Slavemakers (7 page)

*   *   *

THE ATTACK CAME
to Lamu about fifteen minutes later. Jason always remembered that. He knew it might have scientific significance—the fact that the thief assault did not begin at exactly the same moment everywhere.

Of course, destroying a civilization doesn't require perfect precision, and sometimes can take eons to
accomplish. If the thieves unleashed their attacks over the course of a few hours, did it matter in the long run? It didn't.

Still . . . during all the quiet, endless, deadening years that lay ahead, Jason had more than enough time to think, to wonder. And one of the things he wondered about was this delay, and what it might say about the hive mind.

That maybe the mind wasn't something magical, simultaneously commanding each of the countless millions of thieves. Some impulse that traveled at the speed of light, or no speed at all because it was somehow everywhere at once.

No. Maybe it was a network, a set of impulses that moved with stunning—but
not
incomprehensible—speed. Fanning outward from wherever the first attack began, thief by thief. The speed of waves, but not of thought.

At the time, during those fifteen minutes, though, Jason spent no time pondering such mysteries. There was no room inside him for anything but terror.

First he tried to call back on Skype, with no success. The screen froze, so he shook his laptop, a mindless act of panic.

Next he tried his iPhone, but neither the phone nor iMessage connected.

Then, almost overwhelmed by his helplessness, he went to one of the sun-flooded doorways and looked out at the busy waterfront, the fishermen and taxi drivers and tour guides, the sun pouring down out of a deep blue morning sky, the water glittering, and no one aware of the disaster that was happening elsewhere in the world.

He sensed as much as saw Chloe Granger come over and stand beside him. She'd been watching him, seen his panic, and now she said, “Jase, what's going on?”

“I don't know,” he said.

But then a shadow came from the west and obscured the sun, and Jason, coming back to himself, did know. He understood that the disaster that had swept over Gail and the girls had reached them, too.

He understood for the first time that it would reach everywhere.

Chloe, watching, understood as well. What was coming and what it meant.

At the time, Jason didn't understand how she'd figured it all out so fast. A little later, when they had the chance to talk, she told him about her father the airplane pilot, the colony he'd gone to join, and his warning to her, which she'd scoffed at and disregarded.

At the time, though, as she grabbed his arm and pulled him back into the restaurant, he'd marveled at her decisiveness. Even so, at first he resisted, for some reason wanting to see,
needing
to see. To see in order to believe, to understand what had happened to his family.

But then, as the cries of panic came through the open doors behind them, and above all the sound of the thieves, he allowed her to lead him through the kitchen and into the big windowless cold room where the perishables were kept.

The room where he and Chloe and a handful of others would spend the next three days, only emerging when they were desperate for freshwater, when the
electricity had been off so long that the heat and airlessness were intolerable and the remaining food had begun to rot.

Jason had been sure they would all be killed as soon as they opened the door. But he was wrong. Though they stepped into a world transformed, they were left alive.

A life sentence. Ever after, Jason knew that he should have stepped forward and joined all the others who died in Lamu that day and across the world.

Instead—

Daddy . . . help us.

Kissama National Park, Angola

“LOOK AT THAT,”
Ross McKay said, his eyes alight in his pouchy face. “They're so beautiful.”

Malcolm followed the direction of the biologist's gaze: Two dozen unkempt black crosses were circling against the high blue sky to the east, with more winging their way in from the horizon.

“Vultures,” Malcolm said. He shook his head. “Should've figured you'd think
those
buggers were pretty.”

Ross smiled and rocked on his feet but said nothing. This was more typical of him.

Malcolm squinted but couldn't make out what the vultures were soaring over. But he didn't need to know for sure; it was almost certainly a kill, and where there was a kill, there were usually predators.

“My experience, I find myself just below a bunch of those bastards, I'm not usually doing much admiring. Too busy looking over my shoulder for lions.”

He was joking. Kind of. No, not really. Becoming a lion's next meal was a definite possibility here, on their first foray onto dry land since they'd embarked from Refugia. Malcolm had chosen to come ashore on the coast of what had once been Angola, and now they were exploring one of the country's national parks—Kissama.

He'd been here twice before. He'd been nearly everywhere in Africa before the Fall, sometimes without knowing exactly where he was placing his feet.

Without knowing—or caring. Piloting his little prop planes on scientific expeditions, hostage-rescue attempts, and humanitarian missions didn't usually require him to keep up-to-date on current borders. He left that to the diplomats, NGOs, and government officials who were the experts . . . and also, Malcolm believed, some of the main reasons why Africa had been so fucked up at the end of the Last World.

The agreed-upon borders had been so stupid—no, so psychotic—that it was a miracle the world hadn't ended earlier than it did. Hutu and Tutsi jammed into Rwanda and Burundi, and both forced to speak the national language of English? Animists, Christians, and Muslims struggling over French-speaking Senegal? The Ambundu, Bakongo, and Ovimbundu here in Angola, fighting for turf in a country where they'd all been taught to speak Portuguese? Madness.

Human madness. The land itself had never paid any attention to the divisions that its human “rulers” had imposed on it. Even in the worst of times, at the tail end of the Last World, weather, altitude, rainfall, and the
timeless migration of enormous animal herds had dictated the continent's true borders. As they had long before humans had come to dominate the landscape . . . and, he thought, as it would long afterward.

That was one reason Malcolm had chosen to come ashore on this stretch of savanna: It would be a bellwether. The abundance and condition of its wildlife would give Ross, Clare Shapiro, and the others their first evidence of how the rest of the continent was recovering from its human occupation.

Just as importantly, after nearly three weeks on the ocean, the crew was desperate for shore leave. They needed to feel solid ground under their feet, breathe air that didn't smell like salt—or bilge—and get some distance from each other.

Malcolm had left only a small crew back on the
Trey Gilliard
—they'd get their shore leave soon—and those on land were already at work refilling the water tanks and restocking food supplies. Malcolm could see a group under Dylan Connell's command spreading out in search of fruit, nuts, tubers—whatever they could find to augment the meat that he and Ross McKay, the two best shots, had been enlisted to bring back.

Kait was sitting on a large rock off to the side. Part of her assignment was to record the journey's progress in words and drawings, and there she was, alone with her pencils and paper. As he watched, she lifted her head and looked at him. She smiled and raised her right hand in a wave, then looked back down at the pad.

As she did, he noticed her left hand go sneaking
down to pat the pocket of the long cotton jacket she always wore these days, as if making sure that something she'd put there hadn't fallen out.

Malcolm noticed it, wondered about it, and forgot it.

*   *   *

KISSAMA HAD ONCE
been among the richest savanna ecosystems on the western side of the continent, teeming with plains game of all shape and sizes. But by the end of the Last World, wrecked by the human greed and bloodlust that had slaughtered nearly every animal bigger than a meerkat, it had become a ghost town.

Malcolm had seen this up close.

His first visit had been to rescue three ransomed hostages—aid workers from Belgium—in a battered old four-seater Cessna 172. (He didn't remember which side was holding them, or for what reason, and he'd never cared.) That was the time he saw the rotting corpses, animal and human both, that demonstrated the hellish toll that madmen with automatic weapons could take on those with no defense.

He'd survived the hostage transfer and even succeeded in getting the plane into the air. Then, not at all to his surprise, he'd been forced to perform some creative evasive maneuvers to avoid the shoulder-mounted missile that the rebels had fired to knock him and the battered hostages back out of the sky.

His second visit had been more interesting. It had been after the Angolan civil war had finally come to an end—its most recent end, at least. As part of a small caravan of aircraft leaving Johannesburg, Malcolm had
flown a cargo plane containing four South African elephants to the park. The rest of the caravan had contained giraffes, ostriches, and other creatures that had been virtually extirpated during the war.

At the time, Malcolm had been happy to help . . . to be paid to help. But he hadn't held out much hope that the wildlife transfer would work. Yes, the animals arrived safely. Yes, there was abundant food and territory for them to thrive.

But despite a fragile peace, there were still plenty of madmen out there with AK-47s and a desire to see blood flow. Malcolm had no doubt there would be another civil war, and another, endlessly, in perpetuity, with the animals he'd brought—or their progeny—caught in the eternal crossfire.

Instead, the thieves had come, claiming the whole world as their territory, their domain. And so much human blood had flowed, rivers of it, torrents, that the animals of Kissama had been given a new chance.

*   *   *

IT DIDN'T TAKE
much surveying to see that, just as Refugia's savannas had been repopulated, year after year, by animals that hadn't been seen there in generations, Kissama was now showing a similar resurgence.

Back then, Malcolm never paid much attention to Africa's animals. He'd left that to the fanatics like Trey and the scientists he ferried around from place to place. Let them get bitten by flies and catch river blindness and sleeping sickness because they needed to spot some little brown job of a bird or some poisonous snake. He'd be in the bar.

But as he watched a giraffe family, two adults and a baby, head in their rocking-horse way from one grove of acacia trees to another, he could see the appeal. And that solitary bull elephant watching them? Maybe it was a descendant of the ones he'd brought here all those years ago.

Yet somehow, among all that, Ross McKay had chosen the vultures to remark upon. Malcolm looked back at the distant flock. Then, with a sigh, he said to Ross, “I know you're going to tell me anyway, so get on with it: What's so effing beautiful about those bastards?”

“Their mere smelly, ugly presence,” McKay said.

He smiled, that strange, locked-in smile of his that never reached his pale eyes. “Because if
they've
come back,” he went on, “then everything has.”

McKay looked into Malcolm's face. “Come on,” he said, as if everyone on earth should know as much about those ugly birds as he did, “don't you remember? Vultures were on the way out back then, and fast, in Asia and Africa. This chemical, diclofenac, that farmers would give to their livestock to treat fevers and pain from wounds but was deadly poison to vultures.”

Malcolm shrugged. He might have read something about it once.

“Listen,” Ross said. “The population of just one vulture species in India dropped from eighty million—eighty million!—to a few thousand in about five years. And things weren't a whole lot better among the species here in Africa. I can see you're thinking, ‘So what?'”

Malcolm didn't deny it.

Ross's expression had grown more placid, his voice
slower. “This is what,” he said. “Vultures are an end point for pathogens—they eat rotting meat and its bacteria, none of which seem to infect them. Nature's cleanup crew, evolving for millions of years to keep the rest of us healthy.”

Malcolm nodded. “Okay. I get it. With no vultures around, the dead cows just rotted away. Germs everywhere.”

“It would have been luckier if they'd just rotted,” Ross said. “But of course that's not what happened. There's always a worse case.”

A flock of small parrots flew overhead, screeching. Ross tilted his head. “Because there was so much carrion around, the population of feral dogs boomed,” he said. “They didn't do much of a cleanup job, but all that extra protein sure did encourage them to breed.”

He paused and gave a brief glance into Malcolm's face. “You see where this is going, don't you.”

Malcolm said. “Yeah.”

“There were eighteen million feral dogs in India by the end of the Last World.”

“And how many people dying from rabies?”

“About forty thousand each year. Mostly children, of course.”

In the silence that followed, Ross turned to watch the distant soaring vulture flock. “Yet there they are once again, in their abundance,” he said. “Aren't they beautiful?”

*   *   *

A FEW MINUTES
later, he said, “Speaking of dogs—what on earth is that?”

Malcolm followed the direction of Ross's gaze. Among a small pack of jackals waiting out the midday heat in the shade cast by an acacia were two that looked markedly different from the rest. They shared the general size and shape of their more typical pack mates. But their coats, instead of the usual tan and silver, were a mottled brown, and their tails, instead of hanging down, were whiplike and curled partway over their backs.

“Dogs that have joined the pack,” Malcolm said. “Or—maybe hybrids?”

But Ross wasn't listening. He was staring at the strange animals, and after a moment an expression that looked like joy flickered across his face. “They look to me,” he said, “like an evolving species.”

“A what?”

“A species on the road to becoming a new one.”

Malcolm just looked at him. Ross gestured with both hands. “It looks like mongrels from some nearby village interbred with jackals here. If that's true, soon enough there won't be a single purebred left.”

He paused, then said, “That would mean we could be seeing a new species being born. And I'll bet it's far from the only one—not now.”

“You're acting like you have bugs in your brain,” Malcolm said. “Every schoolboy knows that species can't change so fast.”

“That's a discarded theory,” Ross said immediately. “The walls between species have been tumbling down for years. Especially near the end of the Last World. Come on, Malcolm, don't tell me you never heard about pizzly bears?”

Malcolm, for once at a loss for words, stared at him.

Ross gave a little smile. “Up in the Arctic, climate change was bringing grizzly bears and polar bears into contact, and they were breeding to form a new species. Pizzly bears.”

He looked at Malcolm's expression and nodded. “And children and pets were being attacked in the eastern U.S. by coyotes. Did you hear about that? Only they weren't coyotes, they were half coyote, half timber wolf. An evolving species.”

Malcolm said, “Are you telling me—”

But Ross raised a hand. “One moment.”

Then, in a fluid motion, he unslung his rifle, went down on one knee, raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted, and pulled the trigger.

One of the brown animals flew up in the air, its mouth opening wide in a soundless cry before it landed, rolled, and settled into an awkward, final pose. The others leaped and scattered at the sound of the shot, but they didn't move very far away. Even now they were milling about, looking down at their still companion more with curiosity than fear.

Innocent again. For a while, at least.

“Of course, for every newly evolving species that flourishes, countless others fail,” Ross said in his mild way, heading across the grass toward the dead animal. “Let's take a closer look at that guy.”

*   *   *

AS THEY HEADED
back toward the shore a little later, their haul including a pair of little gazelles—gray duikers—Malcolm said, “How many?”

Ross had one of the duikers slung around his neck, his precious jackal-dog in his arms. “How many what?”

“How many evolving species are out there? Right now?”

Ross shrugged under his burden. “Who knows? Certainly dozens. Hundreds. New mammals and birds and invertebrates—so many new invertebrates! It's a big, empty world just waiting to be filled up. And that's what evolution does best—fills empty spaces.”

His smile was nearly blissful. “Imagine the wonders that await us! I wish I could live long enough to see them all.”

Malcolm looked at him.

“Be my fucking guest,” he said.

*   *   *

WITHIN ABOUT TEN
minutes, though, Ross's mood changed. Malcolm, and everyone else, had seen it happen countless times, and it always started the same way.

Ross's characteristic benevolent gaze would darken. His face, usually seeming on the verge of a smile, would cloud, and he'd start looking around with a narrow-eyed, suspicious expression, as if suddenly seeing the world for what it was. His chatty demeanor would drain away as well, and you could barely get a sentence out of him, much less one of his typical explications of some arcane scientific fact.