Tribulation Page 2

  The candidates and T3 contractors slopped toward their assigned vehicles. The suction sound of their bootsteps drowned out the background din of frogs, birds, and bugs.

  ***

  A Land Rover and a pair of traffic pylons helped a road closed sign blocked the way.

  A large, grizzled woman in an orange construction vest wondered out of the bushes. She zipped up her jeans, tossed a roll of toilet paper into the back seat of the vehicle, and plucked a can of Fanta off the hood.

  “Huge massive rains the other night,” she told Taiyo when he rolled down his window. She sipped her drink then checked the sky. “And another trough’s coming in at weekend.”

  “A trough?” Taiyo asked.

  “Nah, yeah.”

  “A cyclone?”

  “Yeah, nah.” She reached under her vest and scratched something. “Gulfies don’t form in August, mate.” She looked at him like he should’ve known.

  A door slammed. The chorus of the rainforest flinched but quickly resumed. Ronin came over and told the woman her fly was down, adding, “I guess you were expecting us.”

  The woman gave Taiyo her Fanta and zipped up. “Of course, I bin expecting ya. Where you folks are from, do the roadworks come out at Dawn’s crack to guard a dirt track with no cars?”

  Ronin and Taiyo shared a look. “Yes,” they replied in unison.

  She snatched back her Fanta as if scared they’d rob her of it.

  “You folks bin briefed on the Bloomfield or what?”

  “No ma’am,” said Ronin. “But down that closed road awaits the destiny of six of the greatest goddamn—”

  “Shut yer cakehole and listen a second, cunt.”

  She asked why their organizers hadn’t briefed them on the road conditions. When they had no answer, she shook her head in disgust, handed them each a pamphlet, and pointed her thumb at the sign behind her vehicle:

  Unsealed road next 32 km

  Region is subject to sudden and extreme weather events

  Drive accordingly

  This time, Ronin raced ahead of Taiyo. At first, Taiyo struggled to keep up over the bridgeless river crossings, muddy slopes, minefields of potholes, and fallen trees, but once he accepted a certain amount of slipping and sliding, he began to loosen his grip on the wheel and even have a bit of fun.

  Twenty minutes in, the weather turned. Fog, rain, and the arching forest transformed the track into a dark, muddy tunnel. Taiyo kept plenty of distance between his truck and Ronin’s, but the wipers only did so much to clear the flying mud. The headlights, too, were masked.

  In searching the console for how to turn on the roof lights, something caught his eye.

  “You guys notice something weird about this set up here,” Taiyo said while tapping a device mounted under the rear-view mirror.

  He piloted the truck up and around another hairpin.

  “Just a drive recorder, bro,” said Walter from the far passenger seat. “Keep your eyes on the road.”

  The comment was the closest thing to an order the team’s commander, Walter Tate, had so far given. Taiyo never would’ve guessed Walter was a Navy guy.

  The Project Daintree candidates had roles, not ranks; admirals and lieutenants may have suited a navy, but space was the realm of explorers and scientists. Walter, however, had yielded more than once on this first day of the simulation to Ronin’s demands—the latest being when Ronin had demanded the driver’s seat. Most likely, and most hopefully, Walter knew the evaluators valued diplomacy.

  “I know,” said Taiyo of the drive recorder, “but something about it—”

  “It’s two way,” Nel said from the middle seat.

  One lens aimed out at the road—nothing strange about that—and a second wide-angle camera pointed at the occupants.

  Up ahead, Ronin’s 4x4 hit a dip and flew a good half-meter in the air coming out over the other side. Taiyo slowed to get a good run at the jump, but the camera in his face changed his mind. Walter laughed at his apprehension, and harder when Taiyo dropped down to low gear to crawl over the rim.

  Nel reached up and gave the fisheye her thumbprint. “I bet it’s got a mic,” she said.

  Taiyo accelerated up a long, straight incline. He knew he’d better get used to being watched, but curiosity got to him. An eye on the track and a hand on the wheel, he stretched his neck and bobbed his head around the camera while probing with his free hand for a mic.

  Water shot in the air as Ronin stormed through a creek. Mud splattered the windscreen of Taiyo’s truck.

  “Giver, bro,” yelled Walter.

  Taiyo focused on the road, sped up the wipers, and gripped the wheel with both hands. He gunned it when the front tires reached the water.

  “Whoooh!” Walter shouted out the open window.

  “Ah, here’s the mic,” Nel said. “Mounted up here.”

  Taiyo’s eyes drew to the roof. His focus only left the track for a second, but in that second, Ronin’s truck left the creek, spun sideways, and stopped.

  Taiyo hit the brakes. The truck skipped and skidded over submerged rocks, the front tires jackknifed left. Walter, Nel, and Taiyo flung against each other and around the cab, constrained by the five-point belts. The truck tipped forward and right, teetered as if undecided, and pitched down onto the passenger side into the creek.

  “Status check,” Taiyo called.

  “Unhurt. Unimpressed,” reported Nel.

  “Walter?”

  “Wet.” Water was flowing in through the open passenger-side window. Surprisingly, the big man seemed to find the predicament amusing. He let out a light chuckle and asked, “Bro. Did you mean to do that?”

  “Yeah, man,” said Taiyo.

  “And it’s all on video,” added Nel without humor. “On mic, too.”

  Shit. This would not look good. “Uh … Did you guys see that?” Taiyo said from his semi-dangling position looking out the driver’s window at the clouds. “Right out of the sky. Must have been a meteor fragment. Wow. You guys saw it, right? I must have just barely avoided it.”

  Nel caught on right away. “Yeah, it was like, Whoosh! Crazy fast. I can’t believe you dodged it.”

  Now Walter clued in. “Mad driving skills, bro. You totally saved us.”

  “It probably moved too fast even for the camera to see it.”

  “Oh, right. Good point,” Taiyo said. He hadn’t thought of that.

  Walter wasn’t done. Squashed against the door, pinned by the weight of two people, he kept up the charade. “Been a ton of these little impacts lately, huh? It’s probably not as uncanny as it seems. I bet a hundred cars a day get knocked over like this.”

  “Oh for sure,” said Nel, “and these are air bursts we’re talking about, so they don’t even leave a crater. No sign of the thing.”

  That was about all Taiyo could stand. Any more and he’d erupt with laughter, and that wouldn’t help Walter’s plight at the bottom of the heap.

  He did his window down and turned off the engine.

  “I knew you couldn’t drive a stick,” Ronin called from somewhere outside the toppled vehicle. With his nose upturned as if it offended his olfactory glands, Ronin added, “Useless hafu.”

  Hafu. The word had long since lost its venom, but it could still sting.

  Hafu.

  Half.

  Halfbreed.

  Of course Taiyo could drive a stick, although his engineering background in aerospace and magnetics hardly qualified him as team navigator. JAXA must’ve wanted to see how he’d do outside his expertise.

  “You kids want out?” Ronin said.

  Like a gopher, Taiyo poked his head out the window and looked around. Kristen, and the team’s medic, Anton, stood behind Ronin knee-deep in flowing mud. The dozen T3 contractors hung back by their own two trucks, dry and taking notes.

  “Nah,” Taiyo said. “Just pull us down.”

  “Say please.”

  Taiyo knew Ronin meant it. “Please,” said Taiyo, looking down and giving
the boulder-headed Ronin his biggest fake smile.

  Ronin reached up, and before Taiyo could tell him to use the winch, the vehicle plunged back down on all fours. The bounce jolted the occupants and nearly rolled them right over onto the other side.

  “Say thank you.” Ronin struck Taiyo with a grin as smug as the one he’d just received.

  “Yeah, yeah. Back to your truck. Let’s go.”

  “Say it, hafu.”

  Taiyo felt Nel and Walter staring at him.

  Ronin reached in and cupped his hand over the key and ignition. “Come on, halfbreed. Say it.”

  Better half-bred than inbred, you ramp-headed troglodyte.

  “Thanks.”

  “Lose the attitude. Say it like you mean it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Good boy.” Ronin took his hand off the ignition and backed away.

  Unable to meet their glares, without looking over at his passengers, Taiyo asked if Nel and Walter were ready. They were, so he moved his hand to restart the engine. Ronin’s arm shot down through the open window and grabbed Taiyo by the wrist.

  “Wait,” Ronin said. “First let the fluids resettle. You don’t want to blow up your teammates, do you?” Not more than five seconds passed before Ronin declared it be safe to turn the key again.

  The engine fired up on the first try.

  “Good ‘ol Japanese quality,” Ronin said of the Toyota Hilux.

  The radio crackled to life: “Proceed when ready, vehicle one.”

  Taiyo raced ahead, leaving Ronin standing in the mud.

  ***

  A small twitchy man greeted Taiyo through the rolled-down window of the Hilux.

  “How ya going? Welcome to Wujal Wujal.” His voice dragged across Taiyo’s eardrums like a wire brush across the hood of a new car.

  “Morning,” Taiyo replied.

  “I’m Ethan.” The little Aussie’s hand shot out and into the cab. He gave Taiyo one quick smile then another. “Call me Ethan.”

  “Taiyo Yamazaki.”

  “Ya check in with the abo office then?” said Ethan.

  “Sure did, bro,” Walter called across Nel and Taiyo from the passenger side.

  “They scab your grog then?” Ethan rose up on his toes and back down again several times. “Ay?”

  “Pardon?”

  Ethan said something undecipherable and then waited at the window, saying nothing but making a series of birdlike micro-nods. Confused, Taiyo nodded back politely, and slowly.

  After another minute of awkward silence and weird body language, Ethan told them to leave the trucks there at the side of the road—in three weeks they’d need them to get back to Cairns—and follow him up the track to camp.

  It felt impossible that in spite of the day’s adventure, they still had three weeks to go. It was only day one. Still morning.

  Everyone hopped out of the vehicles and into the mud. Taiyo looked up and let the mist coat his face, and Ronin rolled up his pant legs and flexed his calves.

  Rather than the white jumpsuit of the T3 contractors, Ethan wore khaki. A lot of khaki. Vinyl bush hat, multi-pocket shirt, hiking boots, too-long socks, and too-short cargo shorts. All khaki.

  The candidates untied their packs from the roofs, and the jittery khaki man led everyone in a short sprint up an incline. If Ethan had a title or a role, he hadn’t given it. He must’ve been their guide, or the caretaker of the camp, or perhaps an orphaned forest dweller. Despite Ethan’s voice, Taiyo couldn’t help but like the guy’s enthusiasm.

  They stopped to catch their breath at the opening to a mud- and gravel-filled clearing the size of a baseball diamond. At the near end, the rainforest spilled overtop and in between half a dozen stilted bamboo and tin-roofed bungalows.

  “If the Canadian Space Agency hired NASA for this,” Kristen told Nel, “and NASA subcontracted T3, and T3 hired this Ethan dude, then wouldn’t that make Ethan a sub-sub-subcontractor.”

  “So it goes,” said Nel.

  Ethan led them past a set of log benches around a large fire pit and over to the closest bungalow. Walter was last up the short flight of wooden steps to the patio but first to drop his pack into the room—a single dorm with six bunks and, to Walter’s surprise, a rat-tailed marsupial.

  Ethan darted up the steps to tend to the intruder and shoo it along. “Go on little fella. The scrubs out that way.” He pointed to the forest, and the animal hopped on past the crowd of people on the porch, down the steps, and out of sight. Ethan chuckled, and to the candidates said, “Ya never know what critters’ll run into ya round here.”

  Walter stretched his back, groaned, and helped himself to a plastic patio chair. At fifty, the large man was the oldest on the team. Walter had probably been athletic in his day, his large frame now drooped. His shoulders sloped, and his bald head resembled a block of processed ham.

  All four of the men were bald or balding, Taiyo realized. Though, only Taiyo had lost his hair by choice. The hair on Ronin’s head still half-remained, but the way Ronin pulled it back into a ponytail gave away how much it had receded even in the few years Taiyo had known him. Anton, too, had a well-receded hairline, though his formed an outline with his eyebrows that made his forehead look like the Batman logo.

  Each of the AsCans, as Walter had taken to calling the astronaut candidates, took a mineral water and joined him at the table.

  Ethan leaned way back over the porch railing and pointed up to the dangling arms of the trees. “Up there’s where the drop bears live.” He held his hat and squinted into the drizzle. Then he sprung back upright and pointed with vigor across the clearing. “That piece of fine Aussie architecture over there is the dunny. There you’ll find your showers, toilets, and heaps vicious snakes and spiders.” Ethan’s eyes flared the prospect of scaring the candidates. But they weren’t backpackers or kids on a field trip, and Ethan’s joy faded when the only responses he got were nods and polite smiles.

  Taiyo stared past Ethan without comment and blinked at the sky. The clouds had split, and a lower layer of fog had fractured the sunlight into strands that sparkled off the puddles. The flight into Cairns, the bus ride, the headland, the 4x4s—mist and diluted light had cloaked every event of the day.

  Ethan scanned their faces. Having barely aroused a smirk, he doubled down. “I’m bloody serious. They’ve got fangs bigger than your pecker.” He put a hand on Ronin’s shoulder. “But maybe not yours, mate.” He stepped back to assess the situation. “Yeah … nah, you’ve got facken bulldozer DNA in ya, haven’t ya mate?”

  Ronin’s booming laugh shook the floorboards and patio furniture. “Purebred Japanese,” he said and knocked knees with Taiyo under the table as he settled into a posture he no doubt believed was inevitable of a man armed with testicles too massive to confine to a conventional one-crotch radius.

  “Bloody oath. So you’re that Jap-o, Ronin Aro, then, ay?” Ethan’s eyes bugged at Ronin, but he quickly tore his gaze away like he’d said something wrong. “Right then,” he said and before clicking his heels and pivoting to scrutinize Nel. “Sorry, love. Forgot ya facken name.”

  “Nel Oonarq.” She folded her hands on the table and looked him in the eyes.

  Ethan’s own eyes darted back and forth between Ronin and Nel. “You and the bulldozer are the JAXA pair, then?”

  Taiyo pursed his lips and drew in a breath through his nose. He didn’t think he’d have to deal with this kind of thing in Australia. “Me and Ronin are Japanese,” he corrected. “Nel’s Canadian.”

  “Well, fack a duck.” Ethan reached out and squeezed Taiyo’s bicep. “One’s a Komatsu, the other’s a Kawasaki.” He gave them a thumbs up and then pointed his finger at Walter and Kristen. “You’re the seppos. The yanks.” It wasn’t a question—more of an accusation—but the two NASA candidates nodded and smiled. “I knew it by your shit-eating grins, bless your buggered little hearts.” Next, Ethan waved to the medic, Anton, who sat across the table looking around absently like the only dad at a paren
ts’ meet. “And you’re the Finn.”

  “Swede.”

  “I love your furniture.” Ethan went around the table and gave Anton a hardy handshake to show he meant no malice.

  The orientation continued with Ethan warning them about snakes. “If you hear a bark or hiss under your bed tonight, you best bugger off.” He scanned each of the AsCans for a reaction.

  Kristen broke first. “For real?”

  “Ay,” said Ethan. “Bird-eating spiders, love. But they only come out in the rains.”

  Walter said, “And I don’t suppose it rains much in the rainforest, huh, bro?”

  Ethan froze mid-step. His eyes flared, and slowly he turned to lock sights with Walter. The team’s commander covered his mouth to conceal his amusement. “Yeah, mate. It facken does.” Ethan shook his head and twitched a couple times.

  “Sorry, sir,” said Walter.

  Ethan gestured to the cooler in the corner. In it, the AsCans found bread rolls and fixings.

  The candidates dug into lunch to the patter of rain on the tin roof. Taiyo accepted the bag of rolls from Anton, took one out, and held it while he waited for condiments to make the rounds. He looked around. No plates. Aussie rules. He shrugged; an astronaut had to be adaptable. When his turn came, he took a chance on a mysterious dark paste. He spread it on his bread while he nodded along to the chatter—mostly emitted by the man in khaki bounding about like a six-year-old on Red Bull. “Thirty percent of Australia’s reptiles live in the Daintree. Ninety percent of our bats. Forty-three snakes.”

  “Okay, so …” Walter put down his bread and rubbed his chin. His languid movements contrasted Ethan’s. “Is that forty-three snakes in total, or... ?”

  Taiyo choked. What the hell did he just put in his mouth? He swallowed hard and washed it back with a swig from his water bottle. When he glanced back up, he saw Ethan roll his eyes at the big man, Walter, then look around to see if anyone else was sharing his experience. “Forty-three species, mate,” he told Walter. “Forty-three species in an area a tenth of a percent of the whole bloody continent’s land area. But they—”

  “Why don’t they spread out more?” Walter said with food in his mouth.