Kalahari

by Jessica Khoury

  “It . . .” I had to clear my throat in order to find my voice. “It’s my mom’s.”

  SIXTEEN

  It’s a voice recorder,” I said. “She always carried one, to record her thoughts and observations.” My voice grew thick as I spoke. Tentatively, I picked up the recorder and turned it over. It was hers, all right. There were teeth marks all over from the time she’d dropped it and a hyena had gotten hold of it. I’d been with her, and we were stuck in a tree when the hyena showed up. He’d settled in the sand and chewed on the recorder for half an hour, until Mom frightened it away by singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” and laughing so hard she’d nearly fallen out of the tree. The recorder had still worked, though it was a bit slimy and we’d had to take it apart to let it dry.

  “So it’s true,” I whispered. “She was there, at the Corpus compound.”

  Somehow, it hadn’t seemed real when Dr. Monaghan said it, but I couldn’t deny what I held in my hand.

  “Why was it in a box of crackers?” asked Avani. She and the others were circled around me, their expressions cautious, as if they weren’t sure what I’d do.

  I mulled it over, my finger hovering over the play button. “She must have hid it there. Somehow.”

  “Sarah . . .” Sam’s teeth ran over his lips; I was beginning to recognize this as a sign of him worrying. “Do you think there’s something recorded on there?”

  I did. And it terrified me. Why else would she hide the recorder? I could almost see it: Mom finds the compound, starts investigating, records her discoveries, and at some point before or after she was caught (it had to have come to that eventually, or she’d still be alive today; I couldn’t believe her connection with Corpus and her death to be coincidental), she hid the recorder in the box of crackers. It might very well have been the only damning piece of evidence to have escaped the compound.

  “Are you going to play it?” asked Avani. By the look in her eyes, she was poised on the brink of snatching it back and playing it herself.

  “Give her space, you guys,” said Sam. “Come on. Let’s eat.”

  He corralled them away from me, giving me room to breathe. To think. To dread. I should have been overjoyed at the chance to hear Mom’s voice again, to finally discover the truth behind her death. But my hand trembled with fear. What if the truth was too terrible? What if the recorder was empty?

  With a jolt, I realized my life these past few months had been one long series of what-ifs. What if I’d gone with Mom on that last trip? What if Dad and I had searched for her sooner? What if we had refused to accept her death as an accident and had pressed deeper into the Kalahari to find the truth? What if wasn’t a form of comfort or healing. It was a purgatory, a waiting place of self-inflicted guilt and torture. There was no rest in it, no peace. How much longer could I go on like this, balancing on the edge of regret?

  I hit play.

  Muffled static. Wind, perhaps, or rustling grass. My ears strained for the sound of her.

  Her voice broke through like lightning from a cloud, striking my heart, leaving me gasping.

  “This is Jillian Carmichael. Date is January 14, and it’s about, oh, ten o’clock in the—”

  I hit stop.

  Forced myself to take a breath.

  It had been four months, but the pain felt so fresh. I brushed away a few tears and pressed play again.

  “—morning. I’ve been tracking a swarm of honeybees that have been moving in a strange pattern, flying directly west. It’s completely abnormal. It’s like they know exactly where they’re going, as if they’re on a mission. I’m nearly a full day’s drive away from camp, and they’ve led me to some kind of facility. Looks like a drilling operation, but there are armed guards. Military, maybe? I need to get closer.”

  “Please don’t,” I whispered.

  She left the recorder running as she moved. I could hear her soft footsteps, boots crunching in the sand. Snippets of birdsong were caught in the recording, and I recognized much of it to come from species found here only in the green summer months, when the rains swept across the Kalahari and left behind countless pools of water in the once-dry pans.

  “Something’s not right,” Mom whispered.

  My heart raced so quickly that my chest began to ache. As she moved, Mom described the compound, the guards, the scientists. I recognized Dr. Monaghan by her description. Suddenly her voice changed, grew excited.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it! The bees are attacking the researchers and swarming around the buildings. Is there a hive inside? It makes no sense! They’re running—the scientists and the guards—going inside . . . I think some of them were stung, but it’s hard to be sure. I can see clouds of bees moving around the buildings, as if searching for a way in. I . . . I don’t know what to make of it.”

  There was a pause, then a loud crackling of static and Mom swore. My eyes popped wide at that. I’d never heard her swear before.

  “Ty? Ty, come in. Sarah? You there, honey?”

  I pressed a shaking hand to my mouth. She was trying to call us.

  She swore again. “Ty? Hello? Sarah? Theo? Is anyone there? Crap, still recording . . .”

  With a beep, the recording cut off.

  My skin was a carpet of goose bumps. I hurriedly clicked the next button on the device, and a second recording began to play.

  “This is Jillian Carmichael. Morning of January 15. I spent the night finding a way into the buildings. Made it into one of the labs when the guard shift changed. I knew all those nights sneaking out of my bedroom window back in high school would come in handy.” She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “They haven’t caught on to me yet. I imagine they don’t expect company, way out here in the middle of nowhere. I’m just outside the compound now, hiding under a fallen log, but I can see them coming and going. Here’s what I’ve managed to learn so far. . . .”

  She’d learned quite a lot, by waiting until the scientists went to sleep and then sneaking into the labs through the high, narrow ventilation windows. During the day she hid in the nearby bush, watching and taking notes. She described the silver animals (apparently at that time, there were only two mice who were infected), Metalcium’s creation, its evolving threat, even Dr. Monaghan’s fight to shut down the project and Corpus’s insistence on further research. Mom had combed through the scientists’ notes and even found her way into one of their less secure computers.

  “I used one of their microscopes to study it,” she said. “It replicated via mitosis, like an amoeba splitting into two. Almost as if— Wait.” Several seconds of silence, then a whisper. “Someone’s coming.”

  My pulse quickened. I could see her, crouched in the grass, listening raptly, her heart hammering as fast as mine was now.

  “Hey!” shouted a masculine voice. “Who are you? What are doing here?”

  “Crap,” Mom hissed. I heard a flurry of disjointed noise—was she running? Fighting? The recording ended abruptly. There was only one more on the device. My hands had gone cold and clammy, my thumb freezing on the play button.

  This was it. This was the last recording my mother would ever make. The last words I would ever hear her say.

  “Sarah?” Sam’s voice was soft, uncertain. The others were still around the fire, doing a bad job of hiding their glances at me. “Sorry, I just . . . wanted to see if you were okay.”

  I lowered my face to hide my teary eyes. My hair was tied back, but a few strands had come loose and shielded me from his gaze.

  “They caught her,” I said, my voice muffled with unshed tears. “There’s one more recording. I don’t know if I can . . .”

  “Do you want me to go?”

  I lifted my face. “No. Stay.”

  Sam looked at me uncertainly.

  “Please,” I whispered.

  He nodded and, without a word, sat beside me. I handed him
the recorder.

  “Could you . . . ?”

  With another nod, Sam pressed play. The voice that we heard next was not Mom’s.

  “—in this closet until we decide what to do with you. You should have stayed away.”

  My gaze met Sam’s, and though I had known it was coming, it still chilled my heart.

  “That’s Dr. Monaghan,” I whispered. “She must have started recording after she was caught.”

  “I was only trying to discover what was impacting the local bee populations,” Mom explained. Her voice sounded muffled. I suspected the recorder was hidden somewhere beneath her clothes, where the scientists wouldn’t have found it.

  “Dr. Carmichael, the guards found your notebook and all the information you’d recorded about us—and we found your radio. Who did you contact? Who are you working with?”

  “No one! I’m alone! Like I said—I was studying the bees, and they led me here.”

  “Someone is coming from our HQ, Doctor, and he will not hesitate to wring the answers from you. I’m trying to give you a chance! Be honest with me now, or I can’t help you! Who did you contact?”

  “What do the bees have to do with this place? Why did the hives converge on your facility?”

  A pause. I imagined Dr. Monaghan exhaling his frustration. “I will ask the questions.”

  “Tell me about the bees, and I’ll tell you who I contacted.”

  Another moment of silence as Dr. Monaghan considered this. Then a noisy sigh. “We’ve been plagued by bees for weeks. We think they’re attracted by some of the chemicals we’ve been experimenting with—must be pheromones or something. So now you tell me: Who did you contact?”

  “No one.”

  I could easily picture Mom and Dr. Monaghan trading defiant stares, like twin poles of two magnets colliding.

  “You have twenty hours until he arrives,” said Dr. Monaghan. “And then there will be nothing I can do to help you. I . . . you must understand, there’s nothing I can do.”

  “You could let me go.” Mom’s voice was a gentle nudge.

  Dr. Monaghan seemed to shuffle a bit before replying. “No. No, I couldn’t.”

  I shot to my feet in a burst of fury. Sam, still holding the recorder, looked up in surprise. He hit the stop button.

  “You okay?” He asked. “Need a break?”

  “To think I felt sorry for him,” I said through my teeth. Overwhelmed with the urge to hit something, I grabbed a handful of dry grass and ripped it out of the ground, tossing it aside. Then I spun, found myself facing a tree, and punched it hard.

  “Hey!” Sam lunged forward and pulled me away. “I’m all for punching something to release anger—trust me, I’ve done my fair share of it—but at least pick something softer than a tree!”

  My knuckles were bleeding. I slumped to my knees and let Sam dab the cuts with the cuff of his sleeve. His touch was gentle, and I watched his face as it creased with concern. His lips were cracked and dry, his hair a shade lighter from being in the constant sunlight. When he let go of my hands, the memory of his touch still burned on my skin. A part of me longed to throw the recording away, to pretend the past didn’t exist, so that I could focus on today, on Sam, on the curiosity and timid hope that his touch incited beneath my skin.

  But I couldn’t shake the image of Mom locked in the closet where we’d found the box of crackers, trapped in the dark, hours away from her death. I could never outlive the past until I knew the full story.

  “Play it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Play it. Please.”

  He sighed and the recording continued.

  “You’re only locking me in here,” Mom was saying, “because you don’t have the balls to kill me yourself—you have to hand me over to your hatchet man. Is that it?”

  “Good night, Dr. Carmichael. If you should get hungry, well, there are crackers.”

  We heard the heavy slam of the door, then nothing but Mom’s rapid breathing. With a wrench of my gut, I realized she was crying. She sniffed and drew a deep breath.

  “This is Dr. Jillian Carmichael, on January . . .” More sniffling, a deep inhalation. When she spoke, her voice was straining not to break, “On January 17. I . . . I’ve been captured by a group of scientists experimenting illegally in the Kalahari. They’re holding me until . . . Oh God! I just wish . . . I just wish I knew what it was with those damn bees!”

  The recording didn’t end, but for several minutes we heard nothing but silence and the occasional crackle that must have been Mom moving around. It sounded as if she’d tried the door, and at one point she pounded on it with something heavy. I was beginning to think the rest of it would just be empty, meaningless noise, but suddenly her voice surged through.

  “Well,” she said. “There’s one thing Dr. Monaghan doesn’t know, at least. I’m—”

  The recording cut short. I looked up at Sam in alarm. “It ends there?”

  He winced and shook his head. “Batteries died.”

  For a moment, I could only stare at him in disbelief.

  “The batteries died?”

  He handed me the recorder and I tried turning it off and on, but nothing happened. I clawed open the battery compartment and took them out, shook them, and put them back in, but it still wouldn’t turn on.

  “Of all the stupid things,” I said softly.

  Sam picked up one of the grass stems I had torn out of the ground and ran it through his thumb and index finger. His brow was tense as he asked, “What are you thinking?”

  My skin felt like hardening cement, fixing my features into a numb mask. I unzipped my pocket and dropped the recorder inside. “I’m thinking that Mom’s ‘accident’ wasn’t so accidental.”

  He nodded, watching me worriedly. “Are you going to be all right? Wait. That’s a stupid question. Of course you’re not. But can I . . . can I do anything to help?”

  With a sigh that began deep in my abdomen, I ran my fingers through the loose hairs over my face, pushing them behind my ears. “I’ll get through it. I have to.”

  “No,” he said. “You don’t. Not right away. You can’t just listen to something like that and get over it all at once. You’re not supposed to.”

  “Well, I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” I returned, a bit too sharply. “Sorry. Look . . . thanks. For listening, I mean.”

  His smile was sad. “Yeah. Sure. Just . . .” His teeth skimmed over his bottom lip, as he watched me with cautious eyes. “Just know you’re not alone, okay?”

  A defensive protest welled within me, as it always did when someone tried to offer me comfort, but when I met his eyes it faded, a shadow shrinking from the light. For once, I didn’t want to curl up like a hedgehog, spines out, pushing everyone away. Instead something in my chest gave way, and I nodded slowly. “I know.”

  SEVENTEEN

  The next morning, after kicking sand over the campsite in an effort to hide our tracks from any passing helicopters, we set off due west. My spine stung from sleeping on the hard ground, and what sleep I had gotten had been plagued with vague dreams about silver animals that appeared and faded out of the savanna. So I walked like the living dead, stumbling and bleary-eyed, each step heavier than the last. The others walked with similar exhaustion. We drifted slowly apart, with me in the front, Sam a few steps behind, Joey in the middle, and the last three lagging after him. When that happened, I stopped and waited for everyone to catch up. It would take just a moment to lose sight of one another, especially here where the bushes were growing thicker and the grass taller, and once that happened it would be difficult to find one another again.

  “Can’t we stop for a while?” asked Avani when she caught up. She bent over, breathing hard. “I feel like I got hit by a truck.”

  “Fine,” I replied, hiding my frustration. At our current pace, it would take
a month to reach Ghansi. We had to move faster; every delay only gave Abramo a better chance of finding us. I didn’t doubt that once he’d regrouped from the skirmish at the compound, he’d begin hunting for us. And anyway, we couldn’t keep going like this for much longer. We needed water desperately, more than the others realized. I wondered if they felt the signs of dehydration like I did: My muscles were cramping, my heart would randomly burst into a series of painful flutters that left me dizzy and weak, and I felt nauseated when I moved too quickly. I could see signs of it in the others: their gazes were growing vacant, their steps clumsy.

  “We’re holding you back,” Sam said softly. I was sitting with my back against a shepherd’s tree, and he dropped down on its other side. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear his whisper. “If it weren’t for us, you’d be in Ghansi by now, wouldn’t you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s not your fault we’re out here.”

  He was quiet for a long minute, and his next words were so soft I barely caught them. “I have a confession to make.”

  “What?”

  I could hear him pulling up the grass, roots ripping out of the earth, and I didn’t push him to answer right away, though I was curious.

  “I didn’t just come randomly,” he finally said. “I didn’t want to tell you, but with everything that’s happened, I mean, we don’t know if we’ll even make it out of this—”

  “We’ll make it out of this.”

  “Right. Of course. But still, I just . . . I want you to know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I came to Africa because I wanted to meet you, Sarah.”

  I turned around and stared at the back of his head. “Meet me? You didn’t even know me.”

  He looked over his shoulder, not at me, but at the ground between us. “It didn’t feel that way. I read your mom’s book.”

  My mom’s book. I remembered the day Sam had first arrived, when he’d picked up the book in my tent and lingered over it.

  “Why didn’t you say so sooner?”