the world from the Black Trump. It changed things, but he wasn’t sure how yet.
He missed his stop and had to walk back five blocks through the cold December wind. When he got in, Ellen was sitting at the kitchen counter, the slightest frown showing between her eyebrows. He put down his coat.
“What did you find out?”
He told her all of it. Takis. Vietnam. The 1960s. Sprout and Kimberly Ann Cordayne and Mark Meadows, really nice guy. Monster and Jumping Jack Flash. And with every word, he found himself talking louder, gesturing wider, getting angry. “We’ve been fighting a hippie’s wet dream about Che Guevara! All of it, all of it, is the one guy’s psychodrama about not being… I don’t even know. Radical enough in nineteen fucking sixty-eight! Do you have any idea how many people have died because Mark Meadows wasn’t sufficiently cool?”
“Hundreds,” Cameo said. “Thousands.”
“And a couple dozen more last week. And next week, who the fuck knows?”
“And,” she said, “how does that help you stop him?”
Bugsy paused and raised his hands in a gesture that meant No clue. “And you know what,” he said, “it isn’t even that. It isn’t even that he wanted to be this bronzed Adonis. Do you know why he wanted that? To impress a girl. To get into Kimberly Ann Cordayne’s jeans. That’s what all of this is about. Back in sixty-I-don’t-even-know- what, little teenage Mark Meadows got a perfectly understandable boner for Kimberly in his French class, and now that same erection is blowing people up in Vienna. It’s the past, Ellen. The past is killing us.
“And that girl? The one with the funny laugh and the enchanting tits that got Mark’s hopes up? She’s gone. She doesn’t even exist anymore. I’ve seen her, and she looks like somebody’s grandma who just got out of a methadone clinic. Even if he was exactly the guy who would have rocked her back in sixty-eight, it doesn’t matter. That girl’s gone. She’s dead. And people are still dying in order to fucking impress who she used to be.”
“Bugsy-”
“It’s sick, Ellen! It’s sick, and it’s wrong, and it’s straight-out pathetic. He’s holding on to this idea of who he’s supposed to be. This idealized image of who he thinks she would have wanted, even though she doesn’t want that, and he can’t ever really be more than Mark Meadows’s psychological failures in a fucking Halloween mask. And so he’s turned into this twisted, empty, evil, sad-ass version of himself and hurting a bunch of people who had nothing to do with it.”
“Hey-”
“It’s like a poison. It’s like he drank too much of the past, and now it’s poisoning us.”
He stopped. Somewhere in the rant, he’d started crying. He leaned against the wall, wiping the tears with the palms of his hands.
When Ellen spoke, her voice was soft. “We aren’t still talking about the Radical, are we?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
On the Congo River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Where the Hell is Japhet?
He said he needed to go to the village and pick up some supplies, but Michelle thought he was taking too long.
She’d had another dream about Adesina while she dozed off waiting for their pilot. Another pit dream, more vivid than before. The smell was even worse, something Michelle hadn’t thought possible, and the compulsion to get to Adesina was becoming overwhelming. It was like a radio station coming in clearer the closer you got to the signal.
Joey was cradling the chimp on her lap, while it stared up at her with its dead eyes. Michelle thought she might hurl. The bonobo was beginning to stink. The heat wasn’t helping things.
“I need to get bigger,” Michelle said suddenly. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us at Kisangani. Could you raise a couple of zombies and have them pound on me?”
Joey made a circle in the dirt with the toe of her shoe. “There’s always dead bodies, Bubbles. How many do you want? There are hundreds here.” Her voice started to have a singsong quality, and that was worse than the nonstop swearing.
“Just a couple.”
It took a few minutes, but soon a couple of decrepit zombies came shambling up the dirt road.
“I don’t know,” Michelle said. “They don’t look like they’ll do much.”
“They’ll be fine,” Joey replied.
The zombies began to hit Michelle. She’d taken much worse pummelings, but they did make her plump up like yeasty dough.
“Okay,” Michelle said. “I’m good for now. I don’t want to add a lot more weight to the plane.”
Michelle was going to say more, but she’d just seen Japhet coming up the road, carrying two string bags loaded with fruit and brown paper-wrapped packages.
When he got closer she said, “Did you get everything you need?”
He nodded. His mouth was pulled into a tight line. “We must leave quickly. When I told a friend at the store that I was taking some people to Kisangani, he got a funny look on his face. It seems there have been men looking for strangers-American strangers.”
“What did he say?” Joey asked her. When Michelle translated the conversation into English she said, “This could be a world of hurt coming.”
“You’re probably right,” Michelle replied. Then she spoke again to Japhet. “Can we leave now?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I’m going to need more money. I won’t be able to come back here for a while.”
“Fine,” Michelle said. It would wipe out the rest of her cash, but there was no other choice. “Can we help you load?” He nodded and pointed to several boxes sitting near the single-engine prop plane. When he climbed into the plane and started the engine, it sputtered to life in a way that didn’t fill Michelle with confidence.
Michelle and Joey were loading the last of small cargo boxes when Japhet jumped from the plane, yelling something Michelle couldn’t quite make out over the engine noise. Then he pulled the pistol from his holster and started firing. Michelle turned around. Bounding up the dirt road, kicking up dust, came seven huge leopards.
“Shit! Go! ” Michelle yelled at Joey. She pushed her toward the plane, then spun and let a barrage of bubbles fly at the leopards. These were rubbery, nothing lethal about them. But they would hurt like hell. She didn’t want to kill the leopards, but animals didn’t normally behave this way. What the hell was going on?
The bubbles hit two of the cats, one in the shoulder, the other in the leg. They went down and rolled over and over in the dusty road. But the other five kept running toward the plane.
Michelle saw that Joey was still outside. Japhet grabbed her arm and yanked her toward the open plane door. Michelle felt claws sinking into her back and she was slammed into the side of the fuselage. She bounced off the plane, spun around, and saw another leopard leaping at Joey as she scrambled into the plane. Its claws raked down the back of her leg. The zombie bonobo leaped up and grabbed the leopard’s head, then started gouging out its eyes.
The other leopards were on Michelle. They clawed and bit her, but that only made her fatter. She created bubbles the size of soccer balls and sent them into each cat’s chest. The leopards popped up into the air. As the first one hit the ground, she heard Japhet’s pistol. The leopard screamed and then turned into a naked man.
Michelle scrambled, grabbed Japhet, and yelled into his ear, “Stop shooting. They’re people.”
“No. They are Leopard Men.” He spat. “They’re not getting my plane!”
“Let’s get the hell out of here.” Michelle released rubbery bubbles at the remaining leopards. He nodded, jammed his gun into his holster, and climbed into the plane. Michelle followed, yanking the door shut behind her.
Joey sat on one hip on the far seat. Her leg was bleeding and stained her pants brownish red. There were four deep gashes in her flesh and blood was welling up in them. Japhet climbed into the pilot’s seat and started the plane down the dirt runway.
“Do you have a first-aid kit in here?” Michelle asked. She glanced out the windshield and saw the end of the runway-and the jungle where it stopped-coming up way too fast. “Christ, we’re not going to make it.”
Japhet just laughed and pulled back hard on the throttle. The plane shuddered, bounced up and down a couple of times, then rose in the air. Michelle could hear jungle foliage whapping the underside of the plane.
“No first-aid kit,” he said. “There’s a bottle of water you can use to clean the wound and I have a clean T-
