locked exit gates. Ammonia from the tear gas made people cough, gasp and vomit.
It blurred their vision.
“Oh, God!” Gretchen’s mother screamed. “Will! Cornelius! Gretchen!”
The crush forced Gretchen’s family tight against the crowds choking the walkway. Gretchen felt her mother’s hand seize hers, as Gretchen grabbed Will’s hand. Her father had Gretchen’s shoulder and Will’s hand.
“Hang on, kids! Don’t let go!”
The pressure was enormous as people began jumping from the upper tiers. Gretchen turned and saw others stampeding toward them from across the playing field!
No. Please. No more.
Now, as Gretchen’s plane began its descent, she swallowed hard.
She knew what was coming. She could not stop it. She glanced at the sky and clamped her eyes shut and bit her bottom lip as the horrible images swirled around her.
The stadium had become a cauldron of hell.
People screaming. Whistles bleating. A foot on her father’s shoulder. Waves of men scrambling above the paralyzed crowds. A sharp kick to her head. Blood trickling. Her mother collapsing under two men, then three more stamping her, then more bodies stamping on her from above.
Wake up from this nightmare! Wake up!
“Nooo!”
Shoes, boots, fists smashing on her father. Her father falling to his knees. More bodies raining down from the upper levels. Thudding, cracking on them, forcing people down.
“Daddy!”
Gretchen struggling to keep on her feet. Her mother’s grip loosening. Her mother’s fingers slipping from hers.
“Mom!”
Her mother vanishing. The light above blotted by wave after wave of frantic bodies. Crawling above them, falling from above, wedging into the immobile mass.
Smells of body odor, sweat, tobacco breath.
Fear.
And death.
Blood flowing everywhere.
“Noooooo!”
A boot grazing her mother’s skull, tearing a chunk of her scalp clean off.
“Mom!”
Her father being trampled to the ground, his body lost in a pulpy blur of stamping.
“Daddy!”
She felt Will’s hand tight in hers, his warm little hand.
“Gretchen! Help me! Gretchen!”
She did not let go of his hand, but she couldn’t see him anymore.
“Nooo!”
One of Will’s arms disappeared into a crush of solid bodies. Compressed so tight people were suffocating.
Bones snapping, organs compressing like accordions.
A heart-wrenching squeal.
Will.
“Gretch-help meee!”
His hand went limp.
Lifeless, it protruded from the tangle of corpses.
The death of innocence. The death of reason before her eyes.
“Will!”
Her baby brother was dead.
Her mother was dead.
Her father was dead.
Gretchen fell into a dream-trance. Helpless to battle the consuming force that was slowly killing her, she prayed.
God, I beg you to let me live.
She felt an overwhelming force slowly ending her life.
And the ants devour their prey.
She felt her blood pressure slipping, slipping. Her life slipping, slipping…away. God, I beg you…
The 737 shuddered.
The flaps adjusted the jet’s approach with hydraulic groans.
The landing gear grumbled down into position and locked.
Dr. Sutsoff blinked her troubled memories away, inhaled and took in the outskirts of Yaounde and the dark forests beyond. She’d come to Cameroon to complete the most critical-most dangerous-aspect of her work.
God had let her live.
She’d come to avenge her family’s death by correcting the error of human evolution.
For here she would find the last key to her ultimate goal.
To exterminate the ants.
42
The Devil’s Tail River, Cameroon, Africa
The diesel-powered barge chugged along the river that coiled its way through the forests of Cameroon’s remote northern region.
The boat was laden with equipment for Dr. Sutsoff’s expedition.
After spending the night in Yaounde, she’d chartered a float plane to an abandoned riverside outpost. It was as far as the Cessna could travel to land safely before the river narrowed. There, four trusted members of her research team awaited her arrival.
They’d arranged for the boat to take them upriver to their field station.
And the discovery.
They had to work fast. Time was running out.
Sutsoff sat alone at the bow in a director’s chair, drinking in the solitude. The isolation offered relief from the episode she’d endured on her long flight. The water rushing under her was mesmerizing, gently pulling her back over her life.
The aftermath of the stampede was a blur of images and moments.
The toll was 249 dead.
Gretchen had survived because she’d been pressed into an air pocket. But she’d suffered a serious concussion. Her head throbbed as if it would crack open.
Vridekistan declared three days of national mourning. They’d used a school gymnasium as the morgue. Embassy staff accompanied her to identify the battered bodies of her brother, mother and father. They looked like bloodied broken mannequins.
“Get up!” she screamed at them before she collapsed.
Orphaned at fourteen.
The embassy staff contacted her mother’s cousin in Paris. He got her the best medical care. She’d sustained major head trauma. Her skull had been fractured in six places. “A miracle she survived,” one specialist said. Her disturbing brain activity concerned doctors who had warned that over time it could degenerate into a psychopathic condition, an inability to feel empathy or remorse or, at worst, a loss of connection with reality. Medication could offset the effects of her injury but she was at risk of painful seizures and potential dissociative episodes for the rest
