Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest Read online

  Eric held his breath. Lungs cried for air.

  A muscular blue arm followed, covered with turquoise blood, and it grasped at the ragged edges of its entry hole. Began to tear the hole bigger. A dark shoulder and a portion of ebony chest pushed further into Eric’s room. Eric rolled from bed. Bolted out the door into the dim hallway.

  Shadows along the baseboards pooled into phantasms that lashed at his feet. Eric ran for the stairs. A bright yellow missile flashed through the wall on his right and passed into the wall on his left without leaving a mark on either surface, yet he thought he smelled the acrid fumes of exhaust. Sirens whistled, seemed to originate inside his head. He pitched forward on the green shag runner before the stairs and landed hard, his head smacking against the padding on the fifth riser. He stared at the pebbled grain of the carpet just inches before his eyes. A window stretched and bubbled into the riser, a window that looked down on a swirling city of spires and slums. The window moved, as if Eric were seated in a hoverchop skimming over the skyscrapers, and when he dipped over low buildings, the familiar peeling white manse of the Jiboa Hotel ballooned below him on the street. Several Blueboys were breaking into the front lobby, weapons ready. He could hear the grunted commands and the thud of heavy boots on the staircase.

  His viewpoint trailed them through a hallway, glided over their heads. He searched frantically for a safe place to hide from the chaos and pain that would come. Entered a dark rectangle, lit by a feeble bulb above the upper jam. Plunged down several flights of stairs. Fell smack on a prostrate body, sinking into it, deep into the recesses of the brain.

  “Hey, this looks like the one.”

  The voice deep and resonant; it surrounded Eric where he lay on the steps. Someone nudged him with a boot, then kicked him. He tumbled back in a heap at the foot of the stairs.

  “He must have heard us rounding up people on the upper levels and knocked himself unconscious trying to get out.”

  “Get Dirk to run a retinal scan. We need positive ID.”

  More gruff voices. Thick hands grabbed Eric under the armpits and jerked him up until he stood, feeling exposed in briefs and a stained tee-shirt. He was spun around to face his tormentors. Men laughed as they shined a pencil beam in his eye. They had wide blue faces and mouths filled with wicked teeth and black gums. Another soldier arrived from upstairs.

  “Hurry up with the scan,” the new one said. “I’ve got to confirm the capture over the comm.”

  “Shee-it. Isn’t this the same kid we picked up last week? What gives?”

  “Popular boy. The General wants him out at Delta Base by dawn. They’re reeling him in.”

  Men on each side of Eric boosted him onto the first step as if he were a feather. Pushed and prodded until he started the awkward climb to ground level. Progress was slow. Projections and drug mists left his body twitching.

  “Should we sedate him?”

  “Why bother? He’s already gone.”

  ***

  General Berkey returned with Jeri’s ID.

  “All in order, Jeraldo. They’re dated but quite valid. I’m intrigued by your history.” Berkey said this with a sensuous curl of her tongue along the ridges of her teeth. “My apologies for the men. They’re upset over an earlier incident.”

  “So I gathered.”

  She called to Trigger, who stood at the back of the vehicle poking a tire iron into the wheel well for the spare tire. “What about the driver?”

  Trigger closed the well, then zipped up Skaff’s bags and crammed Jeri’s duffle on top of them. They were soaked with mud.

  “He checks out, sir.”

  “You two can go,” the General said as the rain quickened, beading on her cheeks and dropping little jewels from the tip of her nose.

  She handed Jeri his ID and his wallet, and with her touch traced a mild stinging shock on the back of his hand. It dissipated along his forearm and burned from the shoulder down his chest to warm his groin. He felt as if he’d swallowed a mug of grain alcohol. His immediate erection strained against the fabric of his pants. Acids flared in his gut. He felt soiled. She’d juiced him with an E-pheromone, a tailored and often addictive drug that imprinted its victim for future susceptibility, a sexually specific susceptibility. Jeri opened the jeep door and collapsed in his seat as Skaff eased his foot off the clutch. He could still feel the heat of her caress and her glistening pupils scanning him as if the topography of his soul winked on a computer screen, revealing his weakness for mysterious women.

  Skaff sped up. Jeri let the door flap open, let the drizzle pepper his face with cold bullets.

  “C-C-Christ, that was close,” Skaff said loudly. “I’ve got a load of coca paste in that spare.”

  As if to place emphasis on Skaff’s relief, a powerful wind sighed through the cracks in Skaff’s door. Skaff’s emotional tone was clear to Jeri, however. It wasn’t worry that drained out of Skaff’s system now, or the sarcasm he’d thrown earlier at Jeri about unpleasant circumstances in Caceres. It was raw fear. A wild look shined in the man’s eyes each time lightning crackled and spit in the sky ahead of them. Indeed, Skaff was a newcomer to the ways of Blueboy troopers and their games, and they’d gotten to him. Jeri caught his swinging door and slammed it shut just as thunder boomed overhead. He huddled under his poncho again.

  “It was closer than you think,” he said as Skaff slowed. “I’m not sure why, but my papers got us through with a minimal search.”

  Skaff didn’t ask for clarification; he chewed gum and concentrated on the road. Ruts and potholes overflowed. The spatter soaked Jeri’s ankle boots through a missing plate in the floor of the cab, and when the downpour came, it fluttered the canvas roof and slapped the windshield in sidewinding sheets that tongued along the glass around the frantic wipers. Jeri’s stomach grew queasy again, its juices frothing and tossing like the leafy branches overhanging the road. He curled against the wet seat and closed his eyes. The jeep moved like a frigate cutting between the crests of tall, black waves. When Jeri nodded off, the present seemed light years away, a slip of coast in the foggy distance, while the past loomed in his thoughts like a steep rocky island.

  He was born Jeraldo Cristobel, one of three brothers orphaned without birthplace or date, a matter that pained him with self-doubt in his youth. The three were settled in St. Sambuca, a drafty, stone church with a small walled enclosure in the back, where a cottage lipped the private bathing pond of an aging Father Superior rumored to have a taste for young boys. When all three had reached schooling age, Eric—whose sensitive mind could perform small miracles—was raped by this man. So, at the urging of his eldest brother Jerico, he snuck off with them to a nearby river and called into their bucket a swarm of candiru for the Father’s pond. The sliver-sized fish were called “piss fish” by the swamp fisherman who had to squeeze themselves off while they bathed, that or face castration when the tiny devils lodged themselves in the urethra. The Father Superior fared no better, and the boys’ revenge welded them into a tight-knit unit—protective of each other—as they found themselves back on the streets of Caceres. A young hotel owner named Mama Lavao took them in, and Jeri, at age nine, buried himself in a routine of hard work and solid food. Though he mistrusted Mama’s charity at first, Jeri grew content as the years passed, his muscles grew hard, and his smoldering eyes attracted many local girls.

  When Jeri turned fourteen, the elite soldiers of the WestHem armies occupied the surrounding countryside for a full winter, a season of rain and mock violence. Each year thereafter these Blueboys stayed longer, staging more elaborate battles and tests until the fateful event that remained branded in Jeri’s memory on a grand scale. The Blueboys’ heavy rain, meant to be used on a condemned slum, flattened an adjacent neighborhood, taking Jerico with it. Eric retreated to his own fantasia of grief and self-pity. Jeri escaped this fate by leaving Caceres at twenty for Sao Paolo. Within a few years, though, his fortune was stitched in aimless patterns across the Brazilian outback. Now, he was giving u
p that freedom.

  By the time they reached the far edge of the Planalto do Mato Grosso, Jeri felt better though still feverish from the drug. He sat up and watched the sunlight leak over the hills and dust the foliage a faint silver. The jungle developed like a photographic plate; first the imperceptible brightening, then a breakdown of solid shadow into visible forms, then the grainy details. The rising sun torched the fine spider-webbing of cracks in their windshield and turned the vegetation they passed to a molten riot of yellows and parrot greens. At last, it cleared the horizon.

  Complaining of stiffness and exhaustion, Skaff pulled over onto a wide shoulder where the road snaked off the heights to the city, which hugged the foot of the hillside and the very edge of the valley below. They sat, hypnotized by the Pantanal where it stretched southeast in the distance like a glittering plain of light, pocked with islands and great weedy domains. Only the Gran Chaco stood wholly aloof from the floodwaters. It ran to the west, a low, sparsely-wooded climax forest that swallowed eastern Bolivia and half of Paraguay.

  “See, it’s beautiful country,” Skaff said to Jeri.

  “Sure, but it doesn’t resemble anyplace that WestHem would defend against EastHem. The soldiers don’t belong here for training.”

  “They have to train somewhere.”

  “In the North American cities, if they must. But invasion there seems just as unlikely. The West has conceded Europe and Africa for Latin America and the Pacific Islands. The world’s split fairly.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Skaff said. “Armies are armies.”

  After they watched a pair of rudderless, cigar-shaped gunships—termed “hoverchops” by the Blueboys—glide silently past them and dip over the checkerboard of Caceres below, Jeri lit a cigarette and began to talk again, not willing to let the subject drop.

  “Want to hear something weird?” he said.

  “Yeah.” Skaff popped a second stick of gum into his cheek.

  “My friend, The Impresario, said in the letter you delivered that Eric had a theory. Something about a mass psychological experiment being used on the city this year. Funny, eh?”

  Skaff said, “Like we’re mice in a maze.”

  Jeri coughed and flicked his ashes out the vent window. Then he rolled his main window down for air.

  “More like lab rats.”

  “I didn’t know your brother was an intellectual.”

  “He isn’t. That’s his delirium. But it could be true. He has a knack for knowing things. I’ve seen him guess names. Seen him call fish and caimans up from the swamp waters.”

  Skaff snorted in disbelief.

  Jeri knew, though. He and his brothers had been monitored in their teens by Blueboy scientists, and Eric, at least, possessed a talent, an eerie potential they wanted to groom. Also, Jeri knew firsthand about the neural disruptions: the drug mists, subliminal fear waves and the projected images the soldiers used. The disruptions had dredged strange things from his soul, until he couldn’t stand it. He had to flee. But Eric had stuck it out. Suddenly the guilt swelled in Jeri’s heart. The same old guilt. He’d escaped, but left Eric to fend for himself.

  Jeri grew anxious to see his brother. He stubbed his cigarette on his boot heel and dropped the half-finished butt through the gap in the jeep’s floorboard. He wondered if Skaff had ever jettisoned contraband through the hole.

  “Let’s get going,” he said.

  Skaff turned the ignition over. They bounced onto the road and slipped down the windy bends to the city and the immense swamplands that bordered it. The descent was bracing. On the last curve that straightened out into the wide basin they skirted the Caceres airbase with its small spacepad that served a fledgling colony on Mars. Here—it had been rumored—Jeri’s father Paulo had emigrated after deserting their mother to the Chagas fever.

  “Road check,” announced Skaff.

  Several Blueboys in black and tan camouflage suits stood at attention by their guard booths. One motioned them to stop. Skaff handed over their IDs with an envelope of money. The guard consulted his computer.

  “You’ve already been scanned,” he said. He returned the cards and waved them on.

  They drove through the outer barrios of Caceres, and into a fog of psychomist blown off course from a Blueboy exercise further into the swamps. This tripped an emotional release which sent Skaff into paroxysms of laughter about the money he’d wasted on the guard, but it left Jeri sick with his head out the window. He let it all out, as if it were physical evidence of the frustrations that had stewed in him during the trip home, and he made a promise to himself to get Eric out of Blueland at any cost.

  ***

  Outside Eric’s cell window a raucous company of white, nearly transparent macaws twisted in the air and dipped, much the way fish schooling in the river currents flitted this way and that by the workings of some genetic, communal instinct. Eric imagined that he’d been transported underwater, to the forests that flooded along the tributaries during the rainy season, and now that mystical place held him in stasis between land and water, earth and fire, between all elements that bound the universe. He remembered the incident with the candiru. Remembered how his brothers instinctually thought as one in the old days, and he felt sad. He wanted his family again. Wanted simple days glowing with their camaraderie.

  In a ceiba tree that arched over the cell, a monkey nibbled on epiphytes, and it looked to Eric like a smudge or a shadow. Spirit creature; all soul, no substance. He called for the beast to come closer, for he wanted to see its fur up close, to marvel at what brilliant stroke of adaptive camouflage it possessed. It remained elusive in front of him, though, with no individual details ever coming into focus. He could use that. With such protection, he could fool the blue men that would come to deliver him to the court of the Blue Queen. The woman who’d summoned him before. Forced him into tests. Forced him to tell her everything and anything she wanted. And in the end, she’d plied him with stimulants and kept him awake through the night with the heat of her touch. Forced him to love her. Hate her. Be dependent on her.

  The door rattled, and the one named Trigger opened it and pulled Eric to his feet. Stepping outside, Eric blocked the mid-morning sunlight with his hand and slumped against the outside wall of his cell.

  “Ten minutes,” the Blueboy said.

  Eric nodded. Sun felt wonderful on his skin.

  Giving up on any effort to steady himself, he slid his back down the bumpy fiberglass wall and sat with his legs straight out in front of him. He basked with his face turned toward the sun. His lizard brain, the tiny bulb of instincts that ruled his body, hummed beneath the more developed lobes of his cerebrum. He tuned out the psychobabble that ran through his head about his life at the Jiboa Hotel, about his friends, about his role as guinea pig for the Blueboy scientists. Though he sensed none of the prescient visions that had confused him before the kidnapping, his thoughts still weren’t clear. Pervasive dread ghosted through him. A confrontation awaited.

  He shut it out. Tried not to think of it, or to see beyond to its resolution. Just vegetated in the sun.

  “Ten minutes are up,” the Blueboy said. “Time to show the General what yer hidin’ from us.”

  Eric tried to raise himself, but he felt weak. The Blueboy helped him up. He had not expected this, yet he was grateful. He wiped his dirt-specked palms on the khaki pants they’d issued him, looked around at the compound he must cross.

  It was a small rent in the canopy of trees along the edge of the Pantanal, and it contained three glass and white concrete research buildings, a long row of quonset huts, a small landing field with one hoverchop, and a pair of confinement cells including his own. Since he’d last been there, they’d poured a pad for the hoverchop and now a crew of Blueboys cleaned up the brush piles about the buildings. Yet the atmosphere remained the same. The base looked temporary. Five years in the future the main buildings would be reduced to concrete bunkers, and the rest would be stripped from the soggy land. Twenty years from n
ow the swamp would silt over the location, mangroves taking hold with steely roots.

  “Move it.”

  The Blueboy gripped Eric by the arm and tugged him toward the largest building in the compound. The walk seemed to take forever.

  Inside an anteroom lit by skylights and tall narrow windows with screens, three Blueboys conversed. One, the Blueboy scientist who would ask Eric questions and record the answers with rows and rows of dials. One, the medical technician who would administer drugs. One, the Blue Queen.

  The Blue Queen approached him while the others continued a conversation consisting of technical jargon. She dismissed Trigger with a nod.

  “Eric! I haven’t seen you for a week.” She held his hand and stroked it as if it were a purring cat. “I’m glad you agreed to return.”

  “Agreed?” he said, though his throat constricted.

  “Why, yes.” She pressed her fingers into his arm until they dug tiny curves into his muscles. “At least I hope you plan to stay.”

  Eric felt a prickly heat that expanded within. Could say nothing. Thoughts became random and burned out of control.

  ***

  A church parade had gathered a small crowd along the avenue, and a commotion started outside the lobby of the Jiboa Hotel as Jeri and Skaff parked the jeep. A Blueboy on solo patrol lifted two teenagers by the backs of their necks and let out a scream that forced Jeri to cover his ears. The kids, who copied the dress and skin color of Blueboys as part of a youthful fad, twitched and jerked. The soldier left the kids collapsed on the pavement, blood leaking from their ears. Jeri pulled them inside while Skaff called an ambulance. After the vehicle arrived, and they’d given brief statements that Jeri knew would be ignored by local officials, he led Skaff to the core of the building, where stairways started down and a great elevator well showcased an antique machine.