Suicide Kings

25

Sunday,

December 20

Kongoville, Congo

People’s Paradise of Africa

“Tom, no!”

Hopping furiously, he tried to pull on a pair of jeans. Outside, it was still night in K-ville.

That bastard Meadows, Tom thought. He actually stole my body for a joyride. His memory was a blank for what the hippie puke had done. But he knew it had happened.

“You’re not strong enough,” she said. “You’re still healing. I saw you when you came in. You looked… you looked as if you couldn’t possibly survive.”

And the fuckers dosed me with drugs. I told them never to do that! “Yeah, well, I’m better now,” he said. “I found out who shot me and kidnapped my daughter. And now I’m going to make the motherfucker pay.”

“What about the Nshombos?” she asked. “They weren’t happy about what happened in Paris. They won’t want you setting out on your own selfish vendetta.”

“The little bastard’s their enemy, too,” he said. “He committed crimes against the People’s Paradise. If they can’t see that, fuck ’em.”

On the Lualaba River, Congo

People’s Paradise of Africa

After catching up on his sleep, Wally spent a lot of time checking himself for rust spots. He’d let the problem slide while he was too exhausted to do anything about it. He managed to get the worst of it, but there were places he couldn’t reach. And he only had the single damp towel to work with. It never dried out.

He’d been completely submerged during his fight with the crocodile, and had been out in the rain a few times since then, but until now he hadn’t had much chance to do anything about it on account of Ghost. She still followed him. But without her knife, that was pretty much all she could do. He tried talking to her every time he caught a glimpse, but inevitably she backed off.

He landed his boat at river’s edge after a particularly hard rain. Rainwater sloshed around the bottom of the boat, soaking his pack, not to mention his feet. He hoped to find suitable leaves in the jungle, something that would help him wipe everything down. Also, he had to pee.

Everything reminded him of Jerusha. She would have been able to tell him which plants to look for, which leaves to use. Right off the bat. She wouldn’t have laughed at his clumsy attempt to build a rain shield for the boat out of leaves and limbs. Well, she might have laughed, but not unkindly. She had a nice laugh.

Wally lost track of the time. He spent more time than he had intended on his ultimately unsuccessful side trip.

On the way back to his boat, he heard voices coming from the river.

He crept back to his landing site. Leaves rustled. Undergrowth crackled. And his joints-still sore from the fight with the croc-groaned like the hinges of an old door. Wally wasn’t built for stealth.

But the newcomers didn’t seem to notice. Whatever they were talking about (another pang of loneliness, another memory of Jerusha), their conversation indicated no sign of alarm. He peeked through the long leaves of a bushy fern.

“Wow,” he whispered.

A hospital barge had moored itself at the center of the river. It looked to be thirty or forty feet long, perhaps a little more than half as wide, with a flat hull. Most of the deck was taken up with a narrow cabin, built of sturdy timber with a pitched roof of corrugated aluminum. Clean white paint blazed in the sun, bright enough to make Wally squint. The walls and roof were marked with red crosses.

A long, sleek whip antenna arced over the roof; it bobbed gently when the barge swayed on its anchor line. The space inside was probably divided into multiple rooms; Wally counted two doors on the near side. The guy on the roof wore the uniform of a Leopard Man. Regular soldiers patrolled a narrow walkway around the cabin. A handful stood on the side facing the riverbank, where Wally had gone. It seemed pretty obvious they were discussing the stolen PPA boat.

These were the men who’d delivered the virus to Nyunzu. The virus that had killed Lucien, and all the other kids Wally had buried with his bare hands.

He clenched his fists. Well, I’ve found it. Now what?

The barge towed a small rowboat. Three soldiers climbed in, threw off the ropes, and rowed over for a closer look at Wally’s stolen boat. One shouted something to his colleagues. He pointed at the rusted orange stump where the forward gun mount had been.

In response, the men on the rowboat unslung their rifles and started peering nervously into the jungle. So did those watching from the safety of the barge. It seemed they’d heard about Wally. Good.

The easy part was that he didn’t have to take them by surprise. Better if he didn’t, in fact: the barge had a radio. If the barge reported an attack here, that could only help Jerusha’s chances of escaping with the children.

The hard part was figuring out how to get to the barge without getting soaked again. He also didn’t want to lose his own boat. What would Tarzan do? Wally thought for a few seconds. Heck, yeah! He’d swing onto the barge.

Wally craned his neck, looking for overhead vines. There weren’t any. Nuts. Wally sighed. The vine thing would have been neat. He watched the rowboat, the barge, the ripples on the water… Huh?

Wally looked again: ripples on the river. Tiny inverted “V”s, glistening chevrons pointing at a barely visible snout, two eyes, and the back ridges of a river croc. The PPA men hadn’t seen it.

If he waited for the men to come ashore, he could take care of them pretty quickly. But others might take his motorboat while he was busy. He’d lose his chance to destroy the barge, plus he’d have to walk all the way to Bunia.

Wally resigned himself to getting wet again. Rats.

He leaped out of his hiding spot, ululating like Johnny Weissmuller. Ignoring the pain in his legs and hips, he charged down to the river, pulping the underbrush beneath his feet. With the running start, he cleared the final twenty feet with a single jump. He cannonballed into the river, a few feet behind the crocodile, before the landing party had time to react. Their colleagues on the barge shouted warnings. Somebody managed to squeeze off a burst from his rifle. The rounds pattered harmlessly into the river.

Wally grabbed the croc’s tail with both hands. It twisted around, angry as it was ugly. It tried to snap at him. But he heaved, swung the hissing reptile in a few wide circles overhead until it made a nice whistling sound, and released it.

The croc’s snout hit the middle guy right in the gut, knocking him clear off the boat. Its thrashing tail clotheslined the guy on the left. The rowboat flipped, tossing soldier number three into the river.

Heh. Bet Kate’s never done that.

The barge men opened fire while he slogged his way to the rowboat. A hail of bullets pinged and whanged from Wally’s chest, sliced into the water on either side of him, and tore through the jungle behind him. A row of bullet holes perforated the rowboat, but they were too small to sink it before he paddled over to the barge.

Over the crackle of gunfire, Wally heard the whir of machinery. A soldier on the barge cranked a hand winch, nervously winding up the anchor line while peering over his shoulder at Wally’s advance.

“Oh, no you don’t, pal.” Wally reached the barge. Two soldiers stood over him. They fired on his head, shoulders, and arms from a few feet away.

It hurt. In spite of his best efforts, rust had pitted his skin everywhere. He felt new trickles of warm blood on his back and neck.

Wally snapped off a length of wooden guardrail. He swung it like a bat, sweeping the soldier’s legs out from under them. They thudded to the deck. Wally heaved himself onto the barge, then stomped them both. They didn’t get up.

That’s for Lucien.

A low snarl sounded above and behind him. Before Wally could turn, the leopard tackled him. It landed on his back, raking its claws through vulnerable rust spots.

Wally screamed in pain. He reached backward, grabbed the giant cat by the scruff of the neck, and tore chucks out of his own back when he pulled it off him. He swung the leopard through a full two-seventy, smashing it upside down on the deck with tooth-rattling impact. Wally brought the segment of rail down on its throat, hard enough to puncture the deck, fixing the transformed Leopard Man in place.

That’s for everyone else.

Time to end this, before the PPA folks realized they could hurt him. He needed to clean his wounds. Wally hoped they’d had enough time to send an SOS.

The rest of the crew abandoned ship when he tore his way into the cabin. He smashed everything that looked even vaguely scientific, especially all the glassware.

Then he punched through the planking and dropped into the hold beneath the deck. The hull itself was wood, but a series of riblike spars ran the length of the barge to give the hull its shape. And those were metal. Wally disintegrated them two at a time, one in each hand.

The hull pulled apart. Water gushed up through the seams. The barge listed to port, then crumpled, then sank. But not before Wally salvaged two fuel canisters.

When he lugged them back to his motorboat, he found Ghost standing on the riverbank. Openly staring at him with a strange expression on her face. She didn’t back away as he approached, and she didn’t threaten him with the knife handle. Wally paused. They stared at each other.

“My name’s Wally,” he said.

Ghost hesitated before she receded into the jungle.

On the Congo River, Congo

People’s Paradise of Africa

“We could take you all the way there,” Gaetan said. “But it will take much more time. And the closer we get to Kisangani the more dangerous the river is.”

“You were paid a ridiculous amount of money for our passage,” Michelle said.

It was raining and she, Kengo, and Gaetan were hunkered down in the cabin. Joey was huddled under the poncho on the back bench of the boat.

“It would take many more days to reach Kisangani on the river,” Gaetan replied. “I have a friend who is a pilot. He flies out of a small airstrip not far from here. He owes me a favor and I am certain he will give you a good price to take you there.”

Faster was better. Her dreams were now filled only with the urgent need to get to Adesina. And the feeling didn’t fade when she woke up. It itched and burned in her mind. It was almost as bad as the fire in her veins after her coma. The farther upriver north they went, the worse the sensation. They were going in the right direction.

“Fine,” she said. “But we better get a decent deal.”

In the Jungle, Congo

People’s Paradise of Africa

The landscape was steep and furrowed; Jerusha often felt they were making more progress vertically than horizontally. It rained at least once a day, but the rain never seemed to reach them. The canopy of the jungle merely dripped continuously, and the air below was ferociously hot, humid, and still. They forded a few more creeks and small rivers rushing through the valleys, though thankfully none of them were as wide or deep as the one they’d crossed before. The rest breaks became more frequent-the exhaustion of scrambling up the verdant slopes and helping the children who couldn’t help themselves took much from all of them. The children were increasingly hungry and the fruit and vegetable seeds in her pouch were nearly exhausted.

She worried that the pursuit of them might mean that Rusty… no. She wouldn’t think that. She wouldn’t.

Waikili seemed nervous. His blind, blank face seemed to survey the jungle around them. “Those two children?” Jerusha whispered to him, so that none of the others would hear.

Waikili nodded. “They’re out there,” he whispered back. “And the one moves so fast… Leucrotta is his name.”

“How can you know that?”

“I know. He wants to eat us.”

Jerusha kept them moving all through the day, and pushed them even through the twilight. The sun was already down, the trees little more than darker lines in a grey murk. The kids were strung out in a long column as they clambered along a ridge. Jerusha was already looking for a spot to halt for the night, some small shelter.

A wailing cry came from the rear of the line, a shrill of terror too abruptly cut off and followed by shrieks and shouts from the other children. “Cesar!” Jerusha shouted and the boy unshouldered his weapon as they ran back toward the sound, Jerusha unsnapping the covers of her seed-belt pouches.

Naadir, the child with glowing skin, was there as well, the shadows of the other children streaming away from her, near the stretcher that carried Eason. But it wasn’t Eason that was the problem. He gaped like the others from the stretcher, pointing with a trembling finger. “Bibbi Jerusha,” he said. “It was awful…”

She pushed through the children. In the greenish illumination of Naadir’s skin, she could see one of the older boys, Hafiz, lying on the ground in spatters of blood blacker than the twilight. Jerusha’s breath hissed in. Something had torn away the boy’s face, ripped it from his skull so that all that was left were black-red furrows through which bone gleamed sickeningly. Another quadruple line of furrows had been carved over his chest; more across his abdomen, so deep that his intestines had spilled out.

“Go up to the others,” she shouted to the children. “Go on. Did someone see this?”

“I did,” Eason said in halting French. “I heard a growl, then something… I think it was that creature at the river… it came from the bushes, and leaped on Hafiz. It was only a moment, and then it was gone into the bushes over there, and Hafiz…”

“Leucrotta,” Waikili whispered. Eason was staring at the body from his stretcher, his tail thrashing wetly.

Jerusha glanced at the undergrowth around them. She could see nothing, not in the gloom. The noises and calls of the night denizens mocked her. “All right,” she said. “All of you, go to the others. Two of you get Eason’s stretcher. Tell them to make a fire-now. Cesar, go with them.”

“What about you, Bibbi Jerusha?”

“I’ll be along in a moment. Go- quickly. I’ll keep you safe. I promise.” She hoped it was a promise she could keep.

They obeyed, hurrying away in Naadir’s glow as Jerusha crouched down next to the body of Hafiz. She shivered. “You can’t do this,” she said in French to the darkness. “I won’t let you do this. I’ll stop you.”

She heard laughter answer her from the gathering darkness: a boy’s laughter, a child’s. Jerusha shivered again.

Standing, she scattered seeds around the body, and covered Hafiz in a blanket of cool green before hurrying to join her charges.

Sofiensaal Concert Hall

Vienna, Austria

A section of the pitched roof of the Sofiensaal collapsed with a rumble as Tom showed himself on the rounded top of the old concert hall’s facade. He felt the heat of flames at his back. They silhouetted him nicely against the night sky. But the whole thing was liable to cave at any minute. Better make this quick, he thought.

“Listen up,” he shouted down to the media crowding the surprisingly narrow street, east of Vienna’s center. He knew they had shotgun mikes trained on him.

The Vienna cops in riot armor who competed with the journalists for space were pointing things at him, too. Most of those weren’t microphones, though. The street pulsated with red and blue lights. “I’m the Radical. I’m here to bring an international assassin and war criminal to justice.” Somebody started bellowing German at him through a bullhorn. He ignored it. “I want Noel Matthews. This was the last place he performed. From here on I’m going to lay waste to any place that limey bastard does his fake magic. And that’s just the beginning.”

He gave that no time to sink in: thanks to decadent capitalist-consumerist technology the whole world could watch the speech to its black heart’s content. Instead he raised a hand to torch the most obvious SWAT-type van, just for punctuation.

Nothing happened.

What seemed like a hundred cops opened up from below. The muzzle flares were like photoflashes at a Superbowl halftime. Tom went to light speed, emerged in orbit.

On one side, infinite night chilled him. On the other he felt the searing heat of the sun, which had already brought dawn to Western Europe.

He flashed back down, emerging a couple thousand feet above the blazing hall, intending to hover while he worked out what happened.

But he didn’t hover. He dropped like a brick.

“Tough luck, schmuck,” a voice said in his head in a distinct New York accent. “You won’t use me to do your dirty work anymore, you genocidal commie creep. I’m outta here.”

As the heat rose and roared at him Tom spotted a patch of darkness to the east, just this side of the Danube.

To orbit, down.

It was a park. He collapsed on a cast-bench. He panted with reaction. A few blocks away flames danced in the sky. “That was JJ Flash, man,” said the hated voice in his head. “You just lost him. For good. Why don’t you save yourself some grief and pack it in?”

“Fuck you, you hippie piece of shit. You think you’ve won? Do you?” A geyser of yellow flame shot up as the Sofiensaal roof went. “I was gonna give people a chance to give up that shit Matthews. But now I’m going straight to Plan B.” Without even rising from the bench Tom held out a hand. Bricks exploded from the row house across the street as the glare of a sunbeam played across it.

So it began.