Terra Nova (The Variant Conspiracy Book 3) (16 page)

Chapter 23

We evaluated each other, taking in our mutual anxiety written on a fresh wave of strangers’ faces. No one made a move toward the van.

I pushed through the group and started walking parallel to the outer edge of the sea of shacks. Gravel crunched behind me and I knew my friends followed.

Kibera was my first in-person experience of extreme poverty. In my childhood I’d encountered people living on the street at home in industrial Prince George and in Euro-inspired Victoria. Apart from the variants living in Victoria’s seaside urban sewer, when I had seen people sleeping on sidewalks and begging for change, I thought that was the lowest and darkest side of life.

Vancouver’s East Side in the Main and Hastings neighborhood ratcheted up my awareness several notches. During our initial investigation of Innoviro’s activities I saw pained faces in the throes of violent addictions and agonized faces suffering from diseases of the mind.

Nairobi’s urban slum represented something else entirely. Kibera was not a part of town where homeless people dotted an otherwise structurally normal area. As we walked around the outer border, the ratty makeshift buildings slowly drove a crack into my soul.

We passed a small shack made of wavy fiberglass, stained with sun and sand. Another larger building next to it declared stability through the brick and mud mortar walls. Another shack divulged downright fragility made of plywood with a rusted metal roof. Decaying mounds of discarded clothing, plastic bags, bottles, cans, cardboard, and layers of rotting muck I couldn’t discern into separate pieces of trash fringed the exterior of these homes.

Two children walked past holding hands. Little boys in shorts and nothing else, barefoot and bone-skinny, probably not unlike the pair Ilya had heard arguing about bread. They glanced at us briefly and turned into the slum down a path bordered by more trash piles.

I wondered why they didn’t ask us for help, or more specifically, money. It took me a moment to realize that my friends and I were still concealed as the salespeople from the Samburu Curio Shop. I blinked out of my haze of disbelief and looked around at my friends.

I had lost track of who was who and I could only pick Jonah out of our group. I decided not to worry about putting faces to names for the moment. I had to focus, like Ilya, on somehow groping my way to where Ivan and Tatiana hid in this crazy maze of misery.

The sun’s heat warped the air over the cracked clay ground. I examined my dark feet in worn-out leather sandals. It was surreal, not just to be outside a massive urban slum, but to literally walk in someone else’s shoes. I felt a stern resolve to go on, to find Ivan, defeat him, and keep moving, keep trying to heal more and more of the world around me.

We walked and walked around the border of Kibera until we reached the end of the dry field we had parked in and came up against a huge cement wall. The wall ahead had to be over ten feet high, and like the pit I’d seen in my vision, it was topped with razor wire. Something in the coiled wire sparkled in the sun. We got closer and I saw a fringe of broken glass embedded in mortar. The residents of this other Nairobi neighborhood wanted very much to keep Kibera on its own side of the fence.

Our path was forced inward and I led the way. We turned down a trash-lined alley that cut into the heart of the slum. People sat on the bare ground and in lawn chairs. They milled about surrounding oil drums over which some were roasting meat on sticks.

And then something green caught my eye on the ground. It was an empty bottle of carbonated water—the exact same brand Ivan had requested so many times back in Victoria. Was it even available for sale in Kenya? And who in the middle of Kibera would bother to waste precious shillings on it?

I bent down and picked up the bottle. Kibera went pitch black around me. I opened my eyes and I was in a pit surrounded by muddy brick walls topped by coiled razor wire around the edges. Two worn wood doors on the other side of the dusty earth were the only way in or out. Skimming the fiberglass rooftops around the top of the pit, I was still in the slum, somewhere. I heard Ivan’s voice muffled by the wood doors.

The doors burst open. Rose and Sage shoved a thoroughly beaten Ilya out ahead of them, nudging him forward until they reached the center of the pit. They pushed him to his knees. Ivan shuffled out after them. His face wore a sweaty white death mask, utterly drained of vitality.

Ivan dropped to his knees across from Ilya. It took all Ivan’s energy to squarely face his son. Ilya struggled against and unseen force. In spite of his exhaustion, Ivan seemed to hold Ilya in place telekinetically. Ivan grabbed his belly as though he was about to heave his stomach contents out onto the ground between them. Suddenly a red bolt of flesh launched from the back of Ivan’s throat, grabbing Ilya by the neck.

The red tendril wrapped around my brother’s throat again and again. It slipped up Ilya’s neck and into his mouth, forcing its way down into his abdomen.

Ivan’s body collapsed as a tail of red wiggled free and snapped against Ilya’s chest. My father lay in a lifeless heap while my brother struggled uselessly against the parasite that slithered into him.

Terror and disgust held me frozen in place. Every fiber of my body was paralyzed as I watched Ilya flinch and twitch through the last of the transition. His eyes flashed red and my brother was gone. The cobra demon had him. It stood up, squared shoulders, stretched, and grinned.

The creature reveled in the youthful strength of Ilya’s body totally disregarding whatever injuries my brother had sustained in captivity. It flexed Ilya’s arms and spun on the spot. It walked over to Ivan’s corpse and kicked it hard in the gut, again and again until the body involuntarily dribbled blood from its mouth.

I finally forced my hand open and dropped the green glass bottle that connected me to the worst vision I had ever seen. Back on the outskirts of Kibera, I regained my bearings. I studied my friends’ unfamiliar faces, trying to reconnect with who was who. Even with a stranger’s features, I saw the fear in my brother’s eyes as he flipped through the images in my mind.

“Well, now we know why it’s me helping Aunt Tat grow the hedge and release the killer bees.” Ilya’s grave manner set Faith back on edge.

“You can’t seriously think we’ll allow that thing to take you?” I gave my brother a reassuring stare.

Ilya slipped into an empty narrow little alley and I followed with the others right behind me. I felt a rush of moisture in the air and we were all ourselves again.

“There’s not much point in hiding anymore,” said Ilya.

It was refreshing to see the faces of my friends again, but I felt nervous about being exposed.

“What thing?” Jonah frowned at my brother, before turning to me and asking, “What’s going to take him?”

“The demon. The alien. The whatever-the-hell creature. Ivan is sick because his body is dying. That creature controlling him wants
my
body now.” Ilya stared at the ground to avoid eye contact with Faith.

“Never gonna happen!” Faith crossed her arms angrily.

“When we find Ivan and Tatiana, I’ll go with them. I’ll remind them that I can heal. I can help Ivan so he doesn’t have to hurt Ilya,” said Gemma.

“No, we finally have a real bargaining chip with Ivan and Tatiana.” Ilya took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “We can trade my body. We’ll find Ivan and you can use me to get their entire supply of Terra Nova. Even if we assume they’ve already got seeds laced with the oil and ready to go, it’ll be a one- shot deal for them if we destroy the rest of their Terra Nova. Once that creature’s got a hold of me, I can fight it. Ivan isn’t telepathic—I am. I have a weapon he didn’t.”

“Don’t you fucking try it!” Faith glared at Ilya with rage in her eyes.

“No! No, no, no! You don’t know all the abilities and powers our father has. And you don’t know which come from our father and which come from that thing!” I flung my arms uselessly trying to prove my point.

“It’s going to happen. I’m going to be possessed. You wouldn’t have seen it repeatedly if we could avoid that path. We should roll with it and make it work to our advantage.” Ilya glanced between me and Faith.

“Horseshit! You’re not rolling with anything! Over my dead body!” Faith’s voice got louder, but nobody tried to shush her. I lifted my hand, wanting to calm her. I withdrew and turned back to Ilya.

“What I saw in my vision before was you helping Tatiana release the virus. Even if you can fight the creature off eventually, the damage will be done by then. What’s the point in fending off that demon if Terra Nova is already loose?”

“We don’t know that this single release point is enough to spread Terra Nova worldwide. I don’t think it could be. They have to move on from here.” Ilya’s amber eyes brimmed with a blind optimism I couldn’t fathom.

“Hang on. I think it is possible for a pandemic to have a single point of origin. And something this virulent is hard to predict. If they’ve adjusted the incubation period properly, combined with the likelihood of infecting nearly a million people within a day, well, I don’t want to err on the side of wishful thinking,” said Jonah.

Ilya rooted around under his shirt. He produced the silver medal Faith had given me to hold back in Victoria. He held it out to me. “Wear this and you’ll keep a strong psychic and telepathic link with me.”

“It’s not enough.” I took the chain from his hand and Faith shot daggers at both of us. “I have never successfully prevented a vision from coming to pass. If we go with your plan, we need another plan to contain the release of those bees. We need to be there with you and Tatiana when the hedge is grown. And I didn’t see that in my vision. I would have seen it. I’m sure I would have seen it!”

“You just said it yourself. You can’t prevent your visions. You can’t stop the creature from taking me. And we need to deal with containing another outbreak.” Ilya struggled to remain calm, but the slight shake in his voice betrayed him.

“Let’s back up a bit to the location here,” said Josh. Faith shot her hands in the air and stormed off at the mere hint of entertaining Ilya’s plan.

“This incident you just saw with Ilya—was it near here?” said Cole.

“I think so.” I took long deep breaths trying to reject the image of Ilya’s possession.

“Describe it to us. Those of us who can’t see inside your head,” said Jonah.

“We’re looking for a ring of razor wire around a deep pit made of brick. In Ivan’s usual style, there’s something underground connecting to that pit. It’s almost large enough that it was a fighting arena before Ivan got a hold of it. But from the street, all we’ll see is the wire. It’s surrounded by fiberglass rooftops.”

“This whole place is made of fucking fiberglass!” Faith marched back into our midst.

“But the razor wire is only on that wall back there,” said Cole.

“That we’ve seen so far.” Josh gave a nod of caution.

“This place is huge. We’ve gotta narrow that down somehow,” said Cole.

“Can’t you listen for Ivan’s mind? That demon thing I mean?” Gemma asked Ilya.

“Wait, I saw it in my vision of Tatiana growing the hedge too. Their base won’t be far from their ground zero. Wherever that pit is, it’s near the outer edge of Kibera.”

“But that heinous wall of razors and glass cut us off from making a circuit of the slum,” said Faith, brining her temper back to normal with visible effort.

“It did to the north. If we retrace our steps back out and past the van, we can follow around the border of Kibera in the other direction,” said Josh.

“Backtracking isn’t the stupidest plan we’ve ever had,” I said.

“Let’s get on with it then.” Ilya marched back out of the alley and the full force of the mid-day Nairobi sun hit his head. Ilya flinched. He fished some money out of his pocket and gave it to a woman sitting at a folding plastic table selling hats. She smiled and started offering him one grubby used hat after another.

Ilya started passing hats around to each of us. I assessed the residents’ faces. It had not gone unnoticed that a group of white twenty-somethings had just walked out of an alley where a pack of locals had entered minutes earlier.

Several men were glaring at Ilya. Josh and Cole surveyed the scene. Before I could stop him, Cole picked up a piece of old rebar off the ground. He bent it into a knot as effortlessly as a child playing with a drinking straw.

More people stopped what they were doing or stood in their tracks to watch us.

A barefoot little girl in a stained sundress walked up to Gemma and gave her a small wood cross. “Christian?”

Gemma smiled at her.

“Good idea. We’re missionaries,” I whispered into Gemma’s ear.

Gemma took the cross and turned it over in her hand. “Yes we are, bless you, darling. You keep this.” She put the cross back in the little girl’s hand and folded her fingers around it.

Cole made a few more ‘donations’ as we walked back the way we came, down the trash-lined street and back past the glass and razor fence.

I heard a flutter above and I whipped up my head, certain the bat-creatures were back. A seagull caw-cawed and sailed away.

A sudden rustle and a low growl in a pile of trash sent my heartbeat into overdrive. A mangy tail emerged and then a tattered brown mutt backed out of the bags.

“It’s almost over,” said Jonah, sensing my panicked state as he walked beside me.

“It has to be. I can’t take much more of this.”