Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest Read online

  Across the dark acidic waters, the caimans and jacares gathered in groups along the igarapees and within the open water courses where the water didn’t stagnate. Mutated ones, the immense lizards that the Blueboys tampered with as they had with Eric, clacked their jaws. Eyes glowed like coals above the waterline. These were the beasts that had haunted his dreams, yet now he saw them as possible allies. And the face of the largest one was human and familiar to him, achingly familiar.

  “Eric. I’m coming for you,” it said.

  The lizard lost substance, shrunk, and floated to the ceiling. Whispering his name. Eric whimpered and pulled the pillows tight around his head. The Blue Queen rolled over and held him against her until the shaking subsided.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  She rubbed his back, then her touch inched down his buttocks until she reached his legs. Her fingers, with nails retracted, stroked his loose scrotum until it contracted.

  Eric tried to block it out.

  Tried not to respond to her coarse tongue moving across his belly, then coaxing him hard again.

  ***

  At first, no spotlights flooded the compound, so Jeri donned an infrared helmet and used the scope on his rifle to monitor the combat soldiers as they geared-up. The spots flicked on when the troopers boarded the hoverchop on the landing pad. With a roar, the vehicle lifted above D Base with its running lights winking in red and blue. It froze in the sky for a moment, then zipped away toward C Base, its air rotors churning the forest canopies below it like a hurricane.

  Vaqui and the other pilot started their air foils at the height of the hoverchop’s vertical rev up, and they gunned their way toward the base with their cloaking fields on. They traveled under a blackout, used the base as a homing target, and for a moment Jeri felt overwhelmed by its lights, seeing a pattern in their brilliance, a prophecy of death like the one he had sensed at Serra Pelada.

  The boats hit the shallows and water splashed across Jeri’s chest and under his visor, forcing him to think only of the moment, of the precise maneuvers they must execute. They skimmed up on a grassy strip. Both pilots cut the cloaking with their engines, saving them for retreat. With infrared helmets tracking for movement, the raiders bailed out on the grass. From the top of Jeri’s machine, the pilot cut the bowels out of two dish communication antennae with a small built-on laser cannon, then the cannon tipped skyward, a beacon of fiery neon, as the man tumbled forward.

  Blood on the man’s khakis. Red laser light darting around them. Two more men fell as Jeri sprinted toward a row of quonsets.

  Ball lightning materialized about the raiders, lashing out with random threads of electricity. A Blueboy in a jetpack arced toward the ground about twenty meters in front of them, positioning himself to cut Jeri down, but Jeri heard the whistle of his descent, guessed the trajectory, and laid out a rifle grenade. The soldier crumbled as he landed, his chest smoking with a hole deep enough to bury a fist.

  ***

  The voice called to Eric once more while he positioned himself on his knees and entered the Blue Queen from behind. He mumbled an obscenity. Shook his head.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. This time she disengaged and snapped the lights on. “What is it?”

  An alarm buzzed from her helmet on the bed stand, and she consulted someone through its speaker-remotes before unslinging her lasrifle and moving to the door.

  In his mind, Eric envisioned someone in the shadows approaching the hut. An ally she would kill.

  It took every ounce of strength in Eric to lift her pistol from its holster on the bedpost and follow the Blue Queen outside with it. It weighed tons, or seemed to. Differences mattered little to him.

  ***

  Jeri sprinted for the end quonset, a fine vantage to command, but when he rounded the building he collided full-force with a Blueboy in a nightgown. The woman lost her weapon, staggered, yet kicked out and shattered Jeri’s helmet and visor, sending him into a sprawl. He rolled onto his back. By then she’d poised her leg, heel pointed, to crush his nose and face. But a figure materialized from the doorway of the hut behind her.

  ***

  With both hands, Eric pressed the barrel of the hand laser to the back of the Blue Queen’s skull. “No!” he shouted.

  She hesitated, and the man on the ground rolled away from her and leveled his rifle before she could make a move for Eric’s gun.

  “Freeze, Berkey.”

  The Blue Queen lowered her leg and stood still. The man whipped off the remains of his helmet, kicked her weapon into the brush. With the situation changed, and his gun where she could grab it, Eric panicked. Flung the weapon away. Saw it bounce between the quonset’s stilt pilings and slide into the shadows underneath.

  “You have me at a disadvantage,” she said to the man. Her voice dripped with superiority and pouting sensuality.

  The man spat at her. “No more than you’ve had my brother.”

  With that, the world spun in Eric’s head, and he collapsed against a tree stump. The voice was JERI’s. His brother found him. His brother JERI had come home.

  ***

  Jeri considered Eric’s state and how few power moves it would take for the General to lock him in a death grip. He stepped between them and backed Berkey away by several meters. She didn’t blink once.

  “I haven’t hurt Eric.”

  “Sure, just look at him.”

  Jeri watched Berkey’s face as she studied Eric where he lay, and his finger relaxed on the trigger when he saw how her eyes softened with a touch of regret.

  “Oh, Eric. You knew this would happen. Didn’t you?”

  A spurt of adrenalin made his head explode with heat. He saw deeper. He sensed the truth behind her concern. She probed Eric, trying to sway him to admit to and use the psi powers he’d kept hidden, to give her concrete evidence to twist for her own purposes. Even with her life on the line, Berkey played for higher stakes. Mind control.

  “What will you do with me, then?” she asked Jeri. Her words were coy, suggestive.

  “You’ll make a valuable prisoner.”

  Her smile turned feral. Her nails extended and retracted reflexively. “You assume that you’ll take this base. Even without communications we will crush you. We’re elite warriors, not rag-tag mercenaries.”

  “Shut up. You’re in no position to bargain.”

  “On the contrary. If you don’t surrender now, I’ll have you both killed.”

  “We may be anyway.”

  She smoldered. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon, though when I did, I thought it would be different.”

  She eased toward him, moving her body with sinuous grace, jutting her chest ahead of her. He stared; the heat rose in him, intoxicating him. Jeri blinked rapidly. He remembered how she’d marked him with the E-pheromones, and his heat turned to rage. He shook with the urge to kill her.

  “Move slowly,” he said in a growl. “Toward the hut.”

  She shifted her weight, stepped to the door in a rigid goosestep. Bracing his lasrifle in his armpit, Jeri raised Eric with one arm and followed her inside just as a lightning ball crackled over the roof. She searched the bare floor, as if discerning a message in the pattern of knots and holes in the boards, and then sat in a specific spot. Jeri saw nothing alarming about this behavior. It seemed engineered to confuse him, to throw him off. He let Eric collapse on the bed and moved opposite Berkey to wait for a lull in the firefight. He’d deal with her when it was time to make a run for the boats.

  The door burst open. Jeri glanced briefly to the intruders, but held his aim steady on the woman.

  “Jeri!” The voice belonged to Vaqui.

  “What’s happened?”

  “We’ve routed the base. The lightning weapons must have attracted the big crocs, the monster ones. They’re eating Blueboys and ignoring us. It’s incredible. Many have deserted their positions. We’ve bolted the leftovers in the lab freezers and reinforced the doors.”

  Berkey s
howed no expression.

  “Not her, though,” the guerrilla said. “We blow her away. Without a leader, the Blueboys can’t organize a retaliation.”

  “What about the video footage on their labs? Proof of what they’re doing here?”

  Vaqui laughed. “The film never mattered, really. We’ve hurt them and freed a comrade. Imagine how much press that will get. Something to rally around. That is if we get our asses out of here.”

  “My brother needs help.”

  Jeri stood and slung his rifle over his shoulder, and he pulled Eric to his feet just as Berkey made a blitzkrieg move. She smashed her hand through the floor, grabbed Eric’s pistol—which she’d determined to be there by some special method of sensing—and then fired as she vaulted for the end window. Vaqui took a shoulder hit. The frame shattered before her and sprayed glass through the room; Berkey was gone. Jeri made Eric run before him out the door.

  Near the waterfront, Vaqui’s men carried the wounded. An airboat started and backed out into the swamp just as the hoverchop returning from C Base showed over the tree line and hung in the air above the fight, unsure about landing and, no doubt, unsure as to what was going on. It pumped laser fire, but too late to be effective. The boat retreated with its cloak on.

  Jeri let Eric fall in the grass while yelling for someone to help him, then he sprinted for the second airboat that stayed hidden by a low overhanging tree. Red beams cut the dirt a meter to his right. He climbed over several wounded on stretchers at the bow and swung into the pilot’s seat in a fluid motion. He righted the laser cannon and flipped on the image screen. It worked; the battery pack hadn’t burned out when the original gunner had been hit. He spun the cannon without its automatic targeting and slammed the fire toggle three, four times.

  Jeri flinched as a pulsing sensation ran into his hands. A thick beam cut past the tree limbs and disappeared to the right of the hoverchop. Then another, closer in. Another. The hoverchop homed in with a return volley that set the leafy cover afire and seared the hair on the side of his face. Jeri jerked the beam left as the last shot discharged and heard a thump-and-roar as the hoverchop exploded into streamers of sizzling metal. The men hooted in celebration, but small arms fire continued to pump past them from somewhere in the jungle. A few of Vaqui’s boys answered. Then a canister of psychomist burped in the shallows to their rear, an ineffective shot smothered by the water.

  Vaqui dragged Eric on board and then collapsed beside him on the deck. Two stragglers sprayed light fire as they stood at the bow. Eric cut a couple swaths with the canon until a replacement pilot moved him from the seat. They pulled out, gun barrels aglow from repeated firing, and no one answered their barrage as the cloaking field flickered on and the rotors kicked up spray. In the receding glow of the spotlights, a swarm of crocodiles queued up beyond the quonsets and moved off into the jungle. Jeri heard screams. He thought he saw one beast the size of a tank raise its jaws and shake the body of a Blueboy like a ragdoll. Somehow, as if Eric’s gift coursed through him, he knew it was the soldier named Trigger.

  After making Eric comfortable, Jeri moved alongside Vaqui and pointed to the shore while he helped him bandage his shoulder. They watched as the base shrunk to a blob of light.

  “They won’t be happy over losing that hoverchop,” Jeri yelled over the motor noise. “Or the men.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We hurt them bad enough that they can’t strike hard. Not immediately.” Vaqui shook his head. “Wish I’d killed the woman. That would have been a blow!”

  “Maybe.”

  Jeri tuned Vaqui out yet continued to bandage him. The man’s bloodthirsty attitude didn’t ring true with the original agreement on their objectives. Suddenly he felt alone, and it occurred to Jeri that this was how he’d begun the adventure: cruising one-way through Blueland, soaked to the bone, and hollering over the sound of an engine to someone he had every reason to mistrust.

  The pilot eased off on the gas and turned toward an inlet.

  ***

  The boat levitated above the water. It seemed to Eric that he was transported on heavenly breath into a featureless gap between two dark throne-like swamp trees, then onto an open, flat island. Their ascension came to an abrupt halt. Voices cried out. Urged them to get the wounded off, guided by the cyclops eye of a single flashlight.

  “So you got him,” a fat man said as he clicked out the light and helped Eric from the boat with his brother. Eric heard the excitement in the men’s voices in the dark, and it seemed also to be bubbling from within him and spilling back through everyone.

  “Skaff. What are you doing here?” Jeri said.

  “Offering you alternative transport. The boats aren’t safe. We’ve got an ultralite plane.”

  Eric lost himself in the sound of the voices, the flow of syllables that issued from a timeless dimension that engulfed them.

  “We? Since when did you join the guerrillas?”

  “I never left. I was a part of it all along. Delivering the letter, playing reluctant to help unless I got my profits. And backing the lie about publicity footage and attacking the Blues in the press. The whole bit. Sorry. Our leader thought it best.”

  A half-man materialized from a swarm of figures busy in the near dark about them. Eric’s friend and confident. Secret leader of the guerrilla forces. He embraced Eric, and as he did, Eric saw the shock in his brother’s face. His brother felt the sting of betrayal.

  The Impresario said, “I’m glad we got you out, son.”

  Jeri pushed The Impresario away from him, and Eric sensed wild tension. Angry frisson.

  “I got him out.” Jeri spat. “I don’t need help any more. Not from you. You planned it all without including me. You put Eric’s life on the line.”

  “All of ours are on the line. That’s what it means here, Jeri. You’ve been away too long to see how desperate things have become. Our time draws near. We can’t turn away.”

  “Shit! Cut the propaganda crap.”

  “As you wish,” The Impresario said as he bowed. “We can argue later. Right now you do need us.”

  Eric followed the loping werewolf stride of The Impresario across a moonlit glade, and the man strapped Eric into a stripped down airplane built for four. He and Jeri did the same. The man called Skaff stopped next to Jeri and leaned close.

  “Things may get hot, still. If the Blues retaliate tonight, we have people ready to resist.”

  “Why risk it? They won’t be surprised a second time.”

  “Ah, but a real battle would draw media attention across the globe.”

  Skaff slapped Jeri on the back and settled himself at the nose. He started the engine. They slid into the darkness, lifting out over the water and the forest dappled with pale moonbeams. The Impresario dangled his glittering bionic legs like a fisherman trolling, hoping, perhaps, to catch his fate. Eric felt transformed. Veins iridescent.

  ***

  Jeri sensed a tug at his shoulder, and he bent until his forehead was resting against his brother’s.

  “Jer?” Eric’s eyes were big.

  Jeri ran his fingers through Eric’s hair and forced a smile, relieved that he no longer needed to keep his adrenalin pumping.

  “Don’t worry,” Eric said. His face softened. “She won’t touch us. I know this.”

  “Did you call up the caimans against her?” he asked Eric. “Did you know to do that?”

  “Yes.” Eric smiled feebly. “I’m sorry. That’s what she wanted, wasn’t it? For me to expose what Mama calls my gift.”

  “Yes. But she got more than she bargained for. Eh?”

  Eric mumbled. He fell off to sleep.

  Though time had become elastic for him during the raid, throwing off his sense of the hour, a feeling of surprise tingled through Jeri’s nerves as the morning sun rose, arced over the trees, then eclipsed. Another streaked ahead, its actinic light bathing the leafy canopy below. Skaff cheered while The Impresario called out the locations of firefights in Caceres and along t
he edges of the swamp, rocking the plane with gleeful idiocy, and as the true extent of The Impresario’s manipulations dawned on Jeri, the truth of how he’d been used, Jeri barked a laugh.

  It didn’t matter that his brother was just a spark to blow the keg, an excuse for an uprising. He didn’t care about their lies to him. Or their hidden motives, which as he suspected now, could be reduced to self-interest and guilt for Skaff, and revenge for The Impresario. And Jeri didn’t want to think about how simply they had subverted him. How gullible he’d been. How easily they’d exploited his own guilt and anger from the moment they found him at the gold mine.

  He cared only that he had Eric. No more, no less.

  The sky danced with light, and explosive echoes skipped across the water and bounced up from the canopied islands. Eric awoke against Jeri’s shoulder. He began to sob. Jeri tried to cry with him, to share release, but he found his emotions steeled against it. They weren’t free of Blueland yet. He held Eric close and watched as Skaff led them like a madman, yelling and dipping the plane and transporting them into a future that burst with possibilities new and important.

  VISIONS

  PRELUDE

  Boston/Frazier

  Some say that more than a century

  has passed since the Radiation Wars,

  if they were wars and not merely

  an avalanche of terrorist abandon.

  Others claim time as we knew it

  has expired, that we now inhabit

  a single day stretched beyond all

  limits, where our theorems have

  decayed to intangibles we are

  no longer capable of grasping.

  They contend we are living in

  the protracted afternoon of

  our species, our perceptions

  and understandings changing

  at random with the mercurial

  winds that stream across

  a fearsome dark continent

  From the Petén jungle, down