Another woman in a white coat comes into the room. She carries a tray covered by a white cloth. Adesina cries harder, and soon all the children are crying. The woman ignores their tears.
The woman opens the door to another room and then steps inside. Before she closes the door, she makes a quick gesture to one of the children’s captors. He grabs the boy who pinched Adesina and drags him inside.
One by one, the children are taken into the small back room. The children don’t come out again. When Adesina’s turn finally comes, she sees why. There’s a door leading out the back of the building.
The woman in the white coat speaks sharply to Adesina. Michelle doesn’t understand the words, but she grasps the intent. Adesina stops crying, but snuffles as she tries to contain herself.
The woman pulls the cloth back from the silver tray. There’s a row of needles. Adesina doesn’t know what they’re for, but they look sharp and hurty. She starts crying again. The woman grabs her arm and before Adesina can squirm away, the needle sinks into her flesh.
For a moment, nothing happens. Adesina’s so surprised she stops crying. Then the fire roars through her. It tears at her mind and pulls her apart. She looks down at her hands and sees that they’re changing. And that’s when she begins to scream. Then the world goes dark.
Khartoum, Sudan
The Caliphate of Arabia
The little girl was unnaturally still in his arms as they hung for a breathless instant in orbit. The bandages wrapped around her wizened little body felt rough. Tom took quick stock: for once his objective was marked by a terrain feature-the confluence of the Blue Nile from Ethiopia and the White Nile from Uganda, becoming then just the plain old Nile everybody knew. Supposedly the ancients thought it looked like an elephant’s trunk. How they could tell, given that the country here was every bit as stomped-down flat as the Sudd not so far south, he had no clue. But the alleged resemblance had given the place its name: al-Khartum, the Elephant’s Trunk.
Khartoum. Capital of the former Republic of Sudan. Now just the capital of the newest province of the Caliphate.
They called the girl the Mummy, for the bandages that covered her whole little body and big head to protect her sensitive skin from the blistering African sun. The docs said she was eleven, though she was the size of a four- year-old, and a none too healthy one at that. The Simbas had found her wandering in drought-stricken northeast Uganda during that country’s recent liberation.
Downward like a beam of light -
And here, see, was where the plans ran a bit off-rail. Tom and his charge found themselves on a dais decked with festive bunting in the Sudanese colors of red and black and white and the obligatory Muslim green. It stood in the courtyard of the Defense Ministry: a blinding white colonial-era wedding cake, like a smaller version of the nearby Presidential Palace, almost on the Blue Nile bank.
The courtyard, partially shaded by trees planted by those same long-gone English colonialists, was packed with martyrs of the Sudan’s wars. The living ones, of course: the merely wounded, who could look forward to life on the leavings of a rat-poor state, propped on a wheeled platform that kind of replaced your legs, and in constant pain that even the rare morphine dose could never really ease.
A mustached man in an extravagantly medaled blue uniform stood behind the podium, staring at the impossible apparition of a tall Western man and a tiny girl completely swathed in bandages right beside him. But he wasn’t the Sudanese president, Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir. And he was supposed to be.
Hell knew where Bashir was. Maybe he was held up taking a call from one of his wives (he had two). Or maybe he had just shone the vets on. They weren’t any more use to him except for PR, after all. Instead, the dude in blue was Major General Abdel Rahim Mohammad Hussein, Sudan’s Minister of Defense. He’d been accused of assorted lurid war crimes in Darfur and South Sudan.
He’ll do just fine. Tom pointed at him. “Do your thing, honey,” he said.
The Mummy never spoke. Probably she only understood a little English. But she went where she was pointed and did what she was told. Which was all Tom needed now.
Beyond the minister was a fat man with a blue scholar’s gown and a bunch of bristling grey beard whose extravagant eyebrows were trying to crawl up under his sacklike hat to hide. He was another prize target, the Sunni Imam al-Bushehri of Iraq, the Caliph’s advisor to the Sudanese. He promptly hitched up his robe and ran with surprising hippo speed for the Ministry’s portico.
Tom grinned and blinked out. He was just as happy to miss the rest of the strangled squawks and squelching sounds that had begun to emerge from the Defense Minister.
Up; then back down to the camp in the Sudd.
His next passenger was a small boy, underfed-looking but otherwise a lot more normal than the Mummy. But his eyes were spooky. Tom didn’t know his story and wasn’t sure he wanted to. And he made sure to keep his parts well clear of his mouth. Just, y’know, in case.
He landed on the podium again. It was the one spot in the courtyard the guards were unlikely to spray with frantic fire from their Kalashnikovs, packed as it was with Sudanese brass. The Minister of Defense had shrunk, although still upright and clinging to the podium with sticklike fingers. The Mummy had ballooned way out. Fortunately they had learned to wrap her in elastic bandages, loose and with lots of give.
The imam, now-his fat ass and billowing robes were just vanishing through the front door between two astonished-looking guards. Still clutching the boy, Tom flew right through the open doors. Fastball fast, not photon fast. But faster than the guards could react.
The imam’s slippers made soft thumping sounds on immaculately polished hardwood floors. Smelling whole generations of varnish Tom flashed past the wheezing man. Ten feet ahead of al-Bushehri he set the boy down.
The bearded cleric labored to a stop. “Here,” Tom said in English. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. Wanjala, Imam. Imam, Wanjala.”
“Go ahead and kill me, Mokele-mbembe,” al-Bushehri said. “I die a martyr.”
The Iraqi had balls of brass. Tom had to give him that. Not like it mattered. “I’m not going to kill you,” Tom said as the skinny boy fixed the huge man with a feral stare, then darted toward him. “The Hunger will.”
“A child? What’s- ow! He bit me!”
“Shit happens, effendi. Gotta book.” He grabbed Wanjala up by the back of his camouflage T-shirt-fuck knew he didn’t want the kid biting him -and dashed past the fat man, who was clutching his soft brown hand and staring at the blood welling up from the tooth marks on the back of it.
The guards at the entrance had wheeled to aim their rifles down the echoing hall. They hesitated to shoot for fear of hitting the imam. Tom didn’t hesitate. Crimson plasma jetted twice from his palm. The two guards reeled away as torches, falling in flames on the Ministry steps. Both were dead on the instant; but superheated air venting from their lungs made them scream as if they felt the fire that consumed them.
Even before Tom cleared the door he saw that confusion still reigned outside. The Mummy was almost globular now. General Hussein lay beside her like a bundle of brown sticks in a gaudy blue sack. The other Sudanese war pigs stood gaping, too confused and horror-stricken even to run the fuck away. Tom reckoned the girl had at least a few seconds’ grace before anyone thought to shoot her. As soon as he got clear sky Tom was gone to orbit, swapping Wanjala for Charlie Abidemi in a single drop and grab.
This time Tom lit on the edge of the Ministry roof overlooking the courtyard o’ chaos. He let Charlie drop to the hot tarred gravel beside him, then gave a quick pulse of sunbeam to the grass right in front of the first rank of martyrs, who fell out of their wheelchairs. That was tough luck; he didn’t have anything against them. But he didn’t hurt them, either.
Fact was, he couldn’t afford to fry too many guards: all this rapid hyper-tripping and flying had about worn him out. He just wanted to make the guys with guns flinch.
They did. He turned to the boy he’d just deposited on the roof. “All right, Wrecker, start wrecking. You got two minutes. Have fun.”
As a guard lined his sights up on the Mummy his Kalashnikov’s receiver exploded in his face. He shrieked. There was no flash, no flame, no fragments larger than dissociated molecules. But the shock of the bonds that held all those molecules together simultaneously bursting- that stripped cloth, skin, and muscle from torso and arm and the front of his skull. Howling out of a red mask the guard fell over backward.
Other similar cracks rang out around the courtyard, each followed by fresh screams. Charlie Abidemi’s ace
