by Alex Archer
In the light of day – brutal in every sense – Dan was a different man. It wasn't as if the sensitive and vulnerable youth of the night before was either illusion or facade, she decided. It was just that the danger and the sheer raw evil of their circumstances brought out another aspect of him, harder edged, more certain. More at home. Maybe he really is an action hero, she thought.
"I guess they know we're here," Dan said after they had mostly finished. "The camp administration, I mean. God knows what they think we're doing."
He took a sip of his coffee. "I wonder how the hell we're supposed to proceed from here?" he said. "I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to go wandering outside the citadel by myself. Call me a coward."
Annja shook her head vigorously. "No. Or I'm one, too. I know you're brave, Dan. You've got nothing to prove to me. But suicide to no purpose isn't bravery. Not in my book."
He looked at her with amusement. "You know, I think that's the first really personal thing I've heard you say."
She shrugged. "Well our conversations have run largely to business, small talk or political statements, haven't they?"
He laughed. "With me making most of those last, huh? Am I really that bad?"
She opened her mouth to protest when he looked past her and his expression shifted.
"Don't look now," he said, "but either our guide just got here or Hell's got a new work-release program."
Annja turned in her chair. His description was spoton. The woman standing just inside the entrance to the commissary had the hunched shoulders and swiveling head of something's prey and big, gold, frightened-waif eyes. She was almost skeletally gaunt – not anorexic, but something visibly other, as if all excess had been melted out of her by an eternal flame of fear. She looked all around the commissary as if expecting to see something terrible lurking in wait, coiled to spring. Then she looked back toward them.
Annja decided standing up might look more welcoming than threatening, so she did that. "Hi," she said in Portuguese. "I'm Annja Creed."
The woman set her narrow jaw and nodded once, almost spasmodically. She came forward, with fast steps, eyes downcast, shoulders slumped, and head forward – the demeanor of a true victim. "I am Dr. Lidia do Carvalho," the woman said apologetically in clear but accented English. "I was told I am to be your guide."
Dan stood up. "Pleased to meet you," he said. "I'm Dan Seddon. Thanks for coming out to help us."
She nodded. She would not look up.
"Listen," Annja said. "We can make other arrangements. You don't have to go."
The head came up. Lidia looked as if she had cut her hair herself, possibly with pruning shears. It was as if vanity had no place in her life. Only survival.
Those huge frightened-cat eyes met Annja's. "Yes," the doctor said. "Yes, I do."
****
She lived out here in the citadel, she told them as they scurried from cover to cover among the ramshackle dwellings. She was part of the camp's small medical staff, recruited from the city of Cuiabá in the high-plains farm country of Mato Grosso State. It was an economically distressed area and jobs weren't easy to come by.
"Even for doctors?" Dan asked. Off in the distance they could hear shouts, shots, screams. They weren't forty yards from the gate between the citadel and the colony, still in sight of its own forbidding machine-gun towers. "Surely they have socialized medicine here in Brazil."
"With ample free injections for the poor," Lidia said grimly, "of saline solution. Medical education is cheap. Real medicines are expensive. And government jobs go to the well connected. Come, now – I think it's safe to move."
She seemed to have a knack for slipping through quiet ways, little traveled by either starveling workers or the armed patrols. The workers weren't much in evidence anyway. They labored or slept at this hour. The mines ran twenty-four hours a day. Still, Annja's stomach was a constant sour knot of tension from anticipating ambush at any moment.
"You work out in the colony?" she asked.
"Yes."
"But you said you were staff," Annja said. "Couldn't you live in the citadel?"
"Yes."
"And you choose to live in this?" asked Dan, his eyes narrowed in disgust and dismay.
They halted behind a structure cobbled together from a random assortment of warped planks. The smell of sewage and decay were stronger than most places. Annja blinked tears from her eyes.
"Oh, yes," Lidia said. "Much safer."
"You have got to be kidding," Dan said.
She shook her head – a quick, furtive gesture. "Out here I enjoy a certain status. I have protectors. People understand that I help them."
"What about drugs?" Annja asked. "Don't people try to steal them from you?"
Lidia held up a cautioning hand. A hundred yards or so ahead a ragged pack of men walked past the alley mouth. They were skinny and so sunburned Annja couldn't tell what race they belonged to. They clutched machetes or wooden clubs.
"I have antibiotics and such things only," Lidia said. The gang passed without a glance aside, as if intent on some goal. "Nothing recreational. The pain drugs are available at a special kiosk right outside the citadel fence. It is heavily guarded day and night. Sometimes, of course, there are those who won't accept that I have nothing to ease their pains of mind and spirit. My shack where I live – not so different from this one, but I try to keep it clean – is ransacked frequently. That doesn't matter. I have nothing even for the most desperate to find worth stealing. And when people try to force me to give them drugs, or to do other things, I have only to scream. Then the people from the vicinity come. They take the people who are attacking me and do things to them. Terrible things."
She looked up at Annja. For the first time she almost met her eyes. "I should try to stop them, of course. Or feel worse about it. But I am weak. I fear that I cannot."
Annja felt an urge to touch her reassuringly on the shoulder. She didn't. She feared it would be perceived as patronizing somehow. Maybe it would be patronizing.
She had ample experience with poor people, and with people in the hinterlands of developing nations. In general she and they got along fine. She wasn't hard to get along with – for people of goodwill. Simple respect and friendliness, she found, went a long way.
She had never experienced anything remotely like this.
"Then why not live in the citadel, where it's safe?" she asked.
Lidia uttered a bitter laugh. "Safe? It's far worse than out in the colony. Here I have some status. I have protectors, as I told you. Inside – "
She shook her head. "Inside they play the games of power. And no one has a friend."
"But aren't they all in this together?" Dan asked. "The bosses, I mean?"
"What?" she asked. "Do you believe in honor among thieves? You are very naive, young man, though you think yourself hard."
"But their class loyalties – "
"Do not exist outside of the air-conditioned class-rooms of the universities," she said. "I, too, once believed in such things. Then I came here and saw the truth. Whatever they call themselves, socialists, capitalists – those who have power are all mad things, struggling constantly with each other for more. Inside the citadel, without a powerful patron you are waiting only to be collateral damage – or a plaything for those with the sort of mind to crucify workers who try to run away!"
"So that's what that's all about," Dan said.
"But we're in the middle of the rain forest," Annja said. "I'd think it would be easy to disappear, once you got away from the camp." Not that that guaranteed safety or survival, she knew. Spanish and Portuguese soldiers and explorers had perished of hunger in droves out there, despite its being perhaps the Earth's most nutrient-dense environment. What doomed them was what would likely doom city-dwellers who tried to trek through the woods – simple ignorance. The early explorers simply hadn't known what to eat.
"The Indians turn them back," Lidia said.
"They cooperate with their exploit
ers?" Dan asked.
Lidia laughed again. "Exploiters? The directors bribe the local tribes well. And the Indians get rewards for any stragglers they bring back – bonuses if they are still alive. As they get paid when they bring other Indians in as slaves."
"My God," Annja said. "Oh, my God."
"You didn't know things like that went on?" Dan asked.
She looked in his eyes. It was like looking through windows to a private hell. "No. I never imagined any such thing. I've seen bad things – terrible things. I've witnessed starvation and disease and even massacre. But – nothing to compare to this."
"All I know is we're a terrible species. And we do terrible things, and the Earth might be better off without us," Dan said.
To Annja's amazement Lidia favored him with a flat, angry glare. "I at least," she said, "know how to distinguish between the victim and the victimizer!"
She walked on, leading them farther into the reeking horror of the camp. Dan stood a moment staring after her, opening and closing his hands.
"I wish I did," he said.
****
Annja dared a second glance. The small patrol had vanished. "Right," she said to Lidia. "Let's go."
The slight doctor led them out across the broad space through which the mercenaries had marched moments before. As soon as she turned the corner of the container hut Annja had to jump to avoid tripping over a dead body, in cutoff shorts and a torn shirt pulled up around its belly. It had begun the bloat in the heat – thankfully it lay facedown. It seemed to be a male.
They had not smelled it from less than ten feet away. It was the third corpse they had encountered that day.
"How come everybody hasn't died of cholera or some other disease?" Dan wondered in a quiet voice as they scurried across the open space and slipped down an alley with containers on one side and plank hovels on the other. Even the three of them, carrying little spare body fat among them, had to turn sideways to negotiate the passage.
"The patrol will probably report the body," Lidia said, "and another team will come out to pick it up and carry it away to dump in the river. And they give out lots of antibiotics."
No doubt breeding all kinds of resistant strains of bacteria in the process, Annja thought. Under the circumstances it was the least of their misdeeds.
Lidia told them how the camp drew workers from all over South America and even beyond with promises of high pay. "All lies," she said, "of course. But once here – well, you've seen what happens to those who try to run away. And they might be the lucky ones."
"How is that even possible?" Dan asked.
"You saw the cage, out in the river?" Lidia asked.
"Oh, yes," Annja said.
"Once you go in the cage you never come out – alive," the doctor said. "It is for people who really annoy the directors. Sometimes failed subordinates, or unlucky rivals. Or sometimes international campaigners who make their way here to reform the camp." She looked meaningfully at Dan.
"I'm not that kind of campaigner," he told her. "I'm more the proactive sort, you might say."
Lidia frowned and looked quickly away. She evidently disliked Dan. Annja understood. In the doctor's circumstances it would be prohibitively hard to make herself look inside the young man and see the genuine care there – and the pain.
"What do they do in the cage?" Annja asked.
"Pan for gold," Lídia said with a wild little yip of a laugh. "Like your gold rush, yes? They glean what is missed by the machines sluicing out in the river or scraping at the land."
"What if the prisoners don't work?" Annja asked.
"Then they don't feed them. Anyone. After a while the holdouts either come around or their fellow sufferers drown them in their sleep."
Annja swallowed hard.
"Of course they don't last long," Lidia said, almost clinically now. "Aside from the grinding labor and the privation and exposure, there are the heavy-metal salts."
"Heavy metals?" Dan asked.
"Oh, yes. The Amazon Basin is rich in heavy metals, didn't you know?"
"So the radioactivity gets them?"
"Not at all. That would take years, decades. Heavy-metal poisoning works much faster." She shook her head. "Then there's the mercury used in amalgamation-extraction methods in the open-pit operation. Workers get the mercury on their skin or breathe in the vapors. Eventually they become so deranged and feeble-minded they can't function anymore. Then they go in the cage – or are simply set loose in the colony to fend for themselves."
"What happens to them in here?" Annja asked.
"They kill or are killed," Lidia said.
"So that scraggly looking bunch we saw earlier – " Dan said.
"A gang of former laborers."
"They fight the guards?" Annja said.
Lidia shrugged. "Or each other. Here, life is boiled down to its essentials. Some people choose to cooperate with one another. Others live as if it's a war of all against all."
She led them onward. The colony must be larger even than it looked from the air, Annja thought. The tension had her heart racing and the sweat soaking her more than the brutal river-basin heat would account for.
Automatic fire roared ahead of them. More than one gun was firing. Then something blew up with a crack like an ax splitting the sky.
Chapter 21
Crouching, Lidia led them forward to peer above a line of plastic drums. Annja's heart was in her throat and thrashing like a wounded bird. She saw nothing in their immediate vicinity. One or two streets to their right they caught glimpses of men running, shouting, shooting.
"What's going on?" she asked in a low voice.
Lidia shrugged. "Mercenaries fighting."
"Private dispute," Dan said, "or some kind of rivalry coming from the top down?"
"Who knows? Both are possible. But we must get close," Lidia said.
"Why?" Annja asked in alarm.
"Our objective lies that way," she said.
"Can't we just go around?" Dan asked.
"We must cut as close as we can. This is a very bad part of the colony we come to," Lidia said earnestly.
Annja shared a wide-eyed look with Dan. Worse things than a firefight? she wondered.
Gunfire rose and fell in surges. A grenade thumped. Someone screamed briefly.
"Some people are seriously annoyed at each other," Dan said.
"I guess we go get a closer look," Annja said in resignation.
They slipped forward as furtively as they could. That seemed to annoy Dan.
"Why creep around like mice?" he demanded. "The camp inhabitants are either heading somewhere else in a hurry or lying low, given the amount of kinetic energy and flying chunks of metal being tossed about so cavalierly by those boys up ahead. And none of them's going to be paying the least bit of attention to anybody but who they're shooting at. Or who's shooting at them."
Annja kept her head turning from side to side. "I don't want to die for an assumption. Nor get run up on by reinforcements. Not to mention some new team looking to get in the game."
Dan drew in a long unhappy breath. "Good point."
They advanced between two rows of the two-story containers-turned-dwellings, into a region of ramshackle huts. In fact this seemed the end of the scrapped containers, which, hot as they'd be in the sunlight, at least were sturdy and would keep off the storms. In front of the trio a nasty shantytown stood, or leaned, for at least a hundred yards before butting up against the twelve-foot perimeter fence. The spirals of knife wire at its top glittered in the sun. Beyond stood the green wall of the rain forest, at once inviting and forbidding.
Lidia led them into a hut. Annja hung back, perhaps even more unwilling to violate a private dwelling than she would have been in some ritzy suburb back home. Some modicum of personal space was about the only thing resembling dignity these people had. To invade that seemed wrong.
"It's all right," Lidia said, with the closest thing to a smile Annja had seen ghosting quickly across her fea
tures like a cloud across the sun. "No one lives here right now."
The place stank of death and buzzed with flies. Annja guessed an occupant had died and spent a few days decomposing in the jungle heat and humidity before being collected by the periodic sanitation sweeps. The hovel seemed to consist of planks and shreds of reeking cloth.
They seemed to have entered the no-man's-land of the battle. To their left Annja saw men in bluish-gray camos leaning out from cover and shooting with what appeared to be M16s and the shorter M-4 carbine versions. They had the beefy, well-packed look she associated with the U.S. military, and seemed to be mostly white or black. Annja guessed they were North American mercs – or security contractors, as the government liked to say. She suspected that they, too, had been attracted to Feliz Lusitânia by honeyed lies and trapped no less thoroughly than the wretches in that horrific cage in the river. There were ways to keep even men with guns in their place.
Chief among those were other men with guns. Those men wore green-and-black camouflage. They might have been Brazilians, but for some reason Annja wondered if they might hail from Cuba or even Africa. One reason was their weapons – they fired chunky assault rifles with an unmistakable broken-nosed profile.
"Kalashnikovs?" she asked. "Do the camp directors equip their forces with those? Russian-made guns?" She added the latter in case the doctor wasn't up on firearms minutiae.
"Who knows?" she murmured. "They hire killers from all over the world. Wherever they can get them."
"Why would they equip guards with RPGs?" Dan asked. "Those're antitank weapons, and there's a notable lack of armored vehicles around here."
"The guards use them sometimes," Lidia said. "So the factions smuggle the rockets and launchers in to their own fighters. Among other things."
"They smuggle in rockets to blow up their own armored cars?" Dan shook his head. "This place is totally screwed."
A beefy mercenary leaned out to fire off three quick 3-round bursts from an M-4. One of the smaller men in green and black hopped out from the dubious cover of a lean-to and sent an RPG buzzing and smoking from his shoulder launcher. The merc dived out of view. The shack he had been using for cover erupted in a white flash and white smoke, followed quickly by billowing orange-and-blue flames.
