Viral

by James Lilliefors

  Dozens of them pushed toward the three turnstiles that allowed entrance. The cinderblock was recently painted white and shone with the morning sun. The men shuffled, keeping their eyes down, or looking at the country or up at the sky. Never at one another. They were in their twenties and thirties, some older, wearing stained T-shirts and trousers with rope belts. Most were barefoot. Jon smelled their dirty hair and soiled clothes as he moved with them. When it was his turn, he swiped his badge and the turnstile gave. Two guards watched as the men filed in, M14 semi-automatic rifles strapped to their shoulders. Jon stepped into the crowded building—a holding pen of some sort—smelling the stink of dirty bodies. Standing there in the dark room, he started noticing things, without trying to: that many of the men were coughing, but no one spoke; and that a few of the men were actually women. Everyone shuffled slowly forward, through an X-ray scanner and toward another station, the base of a dirt road, where they waited to board pick-up trucks to the work sites.

  As they passed out of the concrete building, the workers were each handed a cloth face mask, thin rubber gloves, paper towels, and a pill capsule. Jon climbed into the back of a pick-up with seven other men. Kip was already gone, two trucks ahead of him.

  Several of the men tore off pieces of paper towel, crumpled them into wads, and stuffed the paper into their nostrils. The trip to the work site took another ten minutes or so, over a rocky hill trail. Jon watched the scenery, pretending not to notice things—the man coughing with a deep rattle in his lungs, or the skinny boy-man on the floor who held his arms against himself and shivered incessantly even though the air was warm now. The road climbed to a rise and then twisted downhill into a beautiful valley, where a wide-banked river wound among the maize fields.

  It was as they approached the water that he began to understand what they were here to do and a shiver of revulsion raced up and down his back. God, no! This was why they had been handed the masks, and the gloves. Why some of them had shoved wads of paper towel into their nostrils. The gently sloping hillside across the water was covered with piles of dark-colored bundles. Trash bags, he had thought at first, but coming closer, Jon began to notice the body parts—awkwardly splayed arms and legs—and the picture came into focus. Piles of bodies, most of them unclothed, many of them bloated.

  Jon looked back, behind them. To the east, giant sheets of mosquito netting had been draped over tall bamboo poles to form what resembled a circus tent. At the far end of the tent, a bulldozer was lifting and unloading bodies into fresh piles, and the workers were gathering them, dragging and carrying them, two men to a body, to the backs of delivery trucks. The delivery trucks, presumably, were taking them to a burial ground or crematorium.

  Jon froze. He saw Kip for an instant among them, in the crush of men by the tent, shuffling forward, his shoulders glistening with sweat. Then he couldn’t see him anymore. Four days ago they were just like us, doing the same work. Remember that. Dozens of vultures circled the tent: that was the purpose of the netting. Of course.

  As the men moved along the road, they were divided by the military guards, steered—somewhat randomly, it seemed—either toward the tent and the burial grounds or else to a wooden plank bridge across the river. Jon lowered his head and forced himself to move. He fell in with a group of men who were directed to cross the river, over the plank bridge to a dirt road. The water was shallow and clean, reflecting the blue of the sky and the bright, billowy morning clouds. Loudspeakers had been set up at intervals along the river and played a crude, tinny-sounding reggae music. At several points in the distance, he noticed, the water was clogged with naked or half-naked corpses.

  Jon held his breath as he walked alongside the river with the others, but the putrid smell was there whether he breathed it or not. Another shiver of revulsion raced through him. In all directions, it was the same. So he kept his gaze lowered, staring at the dirt and trying to just move forward, a step at a time. But suddenly he felt overwhelmed. His legs buckled, he fell to his knees, and he threw up. And momentarily blacked out. When he stood, he expected to see a guard watching him, gun raised. But no one even seemed to notice.

  The men were divided again. Some were marched along the river to a clearing, where, working in twos, they loaded bodies into the backs of delivery trucks—a bakery van, old postal trucks—hoisting the men and women and children until they were piled five or six high. The other group was led to a row of five pick-ups, idling on the red hard-dirt road, and driven to the top of the hill. There was a way to do this, Jon thought as he sat in the back of another pick-up, tasting the stew from the night before. He began to concentrate on staying numb, trying not to think about what was in front of him, on just doing the physical work that he was asked to do. But he was angry, too. Why hadn’t Kip told him about this? Why had his brother sent him to see this?

  The pick-up climbed the hill, following the bodies. Farther east, bulldozers and earthmovers filled a long trough with what the trucks had delivered. Burial grounds.

  His detail was different. He was taken to the top of the hillside, in the bed of a pick-up with seven other men, none of whom acknowledged one another. One of them had vomit on his shirt, another could not seem to catch his breath. At the top, they went to work pulling cargo from the delivery trucks and laying the bodies out on a rocky outcrop—belly-down, in rows of five, spreading their limbs so that they would be easy prey. Then they returned to the trucks and waited for the birds to sail in from the trees.

  At first, it was hard not to watch: the immense wings kiting to the ground; the loping steps; five or six enormous birds covering a corpse at once, perching on its back, their crook-necked pecking, the squabbling for pieces, their heads turning red with blood. The bodies seemed to jerk up and down as if they were still alive. Within minutes, ribs appeared, the beginning of a skull, a column of vertebrae.

  When the birds at last lost interest and moved to another corpse, or returned to the trees, the workers broke apart the rest of the body with hammers and tossed the pieces to the vultures to finish.

  That was his job—the work that was required, the business that these men were willing to do, presumably because of the rewards they would receive at the end of the day. Jon willed himself to do it because there was no other choice. In the monotonous, mindless rhythm of his labor, he occasionally saw clearly how this had been worked out. There was too much death here even for birds of prey, so the burials had been split: the sky burials that fed the vultures; the burials underground, in pits deep enough to keep predators from digging up the earth; and perhaps others by fire.

  This was the work that Kip had taken him to witness, and that was his real job today: to be a witness. It was necessary work: Disposing of the victims of the flu, so that something else could take their place. It was all very simple, just as Kip had said.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE MEN WERE ALLOWED a break at 11:30. A rickety flatbed truck rattled up the hill with cardboard boxes full of oranges and apples and plastic bottles of water. The men gathered around and pushed forward until all of it was distributed. Jon sat on an edge of the hillside for a few minutes, in the shade of acacia trees. He ate his orange slowly, savoring the taste. But he couldn’t stop breathing the scent of death in the air, a putrid, slightly sweet fragrance the other men had evidently grown used to.

  And then he suddenly noticed that one of the guards was watching him. Every time Jon looked, the guard was staring. A fleshy man with a goatee, his expression a permanent smirk. Jon began to feel self-conscious, and then very nervous. He tugged his straw hat down over his eyes. He was sweating and wondered if his make-up was running. He touched his fingers to his face and checked. No, he was okay.

  He looked back and this time the goatee was talking with another guard. He didn’t care about Jon, after all. He stood and tried to lose himself among the other workers.

  At a certain point in the mid-afternoon, Jon could at last imagine the day ending, and the routine began to change: He was thinkin
g about how he would write this now, rather than how he would get through it. He was framing a story, composing the sentences, feeling a semblance of objectivity and detachment.

  But it still jolted him at times. The worst was two little girls who came out of the back of an electrical van—twin girls in torn pink pajama bottoms, no tops, maybe five or six years old. One of the men couldn’t do it. He turned his back and seemed to cry. Jon stepped away from him, remembering what Kip had said. Jon looked at the sky and closed his eyes; several moments later, he heard a gunshot. He and another worker carried the man out to the rocks, beside the girls, and walked away as the birds kited in for their feast. Hesitation was a crime up here. He glanced at the trees on the hills, filled with huddled, waiting birds, hundreds of them, like giant black leaves against the afternoon sky.

  Jon stayed in the rhythm of the work for the rest of the day, detaching himself the way he imagined soldiers did to stay sane. He felt increasingly tired and hot but also numb, forcing himself to keep going. This was a war that didn’t have a name yet, he understood. Something his brother had called “an invisible war.” In every war, there were atrocities; the only difference was degree. It didn’t matter if one side was propped up by an idea—of democracy or religious conviction or whatever else was used to sanction it. None of that made any difference, Jon realized—not to the innocent victims of the atrocities.

  As the sunlight began to soften, a voice broke in on the distorted reggae music over the loudspeakers and said “fifteen minutes.” Jon felt the quiet sighs of relief all around, although the men kept working just as diligently, as if they hadn’t heard. He wondered how far they had come for this—these workers who would themselves be buried in a few days.

  Jon helped to unload the final truck, carrying the bodies with a silent, emaciated-looking partner to the terraced, bone-strewn hillside. Mostly women and boys on this truck, a few girls. His gloves were crusty, thick with body fluids and dried blood, but the day was ending and he tasted cooler air in the breeze.

  One of the victims from this truck was a recent death, Jon noticed, as he lifted the feet and dragged. Another man who had been shot, like the man who had cried over the twin girls. Jon set his legs on the outcrop and spread them, glancing up quickly. A large, muscular man—feces had dried on the backs of his thighs; a black clump of tissue had congealed behind his ear—a bullet wound, the blood caked, still partly liquid. As he stretched out the man’s arms, Jon noticed a second bullet wound—an exit hole on the back—and abruptly let go, so that the man’s right arm thumped to the rock.

  No!

  He crouched closer to be certain, his heart pounding. He turned the face, saw Kip’s open, lifeless eyes, and quickly looked away, holding his own wrist as if he had broken it, pretending to be hurt so he wouldn’t be shot. The smirky guard from earlier watched him from afar. Jon Mallory held up his wrist and then retched, his body trying to throw up, to get rid of what he had just seen.

  THEY TRAVELED ON the backs of pick-ups down to the river, then waited for the return shuttles to the parking lot. Several times he closed his eyes, wanting to escape from what he had just seen. But he was still there, waiting, among these day-workers, who smelled far worse than they had in the morning—of soiled clothes and human fluids and a scent that reminded Jon of butcher shops. How could Kip have been killed, after all his warnings? Had it been some sort of sacrifice? Or something that had happened “for no reason,” as he had said? Jon would never know. All he could do was keep moving.

  Somehow, the evening breeze felt good, drifting up from the southern lowlands, so he turned his head at various angles, trying to catch it. His arms and back were already sore from the day’s work. Some of the paint on his face had sweated off, he knew, but no one had seemed to notice. Jon stayed huddled among the others, dropping his gloves and mask in large open barrels on the way out, imagining just how it would feel to be shot in the head. Nothing. It would be over and he wouldn’t know it.

  At the cinderblock station house, he twisted through a turnstile; on the other side, each man was handed seven thousand Sundiatan shillings—the equivalent of $50.

  Jon found the Jeep and sat in it for a while. His bags were still on the passenger side floor beneath a blanket, the keys on the floor mat by the brake pedal. For a few moments, he fought back tears, thinking about Sandra Oku and the boy. Could he have done anything else and made a difference? And still be alive? Before too many of the other workers had driven away, Jon started the Jeep and got in queue.

  THE SIGHTS AND smells of death stayed with him as he drove along the winding dirt roads the way they had come. Jon wondered if the medicine would really protect him from the virus that had killed all of these farm families. He heard Sandra Oku’s voice in his head: Medicine for what’s out there now. Not necessarily for what’s coming. He floored the gas pedal, as if speed might get him away from what he had seen, following a twisting row of red taillights through the darkness of the flatlands. It would be with him for a long time, he knew, probably all of his life. This day had changed things; it was a separating point, Jon knew.

  There was no clear way back, once the jungle ended. The other vehicles seemed to scatter in various directions, disappearing one by one into the darkness. Jon found himself driving across an open plain, bouncing over the dirt trail marked by wooden stakes every quarter mile or so, and then not marked at all. He followed the stars, knowing only vaguely where he had to go to get back to Sandra Oku and the boy. He steered south by southeast, across open countryside, following a distant set of red taillights that might be going to the same place. As much as he tried to think of the story, and of other things—drinking a beer on a beach somewhere and drifting to sleep—the images were too raw to be pushed aside: the vultures’ awkward dance and manic pecking; Kip’s open eyes; the angelic faces of the two little girls.

  Darkness. He was alone now. Driving through nothing, toward nothing. Driving through darkness for more than an hour, the images running like a loop in his head, until he was pulled, finally, from those images to the one in front of him: a small hillside of trees and ramshackle houses in the distance, which appeared to be in flames. The red-blue lights of military vehicles swept arcs across the landscape.

  Jon pressed the pedal to the floor. As he neared the fires, the Jeep’s headlights finally caught the metal gate and he knew for sure. This was the hillside shanty town where Sandra Oku and the boy Marcus had encamped. And Kip. They’re going to sweep through here. That’s what she said. Had it happened, already?

  The breeze reeked of burning gasoline. Jon slowed the Jeep, saw lights approaching from his left—headlights, cutting wildly through the darkness toward him. A pick-up with a machine-gun turret in back. Then a second pair, coming at him nearly head-on. The ones on his left flashing several times. Slow down.

  Jon did. It wouldn’t make sense to turn this into a chase. Not with so much armed military here—soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms, carrying American-made combat rifles. Both vehicles were rusty old pick-up trucks, he saw, as they closed in on him. The one on his left reached him first, pulling alongside. The driver hit his horn three times and shouted something. A government military guard, in uniform.

  “Where you traveling?”

  “Larkin Farm,” he said, hearing Kip’s accent in his voice.

  “Pull over.”

  Jon did. He put the gearshift in park, feeling a creeping panic. Was it all going to end here? After all he’d been through? The military man came around slowly, an M14 raised and pointed at him. The other truck sat facing them, maybe fifty yards away, its high beams in his eyes.

  The man with the raised gun asked Jon for his passport. Examined it.

  “Why do you want to travel there?” he said, finally, handing it back.

  “I know someone.”

  “No one’s there now. And no one’s allowed in.”

  “What happened to the people who live there?”

  “All gone. Evacuated.” He showed
a quick, overbearing grin. Yellow teeth. “This is all government land now.”

  “What?”

  The man pointed his gun. “You must pay six thousand shillings. Travel toll on government land. And then you may turn around and drive back the way you came. Not this way. Otherwise, I shoot you for trespassing.”

  Jon Mallory watched the man’s face, which was full and sweating, his eyes red-rimmed. He was breathing heavily and smelled of alcohol. Jon suddenly remembered he was wearing face paint, but the man didn’t seem to notice.

  This wasn’t going to be a particularly difficult decision. He paid with the money he had earned feeding bodies to the vultures. The man took it and nodded.

  “Okay?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He waited, his gun aimed, as Jon turned the truck around and began to drive back—to what? Driving aimlessly now, numb, expecting to hear a shot, the thud of a bullet in his head. But nothing happened. It just grew darker and quieter again, and eventually cooler. He drove on by the stars and the sky, deciding to travel vaguely north, toward the capital, and the border. Soon, the fires were gone from the rear-view mirror.

  But they stayed with him. For a while, he considered going back, coming at it from a different direction, with lights out. But of course that wouldn’t work. Whatever had happened was done. If he tried to get in, he would surely be killed. He turned on the Jeep’s radio and got only static. He left it on, kept switching the dial, knowing that any signal would mean he was nearing a city. The gas gauge was about a quarter full. He wouldn’t make it far, but he had to keep going. Driving on through the night, north, following the pole star straight up toward the North Pole, directly above the horizon, toward what seemed to be dark, distant bluffs. And then he began to see something, in the distance to his right—the lights of a village, maybe even a city—and steered toward it. But as he approached, the city seemed to just disappear, as if it hadn’t been there at all.