The Last Twilight (7 page)

But he had learned nothing. Only, that he was an animal beneath his human skin—and that his human heart could not abide what that drove him to do.

Outside, bodies sprawled everywhere, covered in blue tarps: transitional corpses, awaiting transport to a secure burial site. Some of the deceased, however, were more recent; they wore protective gear instead of plastic sheets, the white fabric of the suits torn with bullet holes and covered in blood so fresh he could feel the warmth of it through his clothing.

Rikki made a sound. He found her staring at two bodies sprawled against the isolation tent. A woman and a man. Their masks had been torn off, chests nothing more than red pulp. Amiri looked close at their faces and placed them as the nurse and the doctor, the angry man who smelled like cigarettes and a splash of whisky. Mack. Ruth.

Amiri squeezed Rikki’s shoulder, forcing her attention from her dead colleagues. He was afraid she would fight him, but her eyes held no tears, no grief—just something so hard and glittering she might have killed with a look, cut and burned and buried. He had never seen such eyes in a woman—not in anyone—and he had to look away, quick. She was so different from the photograph. Better. Still shining, but with a harder edge.

And her scent…her scent was sweaty, anxious, angry; and beneath it all, sweet and spice, vanilla and pepper. Rolling, warm. Safe.
Dangerous.
He was too aware of her. Even now he could hear her heartbeat, and it felt too much like his own.

Amiri grabbed her hand, flicked Eddie on the shoulder, and guided them both away from the tent into the ramshackle maze of the shadowed camp; away from the structured heart of UN tents, large and billowing and white; farther out to the torn edges, where the shelters became rougher, put together with blue plastic tarps and sticks and string. Crude, but decorated with flaps of brightly colored cloth and clothes that had been left to dry; stiff in the still night air, holding the shapes of ghosts, lives lost, the evidence of which stretched as far as his eyes could see. The ground was treacherous with corpses.

Amiri kept Rikki close, careful not to let her fall, though she was agile enough on her own. Fast and small, good at keeping low to the ground. They both wore biohazard suits. The material felt like a coffin rubbing his skin, or the bars of a cage. He could not stand the sensation, the confinement—the target it made of their bodies. He could still taste the river in his mouth, mixed with the metal of blood. Dead, dying, hunted: it was all the same now.

He pushed up hard against a tattered tent, Rikki tucked into his side. At their feet were cracked plastic bowls and canisters of water, piles of clothing, sticks and cloth fashioned into dolls. Articles of life, adrift with the dead. Eddie stepped on one of the toys as he slithered close; he flinched as the wood snapped. Beneath the goggles, his eyes were strained, bloodshot, the rest of his face hidden by a surgical mask. The biohazard suit made him look like a ghost.

The wind shifted. Amiri smelled gasoline. Sloshing sounds drifted on the hot night air; closer still, shouts in English and French were punctuated by the crack of automatic gunfire. Peacekeepers, trying to round up survivors. Fighting for their lives. Somewhere nearby a man screamed—bloodcurdling, so high-pitched as to be freakish, inhuman. The sound cracked Amiri’s skull, flashing him back into that old tight cage, the lab in Russia. Screams for help echoing off the tile walls. The dying, always unseen, but rich in terror.

Circle come round. He was back again.

“Eddie,” he murmured, and instantly regretted it.

“I can’t,” said the young man, flashing him an uncertain look. “Not from here. If I could get close enough to see them …”

You would set their weapons on fire,
thought Amiri.
You would choke them with smoke and heat. You would be forced to kill, again and again.

And there would be killing enough, before this was over.

Rikki stared at both men. “You want to help? Search for survivors?”

Eddie said nothing. He looked at Amiri, waiting. Rikki also looked at him, but her eyes narrowed and she held up her stolen gun. “I’m willing,” she told them, but her voice was breathless, and he remembered her body in his arms, shaking so hard he thought she would fly apart. Amiri did not think he would ever forget that moment: overcome, hunted by a visceral, overwhelming desire to protect, to make her part of him so that he could hide her in his skin. Keep her safe from harm.

He had never felt that before. Never anything so strong.

“Willingness is not the issue.” Amiri forced his attention from her, as uneasy with her presence as he was the danger around them. Somewhere, the man had stopped screaming. Death, capture, or escape. He met Eddie’s gaze and shook his head.

Your eyes are old enough,
he wanted to say, and though Eddie was no telepath, he met Amiri’s gaze as though he heard every word.

The young man cleared his throat. “We need to hurry.”

Amiri touched Rikki’s shoulder. “Are you ready?”

She shook her head. “What about the others?”

“If we find anyone on the way out, we will take them with us. I promise nothing else, not if it means compromising you.”

“I’ve already been compromised. If I do have what killed these people, bullets aren’t going to mean much.”

It means everything,
Amiri thought, and from the conflict on her face, he sensed she felt the same—even if she were unwilling to admit it. So stubborn. He reached out and took her hand. She glanced at him, startled; her eyelids fluttered, her expression hardened.

Voices cut the night. Low, conversational. Unnatural in their calm. Coming close, fast.

There was no time to run. Amiri yanked Rikki down and pushed her through the opening of the tent behind them. Grabbed Eddie and did the same. They tumbled inside and the air was tight and hot with death.

The three of them huddled on their stomachs. Amiri felt something uneven and yielding beneath him. A body not yet wrapped in plastic. His hand touched cold stiff fingers. His skin crawled right off his body.

“Shit,” Eddie breathed, flinching. Amiri saw Rikki poke his shoulder and the young man’s mouth snapped shut. Outside, the voices were close. Amiri listened hard. The language was unfamiliar. Not Bantu or Lingalese, nothing he could place, though the curl of the words felt familiar. Sharp tones, angry. He heard a clicking sound, like a fingernail clipper.

Amiri exhaled slowly and pressed his eye against a slit in the tent flap. He felt Rikki do the same, peering through a small hole.

He saw legs. A trim waist. Two brown hands. One holding a cigarette, the other a canister of gasoline. Both twitching nervously.

There was another set of hands. Large and capable, skin shadowed with olive undertones. Mottled, marked with burns. One sinewy wrist glittered with gold, a Rolex. And in the other hand he saw a metal clipboard with a silver pen held under a long thumb.

No protective gear. No gloves. Just like the men he had killed.

Amiri could not see their faces. He did not dare try. He focused on those hands, trying to capture scents, the stories in their crackling voices. In the midst of it all, he heard only one word that was familiar, a name that made him question his hearing.

“Rikki,”
said the man with the clipboard.
“Rikki Kinn.”

Everything inside him stopped. Rikki froze tight against his side. All he could hear was her name.

And then the clicking sound resumed. The pen was taken up, something quick written.

Nearby, a gun went off. The men did not flinch. Amiri heard a woman scream. The men did not stop talking. In the canister, gasoline splashed. Its bearer said something loud, laughing nervously. His companion did not respond; he took the pen and stabbed the other man.

Amiri did not see the impact, but he heard it. Rikki recoiled. He grabbed her hand, squeezing—listening as that sharp throaty cry died to a high whine of pain. The man fell to his knees in front of the tent. Amiri glimpsed the crown of a bald head, a chiseled cheek. The pen jutted from his shoulder. His attacker said a few harsh words, and the man nodded his head, babbling. Making promises, no doubt. Trying to make up for whatever had just caused this stroke of punishment.

Amiri heard a clicking sound. The pen was ripped out. Its silver shaft was cleaned on the shuddering back of the wounded man. Then his attacker turned and walked away—back into the bullet-riddled chaos, like he belonged there. Amiri glimpsed long black hair, glossy as silk. Listened as that odd
click click click
faded away.

The stabbed man kneeling in front of the tent still held his cigarette. His hand shook as he raised it to his mouth. He smelled like blood, death; bitter as poison. Mixed with the hard fumes of gasoline.

Which, after rising, he then proceeded to splash on the tent in which they were hiding.

It was so shocking that for a moment Amiri could not move—listening as the man upended the canister over the plastic sheeting and the ground around it—hearing those grunts of pain as the fuel rained down, soaking everything, seeping between the flaps.

No mistake about his intentions. None at all. There was only one reason a person doused something in gasoline.

Instinct took over. Amiri exploded from the tent, claws ripping through his gloves. He rammed his fists into the man’s throat and wounded shoulder, slamming him into the ground with a crushed windpipe. Fast, efficient. There was no chance to shout for help. The cigarette slipped. Amiri knocked it back into the man’s gasping mouth. Safer there. No fire. Gasoline continued to pour from the dropped canister.

Amiri sensed movement on his left, bodies in shadow. Guttural shouts pocked the air, along with the crackle of gunfire. The fumes from the gasoline rolled over him like smoke. His nostrils felt scalded.

Amiri danced back, the cheetah rising up through his skin. Fur brushed against the inside of his biohazard suit. His claws retracted, just barely, through the remains of his latex gloves. He could not fight the beast; it coiled inside his chest, screaming. He clamped his mouth shut tight and reached behind, grabbing Rikki as she pushed through the tent flaps. Eddie rode her heels. Amiri smelled fire, ash, felt an aura of intense heat radiating from the young man’s body.

“Take care,” Amiri whispered to him. “The petrol.”

Eddie nodded, peering deeper into the distant shadows where the clipboard man had disappeared. Flashlight beams cut a swath through the night, and the movement of light solidified on tiny figures, slender enough to be children, an army of them. It took Amiri a moment to reconcile the sight. Those
were
children. Small boys, loaded down with guns and gas canisters. Stumbling, clumsy. Emptying out the fuel with awkward haste. They worked in a line, methodically moving over the wrapped dead with quaking intensity. Some adults stood with them, but they did little but shout and hold flashlights.

Rikki muttered something. Her words were muffled beneath her mask, impossible to understand. She stared at the armed youths.

Eddie said, “Come on. We can slip around.”

“No,” she said, still watching the boys splash the dead with gasoline. “Oh, my God.”

Eddie went still. Amiri set his jaw, following her gaze, studying the children, concentrating solely on their actions. Their diligence. Their disregard for anything but those canisters in their hands, and those deadly diseased bodies at their small unprotected feet. He smelled the gas. Listened to it slosh, and in such amounts as to be part of the river wild on the other side of the camp.

He thought about the men. What he had just witnessed.

Amiri squeezed her hand. “You think they came here to burn the bodies.”

Rikki looked at him. “I think they came to burn us all.”

He stared, but there was no time to respond—a mechanical howl filled the air. The children stopped pouring gasoline over the dead and a shout went up.

“The plane,” Eddie hissed. The UN plane. Their one way out.

Amiri hauled Rikki close, forcing her to run. He kept one hand on her shoulder, guarding her back, his muscles bunching from human to cheetah. Gunshots rode the air, sharp voices. A figure in bright orange and white lurched from the shadows between tents, gloved hands clutching a rifle. Eddie raised his own gun, but stopped at the last moment. It was Patrick, the young peacekeeper who had helped them in Kinsangani. Mask off, hood down, goggles hanging around his neck. He was wild-eyed, flushed, covered in dirt and blood, and running so deep on instinct that for a moment Amiri thought the young man would shoot them on sight. But then his eyes cleared, his teeth flashed, and he gestured fiercely.

“Not that way!” Patrick shouted, but it was too late; they’d already been seen. Bullets hailed down. Eddie whirled, shooting back into the darkness. Heat rolled off his body, pressing through Amiri’s protective gear like a rush from an open oven.

Patrick still shouted. Amiri tried to listen, but this time it was Rikki who pulled, and he had no choice but to follow. They ran. Cut themselves away from the tents onto an open plain carved from the jungle. Airfield, runway, with only one cargo plane on the ground.
Reinforcements coming
had been the word on the flight from Kinsangani, though Amiri had paid little attention. Too many distractions. Memories of photographs, which were now nothing more than ash.