Blood Forest (Suspense thriller) (28 page)

He needn’t have worried.

Around mid-day, Ike spotted the trailing militia soldiers, but not on the opposite bank. Somehow they had crossed the river and now moved behind the mercenaries, heading west. And so as Ike planned, he would lead them straight back to their own camp.

Ike met up with the others soon after spotting their pursuers. Delani gave Ike a look that said he had better know what he was doing. Ike’s plan put them right between the main militia body and the assault group dispatched to hunt them down. A small mistake would leave them surrounded and doomed.

By mid-afternoon, they again crossed the river, this time not far from the pond. They easily found the trail cut in the forest and, while Gilles helped by carrying Nessa, Ike took a point position. Smoke from campfires gave away the army’s position, so they stopped in the nearby jungle while Ike went on ahead.

As the Australian mercenary crept through the brush toward the encampment, the sky finally began to darken. And as had happened every night for the previous month, before the stars began to shine, dark storm clouds gathered above. But that night, as thunder rolled across the distant hills, and Ike watched blue shafts turn deep indigo, he began to think that this storm wasn’t like the previous storms. Something more menacing, something more spectacular awaited.

He couldn’t know how right he was.

28

M
ind control: Alfred’s words reverberated in Sam’s mind. He uses the river as a sounding board, but a sounding board for what? She clutched her useless cell phone as if it held untold answers as she followed Guy through the rain. She had to stand close to him to stay under his umbrella. An Mbuti guard was never far away.

The words “mind control” were firm in her mind for other reasons as well. Like some cult leader, Guy kept her isolated, forced her to depend on him, and invoked her name like it held some sort of magical power.

By the time they returned to the meeting hall, the thick rain and the dark sky blotted out the enormous elephant skull, except when lightning flashed and the haunting eyes flared to life.

Guy and Ndola led Sam inside, trailing muddy footprints on the cold wooden floor.

“I have work to do in my study,” Guy explained. “I will see you tomorrow.”

Sam nodded hesitantly. She took one look at the wooden planks and the thick beam that served as her bed and turned to face him.

“I’m so tired,” she whispered, “but I can’t sleep here again.”

Guy’s eyes searched her face. Sam feared he doubted her until he smirked. “You know the rules, Sam.”

She nodded, not hiding her reluctance. It was only natural and Guy would expect it. “I just want to sleep in a soft bed. Please.”

He touched a hand to her shoulder, slippery from sweat and raindrops. “Of course. That can be arranged. Come with me.”

Her captor stood near the doorway and pushed aside a curtain of leaves in one motion, beckoning her to enter. A long room stretched before her, complete with a bed, desk, cabinets, a bookshelf, chairs, and a table. Thick wooden planks served as a floor with wide gaps filled with shadow. A pair of lanterns blazed at either side of the room, giving off the scent of burning oil.

“What do you think, Sam?” Guy asked as he moved in beside her.

“It seems very . . . cozy.”

“It’s small, I know. But it’s private and peaceful. And it is conducive to my work.”

She moved further in, her bare feet stepping lightly on the splintering wood. She noticed a stack of notebooks beside the desk, marked in pencil. The books on the bookshelf were mostly in French and looked to be of a technical sort, but they ranged in a variety of topics like psychology, anthropology, medicine, zoology, and physics.

“I know the bed is small, but I promise there is room for two,” Guy told her as he stepped up behind her and placed a hand against the base of her neck. She pulled away from the touch before she had time to think.

He moved past her to the table. He pulled out a chair on one side and left it there before heading around the table and taking a seat opposite. “Please, if you would have a seat.”

As she moved to accept the offered chair, her eyes could not help but scan the books on the bookcase. They looked very advanced, some old and some new. They reawakened a new curiosity in her. As she took her seat, Guy crossed to pull a bottle of champagne from its perch on a shelf.

“You can’t know how long I’ve been saving this.” With that, he popped the cork off and watched the bottle froth with white foam. “Wine, Sam?”

She licked her dry lips. She shouldn’t drink when she was so thirsty and hungry, she knew. As she watched the white puffs slip down the curved bottle, she couldn’t help herself. “All right, maybe a little.”

“Excellent.” He poured a glass for each of them and slid one to her.

She took it and sipped it, immediately regretting her decision. It tasted so good she wanted to drink it fast.

As she drank, Guy slid his chair beside her. She became distinctly aware of his presence. He would not waste time, and she needed the rain to stop. That was Alfred’s cue.

“Okay,” she said suddenly with a soft, playful smile. “You have my curiosity.”

“I do?”

“Yes. You mentioned my cell phone. I—I don’t understand what that means.”

“You haven’t figured it out yet? The answers have been right here in front of you the entire time.”

She paused, trying to remember everything she had seen. It did not help that as she tried to think he casually placed his hand beside hers and brushed her wrist lightly with his finger. Her first instinct was to pull away, but she resisted, focusing on the question at hand.

Her mind raced through every possible thing she had witnessed that might have something to do with cell phones: fast communication, making the world smaller. Everybody had one of the damn things in their pocket, on them, talking, texting all the time. But what did that have to do with anything? Out here in the Congo there wasn’t a cell phone tower for . . .

“Power lines,” she said suddenly.

“Hm?”

“It’s the buzzing sound.” She felt suddenly light headed.

“Ahh yes, the buzzing.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“Where have you heard it?”

“By the power lines.”

“Power lines out here?” Guy asked, leading her on as his hand slid over hers.

“No. Power lines back home. The noise is the same here.”

“Yes, it is. What are you hearing, Sam?”

She remembered the radar dish pointed toward Chui’s den, the power station with the lines extending into the jungle. “I’m hearing radio waves.”

“Precisely.”

Water soaked everything, seeping into Brandon’s clothes, so that even in the consistently warm tropical weather, he felt a chill. He lay in the mud without a tent or a fire, surrounded by black jungle. This rain was unlike the previous rains he had experienced in the Ituri. While frequent, the rains from before lasted only a while; this one had already lasted long enough that the raindrops broke through the canopy in torrents. The muddy ground moved in rivers around him.

Delani insisted on keeping to the ground and staying absolutely quiet. They would wait at the appointed spot until Ike returned from scouting and do absolutely nothing except watch for the militia soldiers in the meantime.

Brandon stared into the darkness looking for signs of approaching men. The raindrops played tricks with his mind, long spears became twisting serpents. As the leaves above bowed under the weight of water they dropped buckets to the ground, sounding more like footsteps.

The forest was getting to him. He stopped trusting his own eyes and ears and ignored the dread growing in his heart.

“Traitor!”

Raoul was thrown to the mud, where he rolled to a stop and cowered with his hands over his head. Gilles emerged from the jungle behind him. Raoul had gone behind a row of bushes to relieve himself and Gilles followed after him. The Congolese mercenary towered over the Frenchman, drawing Ike’s large pistol from his belt.

“What’s going on?” Delani demanded, rising to his feet.

Gilles pointed the gun at Raoul. “I saw him in the forest,” Gilles cried. “He was talking to one of them.”

“What? Who?”

“A pygmy!”

Raoul looked up in confusion, hands held up defensively. He said something in French that Gilles ignored.

“Wait . . . what pygmy?” Delani demanded. The South African took a cautious step toward Gilles, ready to step between the two men if necessary.

“I saw them in the forest,” Gilles insisted. “They were hiding in the shadows. They’ve been following us all along and he’s been talking to them.”

“He says he was only singing,” Delani replied. “You’re sure you saw them?”

Gilles’ eyes flashed to the forest, and Brandon caught a glimpse of the fire in them. Suddenly, he understood what was happening. When Gilles looked back to Raoul he lifted the gun and squeezed the trigger.

“No wait!” Brandon cried, stepping in front of Raoul.

Gilles froze a split second before firing the shot. His wild eyes turned to Brandon.

“It’s the forest,” Brandon tried to explain. “It’s affecting you. Don’t believe it. Don’t do anything crazy. It’s making you imagine these things.”

Gilles shook his head with a small hint of uncertainty. “I’m not imagining. I saw him. He is a liar and a traitor!”

Delani looked warily back and forth between Brandon and Gilles. His hand had slipped to his belt and fingered the grip of his own pistol, but he didn’t draw it yet. “He’s right. Put down your weapon so we can sort this out.”

“He’s lying!” This time Gilles turned the pistol on Brandon, the thick barrel aimed at his face. “Think, Delani. He’s the one who led us into this cursed place. He’s the one who said that we had to stay here when we tried to leave. He wants our souls, don’t you see?”

Brandon stood powerless, held in place by the Desert Eagle.

Gilles whispered in French to a steady rhythm. Although Brandon couldn’t understand the words, he knew the meaning of the intonations. It was a prayer. Gilles regarded Brandon as though staring into the eyes of a demon.

Delani moved unexpectedly. Instead of drawing his firearm, his arm flew up, striking Gilles’ wrist. The Desert Eagle was thrown wide and Delani tackled him. The two men collapsed to the mud, pistol waving wildly.

“Do you know what these are?” Guy asked as he slid long sheets of paper in front of Sam. They were line graphs with sharp peaks and dips. In some areas the peaks grew more rugged and in others they flattened out to a gentle ripple, like waves on a seismic chart.

“No, I don’t.”

“They’re brain waves recorded by an electroencephalograph. An EEG machine,” he explained. “They measure electric activity inside the human brain. When individual synapses fire in your brain they give off an electrical current. The EEG measures the sum of these currents to determine which parts of your brain are active and which are inactive.”

He pointed to a line of particularly dense peaks, packed together like a compressed spring. “The waves with the smaller amplitudes are beta waves. You will find these in conjunction with active thought and higher learning. Your brain is most likely giving these off at this very moment.”

Guy slid his finger to a point where the peaks spread out. “If you were to close your eyes and relax in your chair, your brain waves would reduce in frequency until they became alpha waves like these here. You’re still awake but you are not problem- solving or participating in active thought.

“Theta waves have larger amplitudes. They are more common in children, but adults will experience them when they reach either a state of drowsiness or one of arousal. Some have reported detecting them during meditation and they are also commonly associated with hypnosis.”

Guy watched her for a moment, as if his last point was important. His finger fell on a series of wide peaks, the widest on the page. “Finally, we have delta waves. These are common in infants, but occur in adults during sleep.”

She took another sip from her glass. The champagne only quenched her thirst for a moment. After every drink, her mouth felt drier than before.

“On any day, your brain generates this electrical field through alternating frequencies, each frequency dependent on your level of brain activity. Now this has led some to wonder, what happens to these brain waves when they are subjected to waves from an outside source, such as radio waves or such as the waves generated by your cell phone?”

She glanced curiously down at her cell phone. She rarely thought about how the thing actually worked. To her, it transported voice to her ear as if by magic. She took it for granted, forgetting that the signals were a form of radiation.

“A group of researchers performed an experiment on just that effect,” Guy went on. “They attached human subjects to EEG machines and then exposed them to radio waves of the amplitude and frequency that passes through the cell phone, as it would pass with the phone held against your ear. In a matter of seconds, they detected a change in the EEG readouts. While the radio waves were administered to awake subjects, ordinary alpha and beta waves were joined by aberrant theta and delta waves. That is, the waves you experience while you are sleeping, resting, or . . .”

“Hypnotized?”

“Yes. Under normal conditions, these aberrations only occur in adults in the case of certain disorders.”

“What does that do?”

“At such a level? Not very much. Perhaps a cell phone can make you feel drowsy or tired. Perhaps it makes you more prone to ‘zone out.’ Perhaps even, you are more prone to suggestion, or perhaps nothing. What the study does tell us is that beyond any doubt, radio waves affect the human brain.

“People have reported all manner of ailments due to strong electromagnetic fields and the waves given off by power lines: depression, paranoia, aggression, hallucination. When every thought you have is nothing more than an electrical signal and everything you see and perceive is brought to you by means of an electromagnetic field, doesn’t it make sense that these outside waves could disrupt those very processes?”