Kalahari (11 page)

“Did you know them?” asked Sam.

I shook my head. “That’s what bothers me most. If they were out here doing research, they’d have surely sought us out. We know this area better than anyone around—so why hide from us?”

Because they were certainly hiding. I didn’t doubt that for a minute. I also knew that everything that had happened to us in the past few days was somehow linked to this place: my dad, the lion, the poachers.

I turned to the others. They were all staring at me, as if waiting for an explanation.

“Look around,” I said. “We might find a clue about my dad, or that lion, or
something.
They left in a hurry, so they might not have had time to burn everything.”

Everyone seemed reluctant to touch things, but they spread out and began opening cabinets, looking through the samples in the fridges, and sorting through the detritus on the floor. There wasn’t much to be gleaned from broken glass and dusty microscopes. I tried to focus on anything that seemed out of place or missing. I stood still and let my eyes rove the room, considering each detail.

“It looks like they were studying rocks,” I said.

“I’m getting the same thing,” said Avani. “Look at these.” She dumped over a box filled with rough, porous stones.

“There are no rocks in the Kalahari,” I said.

“Yes, but did you see those big drills outside? They dug them up from beneath the sand. This was some kind of geology project.”

I nodded. “If they created a weak point by drilling, fissures could spread out from it and weaken the crust over the caverns. But what were they looking for? Water?”

Avani tapped her lip thoughtfully and picked up the empty box. Then she slammed a finger onto a small scribble on the side. “Look!
W
!”

I gave her a blank look.

Avani sighed and pointed aggressively at the page. “
W
! It’s the atomic symbol for tungsten. They were gathering samples of it.” She began moving around the lab, setting up microscopes and digging through boxes. The rest of us watched, dumbfounded but hopeful that she’d somehow find meaning hidden in the chaos. After a minute, she stopped and looked at us. “What are you doing just standing there? Look around! There have to be more clues.”

Thus bidden, we began a methodical search of the lab, finding more rock samples but little else of significance.

“Whoever they were, they haven’t been gone long,” Avani noted. “There’s hardly any dust on the counters and the minifridges are still cool, even though they were unplugged. This place was trashed two, maybe three days ago, I’d guess.”

“Right around when my dad disappeared,” I murmured.

“What confuses me—among everything else,” said Avani, “is why scientists would destroy what was obviously a pretty expensive, well-established project like this one? It looks like they’d been here awhile; I mean, this place doesn’t look brand-new. No matter what they were working on, even if it was illegal or dangerous, they wouldn’t just burn everything. I’m not saying they’d be publishing their work all over the place, but at the least they’d save their notes.”

“Maybe they did. Maybe they took stuff with them,” I suggested.

“Or maybe it wasn’t them who did this,” she returned. “Maybe someone else deliberately destroyed their research.”

“Then where are the scientists now?”

She shrugged. “We’re just guessing in the dark, really.”

“We should search the other buildings,” I sighed. “Maybe they didn’t have time to sweep them all.”

“Or we could just
leave
,” voiced Miranda. “Why do we care what this place is? It’s creepy!”

“If this place is linked to that lion we saw or my dad’s disappearance, then I want to figure out why. Anyway, they might have a radio or a phone we could use to call for help.”

The ordeal was almost over, at least for the group. I still had to find Dad, but with the help of some soldiers or police and a plane, I didn’t doubt that we’d find him soon. My only worry now was what state he would be in when we did find him.
Please, just let him be alive.

Everyone split up to explore different buildings. I headed for the one farthest away, which was about as large as two trailers placed end to end. I made it only halfway before I heard a scream. I immediately ran toward the building it had come from—the middle one—reaching the door at the same time as Sam and Joey.

Inside, we found Miranda on her knees, her face white and eyes stretched wide, her lips open in horror.

T
he walls were lined with cages. Inside were the bodies of animals, most of them dead, and from the look of them, they’d been shot point-blank. Monkeys, squirrels, meerkats, smaller felines like caracals, lynx, servals, and more—almost every mammalian species of the Kalahari was represented, with the exception of the bigger animals like zebra and kudu. The stench was overpowering. I leaned over, my hands on my knees, retching. Toward the back of the room, hidden in the reeking shadows, the still-living animals screeched and howled and rattled their cages, raising a hellish racket. I didn’t know which was worse: the stink or the sound.

Sam opened the door to let fresh air in, but it wasn’t nearly enough. Kase helped Miranda to her feet and took her outside; she was sobbing. I heard Joey go after them, muttering, “I can’t, I just
can’t
. . . .” I could barely hear him over the racket.

“Sarah,” said Sam. “Come on. There’s nothing here.”

I shook my head. I was a zoologist—or practically was one. I didn’t flinch at death, though it always turned my stomach. I’d seen a lot: piles of elephants slain for their ivory; dead rhinos poached for their horns; colonies of birds poisoned by polluted water; entire ecosystems thrown out of sync because of human waste, deforestation, and greed.

This was one of the most horrifying things I’d ever seen.

“You go,” I managed to choke out to Sam. “I’ll look around.”

He stayed with me anyway, though he looked ill. Together we walked down the aisle separating the cages, and I held my collar over my mouth and nose to try to block out some of the stink.

“Sarah.”

“What?”

Sam was a few steps ahead of me and he wordlessly pointed. About halfway down the aisle, the animals began to turn silver in varying degrees. Some of them were half-normal and half-covered in a metallic sheen. One baboon had silver hands while the rest of him was brown fur; he’d been shot like the others. At the very far end of the horrible room we found the animals that were still alive, as if whoever had come in here to execute them had been interrupted before he or she could finish the job.

These last animals were entirely silver.

They looked like the lion, and some of them had died not from a bullet, it seemed, but from fits of madness, judging by the state they were in. There was a silver owl whose cage was littered with shining metallic feathers after it had beat itself against the bars. The animals who were still living reminded me of the lion, how they shook themselves and scratched and yowled and chattered and screamed as only animals can.

I didn’t realize how close I was to fainting until Sam put his hand on my back to support me.

“It’s some kind of infection,” I said. “Some kind of disease.”

“Have you ever seen anything like it?”

“Nothing even close. Who would do this? And
why
?”

“Look,” he said, pointing to the largest cage. The door was hanging at a crazy angle, as if it had been ripped open. Silver hairs mixed with tawny ones were scattered around it. I bent to inspect the tracks in the dust on the floor.

“The lion,” I said. “He must have escaped and chased away whoever did this.”

“Maybe he chased away
all
of them.”

My mind raced like a mouse in a maze, turning corners, hitting dead ends, doubling back, and struggling to find sense amid this nightmare. “Henrico said someone had reported poachers chasing a white lion,” I said slowly. “So suppose instead, it was these scientists chasing the
silver
lion. They were in the middle of destroying their research—which includes these poor animals—when the lion escaped. They knew they had to capture or kill it before someone saw it. So they went after the escaped lion and instead they found my dad and Theo.” The pieces began to fall together now, like a line of toppling dominoes. “After they found Dad and Theo, they found our camp and realized there were more of us.”

“So now they’re out looking for us,” said Sam. “We’re loose ends.”

“Right.”

“But obviously they’re not finished here,” he said, gesturing at the cages. “There’s still more to clean up. . . .”

I met his gaze and saw my own horror mirrored in his eyes. “Sooner or later, they’re coming back,” I whispered. “To finish the job.”

“We should hurry,” he said gravely.

I nodded.

Sam sighed and scraped his fingers through his hair, then turned and slowly surveyed the room. I looked down to my left to see a porcupine scratching at the metal mesh of its cage, its quills as silver and gleaming as giant sewing needles. I knelt and—keeping my distance—looked at the pitiful creature with tears beginning to well in my eyes.

“Why would they do this to you?” I whispered. “I am so sorry.”

I felt almost ashamed to be human at that moment, to look so closely at the pain that my species had caused its fellow creatures. Ashamed . . . and outraged. I wiped away my tears with the inside of my wrists and stood up.

“Sarah.”

The edge to Sam’s tone caught my full attention. I turned away from the cage and looked to the corner on the opposite wall, where Sam was staring. There was a body, a young Indian man slumped against the wall, his eyes open and his face frozen in a rictus of pain. He wore a lab coat and latex gloves, so I guessed he was one of the researchers. The wounds on his chest and neck spoke plainly of how he had died.

“The lion,” I said grimly. Sam had his hand over his mouth, and he turned away, nodding his head.

There was a revolver locked in the man’s hand. So he’d been the one putting the animals down, before the lion broke loose and killed him. Where were his colleagues, that they’d left him like this? He hadn’t been dead long, but surely someone would have come back for him by now. I knew I should feel angry at him for what I was seeing, for the horrors this building contained, but I could only look at him with pity.

Whatever the metal substance was, it had infected these creatures—and it looked as if it had spread, cage to cage, from one end of the room. If the animals hadn’t been killed, would it have spread all the way? Was that why the dead scientist had been shooting them, one by one?

“It’s contagious,” I whispered, and Sam nodded.

“Let’s go,” he said.

This time I didn’t argue. I’d seen more than I could stomach already, and as soon as we stepped into the sunlight, I hit the ground, retching violently, but nothing except water came up.

I stared at my hands, trembling in the sand. Were we already infected? How did it spread? Had I killed us all by leading us here? Was there a cure? My head spun with questions until I could barely see straight.

I turned to smile weakly at Sam, who looked as sick as I felt. “Some trip, huh? Bet you wish you’d never left the States.”

He seemed to mull that over, then said softly, “No. I don’t.”

“Guys!” Joey was standing at the next building, waving for us. “Over here!”

Great, now what?
I couldn’t possibly bear to see more infected, massacred animals or dead scientists. I reluctantly stood up and followed Sam to the next building.

“What is it?” I asked warily.

Joey opened the door and pointed inside. “There’s food in here!” He whooped joyously and disappeared indoors.

This building was similar to the first, except that it was divided into rooms by curtains that hung from the ceiling. Miranda and Kase were sitting on two chairs in a small kitchenette, wolfing down a pack of vanilla crème cookies. The food made my stomach growl, but my curiosity was stronger than my hunger, and there was no way I could eat after what I had just seen.

“So the building with the animals,” I said, “it’s worse than we thought. Remember the lion?”

“No,” said Miranda flatly. “I’d completely
forgotten
about the horrible metal beast that tried to eat me. Wait.” She put down her cookie. “Oh,
God
, you mean . . .”

I nodded. “Many of them are silver, some covered more than the others. Like it’s a disease or a rash.”

Miranda looked at her cookie as if it had transformed into a spider and quickly set it down.

“Do you think we could be affected?” Joey asked softly. Everyone’s eyes turned to me with such horror that I flinched.

“I doubt it,” I said, more casually than I felt. “We’ve barely been here fifteen minutes.”

Avani gave me a knowing look, seeing right through my flimsy deflection. I tried to signal her with a small flick of my eyes to go along with it, to soothe their fear.

Too late. “We’ve been breathing this
air
for fifteen minutes. If it’s airborne, we’re already infected,” she pointed out.

“I did
not
sign up for this freak show!” Kase shouted. He stood abruptly, his chair sliding backward with a spine-chilling shriek. Miranda emitted a pitiful moan and lowered her face into her hands.

“Stop it!” I ordered. “Just
chill
, okay? Look, the animals may have been infected, but there’s no reason to believe the—whatever it is—can affect humans. The men I saw back at our camp were just fine—none of them were, um, silver. So let’s just all chill. Please?”

Miranda whimpered. “I want to go home.”

“We all do,” Sam said softly. “But Sarah’s right. We need to stay calm and not invent worries that might not come up.”

“Did anyone find a radio? A phone? Anything?” I asked.

“No, but we found doughnuts!” Joey said. “They’re a little stale, but hey, I wouldn’t say no to moldy bread at this point.”

Avani had found a closet stocked with food: crackers, canned vegetables, instant soup, even a box of Twinkies. At the sight of it all, my stomach gurgled. Trying to put the dead and infected animals from my mind, I forced myself to eat some crackers, knowing my body needed nourishment. We ate and packed at the same time, filling plastic bags with bottled water and as much nonperishable food as we could carry. I found a crate of emergency supplies, including candles, matchsticks, and a black flare gun. I tossed some of the stuff in with the food, but turned the flare gun over in my hands thoughtfully before tucking it into the back of my pants.

Joey opened a large freezer and dug around inside, loudly expressing his disappointment that there was no ice cream. Then he paused and picked up a large plastic container. He studied it for a moment, then said, “Uh . . . Guys? Is this what I think it is?”

Sam took a look, then gave a low whistle. “Bees?”

“Sickos,” Joey muttered. “What do they do—sprinkle them on their cereal?”

“This is a scientific facility, you idiots,” said Avani. “They’re probably just specimens. My biology teacher kept frogs and fetal pigs and stuff in her fridge at home when the power went out at the school one week.”

“Let me see that,” I said.

“Prefer bugs over Twinkies, huh?” Joey asked, handing over the container with a shudder. “I should have guessed. Talk about Girl vs. Wild. Do you eat grasshoppers too?”

I studied the contents of the container. It held a partially intact hive filled with golden honeycombs. Dozens of frozen bees littered the bottom, but I spied more deeper inside the combs. I held the box to my ear and listened, catching a faint buzz. The insects in the combs were still alive, generating enough heat to survive by huddling and vibrating against one another. I’d seen hives like this before, in the cold winter months, when I was out doing fieldwork with my mom. The bees fed off their honey reserves until spring, withstanding temperatures below freezing.

The hunger in my stomach turned to a cold lump as my thoughts strayed inevitably to my mother. Of all the things to have in their freezer, why did the scientists have
bees
?

“Sarah?” Sam paused, his hands full of canned Spam. “What is it?”

I looked up at him, startled out of my reverie, and murmured, “It’s nothing.”

Hastily putting the bees back into the freezer, I gave Sam a worried look. “We need to scout every building and then get out of here,” I said. “The scientists could be back at any moment, and I don’t think we want to be here for that.”

Miranda lifted her head and spoke around a mouthful of peanut butter. “You don’t seriously think they’ll just show up and start shooting at us?”

I gaped at her, wondering if she’d completely forgotten about Theo.

“I think that’s exactly what they’ll do,” said Sam. “Sarah’s right.”

Joey snorted. “Aw, dude, you’re just agreeing with her because you want—”

“I’m just
saying
,” Sam interjected hurriedly, “that we should play it safe. We’ve already seen people killed in this mess.”

“Yeah,” said Miranda, “but no offense, Sarah, your dad and your friend did go
looking
for these guys. They kind of asked for it. And if they hadn’t, none of this would have happened.”

My eyes nearly bugged out of my head, and I didn’t realize I’d stepped toward her, my fists clenching, until Sam interrupted.

“She just lost her
friend
, Miranda,” he said. “Leave her alone.”

“I don’t need your help here,” I snapped at him, while at the same time, Kase bristled and pointed at Sam.

“Dude. Don’t talk to my girlfriend like that,” Kase snarled.

Sam held up his hands defensively. “I’m just saying, we need to work together instead of blaming each other.”

“Who are you to tell us what to do? You’re nothing but a charity case delinquent.”

Now Sam’s face flushed and his tone dropped below freezing. “What did you call me?”

“Yeah,” said Kase, lifting his chin. He had the same look in his eye as I’d seen in a bull elephant squaring off for a fight. “That’s right, Quartermain. You didn’t think I’d come out here without knowing who was going to be around, did you? My lawyer checked up on all of you. I’ve been watching
you
since day one.”

Sam’s lips curled inward. “You don’t know anything about me!”

“Whoa, okay!” Avani held up both hands, palms out. The tension in the room was stifling. “Why don’t we make a plan, huh? Let’s look at this logically. I think what we have here is a communication problem. We need to delineate responsibilities and identify our priorities—”