Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller: Book 2 (32 page)

Two days after Sander died, Austin heard voices coming from the forest on the south side of camp. The General and his men were returning. By then, three of the soldiers who stayed in camp were sick. Nobody told Austin what their symptoms were, but he had his hopes.

After a few minutes, Austin saw the first men come out of the trees. They carried a stretcher. All four had anguished faces. More men came into camp. The soldiers who’d stayed ran over to the others, talking, pointing, agitated.

Austin stood up for a better view.

Some of the men coming were supported by their comrades. Austin looked for signs of gunshot wounds, but couldn’t see any. He walked a few paces forward, wondering who was on the stretcher, telling himself it had to be The General—who else would the rebels carry?

In truth, that was an unfounded guess, built from a handful of capricious hope.

Rebels kept straggling in.

Austin decided it was a good time to be out of sight. Angry rebels liked to kick and beat conveniently proximate hostages and Austin was the only one left. He decided he’d be well-suited to slip into the most shadowy corner of his hut and pretend to be asleep, or better yet, feign illness.

After lying for a while and coming to think he was developing a talent for evasion, Botu stuck his head in the hut and said, “Come with me.”

Austin knelt beside The General’s cot and put a hand across his forehead. The General was burning with fever. Austin looked up at Botu, who was standing behind him, keeping a distance, and asked, “What happened to him?”

Waving a hand at the obviousness of it, Botu said, “He’s sick.”

“With what?” Austin asked, showing enough exasperation to demonstrate his frustration, but not enough to earn him a beating. It was a necessary risk. He didn’t want any wandering imagination to connect the accusation of poisoning to The General’s current condition.

Botu scowled and headed for the door. He said, “The black shits.”

Botu stopped and turned back. “Take care of him. Don’t leave this hut. Food and water will be outside the door when you need it.” Botu left.

The black shits had to be Ebola.

Austin got to his feet and crossed over to the door to look outside. At least five rebels were staggering toward huts or collapsing in the shade. Austin bet himself they all had Ebola.

Behind him, The General said, “Bring me water, Ransom.”

Austin looked around the hut and spotted a pitcher on a shelf with some cups. The pitcher was empty. He said, “We don’t have any water. I’ll get some.” Austin took the pitcher, stepped through the hut’s doorway and stopped, recalling Botu’s orders.

“Go,” The General told him.

Austin took another step outside.

Botu hollered at him from across the compound. He was pissed and marching angrily back.

In his defense, Austin said, “The General is awake. He needs water.”

Fuming, Botu said, “Go back inside. Do as I told you.”

Austin retreated inside and Botu yelled some orders.

Looking around in the dim light inside the hut, Austin didn’t know what else to do except go back to The General’s side. “Water is on the way.” Putting as much concern into his voice as he could muster, he asked, “What happened?”

The General’s smile flashed through his pain. “More hostages. More ransoms.”

“You went to get more hostages?” Austin asked.

“I only have two,” The General told him. “Hostages are a good business for us.”

“Unless you brought some back, you only have one.”

The General raised his eyebrows in a silent question.

Austin said, “Sander died.”

“How? Did he try to escape?”

Shaking his head, Austin said, “He died from the beating. He never got out of bed. It took a few days.”

“Did he suffer?” The General asked, in what seemed like sympathy.

Austin wasn’t sure how to answer, but decided that with The General unable to stand, unable to do anything with his anger, it was safe to tell the truth. “He did suffer. A lot.”

The General stared at the ceiling for a moment, his face blank. He said, “Good.”

The trucker was kind enough to pull off at the Lone Tree exit long enough to let Salim out of the trailer. The Denver air held a crisp chill, exacerbated by the long bumpy ride up Interstate 25 in the trailer. Salim thanked the driver, who made a point of keeping a wide gap between them. The driver closed up his trailer, got back into his cab, and Salim watched the tractor-trailer roll back onto the northbound highway as the rumble of its engine faded.

Eight miles from home, Salim stood in the middle of the night, back in the mundane familiar where every sign displayed a name he’d read before, in a nauseatingly bland font; where every wide, clean road rolled smoothly past one block just like the last block, all the way to more of the same; where the dry, cool air smelled of nothing in particular, and everybody he’d ever met readily accepted him into their Facebook-sized circle of acquaintances, but few treated him as a friend or equal. He talked like them, dressed like them, liked the same TV shows, lusted after the same silver screen hotties, and daydreamed of the same shiny future. He had that funny name that they Americanized to Sam, and they always,
always
assumed he was just as Sunday-Christian as they were.

Now, none of it mattered. He wasn’t yet ready to admit it, even to himself, but he longed for a hug from his mother, a snarky smile from his sister, and a nod from his father. A future in a pastel-ified, earth-tone, three-sides-brick, uni-box, Cal-Style, assembly line neighborhood, with thoroughfares lined in drive-thru franchise grease-kitchen clichés wasn’t the deepest pit of hell. It was just life.

Salim walked.

The first mile of Lincoln Avenue going west from the highway was lined with strip malls and big-box stores, all with strangely empty parking lots. Salim had expected to see at least a few cars, not zero. Traffic on Lincoln Avenue’s six lanes had also gone truant.

At the intersections, Salim didn’t bother to stop and wait for a favorable signal at the crosswalk. He had no need. He was alone on the street, walking at a brisk pace to keep himself warm.

The longer he walked, the closer he came to home. He eventually passed the store where his mother usually purchased her groceries. He passed a burger joint that he and his high school buddies visited when taking long lunches and skipping fourth period. He walked by a paved trail on which he rode his bicycle to soccer practice.

Finally, he turned off the main road and entered his neighborhood.

Lights gleamed on front porches and windows glowed dimly behind closed curtains. Cars sat in driveways, waiting for owners to wake in the morning. Trashcans sat at curbs in the company of an unusual number of overflow bags. Every house had an excess of garbage. Many had refuse on the porches.

He rounded a long curve and spotted his house on the corner of a cul-de-sac. He saw his father’s car in the driveway—his mother always had too many of her excess purchases piled in the garage to put the car there. Salim crossed the street and made the final, anticlimactic step onto his own lawn and breathed relief. Though he’d hoped and endeavored all along the way, he’d never truly expected to see his home again.

He looked up at a second floor window at the corner of the house. That was his room in there—his bed, his computer, his television, his clothes, his box of condoms stashed in a drawer in the desk, of which he’d thrown half away. When his snooping mother found the half-empty box, she would of course tell his father, and his father would look at him from that day forward, always hiding a bit of jealousy. Salim was having sex with American girls—plural—and Salim’s dad had only ever bedded his frumpy mother. Ha! Salim had made plenty of mistakes, but at least he had that.

He stepped onto the porch and noticed two bundles wrapped tightly in thick black plastic trash bags, secured in rolls of silvery tape. Salim tripped up the last step and caught himself on a support post as a realization came to him. His eyes had seen more corpses than any boy should ever have to.

Two corpses were on his porch, corpses matching the size and shape of his mother and sister.

Salim gulped and rushed at the door, jiggling the locked knob and ringing the bell. He heard no sound but the bell from inside.

Panicked, Salim ran around to the side of the house, let himself in through the gate and skirted the shrubs to reach the back door, which his parents never locked. He leapt over an herb garden, crossed the porch, and flung the door open.

Kapchorwa smell punched him in the face. He cried his sister’s name. He yelled for his mother and his father, but only got a mouthful of humid, stinking rot.

Salim ran up the stairs and checked his sister’s empty room. The sheets were gone, but the carpet and the mattress told the story of Ebola. He ran to the other end of the house and into his parents’ ridiculously large master bedroom. At the center of the long wall, on a king-size bed constructed of the heaviest looking oak-veneer particle board, lay the body of his father, contorted with pain, frozen by death, in an evaporated pool of all the fluids that ran out as the Ebola virus rotted his body from the inside out.

Salim collapsed onto the stained carpet as the toll of his decisions crushed any desire he had for his heart to pound out one more beat. The only people in the whole world that Salim loved had been killed by the virus that traveled to America in his own blood.

Two days passed, and Austin didn’t see Botu once. At first, food and water arrived as promised, placed outside the door by a rebel who hurried away. Then delivery stopped. For The General, food deliveries didn’t matter. He wasn’t eating. Austin was, though, and the generous portions helped a great deal with his strength and stamina.

Without Botu around to threaten him, and The General slipping between consciousness and delirium, Austin sat on the ground outside the door and leaned against the wall, breathing the fresh morning air. Around the camp, in the other huts, rebels were dying, and not doing it quietly.

A troop of monkeys was making a racket about something far up the mountainside. A couple of soldiers shuffled through the center of the camp, looking nervously from side to side, carrying their weapons, but carrying other things too: their few belongings, and food, pilfered from the camp stores. Austin looked on without interest. Soldiers had been deserting for days, running away from Ebola, taking a chance on survival.

Inside the hut, The General started to hiccup and woke himself.

For Ebola patients, hiccups were the death knell.

Weird, but what the hell.

Austin had no doubt this moment would arrive. He only wondered how he’d feel when The General finally died. He’d seen rebel bodies being dragged out into the forest for disposal, but all of them seemed oddly anonymous. To him, they were beings of one dimension that ignored or beat him, nothing else. When Ebola took them, the passing left no grief or guilt for Austin to feel.

The General called out and Austin looked into the hut’s darkness. He got up and went in to kneel by The General’s bedside. “Would you like some water?”

The General shook his head.

He was a charismatic sadist, but he was a helpless victim of Ebola, too. Austin despised, even hated The General, but it didn’t trouble him to fill the role of nurse. Austin dipped a cloth into a tub of cool water and laid it on The General’s forehead.

“You should run,” The General said.

Austin shrugged, impressed that The General was still coherent. “I will.”

“When I get better—” The General whispered wetly, as though the effort of those few syllables had taken all the energy he could muster. “When I get better, I’ll kill you, if you’re still here.”

Austin patted The General’s shoulder. “You won’t get better. You’ll be dead by sundown.”

The General slowly shook his head. “I’m strong.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Austin. “All you have left now is prayer.”

The General’s head lolled to the side and he looked out through the door. “Bring Botu to me.”

“He’s dead, or gone. I haven’t seen him in days.”

“Their faith was weak.”

“Yeah,” Austin agreed.

The General’s eyes closed and he seemed to go to sleep.

Austin stayed by his side. For hours, bubbles of blood started to grow out one of The General’s nostrils when he exhaled. Each would pop and another would form. Austin dabbed the blood away in an endeavor that grew more futile with each breath.

Night fell, and The General made a liar out of Austin by clinging to life.

“Ransom.”

The General’s voice startled Austin out of his thoughts. The General’s red eyes were open again.

“Yes?”

“After I die, will you take me to Masindi?”

“Masindi?” Austin asked. He’d never heard of the place.

“I was born there. I wish to be buried there.”

“I don’t know.”

The General’s hand reached out with surprising quickness, and even more surprising strength. It gripped Austin’s wrist. “Promise me, Ransom. Promise me you’ll take me back to Masindi.”

Lying, Austin said, “I will. Is Masindi in Uganda?”

“Masindi is in Africa.” The Generals eyelids fell shut again and his hand fell away from Austin’s wrist.

Austin continued to dab at the blood.

The General died.

The next morning, just as the sky was starting to lose its nighttime blackness, Austin disappeared into the jungle.