The Virophage Chronicles (Book 2): Dead Hemisphere [Keres Rising]

by Landeck, R. B.

  “Praise be to God!” Amadou looked up to the ceiling in a never-before-seen display of piety.

  “Holy shit!” Nadia exclaimed, this time with added determination.

  “Help me bring her downstairs to the couch,” Tom instructed, and they sprang into action.

  Grabbing sheets, first aid kit, and their weapons, they stormed down the stairs. Cradling her in his arms, Tom carefully carried Anna down to the living room and placed her on the makeshift bed on the couch the others had already prepared. Gently lifting one of her eyelids, he shone a small flashlight into her eyes. Her pupils reacted without delay, contracting just as they should. Tom let out a sigh of relief.

  “Holy shit.” Nadia struggled to find any other words.

  “Quick, get some hot water ‘Ms. Holy Shit’. Make yourself useful!” Papillon barked at her, and for once, she didn’t dare retort.

  As Nadia made her way to the kitchen, Tom continued his primary examination, ensuring vital signs were there and stable, or at least as stable as they could be under the circumstances. Towards the end of his survey, he fearfully started unwrapping the bandage, which had kept Anna from bleeding out hours earlier. If there was any sign of infection, all rejoicing would have been in vain.

  Layer after layer, Tom peeled back the bandage, and he felt nauseated by the thought that this could be but a momentary reprieve. A small bloodstain began to appear, growing bigger rapidly with each layer removed until the amalgam of coagulated blood and bandage formed one solid mass that did not permit him to go any further. The bleeding had been stopped in its tracks, but whether or not the infection was still spreading would need to be seen. Impatiently Tom lifted the sides of the bandage around the wound but could see nothing untoward, let alone anything like the dark web of infected veins he had seen spreading out from the site of a bite so many times since he had arrived that day at the research station.

  “I think we might be in the clear.” Tom managed, fighting hard to hold back tears of joy.

  “God is good, man.” Amadou smiled.

  “What the fuck?” Papillon cast Amadou an incredulous glance, and the three broke out in nervous laughter.

  “What have I missed?” Nadia returned, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, holding a water kettle, wearing a pink oven glove, and a servant’s apron. The three looked at each other and then back at her.

  “Is that you, Mary Poppins?” Papillon quipped in his best attempt at an English accent, before rolling around the floor in stitches.

  “Mary what?” Amadou, not really understanding the joke, laughed along anyway.

  Soon until they both laughed hysterically, eventually dropping to the floor.

  “Men.” Nadia shrugged and returned to the kitchen.

  The fit of laughter over, Papillon and Amadou joined Tom by Anna’s side. She was sweating profusely now, a fever slowly but surely raging within her weakened system.

  “She was bitten, non?” Papillon asked, trying to understand.

  “Yes,” Tom replied quietly, worried any louder utterance would bring about the terrible reality they still feared. “She was bitten.”

  “But she is alive. I mean, she hasn’t turned into these things.” Papillon tried to make sense of the situation.

  “Yes. For some reason, she is.” Tom had no explanation.

  “Mon Dieu!” Papillon’s quizzical look darted back and forth between him and Anna.

  He watched the two for a few minutes in anticipation, but Tom had no further insights to provide.

  “Let me go and see what Ms. Poppins in doing.” Eventually, Papillon announced and made his way to the kitchen in the back of the house.

  “God…” Amadou had been sitting there watching Anna with pious admiration.

  “Yes, we know. God is good.” Tom interrupted him before he could finish the sentence.

  He had never been much for the kind of endless worship, submission, and guilt-tripping, which seemed to dominate so many churches the world over. And with the dead coming to life, not to mention his wife having fallen victim to them a mere few hours earlier, he felt more than just rising anger at whatever deity had permitted such misery to be added to the already long list of human suffering.

  “Sorry, Amadou. But let’s not go there. Not today, Ok?” Tom managed a wry smile.

  “I understand, don’t worry.” Amadou offered in reconciliation. “I guess one day I should explain.”

  He was very much aware that he had never spoken about his beliefs, let alone professed to his devotion to Christ. But with everything that had happened, he increasingly felt the urge to let the others know that not all was lost. Let them know that the God he knew would ultimately be their saviour. But for now, he thought it was best to keep it to himself. The last thing he needed was to be branded a zealot at best and a preferably-gotten-rid-off annoyance at worst. He got up quietly and went to join the others.

  Nadia and Papillon didn’t notice him entering the colonial-style cooking area, which gave way to a chef’s table, prep island, and pantry towards the rear. Instead, they were staring through the wide kitchen window covered only by a thin net curtain, focused on something or someone outside.

  “What’s going on?” Amadou whispered, by now knowing better than to raise his voice when near a door or window. Having grabbed a half-rotten apple from a decaying fruit basket on the kitchen table, he started eating around its soft brown mouldy patches and joined them.

  He had barely reached the sink when he saw what they were staring at. The house, part of and at the upper end of a row of townhouses built into a small hillside, offered excellent views of the main road that passed the property on its way from the nearby heart of Westlands - the affluent area dominated by expensive apartments, restaurants and entertainment venues – to the outer suburbs. Snaking past antiquated strip malls, shipping containers-turned-retail outlets, petrol stations, ramshackle BBQ joints, and low-end accommodation, it eventually disappeared into the forest a few miles further up. There the rich and powerful lived in lush, heavily guarded compounds where expansive colonial villas sat like defiant ogres of brick and steel; stubborn reminders of how little had changed since the British relinquished their colonies and sailed back to their isles.

  “Looks like they’re on the move again,” Nadia whispered through the corner of her mouth.

  Along the road, all the way from the suburbs, an endless stream of shuffling figures, a slow-moving avalanche of rotten flesh, stumbled towards downtown. Like a festering giant worm, hundreds, if not thousands of dead, were on the move, covering every inch of tarmac, falling into drainage ditches and pushing up against the myriad of abandoned vehicles along the way.

  “How many people live in this city?” Papillon asked in a hushed tone.

  The windows were well glazed and kept any noise from penetrating, but given what they were looking at, nobody dared to raised their voice.

  “Lived,” Nadia corrected. “Around 4 million, give and take a few thousand lived here.” She clicked her tongue and took a seat on one of the chairs at the kitchen table.

  “What’s up?” Still trying to eat around a mouldy patch on the apple in his hand, Amadou looked at the Russian.

  “I am no expert on this city, but I have been here enough times to know the layout. This used to be our R&R spot. We would fly down from Juba every few weeks for…what do you call it…a bit of a good time.” She straightened and gave a forlorn smile as her mind took a brief trip down memory lane.

  “The pilots used to party with girls from the slums. They were always up for anything and easy to get. They would pick them up in the afternoon at a local bar and drop them off again the next morning, a few days later, or whenever the party was over.”

  Papillon and Amadou looked at each other and then back at Nadia, not quite sure where the Russian was going with her story. Seeing their blank looks, she got up, walked back to the window and pointed out towards the forest areas in the distance.

  “You see, when thi
s thing started a few weeks ago, we had been here on one of our party trips for a week. We were due to go back to Juba the next day. So we dropped off our girls back in the slums. Well, we tried anyway. Because at the first sign of outbreak, the government sealed off all those areas. At first, it was just checkpoints, but this is Nairobi. People always find a way around things. So then they dropped the shipping containers to seal it tight and pulled barbed wire across all main roads in and out. Then the army took over. Protect the rich, you know?”

  Papillon and Amadou were still not sure what Nadia was trying to tell them. Resigned to the fact that she was not always quick to get to the point, they sat down at the table, straddled their chairs, leaning on their backrests as they listened.

  “For once, they were quite effective at keeping residents in and outsiders out. We dropped our girls off at one of the checkpoints and made a run for the airport. The last news I got before you guys appeared back in Juba, was that the army was containing outbreaks all around the poorer areas. And that AMISOM had formed additional units to contain whatever was happening. What I am seeing out here…” Nadia’s expression darkened,”…means they failed.”

  “Merde,” Papillon mumbled under his breath.

  Giving Amadou a nudge with his elbow, he whispered: “She keeps talking about our girls. Does that mean she is a…I mean, does that mean she doesn’t like men?”

  Amadou confirmed with a nod, careful not to chuckle at the big man’s confusion.

  “Merde.” Papillon hung his head in disappointment.

  If Nadia’s assessment was correct and the containment zones had been breached, then what they were seeing was not an exodus, but an influx of the dead into every other area of the city. It would not be long before they would filter through every street and property, effectively cutting off every living thing from the rest of whatever was left of civilization in this region.

  “So, what do we do?” Amadou felt a sense of panic but did his best to remain casual.

  “We need to go. Go soon. Go fast.” Nadia’s thoughts trailed off again as she continued watching the maelstrom of rotten flesh winding along the main road.

  Letting the reality of their situation sink in, the men sat silent for a minute or two, mustering the energy for what they already knew would be a hard slog. Then they returned to the living room, where they found Tom exactly as they had left him.

  Hovering over Anna, he dabbed her forehead with a damp cloth. They thought she looked decidedly better than before. Some colour had returned to her face, and her breathing seemed less laboured. But she still seemed weak, and her eyes still refused to open. They relayed Nadia’s observations as calmly as they could, but Tom could sense the urgency in their words. There was no doubt as to the fact that their hours, if not minutes in his home, were numbered. He felt exhausted, physically, and emotionally, and yet somewhere deep inside him, he felt a surge of energy at the thought of getting his daughter to safety. Anna was all he had left now. It was time to blow out the cobwebs, surrender the emotions, and get his mind into planning mode.

  Tom retrieved a roll of paper from a drawer in the desk near the fireplace, and the four gathered around the large coffee table. Gently removing framed photos of him, Julie and Anna, he spread out the map. Within moments these depictions life as it had been, became relics of happier days, of carefree times which would never return. Fighting thoughts of Julie still resting in the bedroom above, he focused on the street guide before him. Jointly they quickly identified their current location and drew circles around places of use or interest to them, along with potential danger areas.

  “Danger areas!” Tom smirked as he thought about the term. “Everything is a bloody danger area!”

  Nadia, being a pilot and used to reading maps, was particularly apt at directions and distances, while Papillon and Amadou, more or less strangers to the environment, kept busy discussing the finer points of what food and other resources to get, what kind of vehicle to acquire and where to possibly find it.

  From past experiences, they all knew two things to be true: Time was of the utmost essence, and any plan they devised was liable to change anyway, if not fail altogether. Once out there and committed, they would need to think on their feet. No plan ever survived first contact.

  “What is this Westgate thing?” Papillon asked, his index finger pointing at a small circle on the map, less than 2 miles from Tom’s home. “It is a gate to where or for what?”

  “Have you been living under a rock these past few years?” Nadia chuckled, earning her a stern look from the Frenchman. “No, seriously, have you ever watched any news at all?”

  “Huh?” Papillon looked dumbfounded.

  “It’s not a gate, it’s a mall,” Tom interjected. “There was a terrorist attack a few years back. Lots of people died, and the whole thing came down in the end. It made international news, big time.”

  “And for all the wrong reasons,” Nadia added knowingly.

  “I heard about it.” Amadou joined in. “It burned to the ground, didn’t it?”

  “That, it did.” Tom continued. “But they since rebuilt it pretty much exactly the way it was. As if nothing ever happened.”

  “The times we live in…” Papillon shrugged.

  “The interesting thing about it, though…” Nadia rubbed her chin and took a closer look at the map, “…is that the siege went on for several days if I remember correctly.”

  “How is that interesting?” Amadou gave her a sideways look.

  “You are right.” Tom, too, leaned in closer.

  Papillon and Amadou still weren’t following, looking back and forth between them.

  “Don’t you see? The terrorists held this thing for several days. Just a handful of them. It was built like a fortress.” Nadia explained wearily.

  “And they rebuilt it exactly the way it was,” Tom spoke slowly to make sure the penny finally dropped.

  Amadou and Papillon finally understood, and it was quickly decided that Westgate Mall would be the first staging point for their escape from the city. Going by how it had been designed, there were but a few entrances, all of them sealable with little effort. Sporting the best of what the Kenyan retail sector had to offer, they would be able to find anything and everything they needed inside. And if all else failed, the mall would at least provide an ideal place to hunker down until either the whole thing blew over or someone or something came to the rescue.

  From there, the next stop as they saw it would need to be some kind of local airstrip so that Nadia could once again put her skills to good use. With Mombasa highway likely choked, the only other alternative would be the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway, the only train connecting the city to the coast and anything in between. Whether it was still running or not, though, was anybody’s question.

  As ever, flying out would remain the preferred option. Where to, they hadn’t decided yet, but there were several hobbyist’s landing strips ordinarily less than an hour’s drive from the city. Heading for the coast, at this stage, seemed like the only logical choice. That was unless they wanted to drive, walk and ultimately crawl through the desert landscapes of Northern Kenya, or return to the lush plains and rainforests of Uganda and the Congo where they had just come from and which none of them was too keen to ever visit again. North or East were the only options, and neither stood a snowball’s chance in hell overland.

  Initially, they had thought moving at night would provide them with a distinct advantage, but their experience on the road to Juba had proven them dangerously wrong. The dead hunted by sight and sound, and thus taking away one of the corpses’ senses had been a good idea at the time. The survivors had quickly discovered that in practice, though, their own night vision was not half as good as they had estimated. Removing one of their own senses, thus, had but placed them but on par with an enemy, who despite being less agile or sophisticated in his approach, made up for it in numbers, perseverance and through his uncanny ability to seek out prey even when
it hid in the most hard-to-find places. They would still move at night, but given their past experience, they would need to be extra cautious.

  ”If you don’t mind, but can I remind you of, how do you say it, an elephant in this room?” Amadou was the first to comment.

  The others chuckled, but let him continue.

  “We are almost out of ammunition, have 3 real guns between the four of us, there are thousands of these things marching past this place, and we have nothing but the moon to help us see at night. I am sorry, but how do you expect to get to this mall, when we almost got eaten just coming here?”

  It was more a statement than a question, and both Papillon and Nadia instantly knew Amadou was right.

  “Oh, and then there is Tom’s daughter,” Amadou added. “One of us will be carrying her. That takes one person out of the battle completely.”

  Tom’s eyes narrowed at the mention of Anna, and he gave Amadou the kind of don’t-mess-with-me-or-my-family look only a father and husband could muster.

  “Just saying…” Amadou added sheepishly.

  “Well, gentlemen,” Tom’s mood seemed to lighten. “I guess you had better follow me then.”

  He got up and walked towards what looked like a bedroom-turned-office, where a big mahogany desk sat against the window, and a large hardwood filing cabinet occupied most of the wall on the other side.

  By now, the others knew not to question the man they had come to know as reliable as he was fierce and knowledgeable when it came to matters of survival. Curious and puzzled, they followed him into the room.

  Tom walked straight to the oversized cabinet, which, well over 6 foot wide, stood tall enough to almost reach the ceiling.

  “Well, as they say…” Tom began as he leaned his shoulder into the far side of the massive piece.

  “Fortune…” He grunted, putting his full weight into the dark wood.

  “…favours…” He hissed through gritted teeth, and the heavy unit began to shift.

  “….the prepared!” With one final shove, the cabinet screeched across the floor, revealing a small darkened opening behind it.