David Walton - The Genius Plague

This time my arms and legs moved when I asked them to, though they were still strapped together with duct tape. I shifted my weight, angled my legs over the edge of the chair, and stood. My legs ached, as if I had been sleeping on them for hours, and the jabs of pins and needles crackled up and down my skin. “You’re on the tarmac in Porto Velho,” she said. “Everyone here is Ligados. There is nowhere to run, no one to hear you if you shout. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Okay. I’m going to cut the tape off of your arms and legs. You’re not going to run or fight, are you?”

I shook my head. She used a scalpel and sawed through the tape, first my legs, then my hands. I yanked the remaining bits of tape off and rubbed my wrists. I felt terrible. My head and throat and chest hurt, and I was sweating despite the cool air-conditioned cabin. I tried to take a step, but the plane spun around me, and I nearly fell.

“Okay, easy does it,” Mei-lin said. She hung on to me to keep me from falling over. I wanted to push her onto the floor and stab her with her own scalpel, but given my current strength, that didn’t seem likely. Besides, I knew the betrayal hadn’t really been Mei-lin’s fault. She was a slave now, the same as my parents and my brother. The same as I would be, too, in a few more hours.

She led me off the jet. On the tarmac, a hundred yards away, sat a tiny turboprop airplane with red stripes on its wings. Two men half-led, half-dragged me to the plane and lifted me up inside it. A gray-haired man with a grizzled beard and headphones covering his ears stalked around outside the aircraft, checking it from every angle and consulting a clipboard.

Finally, he climbed into the cockpit and pulled the door shut. “Better strap in,” he said in Portuguese. He and I were the only people in the plane.

I wrestled with the tangle of leather straps and metal clasps until I was pretty certain I wouldn’t fall out.

“You just settle back,” the pilot said. “I’ve been making this trip for decades. Nothing to worry about.”

“Decades?” I said, trying to think clearly through the haze of my sickness and fear. “Where are you taking me?”

“Johurá village, what was. Lot more to it now.”

“And you’ve been flying there for decades?” A thought struck me. “Did you fly the Wyatts?”

He laughed. “Yes, I surely did. How do you know them?”

“I met Katherine,” I said.

“No kidding. You know Kay? Now that’s one incredible lady.” He grinned, his beard parting to reveal very white teeth, and held out his hand. “Nate Carter. Missions aviator, forty-three years and counting. I’ve clocked thousands of hours in this baby, dropping folks like Kay all over the Amazon. Even more in my old Helio Courier. Now that was a plane—better than anything else in its class. Couldn’t get enough avgas, though, so we had to trade up to something that could burn jet fuel.”

He kept on talking as the engine roared to life, drowning out most of his words. I wasn’t sure the words were really meant for me, anyway. Nate seemed more like a taxi driver who had to talk to his passengers to stay sane. He leaned out the window and shouted “ Abram caminho !”—the Portuguese equivalent of “Watch out!” or “Stand clear!”—and the plane kicked forward along the runway with surprising speed. The vibrations rattled my teeth and shuddered in my chest. Sooner than I expected, the ground dropped away, so fast it was like falling into the sky.

“That’s the PC-6 for you,” the pilot said, seeing my surprise. “Jumps into the air like you’re riding a rocket. Some of the places I land, you couldn’t get yourself out again with anything less.”

“Why are you doing this?” I shouted above the engine noise. “You’re a missions pilot, not a kidnapper.”

Nate looked genuinely surprised. “Kidnap? Is that what you call it? I guess I could see that, from your point of view. But trust me, once you see what’s happening there, you won’t be sorry.”

Porto Velho soon fell out of sight behind us, and cultivated fields gave way to thick rainforest. The green treetops stretched to the horizon in every direction, the details of branches and leaves blending together from this distance, giving the impression we were flying across an algae-covered sea. A wide, muddy river cut through the green, looping back on itself in serpentine curves, like a giant anaconda swimming through the algae.

I pointed. “Is that the Rio Maici?”

He looked where I was pointing, and then laughed. “Not hardly. That’s the Rio Madeira, and it’s practically an ocean compared to the Maici. Settle back, my friend. We’ve got miles to fly before we rest.”

It had been evening when we set out, and the sun hung low in the west, staining the sky with vivid orange and purple hues. If not for my spasming cough and the terror of losing control of my mind, it might have been beautiful. As it was, I barely thought about it, until the sun sank lower, and the green treetops faded to black.

“Nate?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“How can you land this thing at night? Doesn’t it get pretty dark out here?”

“Back in the day, you’d be right,” he said. “Night out here comes down on you like somebody shut the lid on a box. One minute, there’s enough light you can almost read by it. The next it’s so dark you can’t find a book that’s sitting in your lap.”

“So… what’s different now?”

He grinned at me. “You’ll see soon enough.”

We flew on. The sun dwindled to a sliver, then disappeared entirely. As Nate had predicted, the darkness fell suddenly. It took me a moment to realize that I could still see, and another moment to realize why.

The rainforest was glowing.

As far as I could see in every direction, the trees radiated a greenish light. The leafy canopy itself remained dark, but something underneath it shone brightly enough to illuminate our way. As we flew, gaps in the trees revealed glimpses of twisting lines of luminescence, like branching lightning, underneath the canopy.

I couldn’t help it. “It’s beautiful,” I said. We could now see what I assumed was the Maici, a river so serpentine the loops almost met each other in places. In places, I caught sight of the water, which glinted in the forest’s glow.

“There’s our landing strip,” Nate said.

I looked. “Where?”

“That dark spot to the north. See it? Eleven o’clock.”

I saw the spot he indicated, but it didn’t seem possible. Not a clearing so much as a gash in the tree line, barely visible except for a darker color of foliage.

“You’re going to land in that?”

He didn’t answer. He flipped a switch, and the engine changed timbre. We started to descend. As we approached, I could see the landing strip, but actually landing there didn’t seem possible. It was a short stretch of tall grass that looked barely longer than a football field, and so narrow I thought Nate would have to tip the aircraft on its side to fit the wings through.

Nate seemed unfazed, however, and I assumed he knew what he was doing. He buzzed the strip once, peering out the window at the ground, apparently checking for obstacles. On the second approach, he went for it, diving at the grass at an angle so steep I involuntarily raised my arms to protect my face. We thundered toward the ground, propeller spinning, and threaded the needle between the trees. There seemed to be only inches between the tips of the wings and the branches on either side. The wheels hit with a gentle lurch, and Nate did something to the flaps, slowing us as quickly as if he’d thrown a parachute out the back. The uneven ground threw us roughly about, but in moments the plane had stopped just short of the end of the grass.