They looked, in a word, primal.
Even from so far away, I could see a scary deadness in their expressions. They were regular humans on the outside. But was there any soul left inside?
Freitas immediately gave the order for all of us to crouch down and follow. We crawled behind them, maybe fifty or sixty yards, tracking as the group lumbered deeper and deeper into the nature preserve.
At one point I asked Freitas in a whisper what our plan was. How much longer would we be stalking these “people”? How would we ever capture one? He admitted he didn’t know yet. For now, he just wanted to observe them in their natural habitat.
Yeah, right. What we’re looking at? Nothing “natural” about it.
Fine, I thought. Let’s see where this goes. Let’s see where they lead us.
Let’s see what they do next.
That was almost half an hour ago. We’re still crawling along after them, inching our way through the prickly vegetation. We pass a babbling brook. My hands and face are getting rubbed raw, but I push on.…
When suddenly the five feral humans freeze. They prick up their ears. Their senses switch to high alert. They raise their weapons.
I trade nervous glances with Freitas and Sarah. Do they know we’re behind them? Have they picked up our scent? Are we in danger?
The “leader” of the pack grunts something, and in a flash the five humans start running—away from us, farther into the jungle.
“Go, go!” Freitas commands. “After them!”
Too surprised to argue, we all leap to our feet and pursue. But, damn, are those rabid humans fast! Even our African guides are having trouble keeping up.
At last we reach the crest of a small hill. Gasping for breath, I spot the five humans in the valley below—and I gesture wildly at Freitas, Sarah, and the others to hang back and duck down again.
I’ve just realized why they’ve been running.
They’re hunting.
But not us. Their target is a kudu, a grayish-white antelope they’ve managed to separate from its herd and surround.
I expect the animal to start attacking the humans any second. But instead, it nervously leaps and prances every which way, looking for an escape. Carefully, the lead human raises his rifle and fires a single shot—striking the antelope’s hind leg. The creature falls to the ground, crippled but very much alive.
Now things really start to get weird.
The five humans encircle the animal and all place their hands around its neck. Slowly they tighten their grip, choking the helpless antelope as it wheezes and struggles, finally exhaling its last breath.
In unison, the humans bow their heads. They release a low, guttural moan, almost as if in prayer. I’m reminded of the waiter in Bali, who attributed the island’s lack of animal attacks to the Hindu respect for all life.
Then they bare their teeth and sink them directly into the antelope’s flesh.
They viciously tear through its fur, exposing the crimson muscle tissue and tendons underneath. They rip jagged chunks off with their mouths, like a pride of lions eviscerating a fresh kill. They gulp down the raw meat whole, without chewing. Their mouths and cheeks are covered in blood.
Freitas, Sarah, the scientists, our guides, and I watch this feeding frenzy with a mix of disbelief and revulsion. It’s like something straight out of a horror movie, except it’s happening maybe three hundred feet in front of us.
“Still want to try to capture one of ’em?” I whisper to Freitas.
He just flashes me a grim look. Of course the answer is yes.
But we both know the task just got a whole lot scarier.
Before long, the antelope carcass has been reduced to virtually a skeleton. The feeding is slowing down in speed and intensity. The meal is almost over.
We’re all holding our breath. Waiting to see what these wild humans will do next…
When a digital beeping noise suddenly pierces the jungle air.
Jesus Christ—my satellite phone is ringing!
The humans all turn and look up in our direction. The leader lets out a deep, furious roar.
They’ve spotted us.
Chapter 18
“Don’t shoot!” Freitas desperately implores, but it’s no use. He’s lost all control over our group. It’s every man for himself.
And it’s absolute bedlam.
Many team members have already run off, but a few guides and scared scientists stay behind. They use our elevated position to their advantage and let loose a torrent of gunfire at the feral humans in the valley below as they scatter in all directions.
I watch two of the humans get hit. But the other three don’t—and quickly disappear into the dense foliage, dashing back up the hillside in our direction.
“Come on!” I yell to Sarah and Freitas as I turn around to run back the way we came. I see Sarah is on board, but Freitas is pointing somewhere else.
“I think if we cut across the hill, we can probably make it back—”
“Sorry, doc. You’re on your own.”
I’m already on the run for my life. I’m not about to risk getting lost on top of that.
I start hauling ass back through the jungle. Branches scrape my arms and face as I whip past. All around me I hear gunshots ringing and screams echoing.
Sarah’s sprinting just to my left. But after I pass the bubbling creek I remember crawling past minutes earlier, she’s suddenly disappeared. I’ve lost her.
“Sarah?” I call, slowing down the tiniest bit.
She doesn’t respond. But I do hear another voice.
This one is deep and scratchy. With a South African accent. It comes from close by, but it somehow sounds distant. Haunting.
“We…are…human!”
Holy shit!
I do a quick 360-degree spin, searching for the source. My eyes dart everywhere, but I don’t see a soul.
“Hello?” I shout. “Where are you? Who are you?”
“Do not…be afraid! We…will not…hurt you. Please, listen…to me!”
I turn now toward the direction of the voice and aim my rifle at it—not easy to do with my adrenaline pumping and my hands trembling.
For the briefest moment, I wonder if maybe this feral human is being honest. The way they ate that antelope was savage, but how they killed it was almost reverent. Maybe they do have respect for human life. Maybe they aren’t vicious killers like the rest of the animal kingdom. Maybe we pre-judged them too quickly. Maybe—
“Arrrrrgh!”
One of the males lunges out of the tree line and charges at me, baring his teeth and brandishing a pickaxe.
I squeeze the trigger and pepper his chest with rounds. But he keeps coming, swinging his axe wildly.
At the last possible moment I crouch down and spear my bayonet up and into his chest—piercing him clean through the heart.
He releases his axe and flails. He gurgles blood. Finally he goes limp, and I shove him to the jungle floor.
“You…you sneaky son of a bitch!” I shout at his bloody corpse.
I’m livid. I can’t believe I doubted for even one millisecond that he wanted to kill me. These savages are worse than the animals. They have tools at their disposal. I don’t just mean guns and pickaxes. They have language. Cognition. Trickery.
I take off running again, equal parts furious and fearful. I yell team members’ names—Sarah, Freitas, Kabelo, and some of the others—but I get no response.
I keep moving. I hope I’m still headed in the right direction, but I’m starting to feel light-headed. All the trees and shrubs are starting to look alike.
“Help, help me!” I hear a woman scream, from somewhere not too far away.
That voice is one I instantly recognize: Sarah’s.
I switch course and sprint toward it. Not wanting to give up the potential element of surprise, I don’t yell back.
And I’m very glad I don’t. When I finally see her, she’s being chased by a lone female feral human holding
a pitchfork—who is quickly gaining.
I raise my rifle but can’t get a clean shot, so I loop around to outflank her primal pursuer.
As soon as they reach a clearing, I plow into the woman like a linebacker and tackle her to the ground.
We roll around in the underbrush together, grappling viciously. For such a small woman, she’s strong as an ox.
Grunting and straining—employing some of the moves I learned on my JV high school wrestling team—I finally manage to flip her on her back and pin her down.
She starts speaking to me in that same eerie, scratchy voice the man had, in an African language I don’t understand. I assume she’s begging for her life. Or trying to trick me again somehow. Not this time. I swing my rifle around from behind my back and position the bayonet blade inches from her throat…
“Oz, don’t!” yells Sarah, rushing over to me. “Remember? We need her alive!”
Damnit. She’s right. After all that talk of how we were going to trap a feral human, I’ve just done it by accident. Still, staring into this woman’s beady, almost ghostly eyes, the desire to end her miserable life is overwhelming. But I resist.
“Grab her legs,” I order Sarah. “Until we can find the others.”
“You mean us?”
I look over to see Dr. Freitas, Kabelo, and many others hurrying toward us.
They practically pile onto the thrashing woman, helping me restrain her. I’m grateful for the assistance—she’s incredibly strong.
“Is everyone all right?” I ask Freitas, still trying to catch my breath.
“Dr. Langston…he didn’t make it. His death was…ugly. And our guide Dikotsi was mauled pretty badly. Some of the others are tending to him now.”
I ease myself off of the feral woman and help flip her onto her stomach, allowing Kabelo to zip-tie her hands. Freitas and the others just stare at her, seemingly numb.
“Very well done, Oz,” he says, patting my shoulder. “We’ve got what we came for. I’ll call our pilot and tell him we’re ready to fly.”
“Really, now,” I say skeptically. “And how are you gonna do that?”
Kabelo looks up at me and flashes a crooked grin.
“The white man forgets again he is carrying a cellphone?”
Everyone laughs. Including myself. It feels good. A release.
Even the feral woman starts to cackle.
Chapter 19
I’m torn between two women: the most important one in my life, and quite possibly the most important one in the world.
Getting the captured feral human onto our plane was no easy task. It took five of us—five grown men—just to carry this one petite, flexi-cuffed young woman out of the jungle and back to our waiting vehicles. Unbelievably strong, she kept kicking, thrashing, and trying to bite us the whole time.
She also ranted in her scratchy, eerie voice. One of our guides happened to speak a few words of Tswana, the indigenous language she was using. “Someone help me!” he translated. “I am a person, not a wild animal!”
Technically, I suppose she was correct. But I’ve worked on the HAC crisis for many years now and have faced down more deadly predators than I can count. And she is by far the most ferocious and terrifying one I’ve ever seen.
As we finally got the woman secured into one of our SUVs, Dr. Woodruff said, “I just figured out who this pain in the ass reminds me of.” He has a wicked sarcastic streak. “Helen, my ex-wife.”
Of course, the name stuck.
Our convoy sped back through the mayhem of Johannesburg to the airport. We buckled “Helen” into a seat in the rearmost row of our Boeing C-40 military transport plane, her arms and legs strapped in as if she were in an electric chair. An emergency oxygen mask around her face kept her from biting or spitting.
We got airborne as quickly as we could, and not just because time was of the essence. We all knew that what we were doing—kidnapping an innocent foreign citizen and transporting her overseas against her will—put us in a legal gray area, to say the least.
We’d been flying for nearly thirty minutes before I remembered—in all the chaos and confusion of the past hour or so, I’d completely forgotten about my satellite phone, and the ring that alerted the pack of feral humans to our presence.
When I finally checked it, I saw I had a new voicemail, from a blocked number.
Hearing Chloe’s voice, my relief was indescribable—until I listened through to the end.
Sounding remarkably calm, my wife explained how their apartment had been overrun by animals a few days ago. How she and Eli had managed to escape after her father and stepmother were killed. How they’d spent a night in a shelter from the streets but now were safe.
“We’ll be staying with some, uh, friends for a while,” she said. “Friends of the Earth. I can’t tell you where exactly. But I also can’t wait to see you, Oz. So you can…hold me in your arms. Okay, I love you. Bye.”
I knew immediately my wife was in trouble.
One night, years ago, “Hold Me in Your Arms,” a painfully cheesy 1988 love song by Rick Astley, came on at a bar where Chloe and I were having one of our first official dates. We joked that being forced to listen to such an awful tune on an endless loop would be even worse than an animal attack. Since then, “hold me in your arms” has become a kind of inside joke between us, a code phrase we use anytime something is bad or corny or scary.
Or, in this case, I could only presume, dangerous.
My wife wouldn’t say those words unless something wasn’t right. I’m certain of it. And those “friends of the Earth” she’s staying with—who the hell are they? What is she talking about? Why “can’t” she say where she is? What is she scared of?
All I know is, I need to find her and Eli right away and get them out of there fast.
“Freitas!” I shout, marching up the aisle to his seat. “We’re changing course!”
“What in God’s name are you talking about?” he asks. “We’re en route to INL.”
That would be the Idaho National Laboratory, the federal government’s largest research facility with a dedicated biological sciences unit, nestled in the state’s secluded eastern desert. There we’ll poke and prod Helen and use every known test in existence on her.
“First we’re going back to Paris,” I say.
I tell him about the voicemail. What Chloe said. The coded message. My gut instinct that something is very wrong. And that even if I’m the one who’s wrong, my wife and son are still all alone in a foreign city overrun by wild animals.
“Oz, we can’t go there right now. It’s too far out of our way. We’ve got a feral human on board! Don’t you understand that? We have to get her to the lab ASAP.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
“There is no one in the world more committed to solving this crisis than I am,” I fire back, my voice rising. Sarah and some of the other scientists are starting to look over at us. “But you’re asking me just to forget about my family? Imagine if it was yours!”
Freitas sighs deeply. “I consider the entire planet to be my family.”
As a fellow man of science, I know what he means. And I respect it.
But as a husband and father, I think it’s absolute horseshit.
“You promised me—promised—that if I left the Arctic, came along on this wild goose chase of yours, and helped you people stop HAC once and for all, you’d ensure my family’s safety. Remember that?” I’m nearly trembling with rage now. “I’m not asking you, Dr. Freitas. I am telling you. Before Idaho, we are going to France!”
Freitas rubs his salt-and-pepper beard, clearly torn. Maybe I’m getting through to him. Every eye in the plane is now on us—including Helen’s beady, bloodshot ones.
“Oz…I’m sorry. I am. But, no, we simply don’t have the time or resources to—”
I slam my hand against the cabin wall—and pull out my sat phone.
“Oh, really? Let’s see how fast those resources dry up when word l
eaks to the press that HAC has started spreading to people now, too—and that Dr. Evan Freitas of the U.S. Department of Energy has been personally keeping that information under wraps!”
That’s my trump card. I’m not bluffing, either. Hell, I’d give away the codes to the nuclear football if it meant saving Chloe and Eli. And Freitas knows it.
“Fine. But I have a better idea,” he says at last. “I’ll have the White House send a diplomatic security team from the embassy to find them. Your wife called your government satellite phone, right? That means we can track the location of the call. What would you do alone in Paris anyway, Oz? Let the highly trained men with guns save your family. You’re a scientist. We need you in Idaho. To help save the world.”
I’m steaming mad, but I have to admit, Freitas makes a compelling case. And short of barging into the cabin, there’s not much else I can do to redirect our plane.
I slide my sat phone back into my pocket. All I can think about is how badly I want to see Chloe and Eli again. And “hold them in my arms.”
Chapter 20
As I hurry down the movable stairway that’s been pushed up against our plane, I cover my mouth and nose with the collar of my shirt. A dust storm is brewing about ten miles away, and the air is starting to swirl with dust and grit.
A fleet of military and government vehicles is on the tarmac of Hill Air Force Base waiting for us: a few tan Jeeps, some black Suburbans, an ambulance, and a giant fluorescent yellow truck emblazoned with INL CRITICAL INCIDENT RESPONSE TEAM.
Sarah and our colleagues and I have barely stepped off the aircraft when a group of federal scientists wearing white full-body hazmat suits scamper aboard.
With Freitas directing them, they soon reemerge with Helen, strapped onto an upright wheeled gurney liked the kind used to transport Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Except this one is covered with a clear plastic quarantine tent, and Helen is screaming and thrashing against her restraints worse than ever.
Even the stone-faced Marines there to protect us betray hints of fear.
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