The First Bird: Episode 1 tfb-1 Page 5

  “Twenty minutes.” She looked excited.

  Matt nodded, and swallowed down a moment of queasiness. As a specialist in ancient languages and remnant civilizations, jungle came with the territory — jungles, dry deserts, and once, the frozen Antarctic. But he’d take a desert over a jungle any day. The odd scorpion, sand viper, and dry heat were easily preferable to millions of seething, crawling, sliding things with way too many legs. Added to that, he already knew there was something down there, almost microscopic, that literally burrowed under your skin and flayed you alive. What’s not to like? He swallowed again, and tried to pull his lips into the semblance of a smile.

  He looked around at his fellow passengers, who were slowly being roused by the ever-energetic Kurt. He hadn’t needed to nudge Max Steinberg — he was another traveler who didn’t seem to sleep on flights. Come to think of it, Matt wasn’t sure he’d even seen him blink yet. Steinberg was all grizzled baldness and skinny-armed paunch, fifty-something and, so far, uncommunicative, seeming to prefer a slim computer tablet to human dialogue. He had only grinned once, more shark than human, revealing a gold tooth just off to the side. It looked incongruous amongst his polished Hollywood teeth, and Matt wondered why he kept it.

  The producer’s fingers darted over the screen, flicking away images as rapidly as they appeared. The few times he had looked up, his eyes had darted over Matt, Carla, and Megan, then moved on as though the trio had been analyzed, categorized, and then dismissed. It was the look of a man who probably had multi-million-dollar movie stars kowtowing before him, and didn’t need any more pissant scientists.

  Matt shifted his gaze to the man seated on the movie producer’s left. Joop van Onertson was a Dutch paleobiologist specializing in ornithological evolution, and the all-round go-to guy for early species analysis. He had spent the first twenty minutes of the trip trying to explain the pronunciation of his name to Kurt and Steinberg. It rhymed with soap, he had said, with the “J” taking a “Y” sound — Yope. But it didn’t stick. After being called Jewp, Jop, and even soap, he gave up, telling them to call him Joe.

  The small entomologist sitting beside him had been listening to the struggles of Joe-Joop with a face like stone. The Chinese scientist was a leading expert on entomology with parasitological specialization. Carla had acknowledged the man, and later told Matt she knew of his reputation, and was glad he was with them.

  Xue Jian Dong hadn’t bothered trying with Kurt and Steinberg, obviously realizing that Xue would have been an articulation bridge too far, and Dong was just asking for an earthquake of derisive mirth. He simply stuck out his hand and said, “Jian” and smiled flatly. Later, as his eyes had slid across to Carla and Matt, he looked skyward and shook his head. Matt liked him immediately.

  During the introduction process, it became immediately obvious to Matt that Steinberg’s team had been organized for him, not by him. It was clear that he was meeting a lot of his handpicked experts for the first time. That suited Matt just fine; it meant that there was hope that any findings or decisions would be objective, and not simply Steinberg’s paid-for answers.

  Close to Jian, John Mordell, MD, had risen to his feet, placed both hands in the center of his back, and stretched. Silver-haired and daytime-TV handsome, he was a practicing doctor who had worked with allied forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq. When he spoke, his accent was cultured English. Matt wondered where he and Steinberg could have ever crossed paths. Matt couldn’t decide if he was relieved or concerned that Steinberg had brought an English battlefield surgeon on the expedition.

  The last two members of the group were “as different as grease and butter,” as Matt’s grandmother used to say. One was an academic peer of Matt’s, Dan Brenner, head of Linguistics at Stamford. He was a star in the paleolinguistics arena when Matt was just starting out, and if not for the early offer from Harvard, working with Brenner was probably where Matt would be today. The slow-moving older man had been strangely standoffish, and Matt couldn’t hide his disappointment. If there was one person on the trip, other than Megan, who he could have expected to have a rapport with, it was the avuncular academic. Brenner must have been over sixty-five years old by now. Matt hoped that, as Brenner’s career approached its winter, he didn’t begrudge Matt the fact that his was only at spring.

  The final member of their group was their Brazilian guide. Like a small dark bird, his eyes constantly moved over the group, the cabin, his hands and feet. One foot constantly tapped, as though his body coursed with a form of agitated electricity. It was hard to guess at his age — his skin was smooth and hairless, but his eyes had a yellow tinge that spoke of campfires and a native Tupi heritage, rather than jaundice. Moema Jesus Paraiba looked nervous and hangdog, and Matt wondered exactly what he already knew about their mission.

  Matt turned to Carla, who was furiously sending and receiving text messages on her smartphone. Her face was grim. Matt suspected she was probably getting updates about the state of the epidemic back home. She cursed softly, then exhaled between tight lips. She was an impressive woman. Already she had engineered a truce with Meg, rebuffed the silver fox Mordell, stared down Steinberg, and put Kurt firmly in his place. Steinberg had brought six men, not including himself, but Matt felt sure that with Megan and Carla, he already had them outnumbered.

  Matt swiveled to look out of the porthole window at the rapidly approaching land. They were to be dropped off at the base of the plateau. One moment there was reassuring stone only a few dozen feet below them, then they passed over the plateau’s cliff edge. His stomach lurched as he watched a waterfall pour itself, in slow motion, hundreds of feet to the forest floor, its thick spout of water mostly turning to a shimmering mist long before it reached the frothing pool far below.

  They would follow the stream until they came to a clearing cut out of the massive green tangle of plants, spend a single night at the campsite, and be ready for an early start the next morning … an early start into the thick heat of the Gran Chaco, and to its very heart — the Boreal — one of the last secretive, primordial areas in the world.

  They dropped quickly, and the enormity of the continent’s flora rose up around them, overwhelming and intimidating. Matt marveled at the giant trees — green, mushrooming skyscrapers, their monstrous canopies rising hundreds of feet in the air. Colossal kapok, ficus, and giant mango — everything grew big down here. There were rats the size of small pigs, and snakes that could swallow a horse whole.

  Matt didn’t want to think too much about the creepy big-small things … like two-foot long centipedes, or the Brazilian Wandering Spider, which was the size of a large man’s hand, venomous as a cobra, and prone to roaming the forest floor at night and curling up in dark spaces during the day, such as a handy termite mound, a rotting log, or some unlucky camper’s sleeping bag. He shuddered and held tight to the seat as the craft slowed and then hovered for a few seconds, like a giant metal dragonfly about to settle on a palm frond.

  As soon as the wheels touched, Kurt was on his feet. He helped lift backpacks and equipment into place near the door before bulldozing his way toward Megan. He grabbed her pack and slipped it over her shoulders. As she turned her back on him so he could adjust the straps, she looked at Matt and winked, her amusement plain.

  Kurt slapped both her shoulders and announced she was ready to jump, before adding that he’d have to take her skydiving one day… oh, and Matt, of course, if they were still together. This last was said through flashing white teeth. He gave her shoulders another squeeze, and she thanked him and walked unsteadily under the weight of her pack to where Matt was standing, holding his pack on one shoulder.

  “That’s odd; I wonder why he didn’t offer to help me?” Matt raised an eyebrow.

  She laughed softly, then said, with mock earnestness, “Well, it’s nice to meet a real gentleman once in a while.”

  Matt pulled a face and leaned in close. “Yeah, well, just watch out. He looks like the kinda guy who believes there’s only a fine
line between cuddling and holding someone down so they can’t get away.”

  “Ooh, what big green eyes you have, Professor.” She grabbed his shirt and pulled him forward so she could kiss him. He forgave her teasing immediately.

  A hissing clank interrupted them as the side door was thrown back and the Gran Chaco Boreal pushed its way into the cabin, bringing with it a tidal wave of sensations — cloyingly sweet flowers, rotting vegetation, decay, and spoiling meat somewhere close by.

  Heat and humidity washed over them. Up on the plateau it had been roughly eighty degrees and about fifty percent humidity, but down here, in the real jungle, where the geography and towering plants trapped the moisture and held it like a thick blanket over the lowlands, the humidity jumped to around ninety percent. Matt groaned, as if house bricks had just been placed in his pack. Though the actual temperature might not have been much more than up on the plateau, it felt a hell of a lot less comfortable.

  Matt leapt to the ground then turned to help Megan, who had already dropped down beside him. She walked forward a few paces, then stopped to turn and look at her surroundings. She spun, holding her arms wide and grinning.

  “Wow.”

  Matt frowned, noticing that her words were indistinct. After the steady drone of the chopper blades, muffled by headphones, the cacophony of noise from every single thing that could squawk, croak, chirrup, or scream was deafening.

  He inhaled the damp, wet air, and exhaled loudly. He’d better get used to it — they’d be there a while. Adapt or die, he thought wearily, paraphrasing Darwin.

  Matt followed Megan as she walked toward the clearing that would be their camp for the evening. His shirt was already hanging limply, damp and uncomfortable, and a cloud of gnats had formed around his head, attracted by the salty perspiration that was beading on his forehead. Yep, adapt or die.

  CHAPTER 6

  CDC Quarantine Station, Los Angeles

  Doctor Francis “Hew” Hewson, Carla Nero’s second in charge, prodded one of the growing lumps that had appeared on the neck of the female patient. She had presented herself for intense aggravated itching and loosening of her skin, and had been quarantined immediately. However, in the last few hours her new symptoms — the swellings — had doubled in size. Dr. Hewson had to suspect that the protuberances were linked to the infestation outbreak.

  He looked down at the sleeping woman, little more than a girl, and sighed unhappily. The mega-dose cocktail of metronidazole, crotamiton, and mebendazole being fed directly into her system was keeping the spread of the parasites under control, but it wasn’t killing them. It was if the anti-parasiticals were just holding the invading army behind a chemical wall that would soon be overrun. Hew knew the chemical compound only bought them a few more days at most. Eventually, the invasive parasites would overwhelm her system, and if they didn’t, the harsh drugs would probably destroy her internal organs long before they eradicated the intruders.

  Wearing Perspex goggles and a sealed clean-room suit, Hew prodded the lump again. It wasn’t hard, like an epidermoid or sebaceous cyst, but soft, the size of a fingernail, and only slightly red. He turned to a metal table, wheeling it in close, and grabbed a glass slide and a scalpel, intending to lance the eruption and examine the results under the microscope.

  He held the slide below the growth, expecting a dribble of dead biological fragments to be expelled by the woman’s immune system. There would probably be nothing more than a build-up of pus, dead bacteria, and phagocytes, just like a giant boil would contain as the body battled an infection.

  He made an incision in the side of the lump, intending to delicately cut halfway through the skin and then lift it away, like a lid. To his surprise, however, as soon as he pressed with the blade, the small mound burst.

  There was nothing there — no blood, serum, or even pus. Nothing ran from under the cap. Indeed, it seemed hollow. Hew continued slicing through the skin, then, using tweezers, lifted the lid free. Inside was a small, dry crater, descending no farther than the subdermal layer of the skin. Like a dry blister, he thought, and turned to swap the scalpel for a powerful magnifying glass on an extendable arm, a strong halo of lights around its edge. He brought the lens in close and squinted.

  Hew swore softly into his face mask and moved the lens to the side. With the added light, even with the naked eye he could now see the particles rising in a fine mist — a micro-dispersion plume. It could be nothing else. There were nano-sized particles rising, and Hew prayed they weren’t what he thought they were.

  Grabbing a swab, he dabbed it into the dry hole, and then wiped it across the slide. He carefully slid it under the microscope platform and fiddled with the magnification to clarify his image.

  Sonofabitch. Eggs — and now they’re airborne.

  CHAPTER 7

  The evening was hot and humid. Even though Matt had applied enough insect repellent to deter even the most persistent six- or eight-legged blood-sucking pests, they still hovered just a foot outside of the chemical forcefield, as if they knew that his body would soon wash away his defenses and a spot of salty skin would be theirs for the taking.

  Kurt and Moema had dug a fire pit and got a good blaze going for the evening meal. Dinner had been baked ham and flatbread, both cooked in the ashes, with salad vegetables followed by tinned fruit and washed down with revolting coffee. It was probably the last cooked meal they’d have on their trek. Kurt had assured everyone that there’d be more than enough food to supplement, and eventually totally replace, their rations. Water wasn’t expected to be a problem in a rainforest, and purification tablets had been handed out, along with instructions on how to use them to disinfect their water. Add little white pill and shake — simple. It made the concoction taste like a swimming pool, but at least you didn’t contract dysentery and end up squirting half your bodyweight out through your ass.

  Matt had left Carla and Megan talking to Jian. He was delighted to see that the women had found some common ground — the last thing he wanted was a split in his own camp when they were already outnumbered. He knew Megan would force him to take sides and, given he had to work with Carla, it would have meant several weeks of hell … and more of the same when they got home.

  He wandered over to where Steinberg’s linguist, Dan Brenner, was sitting away from the dry heat of the flames, smoking a kretek cigarette — a habit Matt remembered he had picked up in Vietnam, on one of his many field expeditions in search of the mythical mother-root language. The smell of cloves, tobacco, and other mixed spices reminded Matt of crowded Asian streets, bright lights, and honking cars.

  “Professor Brenner,” Matt paused, waiting, as the older man simply exhaled a plume of smoke. “Mind if I join you?”

  Brenner continued smoking. Matt frowned. Okay, awkward, he thought. “It’s nice to see you again …”

  Still nothing. Matt stuck his hands in his pockets. “Uh … is there a problem? Something I’m not aware of?”

  Brenner turned and regarded Matt with half-lidded eyes. The look didn’t just carry indifference, or professional snobbery; it held contempt, disdain, and barely suppressed anger. The stare hit Matt like a physical force. He almost took a step back, but instead he waited, holding the gaze.

  Brenner looked away. “No, nothing, if losing ten years of your life’s work counts as nothing.”

  Matt’s brow furrowed even further. “Excuse me?”

  Brenner sucked on his cigarette, worked the smoke around in his mouth, then blew it out through compressed lips. “My paper on the ancestor language. That work was valid and evidence-based. It took me ten years to trace my way back up the paleo-lingual lines of the Southern African Capoid peoples. And then through the Nilo-Saharans back to the potential proto-language — it was the monogenesis of all spoken tongues.” He paused, and pointed at Matt with his cigarette, the motion ending in a stab.

  He continued, his words squeezing out through clamped teeth in barely suppressed fury. “Ten long years to reach my conclusion
, and it took you ten fucking minutes to obscure and demolish it … and then you encouraged my work to be gang-raped by your teenage cheer squad. Unprofessional, discourteous, and damned downright academically vandalistic!” He turned away, his lips a thin line.

  Matt sat down in front of him. He rubbed a hand through his long hair, pushing it back up off his face. It stayed, slicked by perspiration and insect lotion.

  Now he understood the man’s previous coolness. He dimly remembered the paper — it hadn’t seemed a big deal at the time. It was the responsibility of the scientific community to peer-review papers, and question them where necessary. That was just the way it worked. It forced the author to respond to any challenges to their conclusions with a forceful and factual defense. Sometimes, minor flaws in logic were found, and sometimes, just sometimes, the author had to go back to the drawing board. It had happened to him, and, he’d bet, to every scientist who hung their work out to be road-tested by the academic marketplace.

  Matt remembered that many scientists had agreed with Brenner. Perhaps they shared his belief in the common language ancestry theory, or perhaps they were simply awed by the enormity of his academic status. Matt wasn’t, and being young, he had no time for being polite. The fact was, he just didn’t buy the theory. No matter how persuasive the man’s argument, the proposition didn’t work.

  Matt had written a small and simple rebuttal, and posed a few questions. He expected a polite response, and maybe a professional debate. Instead, he got silence. After that, it was as if a swarm of academic locusts had been unleashed on Brenner’s work. It seemed the questions Matt had asked were good ones. Unfortunately, Brenner had no good answers.