hafiz, lying on the ground in spatters of blood blacker than the twilight. Jerusha’s breath hissed in. Something had torn away the boy’s face, ripped it from his skull so that all that was left were black-red furrows through which bone gleamed sickeningly. Another quadruple line of furrows had been carved over his chest; more across his abdomen, so deep that his intestines had spilled out.
“Go up to the others,” she shouted to the children. “Go on. Did someone see this?”
“I did,” Eason said in halting French. “I heard a growl, then something… I think it was that creature at the river… it came from the bushes, and leaped on Hafiz. It was only a moment, and then it was gone into the bushes over there, and Hafiz…”
“Leucrotta,” Waikili whispered. Eason was staring at the body from his stretcher, his tail thrashing wetly.
Jerusha glanced at the undergrowth around them. She could see nothing, not in the gloom. The noises and calls of the night denizens mocked her. “All right,” she said. “All of you, go to the others. Two of you get Eason’s stretcher. Tell them to make a fire-now. Cesar, go with them.”
“What about you, Bibbi Jerusha?”
“I’ll be along in a moment. Go- quickly. I’ll keep you safe. I promise.” She hoped it was a promise she could keep.
They obeyed, hurrying away in Naadir’s glow as Jerusha crouched down next to the body of Hafiz. She shivered. “You can’t do this,” she said in French to the darkness. “I won’t let you do this. I’ll stop you.”
She heard laughter answer her from the gathering darkness: a boy’s laughter, a child’s. Jerusha shivered again.
Standing, she scattered seeds around the body, and covered Hafiz in a blanket of cool green before hurrying to join her charges.
Sofiensaal Concert Hall
Vienna, Austria
A section of the pitched roof of the Sofiensaal collapsed with a rumble as Tom showed himself on the rounded top of the old concert hall’s facade. He felt the heat of flames at his back. They silhouetted him nicely against the night sky. But the whole thing was liable to cave at any minute. Better make this quick, he thought.