Extract #3 from White Devils

Jean and Joseph Nkala and their dogs lead the way as the hunting party follows the trail of the white devils. Low hummocks of dry ground are interlaced with swampy sweeps where smoky clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies twist over shallow stagnant pools. Trees stand in every direction like the close-packed columns of a vast unending greenhouse. Their trunks all sizes, from pencil-thin saplings to mature giants that rise straight up for twenty or thirty metres before splitting into dense interlaced crowns of leaf-laden branches. Lianas sag and dangle like an unravelling net under the leafy canopy, and some trees are smothered from base to crown by the intertwined arm-thick cords and glossy green leaves of strangler vines. Creepers and briars and surface roots tangle across the ground between the man-high stalagmites of termite mounds, and scrawny bushes and saplings grow everywhere between the trees, the thin screen of their scanty leaves thickening in every direction like a green fog.

The swamp-forest is not quiet: the sharp whistles and hysterical laughter of birds, the constant sizzle of insects. When something starts up a horrible, heart-rending shrieking, Adolphe unslings his assault rifle and says, "Tell me that was an animal."

"Of course it was an animal," Nick says. "A tree hyrax."

"He is right," Michel says. "They usually call at night, but this one -- something must have found its nest."

Adolphe notices that Harmony is videoing the exchange, says, "Motherfucker," and half-heartedly cuffs at the reporter. His shirt is dark with sweat from neck to waist, and he sways a little as he tries to get his breath, like a boxer trying to summon his last scraps of energy to go the distance. A drop of sweat hangs from each of the line of black thorns that prick his forehead.

As they walk on, Michel tells Nick, "When it comes to it, I won't let Adolphe kill you. He wants to play with you, take his time, but I will make it quick and clean. One shot, you won't know a thing. Or maybe we have a duel, like in your Western movies. What do you think?"

"I think we have a job to do."

"You need to lighten up," Michel says. "You have this grim squinty-eyed look, exactly like Clint Eastwood. Like you don't like anything you see."

"I made a deal with your boss, Michel. That doesn't mean I have to like him, or the people who work for him. When we're done here, you can come and talk to me if you still have a problem with that."

"Hey, Adolphe," Michel says, "what are we going to do with this tough Englishman?"

Adolphe's sullen expression doesn't change as he looks at Nick and touches a finger to the side of his head. "Boum!"

Michel says, "I give you your Glock, we take our positions, we draw and shoot. Or if you don't like that, we can take turns. I even let you go first. Seriously."

"You're a fan of Westerns?"

That's what the Brit troops used to watch, in Albania. Westerns, and movies about the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan. The Finns built a sauna; the Germans played volleyball; the Brits watched movies and drank alcohol-free lager and black-market whisky, a hundred euros a bottle.

Michel says, "I'm the biggest fan they have. Especially the Italian Westerns. They show it like it should be, you understand?"

"That's why you like Clint Eastwood."

"Clint's pretty good, but the bad guy, Lee Van Cleef," Michel says, sucking in his cheeks and narrowing his eyes, "he's better. He has all the tricks, he never takes any side but his own, and he has no sorrow about anyone he kills."

"I believe Clint shot him in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly."

"Sure, but Van Cleef came back. He kicked all kinds of ass as Sabata. You and me, we redo the end of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, we see who wins out this time."

The two hunters and their dogs set a fast pace. Nick quickly falls into the familiar rhythm of forest walking. Michel keeps up with him, but Adolphe and Harmony are soon trailing behind, ploughing grimly through the hot, heavy air, stumbling over prop roots, snagging their clothes on creepers and briars, splashing flat-footed through leaf-covered sloughs. Every half-hour or so, the hunters stop and wait for the others to catch up, the dogs casting impatiently through the undergrowth around them, and they all drink from their water bottles and set off again.

"You walk well, for a white man," Michel says, after the fifth or sixth water break.

"It was my job," Nick says. "I did long transects through the forest, studying biodiversity. I'd run out six-kilometre-long lines from a Topofil, using satellite fixes to set the end points, then I'd walk back along the line, recording every plant the line intersected. I'd throw random quadrats at five-hundred-metre intervals, too, and count all the plant species within them."

"I once work for something like that," Michel says.

"You did? Across the river?"

"D'accord, before the Black Flu and the Dead Zone. It was where I learn my good English. I was a bodyguard for scientists who collected material in the forests. Many of the forests were already destroyed, you understand. They were logged, or people burnt them down to make farms, but there was still a lot left. The scientists took samples of everything. Plants and insects and animals. They even took cores of the dirt and froze them."

"In liquid nitrogen. We did some of that too. If you want to be able to recreate the whole ecology, you don't just need the plants and animals, but all the microbes too -- the fungi and bacteria and whatnot in the ground. Nematodes, for instance -- microscopic, very simple wormlike creatures. There are more species of nematode than of all other kinds of animal on Earth."

"They froze the dirt in big flasks, and it went to America."

"Gaia Two," Nick says. "In Arizona. Obligate bought it from the US government three years ago. It has the biggest collection of genetic material on Earth, and Obligate just sits on it. I suppose the point is to stop biotech companies using it."

All this time they are walking around trees, ducking under branches and loops of lianas and creepers, avoiding tripwires of briar and vine, and roots that stick up through the leaf litter like admonitory fingers -- breather roots supplying air to the roots that anchor the trees in soil sodden with oxygen-poor water.

"Across the river, you are either very rich or very poor," Michel says, "but at least you are not ruled by crazy people. You can make your own destiny."

"Just like the Westerns."

"Yes, just like them! But here, in this country, the people were almost ruined by the communists in the last century, until they threw them out. And then Samuel Nyibizo took over and finished off what the communists started. That's why Obligate could buy the place. They say they want to help the people, but they break the spirits of men, hypnotize them to make them want to live only in cities, to work in factories for very little money. In the last century, white people came here to steal our diamonds and ivory and rubber; in the century before that they took our young men and women for slaves. Now they want our souls."

Michel stops, and Nick stops too, and hears the dogs barking in the distance.

Adolphe puts his hand on his rifle, says, "Comment ça va?"

Michel shakes his head slightly, cupping a hand over the earpiece of his headset. After a moment, he grins and says, "They have found a white devil."

#

Harmony makes Nick do his speech to the camera twice. "Don't worry about doing it the same. I take the best bits from both, make you into a superstar."

So Nick does it all over again, his gorge rising as he squats next to the white devil's body and tries not to breathe in its stink, tries to ignore the sweat bees and flies crawling over his face as he concentrates on the black lens of Harmony's little camera. He manages to make it to the end, and then stumbles to his feet, steps around the fin-like buttress roots of the big tree and spews half-digested pineapple curry and coffee.

Michel was talking with Raphael on his short-wave radio while Nick said his piece to the camera. Now he comes over and says, "You did good. You kept mentioning Obligate -- Raphael will like that."

Nick rinses his mouth with warm water from his canteen, spits it out. "What's the plan? Is Raphael coming to pick up the body?"

He finds that he can look at the white devil now. It's propped in a sitting position between the buttress roots. Harmony is stepping around its splayed legs, taking brief shots from different angles. Its head lolls sideways and its white-filmed eyes stare vacantly at its right hand, which lies limply, palm up, on vivid green moss. Its tongue is a swollen black maggot pushing against the thorns and nails of its teeth. It is very dead, a loose-limbed doll leached of significance.

Michel grins around the cheroot plugged into his mouth, and says, "We need a fresh body. This one, it's been dead at least twelve hours, maybe more. Raphael says it's probably no good, but we'll tag it anyway, come back if we can't get anything else."

With a cold little shock, Nick suddenly understands something. He says, "Raphael wants to clone them."

"A live one will be better," Michel says. "We have a client who very much wants to hunt one. He is willing to pay a lot of money."

"You should have brought him along instead of me."

"He's a crazy man, even crazier than you. He wants to use a bow and arrow, he wants to try and track them by himself. Crazy. No, we do this scientifically, with the dogs and the tagged meat. A female will be best -- we harvest the eggs from the ovaries. But a male will be okay too. Raphael has all kinds of hackers working for him. So we get one, the helicopter comes, and we get out of here. We go back across the river, we go home."

"As easy as that, huh? How is the helicopter going to land in the middle of the forest?"

Michel shifts the unlit cheroot from one corner of his mouth to the other. "It doesn't need to land. Don't worry -- we've thought of everything."

Adolphe is clowning with the body of the white devil, putting an arm around its shoulders, patting it on top of its head, telling Harmony to take a good picture of him and his new friend. The two hunters squat side by side a little way off, flanked by their dogs, making a show of being unimpressed.

Nick says, "If Raphael manages to make more of these things, Obligate will try and take them from him. And Obligate has an army."

"And we'll be on the other side of the big river. I don't think Obligate will want to start a war."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that."

"I hear you talking with Raphael last night," Michel says. "You tell your story, you tell him how the white devils killed your friends, then you plead with him. But he wouldn't listen, so now you're pleading with me. But listen, do you think I will help you when my boss won't?"

"The difference is that Raphael is crazy, and I don't think you are."

"All you have to do is tell the world about how Obligate made the white devils. You tell the world that Obligate tries to suppress the truth -- the lies they told about the massacre. You do what you agree to, and maybe you and that silly reporter get to go home. Maybe Raphael even pays you something for your troubles. What's so hard about that?"

Nick says, "Why I'm here -- it isn't about money."

"I understand," Michel says. "You want to kill the white devils because they killed your friends."

"That's not exactly -- "

"Maybe we let you kill one. You can fight it. A small one, I think, and perhaps we cripple it first, so it does not kill you straight away." Michel takes off his baseball cap and uses it to wipe his forehead, sets it square on his head. "Adolphe, unless you're going to fuck him, you leave your friend alone. Let's get going. We find a white devil and Monsieur Hyde can fight it, one on one. We make bets who wins, eh?"

Adolphe pats the cheek of the white devil as he stands up, smiles at Nick. "Maybe we use him as bait," he says. "He'll be better than the goat-meat."

#

The ground begins to rise in a gentle slope, and becomes drier. The trees are more widely spaced, and it is possible to see for a hundred yards or more in any direction and to walk freely and easily. Sunlight splashes across cracked clay almost bare of ground cover and deeply gullied by run-off. Then there are no more living trees. They have reached the edge of a necropolis of giant bleached trees whose massive layers of leafless branches are hung with ragged grey sheets and streamers that sway in the slight, hot breeze like a vast abandoned laundry. Bits of dead wood crackle underfoot, and a thin layer of freshly fallen dry white dust coats the crazed clay hardpan. Even the termite mounds that stand amongst the trees look dead; their red clay pinnacles, hard as fired brick and dusted with white ash, are leached and gullied like candles melting into the ground, and tangles of thin black laces are woven through them. Hot light glares on the dead white trees and the white, ashy ground. A faint but pungent smell hangs in the hot, clammy air, a cellar smell of rot and mould.

"They are all the same kind of tree," Harmony says to Nick, when they stop for a water break. He turns slowly, taking a wide panoramic shot.

"I've seen this before," Nick says. "These big trees are Gilbertiodendron dewevrei. They have deep roots, and a symbiotic relationship with a fungus that lives on sugars secreted by the roots. The fungus is very efficient at extracting any nutrients released into the soil from decaying leaves and so on, so other trees can't grow near them. But a biowar fungus escaped or was released from some lab in the aftermath of the Dead Zone, and it displaced the symbiotic fungus, killed the trees, and overgrew them."

"This is nothing," Michel says. "I've seen far worse across the river. There are places there where the forest glows at night. And in the Dead Zone, all the leaves and grasses turned into plastic, and the plastic flooded the ground."

Jean Nkala takes a long pull from his water bottle. His fingers are shaking as he screws the cap back on. Three dogs are tangled around him; his son is walking behind the fourth as it casts about. "This is a place of the dead," he says. "A place of ghosts."

Michel glares at him. "Don't talk such nonsense. Scientists made the things we are hunting, not sorcerers."

They walk on in single file, creeping through the dead, white forest like ants crossing a spill of flour. Nick is at the end of the line, behind Adolphe, who turns now to give him a hard look. Everyone is keyed up, anxious and excited. Fine powder coats Nick's running shoes and whitens his trousers to the knee. A peppery smell like dry spoiled bread is strong in his nose, parches his mouth. It's very quiet: no birdsong, no insects. Mirages shimmer above the baked white ground. Ragged sheets hung from bone-white branches creak and sway, releasing siftings of white dust; it's easy to imagine quick pale things dropping out of this restless drapery onto his back, or suddenly scrambling out of the huge, grey-white folds of parchment that are thrown up around the bases of the trees like heaps of flayed elephant hide. Once, Nick is startled by a splash of colour on the white ground ahead of him, but what looks like a bloody hand thrust up from the dusty clay is only some kind of parasitic plant, a cluster of blood-red fleshy flowers on top of a thick pale stem looking just like what all flowers really are -- sexual organs. Harmony stops to point his video camera at it, and Adolphe cuffs him and pushes him forward.

Nick plods on, head bowed, sweat dropping from the tip of his nose and his chin. Dust stirs knee-high with every step. The dogs and the hunters draw ahead, the dogs stopping now and then to cast around before setting off again, jiggling motes in the white glare, disappearing between the shrouded trees.

Ten or twenty minutes later, Adolphe shouts, and Nick looks up and sees someone running towards them. His heart trips. The man is running very quickly under the heavy canopy of the dead trees, bent low, jinking this way and that through shimmering layers of hot air. Then Nick realizes that it isn't a man at all, but an animal, a duiker antelope not much bigger than a labrador racing flat out across the bleached ground, dusted white all over, its black eyes rolling as with a graceful leap it twists away from the men. Adolphe unslings his rifle and fires a short, quick burst, shattering dead branches and sending up a great cloud of white dust where the antelope had been a moment before. As if in answer, shots sound in the distance, dull pops muffled between the hot white ground and the sky's blank glare. Michel shades his eyes as he stares into the shimmering glare and speaks urgently into the bead microphone of his headset, asking Jean Nkala over and over to talk to him.

Something else is running towards them out of the layers of heat haze, a jiggling black dot growing in mass and definition. Adolphe raises his rifle, but Michel steps up to him and knocks it aside as the dot resolves into one of the dogs, coated in white dust from head to tail, a splash of blood vivid on its flank.

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