Kalahari (16 page)

“Hold it above your face,” I said, demonstrating. “Point your thumb at your mouth and squeeze.”

White liquid ran out of the shavings and down my thumb to drip onto my tongue. It was bitter and left my mouth feeling dry, but it was full of valuable nutrients and would ensure, at least, that we didn’t dehydrate.

“Ugh,” Miranda said, spitting it out. “It’s disgusting.”

“Drink, babe,” Kase said. “It’s better than nothing.”

She made a face but squeezed more of the pulp.

“Mm!” Joey rubbed his stomach. “I love me some root juice in the morning. Enlivens the senses!”

The “root juice,” as Joey called it, took me back to my first year in Africa, when Theo used to take me on long walkabouts and teach me the survival skills of his ancestors. His father’s generation had lived off the land, using the same techniques the San people had been using for thousands of years. They had been the last living remnants of the Stone Age, hunter-gatherers untouched by the modern world. All of that had changed in the last fifty years, when the few remaining tribes of Bushmen were displaced to make room for game reserves in southern Africa. Now all that remained were scattered, fractured groups who made a living by demonstrating their ancestors’ ways to tourists or, like Theo, by tracking game for researchers or hunters.

The bitter taste of the root left me with bitterer thoughts about my friend’s death, and I turned away from the others so that they wouldn’t see the tears stinging my eyes. I wiped them off and steadied myself by naming the birds whose songs I could hear from the bushes and grass:
guinea fowl, korhaan, pale chanting goshawk, crimson-breasted shrike . . .
It was a trick I’d picked up when Mom died, a way of distracting myself from my own thoughts.

The traps were empty, though one of them had been sprung by a mongoose from the look of the tracks around it—that, or the mongoose had made off with whatever the trap had caught. Disappointed but unsurprised—trapping was hardly a reliable source of food—I instead turned to more brutal methods. We had to eat. There was no way we could keep walking without sustenance, and we needed something more hydrating than crackers.

I found a bent stick about as thick as my wrist and tossed it experimentally into the air, then nodded to myself.

“Okay, guys,” I said. “Here’s how it’s gonna go. Hear that chirping?”

“You mean the sound like a turkey?” asked Joey.

“It’s a flock of guinea fowl.” I pointed in the direction of the noise. “Two of you sneak up on them—don’t worry, they’re pretty dumb and they won’t notice until you’re right on them. Scare them into the air and then duck.”

“Duck?” asked Sam.

“Duck.”

He shrugged, and he and Joey crouched into the grass and headed for the flock. I motioned for Kase, Miranda, and Avani to stand back. They did, watching warily and yawning. The morning was chilly enough that I could see my breath in the air. I bounced on my toes, trying to warm myself so that my arm would be steady enough to throw.

Suddenly the guinea fowl burst from the grass, their wings flapping frantically as they cawed and chirped in alarm. Joey and Sam stood and waved, scaring the last of them into the air, and I yelled, “Duck now!”

They dropped back into the grass and I slung the stick as if it were a boomerang. It whistled through the air in a beautiful arc that would have made Theo laugh with pride.

The stick took out two of the fat birds, stunning them out of the air. They fell near Sam and Joey, who ran and picked them up. The boys turned to me, each holding a dazed bird, and their mouths fell open.

“Holy McNugget!” said Joey. “You are badass!”

“That was completely barbaric,” said Miranda.

Despite Miranda’s jab, I couldn’t help smiling a little. It was nice to be appreciated.

I could have sworn I heard Theo’s laughter rippling through the grass—musical, wild, completely uninhibited, drawing profound pleasure from the hunt. The first time I’d successfully brought down a bird, my mom had lectured me for an hour about unnecessary slaughter of the wildlife and the destructive ramifications of sport hunting. All the while Theo had stood behind her, safely out of her line of sight, giving me thumbs-ups and smiles as he plucked the birds in preparation for roasting them. Such a wave of sadness hit me then that my satisfaction was washed entirely away.

Guinea fowl was monstrously tough meat. I’d have much preferred a korhaan or a nice, fat kori bustard, but guinea fowl were the easiest to hunt and they were found in abundance. I had to snap the birds’ necks to kill them, a task I definitely did not relish, but I did it quickly and got it over with. Then I plucked the birds, wishing I had the tools to properly prepare them. Sam rigged a spit out of sticks over the fire, and soon we had the birds roasting nicely. They wouldn’t taste great, but they smelled divine, like roast chicken, and soon we were all huddled around the fire salivating. Even Miranda looked at the birds hungrily, but she swore she wouldn’t touch them. Instead, she had more root juice and some berries she found nearby.

“I’ve been thinking about the Cruiser,” said Sam as he slowly rotated the spit. “Should we go back and try to get it out of the sand?”

I mulled it over, then reluctantly shook my head. “The bushfire’s in that direction. It may have already reached the truck, and anyway, now that those goons have a chopper, it’d be too easy for them to spot us in the Cruiser. We’ll have to go on foot from here.”

“How long?” asked Kase.

I squinted at the fire, doing the math. “A week? Depends on how much food and water we can find, and if we stay in good condition.”

Everyone groaned.

“We can do it,” I said. “We just have to take it a day at a time.”

I watched the sky, listening closely for any sounds of helicopters and trucks, and sent out a questioning thought:
Where are you, Dad?
If only he’d pop out of the bushes and yell “Surprise!” I might be able to believe my own positive assurances.

“Um, so guys . . .” said Joey, when the birds were almost finished cooking. He scooted closer to the fire and glanced at Avani; she was perched on a termite mound a short distance away, struggling to open one of the soup cans again. He dropped his voice to a whisper and leaned in conspiratorially. “So I have a confession. I’m kinda into Avani.”

Miranda arched one eyebrow. “I don’t know who I feel sorrier for, her or you.”

“Do you guys think she likes me?” he asked. “I mean, I know she pretends she hates me and all, but girls are always doing that.” He sighed. “They just like me for my . . .” He made a vague gesture at his torso. “My body, you know? I just wonder if she sees me as a
person
.”

“Breakfast is done,” I announced, and he brightened, his romantic woes seemingly trumped by the announcement of food.

“Canada!” he called, and then he lapsed into full-throated rendition of the Canuck anthem. “
Oh, Canada
!
Something, something-ish in French . . .
Time to eat!” To the rest of us: “How do you say ‘time to eat’ in French?”

But Avani didn’t come. She was peering inside the box of crackers as if she’d lost something inside.

“Um, Canada?” Joey called uncertainly.

She looked up, her eyes fixing on me. “I found something.”

“What?”

Walking over, she upended the cracker box. The remaining packages of crackers slipped out—along with something small and black.

“It was down at the bottom. I didn’t see it last night, but I was going to open another pack and when I reached into the box, I grabbed this instead. What is it? And why was it in the cracker box?”

I barely heard her. My ears were roaring as if I were standing in a hurricane. I stared at the little device, no bigger than a cell phone, and swallowed.

“What is it?” Avani asked in a softer tone, staring uncertainly at my stricken expression.

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

I
t’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?”