Sandpaper Kiss

  Copyright ©2015 Angel Wedge

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, duplicated, translated into Oggham, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means except by permission of the author.

  The right of Angel Wedge to be identified as the author of this work is asserted by him in accordance with the 1988 Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act.

  All characters in this book are entirely fictitious, and any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Photographs from Dollar Photo Club:

  Close up portrait of grey kitten ©Vladimir Voronin

  Angry girl ©Taramara78

  Dark Tropical Jungle Bamboo Background ©lazyllama

  Dedication

  With many, many thanks to twilight and Kiba, and all the wonderful people on Campnano and #SaturdayScenes without whom this probably wouldn't have happened.

  This second revision is dedicated to all the people (especially my dad) who pointed out errors in the first. This book is a lot cleaner than it would have been without your help.

  Chapter 1 — One Choice

  A month ago, waiting outside Sante Benedicté airport, I would never have imagined that my future would involve sneaking past armed guards and fighting for my life. I would have thought there was even less chance of me diving in front of a soldier’s gun to save someone else. That just wasn’t the kind of thing a sane man did, especially a journalist. I was supposed to remain impartial, I was supposed to not get involved with the people I was saving. I’d get a true story out, and then the victims of oppressive regimes and dictators would be saved because the global public, on seeing an unbiased account of the truth, would always do the right thing. I had to trust in that, because it was the one fact around which I’d built my entire life.

  No, a month ago I’d been sitting outside the airport breathing a sigh of relief, hoping I’d never have an excuse to go near those jungles again. I hoped I’d submit one last article and claim the gratuitous rewards that my editor would surely bestow on me. Maybe I’d win a Pulitzer, who knew. But whether I was a success or not, I wasn’t going to be struggling to make a living. I’d retire back to a comfortable life, maybe take a part time job to cover the bills, and spend the rest of my life in peace with the woman I loved. Maybe we’d have kids at some point, though I would have settled for raising kittens.

  That’s the big thing about me, I guess, that you have to understand when reading my story. I’m an easygoing guy, I’m not going to fight against the path that the world wants to take. That’s the way I’ve always been. That day outside the airport was probably the first time I even considered there might be another way to live. It’s just not in my nature to try to change anything for my own benefit, or it never had been before. Maybe there’s a little bit of fatalism in there, and I believe that if something bad happens to me it must be for a reason. Like my brothers, there must be something to explain their war against each other beyond simple animosity. But whether it was a quirk of nature or some grand, hidden conspiracy, it wasn’t my place to challenge their decisions. That was the important thing: It wasn’t my fight.

  You can’t fight chance, or genetics, or the place nature gives you in the world. Nature doesn’t care if you want a son or a daughter. The world doesn’t care if you have a dream to become the greatest. In the grand scheme of things, there’s so many places that your nature doesn’t matter simply because you can’t do anything to change it. If you can’t change the world, then there’s little to no point even trying. Does that make me cynical? Well, I’ll own up to that one. Does that make me lazy? I’ll let you decide.

  Because there are some times when you can make a difference, a few points where the input of one individual really can change the world. What you want matters when you can actually change something, and that’s when I’m not the privileged guy just coasting along on the success of my brothers. The only time I’ve put all I can into a cause is when it’s possible for me to make a difference, and then you’ll see what that kind of determination can do. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all about picking your battles. While I don’t know if my future family would involve babies or kittens crawling around our feet, that’s all in the hands of genetics, and you can’t fight nature. But when I see a corrupt administration keeping people down and telling them they’re less than human; well, that’s when I step in to show the world what’s going on. I can’t do much when I’m there at ground zero. But if my reports make the world news then my words could become the fulcrum that public opinion turns around. That’s how I can change the whole world.

  I only put the effort in when there’s actually some point to it, when I can do something to change the outcome. My instincts have always been pretty good for telling me when it’s one of those moments, and I had no reason to distrust them now. Every instinct in my body was screaming at me outside the Sante Benedicté Regional Airport that my choice here meant everything to me and to my small family. I knew it was almost eighty miles to the falls from here, and that there was no way I’d be able to see anything, but I couldn’t help staring out at the sky over the jungle, hunting for the pall of smoke that any war film would have you believe is the sign of the front line coming closer. It wasn’t there, this was real life. But this was the kind of situation that any sane observer would think could only happen in Hollywood. The instincts that had served me so well before were all screaming the same song of terror. I should get well away from this place as soon as I could. This wasn’t the kind of business I should be mixed up in, and there was no way that adding to the chaos here could help anyone.

  Right now Sante Benedicté was a small town under siege. The populace at any other time of the year, any other time in history, was a rough mixture of three types of people. Most of the population belonged to two groups of natives, differentiated by a minuscule difference in skin colour and vaguely similar languages. They held completely opposing beliefs that they were the ones who owned this land while the other group constantly tried to take away their birthright. Their hatred had gone on for generations now, and neither side was willing to give any ground even when it was to their advantage. They met in the markets, where each had at least something that the other wanted to buy, and the traditional regional pastime of secret murder among the giant trees had been replaced by undercutting and petty theft. It didn’t matter what colour you were, you kept your wits about you in the bazaar, because everyone knew that the other group – the interlopers who had only come to this land a few generations before, or the tribesmen who had no place in the modern world – were devious cowards only one step above animals. They’d take anything that wasn’t nailed down, and even try to trick you out of your soul if you let them close enough.

  The only people who weren’t afraid of some other group were the Americans, and that was because they were oblivious of the simmering conflict that threatened to erupt all around them. The tourists weren’t all from the United States, but the locals (of both colours) called them all Amerikanjie in any case. The Americans were the majority, and the yardstick by which both tribesmen and native Benedicteans judged all outsiders.

  They were proud of their own countries, and walked the markets and unlit streets bearing their pride like a shield. As if patriotism and simply being from somewhere else would protect you from a knife, would stop someone taking your bag. They thought that because this wasn’t their world, it wasn’t their conflict, and they wouldn’t be touched because they weren’t involved. Both groups of natives had a word for that opinion, and neither is repeatable. The tourists tended to be the kind of people who thought that not understanding English could be cured by speaking slowly and loudly, and that displays of local culture had been laid on
for them by some tour company. That attitude, more than an accident of nationality, was what amerikanjie meant.

  People who were researching indigenous cultures, or travelling in search of anything in particular, weren’t in the same class. But then, those people didn’t have much reason to stop here. Sante Benedicté was a town that existed purely because you can only have so much uncharted jungle before the people of one village need somewhere to trade with their ancestral enemies without violating anyone’s taboos. The first thing most tourism companies would tell you was that Sante Benedicté was a city about two hundred and ninety miles west of Oimbawa, just north of the high road. Oimbawa, of course, was just as mysterious a name to anyone who hadn’t spent a lifetime untangling the patchwork quilt of alliances, sovereign states, and former crown dependencies that covered this part of the rainforest. Oimbawa would possibly qualify as a city in the civilised world, which is more than could be said for Sante Benedicté. But even in a tiny jungle country like this there needed to be occasional population centres simply for the purpose of laying claim to the land, and whatever minimal level of taxation and administration could be achieved. Sante Benedicté’s main purpose was that it stopped the map from being a blank page of green.

  Now, that had all changed. The Americans weren’t the quiet, indifferent minority any more. Soldiers had moved into the town and surrounded it. There were huge wire fences cutting across the suburbs in rings, ensuring that nobody could come in or out of Sante Benedicté unless the United Nations Inspectorate and at least two different governmental bureaucracies said so. The people of the town thought that was strange, but they lined up at the checkpoints just the same. Their city had been taken by so many occupying forces, rebels, and dictators over the years that many locals had loyalty to the city, and most to their village or tribe, but next to no-one gave a damn what nation currently claimed sovereignty here. Over the years, most of the people in the region had got used to doing whatever the government currently occupying their city said, and they didn’t worry too much about why.

  What was different this time was that the soldiers weren’t seeking to conquer the city, or even the nation. They were on paper a peacekeeping force, brought in to protect the place from rebels. Nobody seemed to ask who was leading these rebels, or what they were rebelling against. The people on the ground didn’t seem to care, for the most part, and the governments of the area were tied up in a disorganised political stalemate where nobody wanted to be the first to admit they knew why their lands were all full of foreign soldiers. The troops were just here as a staging post, because whoever controlled the Benedictean territory controlled the only airfield with easy access to the suddenly valuable resources hidden in the jungle.

  When I agreed to come here I hadn’t known what the science labs out there really meant, and once I knew the truth I didn’t want anything to do with that place. But there were some things more important than my own desires, and I was only just coming to realise that. After crouching in the trees and watching the airfield for an hour or more, I was approaching a decision that would change my life more than I had ever thought possible. When I turned my head and saw albino eyes staring straight into mine, the message ‘please save my people’ was clear without needing a single word.

  “Okay, you win,” I sighed, “So how do we get to the lab?”

  * * *

  All the paperwork was in place for me to visit this tiny country, but I hadn’t got on so well with the people who were in charge, especially the people who were close to taking over. I had more than enough reason to leave, and I’d called in all the favours I had to get a flight out at short notice. Getting a vehicle and heading into the jungle was bound to be a nightmare, but much to my surprise it went off without a hitch.

  I wasn’t sure how many of the civilian vehicles in town would cope as far into the jungle as we intended to go, and in any case it would be a challenge in itself to get past the checkpoints at the city gates. I thought that we could take a Jeep from the militia, if we could provide a distraction to draw two of them away from watching their vehicle. That didn’t quite work; we couldn’t get away unnoticed, but we were lucky enough to find a soldier sympathetic enough that he was prepared to desert his post and come with us once I explained what we were fighting for. There were no further signs of pursuit as the city dropped out of sight behind us, so I could only hope that luck would stay with us.

  The road started out as packed earth, but quickly degenerated into a rough dirt track. Just enough heavy trucks came this way that their tyre tracks had pressed the loam into what could be a level enough path for pedestrians, and just enough people walked along those ruts to keep the undergrowth at bay for the first few hundred yards. After a while the path started to become less distinct, but when it seemed it was about to vanish completely, the main road appeared. This track rose up onto a bank of earth, a raised causeway a few feet above the average ground level. I’d never got around to asking why it was built like this. Maybe for better drainage, or from some obscure engineering need that I didn’t understand, having not studied any kind of physics since college. What I did know was that the road led to Oimbawa in the east, for the benefit of travellers too frugal to arrange a short flight, and presumably stretched away towards some equally well-known metropolis in the distant west. We weren’t headed to either city today, but further into the wilderness. I drove straight over the rough markings of the highway, and down the opposite bank. From the road, it would have been hard even to see this path if you didn’t know it was there.

  The sky overhead quickly disappeared, covered by all the trees racing to colonise any gap in the great canopy. Presumably that meant the trail was hidden from aerial surveillance as well, and I wasn’t surprised that Faulkner’s lab had managed to avoid the attention of the world for so long. We followed the path for several minutes, passing gaps between trees that were almost as wide as the route we followed. Every landmark looked the same to me, and I would have been completely lost without a local guide to point me in the right direction. First the track split in two, then each branch split further to serve the more isolated tribes whose entire village would move every few weeks. Those people would send one man to trade with the outside world maybe every month. There wasn’t much they needed, but their adherence to tradition wasn’t quite enough to shut themselves away entirely. A hundred yards after yet another fork that I wouldn’t have even seen, we left the road entirely. The Jeep shuddered and reared up like a recalcitrant beast of burden as I guided it off its natural habitat, onto a narrow strip of rock that followed the line of a stream.

  They called this a rainforest, but I’d never understood why. You’d never see a storm-cloud here. The weather came more from the trees than from the sky. To my mind, it was more like being inside a giant percolator. Any precipitation was quickly consumed by the canopy, seemingly miles above. It was second-hand rainwater that continued to drip from each bough onto the ones below, until the constant, boiling heat meant the droplets were little more than steam by the time they reached the ground. The streams here wound uneasily between the rocks, almost choked by roots questing for water along the ground, and slowed by the silt they pushed into the water’s path. The river wasn’t always easy to make out, but at least its bed was level and the stones that would come to rest there instead of being swept away were pretty much of a size. By the law of averages, the surface over rock and root with the water below was almost as level as many roads. Those in this part of the world, at least.

  The research outpost at Lucretia Falls was in an area mostly only inhabited by the native tribes, a long way south of Sante Benedicté. When we couldn’t even maintain a walking pace over much of the terrain, that meant it would be nightfall before we arrived. To my right, my pale companion was studying my eyes for any sign of hesitation, or of second thoughts. I knew that I was wavering, my mind filled with terror as anyone else’s would be. One false move, just upsetting the wrong natives, and this jungle co
uld rain spears or bullets, neither of which would be significantly slowed by a veritable wall of foliage. But sometimes, I was finding, if your moral compass is strong enough to point straight past the varied demands of family, politics, career, and religion, there’s no way you could imagine holding back. I was right there now, my heart so firmly set on doing the right thing that I knew what I chose could make all the difference in the world.

  By the time we caught sight of the setting sun, rays low enough to filter through the canopy overhead and catch the iridescent surface of the compound’s solar cells, we weren’t speaking. Anything important we needed to discuss had been talked out long before, and when every moment could be your last it seemed a waste to spend them on fighting the language barrier just to make small talk. We knew that whether or not we lived through this night – and that would be determined as much by luck as by our actions – we would have to make a statement to the world about things man was not meant to know. We would have to tell everyone about the abominations that the foreign geneticists had created here, because getting the truth to the world was so much more important than any of our lives.

  My knuckles were white where one hand gripped the strap of my camera bag, desperate not to let it suffer any damage. I dreaded the change that would sweep the world over the coming weeks and months, but I knew that it was our responsibility. That change started with us, though I had only joined this story near its climax. Lucretia Falls had been in the news years before I even dreamed of getting involved in the scandal, and this catalogue of bizarre experiments and catastrophic mistakes had its real beginnings earlier still…

  Chapter 2 — Lucretia’s Diary

  While I was at the heart of this story for its climax, I didn’t know half of what had gone before when I first flew out here. The only way to really know the whole story is to ask the right questions of the right people, and to find out who tells the truth and who lies. At some points, the lies are the more important part because they influenced so many people’s actions. I found out some parts of this story much later, by asking the right questions long after I should have known the answers, and by looking into a diary I had no right to take. I think that makes me qualified to tell the whole story, even including the starting point that came so long before I even dreamed of coming to this country…