by David Walton
“Come and see me,” he had said. In the depths of the rainforest? It was ludicrous. The infection had in some ways made him so smart, and yet in other ways he was disconnected from reality. He seemed to expect everyone else in the world to enthusiastically accept a fungal parasite in their brains, and to be surprised when they didn’t.
My pocket vibrated and then rang. Startled, I fished out my dad’s iPhone, my heart pounding. I was so used to the prohibition against phones in the NSA buildings by now that a ringing cell phone at work was enough to dump a rush of adrenaline into my bloodstream. But of course, we weren’t in an NSA building, and nobody knew what correct security procedures were anymore.
I looked at the screen and recognized my father’s home number. “Hello?” I said.
“Neil?”
“Mom! How are you? How’s Dad?”
I felt guilty for how little time I had managed to spend with my parents. I had essentially abandoned them there at the hospital, while their doctor fought her own infection in another wing. But what else could I have done? I couldn’t trust my dad on his own, and I couldn’t very well bring him to the NSA.
“He’s okay, or at least he was,” my mom said. “But they won’t let me see him anymore.”
“What? Why not?”
“Some people came and moved him. They said he was dangerous, and they’d take care of him. They wouldn’t let me go with him.”
“Where are you?” I asked, then remembered that, of course, she must be at Dad’s house, because that’s the phone she had called from. “Stay there,” I said. “I’ll be right over. We’ll go to the hospital together, and we’ll figure this out.”
I made my apologies to the team. “I have to go,” I said. I explained to them what was happening. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad,” I said. “Somebody may be taking the infection seriously and quarantining patients. But I’m afraid it’s something worse.”
I took the roads at top speed, trying not to think about the possibility that my dad had fallen into the hands of Dr. McCarrick’s staff. I had no idea where he had found his collection of infected subjects. It seemed possible they were casing hospitals for recognized symptoms and then descending with the authority of USAMRIID to whisk patients away.
I crunched into the driveway and was surprised to see no cars parked by the house. I tried the door, found it open, and stepped inside. “Mom?” No answer. Had she misunderstood and driven to the hospital without me?
I climbed the stairs slowly, afraid of what I might discover. “Hello? Is anyone home?”
Silence. I continued up. My father’s bedroom door was closed. I touched the handle and hesitated, remembering the trap at Paul’s lab. I took a deep breath, held my sleeve over my mouth and nose, and swung the door wide.
My father and mother sat on the bed facing me, holding hands. They were not the only people in the room. Before I could register who the others were, I was tackled from behind, knocked to the floor by someone big. I thrashed and tried to get up, but more people jumped on me, strangers, holding my arms and legs. “I’m sorry,” my mother said. “Neil, I’m so sorry.”
They pinned me down and someone wrapped duct tape around my ankles. I caught a glimpse of Mei-lin leaning over me, her face impassive. “Do it,” she said.
Of course. Mei-lin had gotten out, had probably let my father out as well. Lauren hadn’t been able to hold her there against her will and had eventually let her go free. Or maybe Lauren herself was infected. It didn’t matter. They had deceived me, all of them, and I had walked into it as easily as a cow into a slaughterhouse.
My mother leaned over me holding a small Ziploc bag of white powder. “No, Mom,” I said. “Don’t do it. I don’t want this.”
“It’s for your own good, honey,” she said. She opened the bag, used a teaspoon to scoop a small amount of the powder, and blew it in my face. I tried to hold my breath, but one of the strangers holding me down punched me unexpectedly in the stomach. I gasped for air, involuntarily inhaling thousands of spores.
I coughed and spat, but I knew it would do no good. They coated the insides of my lungs now, taking root. I was one of them now, or would be once the sickness ran its course.
“Hold him still,” Mei-lin said. She leaned over me with a syringe. I kicked out, trying to get free, or at least to knock it out of her hand, but I was held too tightly. The needle bit into my arm, and she pressed the plunger home. “This is just to help you relax,” she said. “You have a long trip ahead of you, and you’ll be feeling pretty sick.”
Resist it, I thought. Don’t let it take control. But there was nothing to resist. The fungus wasn’t in my mind yet.
“Dad!” I shouted. “Help me!”
My father turned his head and looked at me. If there was any uncertainty in his mind, any struggle for control, I couldn’t see it in his face. “Don’t fight it, son,” he said. “There’s no point. You’ll understand soon enough.”
CHAPTER 29
I had the vague awareness of being shuffled into a car and then out of it and into another one. The second car had a very loud engine, persistent enough that it seemed to blot out thought. It was only after what seemed like a very long time that I realized it wasn’t a car at all but an airplane. I gradually became aware of having arms and legs, and my vision swam into focus. I was propped into a seat in a small passenger jet, probably a private one generally used by corporate executives. Out the window, I saw only ocean.
“We’ll be landing in Panama in thirty minutes,” said a female voice. “Then we’ll refuel for the final jump to Porto Velho.”
My chest burned. I tried to take a deep breath, but it caught in my throat, and I coughed violently. I felt something wet on my chin.
“He’s waking up,” said a male voice.
Mei-lin appeared next to me. She wiped my mouth and chin with a warm cloth. “Not much longer,” she said. I felt a distant pain as a needle slid into my arm. I tried to move, to push her away, but my limbs didn’t want to obey me. A few minutes later, I slipped away again.
When I came to again, the plane was on the ground and the engine had stopped. “Can you walk?” Mei-lin asked.
This time my arms and legs moved when I asked them to, though they were still strapped together with duct tape. I shifted my weight, angled my legs over the edge of the chair, and stood. My legs ached, as if I had been sleeping on them for hours, and the jabs of pins and needles crackled up and down my skin. “You’re on the tarmac in Porto Velho,” she said. “Everyone here is Ligados. There is nowhere to run, no one to hear you if you shout. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Okay. I’m going to cut the tape off of your arms and legs. You’re not going to run or fight, are you?”
I shook my head. She used a scalpel and sawed through the tape, first my legs, then my hands. I yanked the remaining bits of tape off and rubbed my wrists. I felt terrible. My head and throat and chest hurt, and I was sweating despite the cool air-conditioned cabin. I tried to take a step, but the plane spun around me, and I nearly fell.
“Okay, easy does it,” Mei-lin said. She hung on to me to keep me from falling over. I wanted to push her onto the floor and stab her with her own scalpel, but given my current strength, that didn’t seem likely. Besides, I knew the betrayal hadn’t really been Mei-lin’s fault. She was a slave now, the same as my parents and my brother. The same as I would be, too, in a few more hours.
She led me off the jet. On the tarmac, a hundred yards away, sat a tiny turboprop airplane with red stripes on its wings. Two men half-led, half-dragged me to the plane and lifted me up inside it. A gray-haired man with a grizzled beard and headphones covering his ears stalked around outside the aircraft, checking it from every angle and consulting a clipboard.
Finally, he climbed into the cockpit and pulled the door shut. “Better strap in,” he said in Portuguese. He and I were the only people in the plane.
I wrestled with the tangle of leather straps and me
tal clasps until I was pretty certain I wouldn’t fall out.
“You just settle back,” the pilot said. “I’ve been making this trip for decades. Nothing to worry about.”
“Decades?” I said, trying to think clearly through the haze of my sickness and fear. “Where are you taking me?”
“Johurá village, what was. Lot more to it now.”
“And you’ve been flying there for decades?” A thought struck me. “Did you fly the Wyatts?”
He laughed. “Yes, I surely did. How do you know them?”
“I met Katherine,” I said.
“No kidding. You know Kay? Now that’s one incredible lady.” He grinned, his beard parting to reveal very white teeth, and held out his hand. “Nate Carter. Missions aviator, forty-three years and counting. I’ve clocked thousands of hours in this baby, dropping folks like Kay all over the Amazon. Even more in my old Helio Courier. Now that was a plane—better than anything else in its class. Couldn’t get enough avgas, though, so we had to trade up to something that could burn jet fuel.”
He kept on talking as the engine roared to life, drowning out most of his words. I wasn’t sure the words were really meant for me, anyway. Nate seemed more like a taxi driver who had to talk to his passengers to stay sane. He leaned out the window and shouted “Abram caminho!”—the Portuguese equivalent of “Watch out!” or “Stand clear!”—and the plane kicked forward along the runway with surprising speed. The vibrations rattled my teeth and shuddered in my chest. Sooner than I expected, the ground dropped away, so fast it was like falling into the sky.
“That’s the PC-6 for you,” the pilot said, seeing my surprise. “Jumps into the air like you’re riding a rocket. Some of the places I land, you couldn’t get yourself out again with anything less.”
“Why are you doing this?” I shouted above the engine noise. “You’re a missions pilot, not a kidnapper.”
Nate looked genuinely surprised. “Kidnap? Is that what you call it? I guess I could see that, from your point of view. But trust me, once you see what’s happening there, you won’t be sorry.”
Porto Velho soon fell out of sight behind us, and cultivated fields gave way to thick rainforest. The green treetops stretched to the horizon in every direction, the details of branches and leaves blending together from this distance, giving the impression we were flying across an algae-covered sea. A wide, muddy river cut through the green, looping back on itself in serpentine curves, like a giant anaconda swimming through the algae.
I pointed. “Is that the Rio Maici?”
He looked where I was pointing, and then laughed. “Not hardly. That’s the Rio Madeira, and it’s practically an ocean compared to the Maici. Settle back, my friend. We’ve got miles to fly before we rest.”
It had been evening when we set out, and the sun hung low in the west, staining the sky with vivid orange and purple hues. If not for my spasming cough and the terror of losing control of my mind, it might have been beautiful. As it was, I barely thought about it, until the sun sank lower, and the green treetops faded to black.
“Nate?” I asked.
“Yes?”
“How can you land this thing at night? Doesn’t it get pretty dark out here?”
“Back in the day, you’d be right,” he said. “Night out here comes down on you like somebody shut the lid on a box. One minute, there’s enough light you can almost read by it. The next it’s so dark you can’t find a book that’s sitting in your lap.”
“So . . . what’s different now?”
He grinned at me. “You’ll see soon enough.”
We flew on. The sun dwindled to a sliver, then disappeared entirely. As Nate had predicted, the darkness fell suddenly. It took me a moment to realize that I could still see, and another moment to realize why.
The rainforest was glowing.
As far as I could see in every direction, the trees radiated a greenish light. The leafy canopy itself remained dark, but something underneath it shone brightly enough to illuminate our way. As we flew, gaps in the trees revealed glimpses of twisting lines of luminescence, like branching lightning, underneath the canopy.
I couldn’t help it. “It’s beautiful,” I said. We could now see what I assumed was the Maici, a river so serpentine the loops almost met each other in places. In places, I caught sight of the water, which glinted in the forest’s glow.
“There’s our landing strip,” Nate said.
I looked. “Where?”
“That dark spot to the north. See it? Eleven o’clock.”
I saw the spot he indicated, but it didn’t seem possible. Not a clearing so much as a gash in the tree line, barely visible except for a darker color of foliage.
“You’re going to land in that?”
He didn’t answer. He flipped a switch, and the engine changed timbre. We started to descend. As we approached, I could see the landing strip, but actually landing there didn’t seem possible. It was a short stretch of tall grass that looked barely longer than a football field, and so narrow I thought Nate would have to tip the aircraft on its side to fit the wings through.
Nate seemed unfazed, however, and I assumed he knew what he was doing. He buzzed the strip once, peering out the window at the ground, apparently checking for obstacles. On the second approach, he went for it, diving at the grass at an angle so steep I involuntarily raised my arms to protect my face. We thundered toward the ground, propeller spinning, and threaded the needle between the trees. There seemed to be only inches between the tips of the wings and the branches on either side. The wheels hit with a gentle lurch, and Nate did something to the flaps, slowing us as quickly as if he’d thrown a parachute out the back. The uneven ground threw us roughly about, but in moments the plane had stopped just short of the end of the grass.
I took a deep breath and let it out. The breath turned out to be a mistake, however, because it turned into a fit of coughing, and it was a while before I could catch my breath. I wondered how long it would take the lung infection to clear up without medical care.
“Still kicking back there?” Nate asked.
“For the moment.” Now that we were on the ground, my fear of what I would find here came roaring back. As far as I knew, I might have only hours left as the sole master of my mind. Certainly not more than a day. My only hope was to escape from the rainforest, but that didn’t seem likely. I felt so sick I could barely walk, and I didn’t know how to fly an airplane, much less take off from a landing strip the size of a playing card.
I managed to unstrap myself and climb out of the airplane on my own strength. The glow was all around me, emanating from the trees on every side. The sky above, though the stars were now visible, seemed dim by comparison.
A familiar figure strode out of the forest and crossed the grass toward me. It was my brother.
Paul walked toward me, arms open wide. He wore loose tan cotton pants and no shirt. He looked healthy, well-muscled, tanned and weathered by the outdoors. I staggered to meet him. When he came within range, I swung a punch at his head with the whole weight of my body behind it.
I’ve never been a fighter, but I took him by surprise. My knuckles connected with his mouth, and both of us went down, him on his backside and me flat on my face. I struggled to my knees, meaning to hit him again, but my body betrayed me with a violent fit of coughing. I doubled over and spat blood onto the ground.
“You bastard,” I said when I could catch my breath. “Is this who you are now? Kidnapping? Bioterrorism? You infected your own family.”
“That depends on your point of view,” he said, as calm as ever.
“Well, my point of view is apparently not very important, since the fungus in my lungs is about to climb up into my brain and destroy it.”
He stood, dusting off his pants. “Not destroy it,” he said. “Our perspectives change all the time. We learn new things, have new experiences. All you have to do is read a book to change your point of view. Sometimes in ways you didn’t expect.”
/> I turned to face him, still sitting on the ground. “I get to choose what books I read.”
“Sometimes. And sometimes a teacher or a parent chooses them for you, because the perspective the book gives you will be important for your life.”
I felt like the metaphor was getting away from me. “This is nonsense. You dragged me here against my will. It’s not like assigning me a book to read in class.”
He held out a hand to me. I stared at it like it was poisoned. Which, given the number of spores that had to be flying around this place, it probably was.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you around. Before the mycelium reaches your brain. So you’ll understand. This is good for us, Neil. For all of us.”
I still didn’t want to touch him, but there didn’t seem to be any point in sitting there in the dirt, either. I clasped his hand, and let him haul me to my feet. He smiled.
“Welcome to the future,” he said. “Follow me.”
He strode off toward the edge of the forest. I shuffled unsteadily after him, feeling dizzy, stopping every few steps for a fit of wracking coughs. At this point, the sickness didn’t bother me. Sickness meant my body was still fighting the infection. When I started to feel better, then I’d be in trouble.
He waited for me at the tree line. The glow was brighter now, though diffuse, so I couldn’t see any obvious source for the light. After a brief hesitation, I stepped into the trees.
The humid air pressed around me, making it harder to breathe. In the branches above us, insects hummed and birds chirped, their calls echoing strangely. The ground felt softer than I expected, like a foam mattress instead of solid ground. When I peered behind me, I saw my footprints glowing faintly, their outlines traced with bright filaments.
“It’s the fungus, registering your presence,” Paul said. “It’s exploring the warmth left by your body and the traces of DNA you leave behind.”
