Toxic (38 page)

“But you were there?”

“I got out of there,” Masters cut him short.

The bangs multiplied in the hall. The mass of L-Ds was growing. Masters went back to his perch. He counted a good fifty along the paths. They were coming towards the same place.

“The night is going to be long,” he announced. “I hope we make it until morning.”

M
irha remembered the words the businessman had addressed to his audience and afterwards, their diffusion across networks to the entire country and continent: “A predator always hunts another, a lesson which is more valuable here in Africa, this kingdom of savage fauna, than elsewhere.”

The whites possessed this sort of mania for evangelizing the obvious in the most obscure way, as if they took themselves for shamans inspired by spirits. According to her neighbor, it was a technique to make them seem more intelligent or wise than they were in reality. “From the wind, you only get wind,” she often explained.

Mira woke up in her uncomfortable bed. The noise was coming from the floor below her, but she wasn’t sure, and was still groggy from a not so satisfying sleep. With an attentive ear, she remained on her elbows for a good minute. Then, she rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling, which was missing several rows of slabs. It was hard to swallow with her dry throat. She decided to stretch her legs.

Up until now, she hadn’t touched the food or water. She unscrewed the lid of a jerry can which she then tilted to fill half of the seal. With the help of a sponge towel, the young woman wiped her face like the rich actors who she saw on television, just to refresh herself. Even if it cost her life, she would refuse to eat and drink until her jailer presented himself. She hoped to provoke some sort of reaction and to show him that no person could control Mirha M’mbe Ebanee. The world had changed, but she was still the same woman, bold and proud, who would walk without complaint for several kilometers under the beating sun to bring potable water to her family.

Once again, she heard banging on metal on the floor below her. The she heard the “gong” clearly. She returned to the window. The sun’s rays had chased away the morning fog that covered the hills and the horizon. The piercing light revealed the wounds and scars of an abandoned city. In the distance, towards the airport, she counted five glowing protrusions.

Someone had locked her up in here, at the top of this tower. Maybe he was working with the people that made the domes. Aside from the color, the strange balloons had little in common with the white people, to be sure.

A black insect came out of nowhere, not far from a neighboring building. It flew at a great speed just over the roofs. Her hands on her mouth and her legs shaking, Mira recoiled. She remembered those flying ships, the same ones she had seen attacking her village. The rich businessman was right: Africa was under the claw of a new predator. She wondered what had happened to the white people.

Jave folded up his flexible screen once again.

His rootlets quivered as a sign of caution. He cleaned out the auditory channel, located at the base of his neck. His human was refusing to eat. She needed to eat and drink, but most of all drink. It was essential. On the other hand, the software had detected subtle changes in the behavior of the infected human. For sure, it was still banging on the walls, the windows and almost anything that was in its way. Its movements remained shaky and broken, but they became more fluid at the neural level. The difference remained undetectable to the naked eye. According to the botcam scanners, the creature was establishing new connections where its former motor skills were starting to be reactivated. That was encouraging. However, it seemed premature to come to conclusions at this stage of the experiment.

He crouched down and grabbed a fistful of humid earth, which he brought to his nasal vents. A rich planet, he recognized, smelling with meticulous care each odor that came off of it. Before him, the lake stretched out over octains of square kilometers. The surface was a mirror under the effect of the piercing light filtered by the canopy. The gold dust danced to the slow rhythm of the waves. The emissary took advantage of this moment of calm.

Further along, the Primark’s T-J rested on its wheels, which were half-sunk in the beach. Naakrit had insisted on him being present during this new octo-diem of hunting. Currently in retreat, the swarms were preparing to sweep the sector. Given the number of smoke stacks, each one signaling a house or a camp, the pickings were once again going to be excellent.

“Without you, I would be overturning rocks in Dubai, looking for a way out of this hole. Thanks to your clairvoyance, I find myself able to open markets.”

Naakrit moved forward, letting the backwash wet his boots.

“I’m going to go away,” the Primark continued.

“For negotiations?”

“New customers.”

“For the animals?”

His tongue whipped the air as a response. Jave encouraged him, seizing the opportunity to gain more freedom of movement.

“Your soldiers are well trained. They’ll know how to manage the situation.”

“Of course.”

Jave recognized this quality in the reptilian. He was well aware of the importance of giving troops advanced training and its impact on their efficiency. But of course, there was a downside to this: gifted and ambitious students tempted by a power reversal, for example.

“I wanted to have you at my side for this last human hunt.”

The Lynian got back to the base at the end of the evening, finally freed from his obligations to the head mercenary. Naakrit hadn’t let him get a rootlet’s distance away and was always beside him, hurling insults at the humans who tried in vain to flee or spitting his venom at the merchant princes, saying that all that the three galaxies contained were rivals trying to plot to rob him of his treasure. The hunt and the excitement amplified the release, Jave noticed, thinking that he could do without it all. With his experiment underway, the reptilian had chosen his moment poorly.

Jave jumped from the T-J’s ramp and took advantage of the moment to move away. He unfurled his flexible screen. The shock seized him when he saw the developments with his test subjects.

“What happened?”

The result taught him one thing at least: the antidote didn’t work. The infected person was lying on the floor, dead. On the upper floor, he saw the female wandering around, her leg dragging. A permanent grin was stuck to her bloody face. Her hands trembled and she smelled the wall like an animal, her head leaning to the side. He commanded the archives access right away. The system went back in time. Jave stared. “What did she do?”

Mirha hadn’t cracked.

The stacked jerry cans of water taunted her and even though she looked at them often, she held out. It was possible that nobody was going to come and that her jailers were hopelessly mocking her futile act of resistance. Maybe they even found it funny. Or, she told herself, she had been forgotten here. The possibility made her shiver a few times. Each time, she inspected the premises looking for a way to flee. The house in which she had lived her whole life was much smaller and even then she found hiding places, hidden passages and holes where rats hid. Around here, she only saw large, colorless walls. She slid her hands along them while she walked beside them. The immense room, more solid than her cob shack, could have held generations of her family.

She stopped, her head lowered towards her dirty feet.

Her pitiful tunic dragged along the floor and she stunk. Once again, she observed the full jugs. It was unacceptable to show herself naked in front of people she didn’t know, she decided. Mirha went to sit down in her place, her back against the wall. She put her head in her hands.

The muffled noises came to her. Sometimes, she didn’t hear anything for a long time and then they started again. The hammering resembled that of someone banging in the hope of attracting attention or escaping. She had tried to respond, banging on the walls and the table in turn. The individual hadn’t reacted, at least in an intelligible way. She had even screamed. Without being able to explain it, communication between her and her downstairs neighbor was impossible.

Heat and fatigue overcame her. When Mirha woke up, the light had gone down but it wasn’t yet night. Her eyes on the false ceiling, her spirit wandered, counting the panels and jumping from one square to another. She interrupted herself all of a sudden.
A false ceiling
, she murmured to herself in Swahili.

She got back up. The shady space seemed big enough to allow for the passage of one person. Who knew where it would lead? Maybe outside. She still needed to climb up without breaking her neck. She turned towards a table. In less than a second, she decided to take her chances. She pulled it until positioning it just below the largest opening, and then she piled up the jerry cans as stairs. Taking care, she managed to haul herself up, supporting herself on the wobbly metal mesh. It wasn’t the most stable place to climb, but she continued forward, as stopping and going back down seemed more complicated. Near the end, she spotted a duct that she hoped led to a hallway, another room or an exit. Pushed by an outcome that her optimism wanted to be happy, the young woman continued her progress towards her new goal.

She didn’t get very far.

As it turns out, the tired structure was incapable of withstanding her weight and the twisting force caused by her repeated pressure. After a dozen meters, the bar creaked loudly and bent more and more. The inevitable was upon her when she convinced herself that she still had a chance of reaching her goal. Then there were cracking noises, the fall and pain. Mirha cried out in surprise before dropping two meters and yelled grabbing her leg. She felt the broken bone through her skin and it wasn’t sweat that was sticking to her fingers. Tears rolled down her hollow cheeks.

When she was younger, she had fallen from a banana tree while trying to grab a bunch of fruit, but even then she hadn’t been in so much agony. She managed to drag herself to the wall. One of the jerry can was within arm’s reach. She dragged it towards her and unscrewed the lid. Despite her shaking body, she managed to tilt it over her wound. The clear water cleaned her skin. She grimaced. It throbbed. She rubbed the red flesh. The bone was broken. She tilted the jug a little more. With a bit of luck, the wound wouldn’t get infected, but her days as a tightrope walker were done.

Mira didn’t know that she had just damned herself.

Everything explained itself.

Instead of drinking it, as Jave had foreseen, she had poured the liquid contaminated with the test carried out on the creature directly on her wound. As he observed, accelerating the recording, the previously injected antidote worked about as well as a placebo. In less than an hour, the transformation was complete. His disfigured subject had adopted the twisted walk; her skin lost its color and turned almost gray in areas and she cracked and peeled off into scales similar to those of a reptilian.

At least he now knew.

For an instant, hope lit up the deceiving assessment that came up when he consulted the information from the lower level. The creature had perished. It was lying face down. The electrical activity in its brain had gone out according to the readings of the scanners. According to Naakrit, spoiled products only died when they were decapitated or their brain was reduced to mush. And yet, his test subject was still biologically functional.

Jave went back in time once again.

The incoherent wanderings didn’t inform him of anything in particular until the last three minutes before its death. Three minutes that captivated him. First of all, there was a convulsive phase. The infected person suddenly fell to the floor. It started to tremble. White foam flowed from between its lips. Its chest rose, he noted, indicating that respiratory function had been restored or at least had been attempted to be restored. Its eyes opened so wide that Jave though they were going to fall out of their sockets. The pain seemed to have no equal. A scream tore the air. The curves of the scanners went up, indicating brain hyperactivity. The graphs exploded past the average figures for a healthy individual. Following the crisis, the creature got up. Its walk remained hesitant, but it was no longer chaotic or broken. The gestures were almost fluid. It lowered its head and walked towards the window. The dragging step reminded him of something, but he put the parasitic though aside, literally absorbed by the scene. The subject didn’t reach its goal: it fell down two meters before it. The botcams showed a surprising diagnosis: heart failure.

What did that mean?

The Primark appeared on the communication network. Jave put away his screen and went to the operations center immediately. The reptilian greeted him there and pointed to the display, where Kjet’s scaly face was showing.

“Can you summarize the situation for the emissary?” Naakrit addressed him.

“We have something new. A radio source.”

Jave, confused, expressed doubt.

“Really? I thought that the EMP bombs had fried the systems and their technological infrastructure, including hard devices.”