The White Book

by George Shadow

  “Well, yes,” Rachel said.

  “But you’ll move these people further into the future when you write down their names, right?” Aiden wondered aloud.

  “I guess so,” Rachel said, frowning.

  “Still you’ll meet them when you touch their names, wherever you’ve moved them to, wherever they eventually find themselves in space and time,” Kimberley concluded for the strange girl. “Just brilliant,” she added sarcastically. “Will you know this Ezra fellow when you see him?”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Rachel began. “He’s short, fat and always happy. Who wouldn’t recognize him a mile away?”

  “And where do you think we’ll find him, smart girl?” Aiden put in.

  “In a school or some university,” the little girl revealed. “I usually find the people I am looking for in such places.”

  “So we’ll find him in a university here,” Kimberley started.

  “Or a hospital,” Rachel added. “Anywhere there is professional work going on.”

  For once, Kimberley admired the girl’s attentive evaluation of the bizarre situation they’d all found themselves in, wondering whether this same strange individual was saying the truth, or comfortably stammering.

  The old Toyota Sienna drew nearer. It had three African occupants. A man and a woman sat at the front, while a young boy took up the last seat behind the man, who drove the car.

  “Good evening, Dr. Katie,” the driver said through his open window once he pulled up. “I hope all is well?”

  “How do you mean?” Kimberley blurted out. She had no idea where the conversation was headed.

  “I mean, you’re on foot, doctor,” the man explained. “What happened to your car?”

  “It broke down a few minutes ago,” Kimberley said. She didn’t know what she was saying. Then she realized she had briefly held the man’s hand moments ago. Did that contribute in anyway to the words she’d been uttering? Strangely, she felt so.

  “Is it the red Cherokee back there?”

  “Yes,” Kimberley replied.

  “Can it be fixed now?” the man asked her. “Luckily, I have my tool kit with me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Kimberley said. “A team is coming for it, and us, just that they’re really taking time.” She still felt strange. “Where are you going with your family, Sankoh?” That one came from nowhere.

  “I’m taking my son to the capital,” Sankoh said. “He’s not feeling well and I think a doctor needs to look at him.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Rachel wanted to know, looking around as if she was expecting an unearthly intrusion anytime soon.

  “Nothing serious, young lady,” Sankoh replied. “Nothing a hospital visit cannot take care of.” The woman seated beside Sankoh nodded. Kimberley knew this lady to be the man’s wife.

  The sergeant-turned-doctor looked at the boy sitting far behind the man driving the Sienna. Her new doctor’s knowledge of Ebola told her that the emergency was being handled as well as the present situation would allow. Besides, the boy’s father seemed quite sure of his assessment of his son’s condition and she saw nothing unusual to doubt his evaluation when she looked his child over.

  Now, she turned back to the car’s driver. Speaking about the virus could rattle the man’s confidence in deciding what was best for his son. And besides, the boy would get the best available treatment in the capital. “We need to get to Freetown as well,” Kimberley said. “Can we hitch a ride with you?”

  “Of course,” Sankoh said. “You must be itching to get back to your work on the virus. That is very important work, right?” His wife nodded again.

  “Exactly,” Kimberley said with ironic satisfaction. The man just brought up the one thing she’d tried to keep from him. “I am not just a doctor; I’m also a scientist investigating the Ebola virus.”

  “Well, yes, that…that is correct,” Sankoh stammered, staring at the lady in a laboratory coat. “At least, you told us that much when you came to our town meeting yesterday, remember?” He opened the car door to the passenger space behind him and looked on as the little girl with the American scientist refused to enter his car.

  “I’m not going with you,” Rachel told him.

  “Why not?” a frustrated Kimberley asked.

  “You know why,” Rachel burst out, turning to the female-sergeant-turned-scientist. “We’re putting them in danger! The Gray Ones will get them if we travel with them since the book cannot protect many people at once.”

  “What do you mean, my dear?” Sankoh asked her.

  “She is talking of a movie she saw yesterday, sir,” Aiden said as quickly as he could. “Please ignore her.”

  “We don’t have all day, Stacey,” Kimberley told Rachel. “Besides, the Gray Ones will catch up with us if we don’t get to Freetown and meet Ezra before they get here, right?”

  “Maybe,” Rachel said, uncertainty written all over her face.

  “Are we still thinking about this?” Kimberley grumbled, and both kids climbed into the Sienna before she followed suit. She helped them fasten their seat belts before locking herself down.

  “So we’ll find this…Ezra in Freetown?” Aiden whispered to Rachel and Kimberley frowned at him.

  “Maybe,” Rachel said.

  “It doesn’t matter if we catch the virus, Mum,” Aiden whispered to Kimberley and Sankoh’s wife turned around in consternation. “We’ll leave this place and time once we meet Ezra and he succeeds in stopping those things, right?” This question went to Rachel.

  “Maybe,” the little girl repeated.

  “What things?” the woman in the front passenger seat asked Aiden.

  “Don’t mind him,” Kimberley told her. “Harvey likes making things up. Too much time on his PlayStation.”

  “Are these your children, doctor?” Sankoh wanted to know.

  “Yes, they’re leaving the country,” Kimberley said, glancing furtively at Aiden and Rachel. “They–They’re off to a holiday back home.” She knew better. The Ebola situation was getting out of hand and, having lived for sometime in the country with her kids, she’d thought it best to send them back before things got worse. Where did all that memory come from?

  “You mean it’s not about the pandemic?” Sankoh asked, starting his car’s engine.

  “Yes.”

  “So, you don’t travel with luggage?”

  “Their father took their things to Freetown yesterday,” the police-sergeant-turned-Ebola-scientist lied.

  Sankoh’s wife turned to her husband. She looked worried.

  “We’ve been very careful with David,” Sankoh told Kimberley as the Toyota slowly picked up speed. “We’ve made sure since this whole thing started that he’s home-schooled. So, I really don’t think his condition is anything other than a simple cold.”

  “The hospital will find out what the matter is,” Kimberley told the man’s wife in a bid to allay her fears.“Hope you took his temperature?”

  “36.5 degrees,” Sankoh said. “That’s why I don’t think it is anything worse than a cold.”

  “I pray you’re right,” his wife said.

  Kimberley noted the frown on the woman’s beautiful face. She also caught Aiden glancing at the boy in the car’s back seat from time to time. She nudged him, but couldn’t help looking, herself.

  David could be Aiden’s junior by a year. He just sat there respectfully and quietly. He smiled at the American scientist, whose attention appeared drawn to his face for reasons best known to her.

  Kimberley’s gaze remained on the boy’s face, because her voice had failed her when she saw what she saw.

  Was that blood on his nose?

  The Sienna bounced once and flipped over as if upturned by a gigantic hand. Glass shattered on both sides of the vehicle as Sankoh’s wife started screaming. Everything slowed down as long shimmering hands plunged into the vehicle’s cabin through the broken windows. Kimberley realized she was shouting like the others. She saw the hands before her scari
ly pass through Sankoh’s head in a ghostlike manner. His wife didn’t escape the same fate.

  The slow motion stopped and the old Toyota slid off the dusty road on its roof, halting a few feet away.

  * * *

  Carl Bain looked around and sighed. He wore white like the other four men. White with a surgical cap, goggles for his eyes, respirator for his lungs, and yellow rubber gloves and boots for his hands and feet respectively. The piece of paper with the girl’s name had brought him here once he touched the name like he did the first time. At least, he thought, his Caucasian targets would stand out if they were in the vicinity since all he could see were black faces.

  “Hey,” he called out to one of the men with him. “Where are we?”

  The man appeared puzzled by the question. “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Where are we, I mean, which part of town are we in?” Carl Bain tried to reframe.

  “We’re miles from Freetown, sir,” another man said, quizzically looking at the foreigner.

  “Okay,” Carl Bain said. “Thanks.” Freetown meant Sierra Leone, so he’d been brought to West Africa by the mysterious paper. “Have you seen any other foreigner here?”

  “That should be in Freetown,” the first man said.

  “Right, so I need to get to Freetown now,” Carl Bain said. He moved to remove his gloves.

  “No, sir, please don’t,” a third man warned him. “We’re already in an Ebola-infected house. You know you can only do that when you go outside.”

  “So, where the hell is the exit door?” the American snapped.

  “Our instructions are to bury the occupant of this house, disinfect the rooms before going back to Freetown, sir,” the first man said angrily. “If you go back to Freetown now, your action will cause us our jobs.”

  “Watch me,” Carl Bain said. He turned to leave the passageway in which they all presently occupied and two of the men blocked his path. They were both tall and hefty looking men. “Out of my way, will you?” he ordered them, eyeing a frying pan hanging from a nail on the wall to his left.

  “We’ll soon go back to Freetown, sir,” the fourth man, who carried a spray tank, said. “This is just a burial procedure, and it will not take time.”

  “Don’t think that because you’re a white man, you can do anything you want to do here, sir,” the first man threatened respectfully. “You have a job to do like the rest of us. You’re behaving like this, because you’re in Africa.”

  “And remember you’re here to witness this and report back to the center in Freetown, sir,” one of the men blocking his way added. “Which car do you even want to go to Freetown with? Just know that I’ll never hand you the keys to our SUV. Freetown is very far from here, if you must know.” His fellow Sierra Leoneans joined his short laughter.

  Carl Bain studied the situation. They would all join hands to pummel him if it came down to a fight, and even if he could finally dash to safety, he couldn’t walk to Freetown if it was miles away like they told him. He still needed to get the car keys from one of the hefty men now blocking his path. The fellow would never hand over that possession without breaking his neck first. He wished he still had that Kalashnikov. “Okay,” he said as the Africans looked on. “Let’s be quick, then.”

  He slammed his right fist into the face closest to him, dodged an incoming blow from his right and kicked the man with the spray tank in the groin. Grabbing the frying pan on his left, Carl Bain avoided a second blow from the hunk with the car keys and slammed the cooking utensil into his first attacker’s left flank.

  Mr. Keys got an uppercut from the pan and sprawled on the floor.

  The remaining Africans tried to avoid being hit by the mad American holding the instrument that had knocked out their colleague. They hoped for a chance to charge this offensive white man again as they drew nearer.

  But Carl Bain had other ideas. He attacked first, swinging the aluminum pan in an arch, which connected with a head and blacked someone out.

  The last man turned and fled just as the foreigner stopped before Mr. Keys, who lay motionless on the cold floor.

  The American bent down and felt the knocked-out hunk’s sides for signs of a key. “Your friends underestimated me,” he told the fellow carrying the tank, who lay groaning some feet away. “Now I’ll be on my way.”

  Looking around, he found a pair of scissors on a table in the passageway and used it to slit the hefty man’s protective suit to free the car keys.

  “You’re a mad man,” the African carrying the spray tank said. “Now, he’ll be infected with Ebola!”

  “He won’t be worried about that if he’s dead,” Carl Bain pointed out.

  “But he’s still breathing.”

  “Then he’ll be worried when he wakes up. You can use that thing you’re carrying on him, then. This is an emergency, right?”

  Stepping outside with the frying pan in hand, Carl Bain noticed the angry villagers chanting a few feet from the compound. They didn’t pose any threat since they couldn’t attack him for fear of the virus. He pulled off his goggles, respirator, gloves and boots, and discarded the protective suit. Nobody approached him when he left the compound. They just made a pathway for the mad foreigner with a frying pan as he walked to the Toyota RAV4 parked beside a mango tree. Who knew where he would find the trio holding his property now? Who even knew whether these targets of his were still in that African country?

  The last thing Carl Bain saw as he drove away were his friends in the brawl trying to resuscitate Mr. Keys in front of the Ebola victim’s house. Of course, they must have notified the authorities about the incident, but being chased by the local cops and army did not bother the American behind the RAV4’s wheel as much as knowing that he must have exposed himself to a deadly virus he’d never heard of before then.

  All this would go away once he killed that police sergeant and retrieved his property. The virus, the authorities now probably chasing him, and this cursed country. He would find a way to go back to his time and place with the paper, which must have come from that white book the little girl with his prey had with her. Maybe he would confiscate that book as well. Maybe it would help him get back to Portwood faster.

  Chapter 6: David’s Infection and the Sienna Offensives

  KIMBERLEY started and searing pain shot through the back of her head. She looked around her and realized the car’s ceiling hung beneath her. She still had her safety belt on, meaning that they still sat in the Sienna. Upside down, that is.

  The vehicle started rocking from side to side.

  “They’re getting bolder. We must hurry now!” a fearful Rachel said beside Aiden, who turned his head slightly, feeling the car’s ceiling with his hands.

  “Let’s get out,” Kimberley told the boy and struggled to free herself from her seat. Using her left hand, she blocked her fall onto the car’s ceiling before slowly lowering her body once she was free from the seat.

  She forced a door open before unfastening Aiden and helping him to crawl out of the car. The boy gasped at seeing Sankoh and his wife still strapped to the front seats and rocking from side to side with the car’s rhythm. Kimberley didn’t know how to deal with that tragedy at the moment, although she knew that Aiden and Rachel must have figured out what happened to their hosts on their own. What of the man’s son?

  Turning back into the vehicle, she picked out the boy, David, at the back row of seats. He looked terrified. “Hang on in there,” she told him, and proceeded to unfasten Rachel’s seat belt, gently lowering the little girl afterwards.

  As Rachel crawled out with her precious book firmly underneath her right arm, Kimberley adjusted the seats so that she could get to the boy at the back, whose nose wasn’t bleeding.

  What had she seen before the accident?

  “Daddy…,” he began.

  “I’ll look him up,” Kimberley told the boy. “Let’s get you out first.” She could be wrong about his having the virus. After all, his father found his temperature to be fa
irly normal.

  An explosion jolted her as Sankoh’s son screamed from the back seat. Looking back, Kimberley saw that the Toyota’s rear windshield had shattered. The car’s mysterious rocking increased to become vibrations shaking her soul. Destabilizing fatigue gripped her in slow motion, and she thought she saw long eerie hands grope into the vehicle a second time. Amidst screams coming from Rachel, Aiden and David, who was still with her in the car, Kimberley blacked out when an unearthly hand reached for her face as a fading image of a small gust twirling round Rachel’s book in the distance persisted before her.

  She woke up sprawled on the upturned car’s ceiling.

  “Daddy,” David groaned and Kimberley recollected what just happened. The dragging fatigue had gone, so she knelt upright, reached out and released the boy’s seat belt. He craned his neck to see what sat in the car’s driver’s seat, but Kimberley prevented a good view by turning him towards the open door and guiding him out with some force. She silently thanked Aiden for instinctively pulling the boy to the Toyota’s rear as soon as he got out of the car. “I want to see my parents!” the boy said as the sergeant-turned-scientist crept out of the upturned vehicle.

  A worn-out Rachel sat before the Sienna’s open door amidst heaps of ash Kimberley could not fit into the picture before her. Aiden still held the boy, David, to her left. “That was a second attack,” Kimberley said.

  “And we–we survived it,” Rachel breathed, scratching her hair.

  “There was no warning,” Kimberley realized. “The weather didn’t turn cold like before the previous attacks.”

  “It didn’t warn us in the car as well,” Rachel pointed out.

  “Maybe they’ve found a way to go round the book’s warning system?” Aiden suggested with a frown. “What good has the warning done for us, anyway? None at all.”

  “I want to see my daddy!” David began again.

  “You’ve got to calm down first, okay?” Aiden cajoled the younger boy, resisting his efforts to break free. “Just calm down first, okay? Then you’ll see him.”