Not even a little bit? Fuck, Bubbles, it smells. Decay and rot.” Joey squeezed her hand. Anyone else it might have hurt. She was strong for such a little thing. But Michelle was at a loss for how to help her.
Juliet would know what to do. But she wasn’t here, and for that, Michelle was very glad. If the number of bodies Joey was sensing was any indication, there had been massacres here.
Michelle looked into the jungle, hoping to see anything of the destruction that Joey was feeling. And silently, the jungle looked back.
In the Jungle, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
It was late afternoon, and they stood on a ridge overlooking a deep valley. They were trying to determine the best route down the face of the slope when Waikili touched her arm. She only needed the look on his blind face to know.
“Are they…?” she asked Waikili. The boy nodded. “They’re close?” she asked. He nodded again, silently, and her stomach knotted in fear. Cesar was standing alongside her, and she saw the muscles twist along his jawline. “Cesar, take the children and get them down into the valley. Make them hurry. I’ll… I’ll try to stop them here.”
Cesar swung the weapon he carried from his shoulders. “I am staying here with you, Bibbi Jerusha.”
“So am I,” another of the older girls-Gamila-echoed, and suddenly they were all saying it, gathering close around her.
“No,” she said firmly. “You can’t. At least, not all of you. We have three weapons: Cesar, Gamila, and you, Naadir, all right, you three stay. But the rest of you must go. Quickly, now! You don’t have time, and I don’t want any argument from anyone. Go! Someone take Waikili’s hand; make sure that the young ones don’t get lost, don’t spill Eason on the ground…”
They obeyed, if reluctantly, and she watched the knot of children slip away into the foliage downslope as she wondered if she would see them again. Cesar, Gamila, and Naadir gathered around her, looking fierce and brave… though she could see the fear in their eyes and in the way their muscles tensed as they wrestled the heavy weapons in their arms.
“Spread out here at the ridgetop,” she told them. “Make sure you have a good view of our trail up the slope, they’ll be following it. And get yourselves behind the big trees. I’m going to stand here at the top, where they can see me. If they attack me, or if you see me attack them, then I want you to open fire. Now, listen to me-make it a short burst, just one, and then I want you to leave. Do you hear me? I want you to go find the others. Don’t look back, don’t worry about me. Just run. Promise me you’ll do that.”
They responded with solemn nods of their heads. “All right, then,” she said. “Let’s get each of you set.”
The first sign she had of their pursuers was a flitting glance of a leopard fez downslope from her, the man’s form rising from the fronds of the undergrowth. He ran a hand over his mouth, staring at Jerusha, standing at the top of the ridge in the end of the trampled path left by a hundred feet.
He ducked back down again. She heard him call to someone.
A few minutes later, others appeared: three teenaged soldiers behind him armed with automatic weapons, the muzzles pointed at her. Jerusha was acutely aware that she was not Rusty, that if those weapons fired, she would likely be dead. The Leopard Man smiled up at Jerusha, his eyes masked behind aviator sunglasses, the fez bright in a shaft of sunlight piercing the canopy of the trees. “Ah, the plant lady,” he said in his accented English. “We meet once more, with no river to protect you this time.” The smile vanished. “I want the children you have stolen from us,” he said. “Give them to me, and I will let you go.”
“No, you won’t. That’s a lie,” Jerusha told him.
The smile touched his lips again. “The truth then. Give them to me, and I will make your death a quick and painless one.”
“You can’t have them,” Jerusha told him, and with that she opened her mind to Gardener’s wild card power.
She’d placed the seeds carefully, scattered along their trail. She’d touched each of them so that she could feel them in her mind, could caress the coiled power within. Now she wrenched them open: angrily, coldly. Vines sprang up from the floor of the jungle as Cesar’s, Gamila’s, and Naadir’s guns fired. Two of the soldiers went down; Jerusha wrapped a vine around the Leopard Man, feeling the vines slip as he shape-shifted. She tightened them harder, directing the growth of the plant: it whipped violently to the left, slamming the were-leopard against the massive trunk of an umbrella tree. She heard the ugly sound of its skull hitting wood, and suddenly there was only an unconscious man snared in her vines.
The gunfire had stopped; she hoped the children had obeyed her, but she didn’t dare look back to see if they were fleeing. Two more soldiers had appeared-she caught the duo in more vines before they could fire, snatching their weapons away, wrapping them so that they couldn’t move, and lashing them to the ground.
A grey-yellow shape bounded toward her from the left: the monstrous hyena thing. She chased the creature with the vines, but they were too slow. It roared as it came, its terrible mouth a snaggle of ivory teeth. A tree erupted from the ground in front of it, but the beast dodged to the side, and the branches that snatched at the creature slid harmlessly along its flank.
Jerusha plunged a hand into her seed belt, but she knew she was dead, that it would be on her in a moment.
More gunfire rattled from the ridge behind her, tearing the ground directly in front of the creature. The were- beast snarled in defiance, a roar that made the hair stand on the back of Jerusha’s neck, but the creature turned and leaped away back down the slope, vanishing into the undergrowth.
Far down the slope, she saw the second child for an instant: with his gaunt, haunted face. Then he turned and followed the other boy down the hill.
It seemed to be over. The forest was hushed, even the birds silent after the clamor of the guns. Jerusha went to the Leopard Man, snagged in his cage of vines. She heard Cesar scrambling down toward her and she waved him back. “Go to the others.”
“You need me.” He hefted the gun. “For this.”
She knew he would do it, that he was more than willing to kill the man, that he knew as well as she did that there was no option here. She also knew that Cesar was still only a child-a child who had seen too much death and violence already. He didn’t need to be part of this. He didn’t need this memory to color all the others. She shook her head. “No.”
“If you leave them alive, they will come after us again,” he told her, his dark eyes stern. His lips pressed tightly together into a dark line.
“Go to the others,” she told him again. “Make certain that they’re all right, that there aren’t more soldiers after them. That creature may come after them next.”
Cesar stared at her for several seconds. Finally, he shrugged and went back up to the ridge; she heard him call to the other two.
“Let me go, plant lady, and I promise you I will leave,” the Leopard Man said. Jerusha turned to him. He was gazing at her. Blood drooled from a cut on his forehead and one eye was swelling shut. “I will take my men with me. Let me go. I swear this. The truth.”
“How do I know you will keep your promise?”
The man licked bloodied lips. “I give you my word. I swear to God. I swear on the lives of my wife and children, who will weep if I die.”
“You have children?”
The man nodded. “Yes. In my pocket, there are pictures. I could show you.”
“You have children,” she repeated, “and yet you could do what you have done to these other children?” Jerusha said it softly, and the man’s eyes narrowed. He shifted abruptly back to leopard form, snarling and roaring; she tightened the vines around him, around the soldiers. She was crying as she manipulated the plants: in frustration, in fear, in rage. She heard them scream, heard the screams fade to moans as the vines clenched tighter, sliding up to wrap around throats, to slide into open mouths to choke them. The were-leopard at her feet clawed futilely at the ground, and again he shifted back to human form. He was staring at her, but the eyes were now dead and unblinking.
She watched for a long time, until she was certain that he was no longer breathing.
On the Lualaba River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
