Containment: The Death of Earth

by Charlee Jacob

Marianna didn’t follow her. Laura was surprised. When she returned to the living room, she discovered her feline BFF struggling to drag the journal away.

  She reached down to take it. “I know you’re not getting your usual attention but—I promised Adam.”

  Laura sat back down. The cat lowered its head.

  “Come back up here with me. Please.”

  She patted the cushion next to her.

  Mariana wouldn’t leave the floor.

  “Come on, sugar. If you’re waiting for an invitation, here it is.”

  The cat refused to budge.

  Laura sighed. She was almost finished. She’d make it up to the cat afterward with ear-rubbing, chin-scratching, and belly-tickling.

  She opened the notebook to where she’d left off, then turned the page.

  Laura Laura Laura Laura Laura Laura Laura Laura Laura Laura

  I cannot do this anymore. No more.

  These are the End Times.

  Is it Science; is it Religion; is it Psychosis?

  The blister was like the Italian bubble, bursting to leave mountains of bone.

  Who is he and who am I?

  “My sins are your sins,” he told me.

  I replied, “Your sins are my sins.”

  And why was that both true and false?

  You and I somehow belong to him, yet I do not understand.

  It is the End Times, darling.

  The dead pass through the living like threshing machines.

  The plagues are now at the top of the food chain.

  The End Times.

  The Death of Earth.

  Laura grabbed her purse and car keys.

  Maybe the CDC wasn’t answering its phones. She’d still bang and bang on their door until they let her in to see him.

  Chapter 13

  ————

  “There is no discrimination in the forest of the dead.”

  —African Proverb

  ————

  The four ladies had walked all night. Three, pregnant and related by blood or fostering, were side-by-side. The last, all alone, straggled several feet behind them. Ubani watched them. Louise would hug first Asali, then Aziza, her smile full of reassurance and sympathy.

  Ubani coveted the little family, wishing she were related to them. But she could never be. She vowed to them once they reached Kimbilio, a small city in Kanisa, she would leave them.

  She didn’t want to. But they were somehow blessed at the core of their tragedies. All pregnant when—each for different reasons—they could not be, surely proof of some kind of holiness.

  Ubani’s suffering hadn’t been exalted. God, were it indeed God, chose few upon whom to bestow miracles.

  And she had no doubts. If it had only been one of them, this could be put down to a freak of nature. If two, something unusual in their blood line. But all of them? It could only be prodigious, even if it came anointed in blood.

  How stupid she felt about having paraded around in Louise’s finery. I only did what Sam Joto told me to do. He’d told her Louise had betrayed him and was dying of her sins in the hospital. He’d pretended to be a sad old man, playing on Ubani’s sympathies—and on a poor orphan’s desire for worldly prosperity. He’d studied her as she worked in his office, promised to marry her, after the sexually transmitted disease finally bore faithless Louise away.

  Sam. A lying sack! And Ubani thought of herself as loathsome. The fact that she hadn’t known the truth spared her no guilt.

  The others in Sam’s office. How they’d looked at her. As if she were the tramp. Even the cowardly neighbors glowered at her.

  Why hadn’t any of them simply told her the truth?

  Ubani knew why. Now. Because Sam Joto had a terrible temper. He browbeat people, intimidated them. And if he got mad enough—

  Ubani wondered if he’d paid someone to murder her. A killer could be looking for me this very moment.

  “Make sure she suffers,” Sam would have told him, smiling with his old man-lips. Ubani felt the sadness. She’d inherited it from her mother, depression no different a trait than the shape of the eyes or the ability to create great works of art. Often she was so unhappy the world seemed to allow her only a 4-foot square. A prison. She couldn’t move herself from it, take no step in any direction nor even reach out her arms. She couldn’t be touched or touch others.

  “Ubani! See, we are in Kimbilio!” Asali shouted, waving for Ubani to catch up.

  The streets bustled with people, yet it was quiet. Ubani jumped aside as a string of people stumbled past her, clutching each other for guidance. Others had grotesquely gigantic portions to some body parts. She saw men and women whose hair and skin had fallen off. People squirted blood from orifices or had maggots crawling in open sores.

  Louise stopped and called for everyone to step off the road.

  There was a notice nailed to a post at the towns’ limits.

  Onyo! Ambukizo!

  ugonjwa mbaya wa koo ndani wa kuanbukiza

  homa mbaya matumboni

  homa kali iletwayo na chawa

  ndui

  kipindupindu

  mateso

  namna ya maradhi ya wanyama

  ugonjwa Fulani

  kaswendi

  kisonono

  surua

  makamasi

  ugonjwa wa ngozi wa vilengelenge

  ugonjwa wa wazimu wa mbwa

  ukoma

  kidinga popo

  matubwitubwi

  ndigano

  homa ya papasi

  homa ya vipindi

  homa ya malaria

  malale

  ugonjwa wa ngozi ineyofunika ubongo

  wala hawezi wala kugeuka

  halula

  namna moja ya ugonjwa kama safura au istiska

  ugonjwa wa mafigo

  ebola

  The notice then related in English:

  Warning! Contagion!

  Diptheria

  Typhoid

  Typhus

  Smallpox

  Cholera

  Plague

  Anthrax

  Tuberculosis

  Syphilis

  Gonorrhoea

  Measles

  Influenza

  Herpes

  Rabies

  Leprosy

  Dengue Fever

  Mumps

  East Coast Fever

  Tick Fever

  Relapsing Fever

  Malaria

  Sleeping Sickness

  Meningitis

  Quinsy

  Beri Beri

  Bright’s Disease

  Ebola

  The notice went on to put the list additionally in French and Arabic. It cautioned that these diseases were mutated into newer, deadlier forms and were being passed on by ‘Persons Unknown’.

  “Why are the dead at my doorstep?”

  The troupe turned to find a woman standing behind them.

  The woman poured out her story. “I escaped through a window. I went to my neighbor’s house but she was dead. I ran to the next house. They were all sick in bed or on the floor, waiting to die.”

  A group of schoolchildren trooped by, singing as if out for a picnic.

  She whispered fearfully to them, “Nyamaza! Tulia!”

  But the kids sang on.

  “I see dead people;

  You see dead people.

  We see the dead frown;

  Then we all fall down.”

  A group of other children, so covered in pox they had no features, somehow walked… Right through the first group of youngsters, as easily as shadows slip through light. And then they did fall down.

  “Nifanyeje? What am I to do? Why are the dead at my doorstep?” The woman pleaded with them, ignoring the schoolchildren who writhed upon the road, sores appearing so fast it was obvious they had little time left to live.

  “Ah! Masalale!” Asali cried out, stepping toward the stricken children. Louise and Aziza hurried to pull her back but the wom
an blocked their way, wailing, “Why do the dead bother me? What have I ever done to them?”

  “Asali!” Louise called to her daughter.

  A man appeared, bleeding out, but the blood not running down but trailing off into the air like the flames from the forest fire the night before. He lurched toward Asali. Louise and Aziza couldn’t get past the crazy woman.

  Ubani grabbed the woman by her braids, slinging her into the bleeding man’s path. As blood began flowing from the woman’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth, she raised her hands to the sky. Ubani jumped into the road to scoop Asali up the best as she could.

  “But those kids…” the girl protested.

  “Come away. They’re as good as dead,” Ubani replied, depositing the pregnant yet scrawny child back with her family.

  Then a great shout arose, combined of many voices into one, from Kimbilio. It continued as a single long note of terror, then an agonizing silence—

  Ghosts.

  Everywhere.

  No way to escape them unless you could fly.

  As if to illustrate the fallacy of even this thought, a flock of birds flew overhead. Another flock winged into them, through them, and the first flock fell as hailstones to the earth.

  Grasses rustled obscenely, as if an army of snakes was on a slithering march. Yet there she stood, an unstrung marionette lifting her arm by the will of the wind alone. She wept tears sweet as juice, voice a rising/falling keen to announce her ever-present grief. A ghost well-known to Louise and Aziza, the mango woman beckoned.

  “Let’s go to her,” Louise said.

  But the four had already begun to run toward her, dodging the dead and dying. They tumbled, rolled through the grass, pregnant though they were. What of Louise? Running, just emerged from a six-month-long coma. Aziza, while never frail a day in her life, was almost seventy. Asali had suffered a gash in her leg which had severed muscle and tendon, leaving her with a pronounced limp. Ubani could easily have outdistanced the other three, maneuvering between confused apparitions like the heroine in a video game.

  But she kept pace with them, for she loved them, stopping to help when they fell. Ubani especially loved Asali. Although her own youth had been terrible, she couldn’t imagine suffering the child’s injuries, or lying beneath the bodies of the butchered classmates and nuns, then having the curry chicken and honor to dig graves for them—taking her six months.

  An insurgent convoy went by. The group ducked in the tall grass. Only the mango woman stood, loudly lamenting.

  “They don’t see her,” Aziza noted.

  Louise blinked, then gasped. “That is because they are ghosts also.”

  Covered in blood, their wounds were terrible. Some marched by without their heads. Others, with holes in their torsos such heads would have fit through, wore grisly trophies around their necks, cut from people whose bodies they had savaged before they were themselves cut down. They also bore the marks of a mortal contagion. Someone came along to find the rebels dead from a disease. In revenge—perhaps from having lost his family—he desecrated the bodies with the rebels’ own weapons. Being contaminated, then, too, this vindicator soon died.

  Asali stood up. “Hey, you’re pigs! Do you know that?”

  “Asali, get down,” Aziza told her. “We don’t know they’re ghosts.”

  “Yes, they are,” Ubani said, getting up, too. “They can’t see us, but we can see them. Worlds intersected…”

  “It’s sorcery,” Aziza declared, standing with Ubani’s help.

  “None of them will come close to the mango woman,” Louise said. “Even if they can’t see her, they feel her.”

  Their orange guardian had tramped down grass in a large circle. Her copious tears sparkled as nectar in that ring, a thin line of them, unbroken. Each tear joined the next and that next touch the one that followed it, and so on. She waved them into the circle. Then she disappeared, into earth or air.

  “Look!” Asali cried out in despair.

  More ghosts. She knew them. They were nuns and many of her classmates, they who had died in the convent’s hospital of some of the many ills particular to equatorial forests.

  They watched as more dead marched by, from centuries, from thousands of years, and from only hours. Safe within the mango woman’s circle, they watched as the ghosts went past until the sun set and the world dropped into darkness.

  ««—»»

  They heard the predators, saw their eyes shining in the night, smelled the heat of their bodies and breaths. The sounds vary from growling to yips to panting.

  The ghosts—despite effusive blood, gangrenous sores, emetic and dysenteric floods…had no scent to them.

  The four huddled in the circle. Soon they heard more animals come. Yet none attacked.

  “Mama Mzazi,” asked Asali. “I have but one arm now. Will I be able to hold my baby when it’s born?”

  Louise answered quietly, “Yes, of course. Besides, we will be there to help you.”

  “Don’t be afraid, kipenzi. It will be all right,” Aziza told her.

  “It won’t look like me, will it?” Asali wanted to know. “Head like a zero?”

  “Our tribe, the Kifo, all have round heads,” Louise reminded her.

  Asali fretted. “Not as round as mine. And I want to have a beautiful baby.”

  The creatures so close had eyes like the stars in the sky. What were they? Lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas?

  They heard a yawn and then a steel trap snap, then another snap, almost as startling as a gunshot in silence. Lake Mojonsi was nearby, providing the main water source for Kimbilio. They knew this sound. Crocodiles.

  Still, the mango woman’s circle kept them safe.

  They couldn’t see each other. There was no moon. But Ubani put her arm around the child and hugged her.

  “There was a little girl in the village where I lived with my mother. Her name was Asali, too. She was about your age.”

  “Did you play together, Ubani?” the child asked her.

  “No, I was only five or six. Too young. But I know the story they told about her after she left the village.”

  “Can I hear it?”

  “Sure.”

  Louise and Aziza smiled as Ubani began.

  ««—»»

  “I’ll tell it as I heard it,” said Ubani, stroking Asali’s hair. “It begins with a dark ship coursing through changing stars, landing on the Uzuri family’s home. It quivered on the back slates of the roof. So gently it landed, it broke not a single tile. Young Asali Uzuri heard it sing, vibrating her round head as a harp string bent to form zero.

  She ran to her older brother’s room, shouting, “The dark ship is here!”

  He hit his sister with a pillow, then drove her back out into the hallway. He yelled, “All girls are stupid!”

  Asali watched next evening as it descended again, landing like a sleepy dragonfly on the Uzuris’ roof. This time she ran to her little sister’s room, whispering, “The dark ship is here.”

  Little sister screamed until Asali hid under the bed, unable to see the violet dripping down the window.

  “Shut up!” Asali cautioned.

  “But I’m having a nightmare!” wailed the little sister.

  Asali tried to reason with her. “Maybe it is like riding the black camel from Arabia on carnival day. You like that, remember?”

  “That camel bites,” her sister reminded her, rubbing her arm from only two weeks ago. Asali had been bitten and stepped on. Asali’s eyes moved to the camel’s teeth marks on her skin. They didn’t look sore anymore but were like poetry pressed through the flesh.

  The dark ship left again. There were no scratches or broken tiles on the roof. There were no bent or broken stems among the cannas and birds-of-paradise flowers that grew in the fragrant garden.

  In the morning Asali stared at blue sky and sun. She wondered if the ship became invisible during the day, as did stars and dreams.

  Asali wept, hating herself for lacking courage to in
vestigate the ship when she knew it was there, had actually seen it with her own eyes. I am cynical like my brother, she thought. And just a frightened girl like my sister.

  Very early that morning Asali walked to the village cemetery behind the church. She’d picked an armload of red daisies.

  Her father’s grave bore a headstone. There was no body in the casket. He had never come home after flying someplace were clouds swirled into ribbons striped like tigers, and the breath of wild sugar gave birth to worlds.

  “Baba usemi wa kitoto. The dark ship was on our roof again,” Asali said softly.

  She didn’t remember him much. She only knew that he’d perished in the sky, after seeking the songs of drums and night’s fertile reveries which had played for him since his own childhood.

  Asali felt music in her round zero head. During showers of falling stars she closed her eyes, flying out of herself to greet each incoming burst of stone. During eclipses, she imagined the moon—black—as having lit upon their house. If she held her breath long enough, she swelled up to match it. Together, Asali and the moon floated away from the earth.

  The grave murmured nothing, being a creature of soil and empty besides. Frustrated, she tore up the daisies and flung the petals. They fell in slow light, an exotic condition of grief.

  She ran home. Everyone she passed pointed at her. “Have you ever seen such a round head?” they asked each other.

  Once home, Asali stormed into the kitchen. She rummaged through the drawers and cupboard. There must be pictures of her father somewhere.

  In the photographs she finally discovered, why did he always seem to have one ear cocked, as if listening to a distant music? And why was his skull so round?

  Asali went up to her room, watching the sun as it lost its balance on the horizon, tossing its last rays like an armful of daisies. She waited, listening as everybody went to bed.

  At last the dark ship came down, the way a child’s sigh floated to crumbled earth.

  Asali rushed to her mother’s room…her last hope.