Catacombs (2 page)

When Chips continued to argue, too vehemently, with the general, he was placed under arrest, at gunpoint, and taken away to the base camp. It was as if they had intended from the beginning to make us prisoners.

I was only a few yards from the entrance to the Catacombs. They weren't watching me. I slipped back inside. By now I've been missed. Will they search the Catacombs? I don't think so. It is measurable in square miles, and I could evade them easily. But without food or the means to recycle urine, I have no chance of surviving.

If they leave without me I might try to escape down the mountain. Difficult, even if I were strong, at a peak of conditioning. But anything could kill me out there–a misstep, a rockslide, the biting cold of night. Oh, God!

. . . Later. The earth was shaking so strongly I found it difficult to stand, let alone walk. I vomited, and have a severe headache.

Fireballs are more in evidence. They're clustered around the core of the Catacombs, each as bright as a miniature sun. They are frightening, but harmless.

So I hope is the transformation, quite unlike any I've experienced here.

I made the mistake of making eye contact with one of the entombed creatures–and abruptly I was striding across the storm-darkened Serengeti Plain, solitary, like most of my kind, in search of a morning kill: wildebeest, Tommy. The transformation was astonishing. I knew who I really was, yet I felt the smooth power of another body, of unsheathed claws and spotted coat, of hunger burning in a lean belly. I had the ability, unique among animals of the world, to sprint at an incredible speed in pursuit of game. I spotted my prey, accelerated, overtook the gazelle, and slowly strangled it with the bite of claws that were too weak for dealing quick deaths. I feasted, then returned miles across the plain to the hiding place of my cubs. I found nothing left but hanks of black birth-hair: While I had eaten, they were eaten. By hyenas.

The transformation abruptly was reversed, as they all were, and I stood weeping in the chamber, unaware of how much time had passed.

. . . Chips is calling me now, pleading with me to come out. General Timbaroo must have put him up to it but he does sound worried, for my sake. He knows what I'm capable of. Chips says that I am only making more trouble. He may be right; I only know I have no more time to think about it. I don't know why we're under arrest, why the data collected by the expedition was taken. But surely Chips will straighten everything out.

In the meantime, it's unthinkable that any harm will come to us.

THE POWER

OF THE STONES

"The Lords of the Storm. They sound like gods. Think of that, Matthew. They have looked upon mankind and seen that we are assholes. From their infinite wisdom and compassion is distilled a drop of pity. A blood-red drop. Maybe FIREKILL is a gift from the gods."

"On the other hand," Jade said, "they may have a godlike sense of humor we won't appreciate at all."

Excerpted from the archival tapes of

President Douglas Jaret Creighton,

cross-file reference N640-1715,

The
Hondo
series.

KINGDOM MISSION

Ivututu, Tanzania

April 29

I
n the late afternoon Erika awoke from exhausted sleep to find herself shivering, and for a few moments she was horrified, thinking that she too had come down with the fever.

She sat up in her creaking bed, bagged in mosquito netting that had turned brown from the sun and was weighted with the dust of drought. Except for a violent pulse and heartbeat she discovered no other symptoms of a possible viral infection. The tremors were a reaction to a dream which, recurring, always found her vulnerable: a chilly bath of terror to purge the frustration and anxiety of her waking hours. In her dream magisterial men with the savage, flat-skulled heads and yellow faces of cheetahs came vividly to life in their crystal tombs, shattering barriers that had lasted ten thousand years. The cat people of the Catacombs–always they brought her back to the months of the expedition, and the bloodstones.

In retrospect, as she sat huddled on the bed with her head close to her knees, coughing a bitter taste of unassimilated dust from the back of her throat, the Lords of the Storm were less threatening than concerned in their attitudes toward her; they reached out as she slow-stepped through the ritual of the dream as if to bestow power which she so sadly lacked in her present circumstances. But as they touched her with slender hands nearly doubled in length by hooked fingernails, their expressions became static, simplified: The faces vanished slowly, leaving just the bold strokes of pictographs, a dead language she could only partially read after weeks of study.

The afternoon wind was blowing from the north, from the shrunken soda lake of Rukwa, across the miles of glazed savannah, and through the upland bush and acacia trees that surrounded the deteriorating old mission. Erika, in her misery, wrapped her arms around her thin knees to diminish the trembling; darkened by the sun, viewed through layers of netting, she was like the uneasy seed in a strange, transparent fruit.

She heard footsteps in the bungalow and looked up.

Alice Sinoyi filled the door space of the little bedroom; there had never been a door. Alice's cropped head was the color and texture of burnt sugar. The lower half of her face was covered with a surgical mask, a protection against dust aerosols which they all were observing. Beside her head, on the wall, was a stark, slightly askew pale shadow of a cross that had been removed when the mother superior of the white sisters who had taught in the mission school departed for another assignment.

"Erika?"

"Oh, Alice. What time is it? How long have I slept?"

"About four hours. You are coming with me? Bwana Chapman now is having the fever."

There was no tone of urgency in her voice. She seemed fatalistic, unmoved.

"Oh, my God."

Erika tumbled from the bed, flinging the cumbersome net aside, and reached for her sandals. She thought she heard an airplane circling above them, the twice-weekly Beechcraft from Mbeya that carried supplies and, occasionally, more help from the district hospital to the quarantined mission and village. And she heard something else: a surge of orchestral horns, the scratchy but still-powerful voice of Maria Callas. The aria was in French, issuing from the hi-fi equipment of Father Varnhalt, the half-crazed old priest who presided over the largely defunct mission. He was a serious opera buff and was given to playing his records for hours, often in the middle of the night, and at full volume.

Divinités du Styx, ministres de la mort!

Je n'invoquerai point votre pitié cruelle.

Gods of the Styx; ministers of death! I shall nevercall upon your cruel pity
. . . Erika shuddered again; today his choice of
Alceste
seemed dismally appropriate. She took a fresh mask from a carton on top of the dresser, which was dark and ugly and typical of mission furniture, and airy from wormholes. As she followed Alice through shaded but stifling brick arcades, she tied the mask behind her head. Her fingers were a trifle clumsy; she felt dizzy and dreamlike, the world falling into soft focus at the edges of her vision.

Erika stopped and glanced up as the plane, throwing off needles of light, made another low pass over the mission buildings. Something, apparently, was obstructing the salt-pan landing strip half a mile downhill. A herd of zebu, cattle, or perhaps one of the thinning bands of topi seeking what was left of the brackish water in the Songwe River.

By the stockade gate the masked soldiers slouching under dust-caked but still-green mango trees also looked up, shielding their eyes and making feeble jokes about the prowess of the bush pilot. But he was free to come and go and they were not. The soldiers were of tribes other than the Fipa or the Nyika, stationed far away from their own districts. They were afraid of the plague, but more afraid of running away.

If they were caught, Colonel Ukumtara, a Masai whom they all feared, would personally shoot them.

And few of the conscripted soldiers had any idea of how to make their ways home from the southern highlands, through empty hostile country which they knew to be populated by sorcerers, vampires, and werewolf hyenas.

The hospital was a long, two-story building with high ceilings; it had been built in 1912, a few years after the end of the devastating Maji-Maji rebellion, during which the Germans had killed seventy-five thousand blacks and gained a firm hold on the southern tribal districts. Only about half of the original stucco remained on the brick walls, and a wooden gallery was in serious disrepair. There was an overhanging tin roof topped with thatch that had been riddled by rats.

The rats had become so numerous and threatening as the mission population dwindled that a quartet of tough young tomcats recently had been flown in from Mbeya. They patrolled together, for their own safety, and had succeeded in driving the rats from the living and eating areas of the mission grounds. The ecology of Africa is exceptionally fragile, habitat and migratory patterns depending almost entirely on the erratic monsoons. It was now the season of the long rains in East Africa, but even in a good year this crescent of the Rukwa Valley received only about twenty inches of rainfall. This year, so far, there had been almost none; brief showers did little more than settle the laterite dust. With every humid drizzle, the sky seemed to bleed.

For three weeks the hospital had been crowded with the seriously ill. Surrounding it, almost like a halo, was a corrupt, nauseating odor which Erika had become somewhat accustomed to: She had spent most of her time there since the outbreak of the fever. An abandoned school building nearby was now rapidly filling with blacks from the surrounding villages; in another day or two there would be no more room at the mission.

Alice left her and went, fiat-footed, heavy in the haunch, toward the auxiliary ward, where a woman's despairing
lulloo
had interrupted Mme. Callas' passionate mezzo air. Already nearly one hundred fifty cases of the fever of unknown origin had been diagnosed. Sixteen patients, unresponsive to broad spectrum antibiotics and serums for known fevers such as Rift Valley and Congo, had died. A few victims, those under thirty years of age who had contracted the disease, seemed to be recovering. No children had been brought in as yet, and only two of the young soldiers assigned to the mission had been stricken, not seriously. The older you were the more deadly the fever.

Raymond Poincarré had come out onto the gallery in his short-sleeved smock to drink a cup of fruit juice and smoke a strong cigarette. He was the only doctor the Tanzanian government had sent to them in this emergency. For nearly a month he had worked eighteen hours a day with a staff of native nurses from the Mbeya hospital to contain and attempt to identify the fever. His father was a Belgian, his mother had been a Fipa woman from the valley south of Muse. He'd been out of medical college for less than a year, but Erika thought he would become an outstanding doctor if he wasn't worked to death. His only fault, as she saw it, was a steadfast refusal to discuss or even acknowledge the fact of their involuntary sequestration.

Poincarré looked at Erika as she negotiated the tilting, creaking stairs to the second floor. He had a high, light-brown forehead and wore gold-rimmed glasses, a miniature gold ring in the lobe of one ear. His face was too youthful to be lined, but these days it had fallen into a pucker of weariness, or resignation. He spoke to her in French, his voice still strained from laryngitis caused by the dust.

"I'm sorry to get you up so soon; but he was asking for you."

"Are you sure it's the fever?" Erika said, still in shock. "Chips has had malaria for many years–he could be having a flare-up in spite of the chloroquine."

"No, he's not malarial. It's a fulminating febrile sickness. Lymphadenopathy is evident. Time will tell." Poincarré didn't sound hopeful. The pitch of the airplane engine had changed as the pilot sought to land. He glanced from the descending aircraft to the livid hollows beneath her eyes. "They should have sent me a good supply of gamma globulin this time. I've asked for it nearly every day. For your safety I suggest that you have an injection. Why haven't you been eating? You mustn't lose any more weight. You'll surely collapse if you keep on at this pace–you were up all of last night."

"I feel fine." In truth she had experienced dancing spots before her eyes, and palpitations, as a result of jumping too quickly out of bed. Erika blinked hotly at the frieze of lizards around the screen door, and heard someone groaning inside the ward. "Shouldn't we know what it is by now? You sent the blood and sputum samples to Mbeya over three weeks ago."

He shrugged. "The laboratory there is primitive. The samples may have been mishandled; they often are. Or perhaps they were spoiled in transit to the virus lab in Dar."

"This can't be an isolated outbreak; there must have been something like this fever before. There must be a vaccine."

"I don't know, Erika. Mutations of deadly viruses are common in Africa. It takes a very long time to isolate the new strains and cultivate antiviruses. By the time that happens, the disease may run its course."

"Leaving how many dead?" She was panting for breath. She leaned against the wall; the lizards rearranged themselves watchfully. "But that's it, isn't it? That's why the government can only spare us one doctor and a few nurses when what we really need are virologists, epidemiologists, a well-equipped field laboratory. Does USAID or the World Health Organization know what's happening in Ivututu? No. Because someone in power in this country will be bloody well pleased if every single member of the Chapman/Weller expedition dies here!"