Throughout the day, Jameson had done his best to hold the camp together, aided by the armed ICCN team—members of Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature, also called eco-guards due to their labors at protecting the rain forest against poachers or illegal foresters. But as more ants flowed into the camp and word of an unknown illness spread, any hope of quarantining the area broke down. Desperate looting started, along with spats of gunfire as the eco-guards protected the team’s medical supplies and ICCN trucks. In short order, a majority of the refugees had fled off into the jungle.
It also didn’t help matters that the Tshopo River continued to steadily rise. It became evident that the medical team would also have to evacuate. Two hours ago, Jameson had tried to radio authorities and alert them that the medical team was moving to a secondary position and not to come here. But ants had overrun the innards of the camp’s radio, fritzing the electronics. The pediatrician was not even sure if he’d reached anyone.
Charlotte turned her eyes to the low layer of dark clouds. A faint rumble of thunder echoed down. The rain continued at a steady drizzle, but flashes of lightning in the distance warned that the true teeth of the storm had yet to reach them.
We need to be gone before it strikes.
She turned from the window to the rows of cots. There were only a handful of patients still here, those too weak to move on their own. Fever shone from their faces. Eyes glowed with fear. Dr. Mattie Poll, the Aussie ob-gyn with the team, pulled an I.V. and capped the catheter of a frail elderly man with a crown of white hair. Mattie nodded to Charlotte.
All ready to go.
Outside, a pair of ICCN trucks stood at the edge of the camp, prepared to transport the patients to a new site, somewhere up on higher ground. A rutted trail through the jungle marked the only route away from the river.
Charlotte’s eyes settled on the young mother humming softly to her three-month-old baby. The boy lay slack in her thin arms, his head lolled back, his eyes staring blankly at the roof of the tent. His chest continued to rise and fall—but for how much longer? During the earlier chaos, the mother had tried to leave with the child, but Charlotte had urged her to stay, promising she would do all she could for the boy.
Yet, what can I do? I still have no idea what afflicts him.
The tent’s door unzipped, drawing Charlotte’s attention. Jameson bowed his way through and tugged his mask lower, panting hard. Behind his goggles, his eyes shone with anxiety and desperation.
“We’re ready. I’ll have Byrne and Ndaye’s men help get everyone into the trucks.”
An engine coughed to life out there.
“What about Benjie?” Charlotte asked, stepping forward.
Jameson looked around the tent and sighed in exasperation. “He’s not back yet?”
Charlotte didn’t have to answer. The grad student had left over an hour ago, shortly after Jameson had tried to raise the local authorities. Prior to that, the biologist had spent most of the day collecting and examining ants, his brow furrowing ever deeper, fastidiously focused on his work.
Benjie had grown particularly intrigued when the camp was swarmed by the winged ants. They were so large that Charlotte had mistaken them for bees. Before leaving to investigate the swarming, Benjie had assured her that these males posed no threat, lacking the fierce mandibles of the soldier ants. Still, the drones hummed the air with a buzzing menace and inflamed the already tense situation. Before long, the camp had broken into a full panicked rout.
“We have to wait for him,” Charlotte said. “We can’t leave without him.”
Jameson shook his head. “We’ll wait for as long as it takes to load everyone into the trucks. That’s it.”
“But—”
Jameson turned away. “With the river rising and a storm threatening, we can’t stay here. Benjie can follow us on foot—that is, if he’s even still alive.”
Charlotte inwardly winced. She turned to the tent’s plastic window and rubbed at her wrist. The raised welts from the earlier ant bites itched, which she hoped was a good sign. She had been monitoring her own vitals, worried that whatever had afflicted the boy might have infected her, too. But so far, all seemed normal. She wanted to attribute her earlier numbness to adrenaline and tension.
Surely that’s all it was.
She stared into the dark night, focusing on a more immediate worry.
Where are you, Benjie?
10:55 P.M.
Benjamin Frey hunted through the dark forest, armed with a flashlight and a fierce determination to learn the truth. He rubbed raindrops from his plastic goggles and from the lens of the GoPro camera banded atop his forehead. He followed alongside a thick trail of driver ants, heading up their stream.
Doesn’t make any sense, not a bit. This is not like them at all . . .
The pockets of his coveralls clinked with small sampling test tubes. All day long, he had been plucking ant specimens and examining them under a dissecting microscope in his tent. Next to him he had kept an iPad, glowing with a digital entomology text; one of hundreds of biology-related books and journals loaded there. He had compared the anatomy of his captured specimens, noting slight variations between individuals. The size and angular spread of mandibles, the shape of thoraxes, the joints of antennae. These subtle distinctions differentiated the various species and subspecies of Dorylus ants. So far, he had identified over a dozen of them.
Their names ran like a recording in his head.
Dorylus moestus, Dorylus mandicularis, Dorylus kohli indolcilis and militaris, Dorylus funereus pardus, Dorylus brevis . . .
While all those species thrived in these equatorial jungles, they never ran together in the same colony. They were normally too combative. Yet, the trails throughout the camp ran with tangles from all those spe cies. It baffled him. Still, it was not this mystery that drew his focus, but rather the wrongness of it all.
Benjie could not tolerate anything out of its proper place.
He never could.
At the age of eleven, he had been diagnosed with mild Asperger’s—what was now called Level 1 Autistic Spectrum Disorder. He had been born a month premature, or as his mother often described it, Benjie was too sodding impatient to wait the full nine. Maybe that had something to do with his condition, but he seldom gave it much thought.
During his school years, he had been trained by a behaviorist to use his hyperfocus and nearly eidetic memory to study facial expressions and social cues. He eventually learned to cope well enough, but his most persistent difficulty was an obsessiveness when it came to problem-solving and orderliness. In secondary school, he had taught himself to solve a Rubik’s Cube in under seven seconds. He had found it soothing to put right what was wrong, to return order out of chaos. But this same feature also left him with a compulsive nature, one he continually fought to temper.
Still, this nature also helped him excel in his studies. Not that he wasn’t bullied at school, both for his lack of social acuity and because of a persistent tic that would set his eyes to rapidly blinking. But he was also deeply loved. He had been raised by a single mother in council housing in Hackenthorpe, in South Yorkshire. She had doted on him, encouraged him, and did her best to bolster his confidence. It was her support, more than anything, that had earned him a spot at the University of Sheffield, a public research university only sixteen minutes by bus from his house.
Now he was much farther afield, farther than he’d ever been from home. This trip to Africa was necessary to complete his doctoral thesis in evolutionary biology. His dissertation director at Sheffield had teamed him up with a colleague of his at the University of Kisangani, who in turn had embedded Benjie with the medical relief team. The refugee camp, set in the midst a local flood, offered a possible case study for Benjie’s thesis, which dealt with stress-induced mutations and their inheritability.