by Jon McGoran
Before long, we crossed through a patch of trees. Fifty yards past it was a cluster of small wooden shacks with corrugated metal roofs. On one side was a vegetable garden surrounded by a fence of plastic netting.
We stopped for a moment and looked. It was utterly still. Regi held up the bag of gear, and I stepped back into the trees, motioning for him to follow. We went in ten feet, just far enough so we wouldn’t be easily visible. Regi put his head near mine and whispered, “Just do exactly what I do.”
I nodded, and for the next five minutes, we took turns securing our hoods, gloves, and goggles. He would put his on, slowly and deliberately, letting me see how each tie was secured, each flap was affixed down, and then he would watch as I did the same, checking my closures and tightening my ties. Finally, we taped each other’s gloves at the wrist and put on our goggles. As we checked each other over, I felt bad that I didn’t really know what I was looking for, that I was receiving a level of scrutiny I couldn’t provide for Regi. But he seemed satisfied.
When we were done, we exchanged a terse nod and headed into the village.
The mask and goggles heightened my sense of isolation from the world. Instead of reassuring me, they somehow made the threat seem that much more real. Through the goggles, the world seemed scarier, more toxic. There’s a big difference between being intellectually confident something is true and testing it by putting on a biohazard suit and stumbling into what is supposed to be a hot zone saturated with one of the deadliest diseases known to man.
As we approached the rear of the closest house, the breeze picked up. I could see the leaves in the trees fluttering, and I could hear it, the hood making an exaggerated crumpling sound in my ear. But all I could feel was heat and dampness. All I could smell was plastic and my own sweat. I had a moment of claustrophobia, a panicky urge to tear it all off. But then it passed.
We walked between two houses and out onto a common area. It was surrounded by half a dozen houses, with a few others farther back.
The breeze disappeared, and again there was no movement, no sign of life, just the two of us there in our space suits. We turned to the right and looked in the first house. Two rooms, sparse and empty except for a couple of chairs, two wooden chests, and a pot rack. There was a rug on the floor and three bedrolls against the wall.
Nothing seemed amiss except that it was unoccupied.
The next hut was in a similar state, empty but unremarkable. Maybe the inhabitants had been evacuated to a hospital, I thought. But if that was the case, Regi’s office would have known, would have been involved.
I tapped Regi’s arm—time to move on—but he had seen something. He entered the hut and went over to a small wooden table next to a chair. Sitting on it was a rectangular black leather medical bag and a shrink-wrapped brick of a dozen small boxes of steroid inhalers.
He opened the bag and looked inside. In addition to the stethoscope and a few other instruments were several large Ziploc specimen bags, each filled with a dozen blood samples. “This is Portia’s bag.”
Next to it was a white paper bag, almost empty. The top of it was crumpled over. I unrolled it and looked in. It was filled with white powder.
“Drugs?” I said.
Regi looked at it, then looked at me. “Soy, I think. It looks like the bags that the other Soyagene soyflour came in.” He shrugged. “Maybe Miriam was right.”
I picked it up and looked at the bottom. It was stamped on the bottom, a barcode and GES-5322x. The code seemed familiar, and I wondered if it matched one of the product codes from Ron’s files.
I put it back next to the medical bag.
Regi went outside and paused, looking around the common area as if he thought he’d see Portia if he looked hard enough.
We moved on to the third building. It seemed much like the other two at first. Regi ducked back out, anxious to continue, but something caught my eye.
A wicker chest had been upended, spilling a tangle of brightly colored textiles onto the floor. One of the colors stood out, a deep, vivid red. Moving closer, I saw it wasn’t a textile at all. Even in the sweltering heat of the biohazard suit, a chill went through me.
Regi was standing in the doorway looking back in. I beckoned him closer, pointed at the blood on the floor. He looked at it and then up at me, then out the door at the rest of the village. I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew that just like me, he was wondering what other horrors we were about to find.
54
“Could it be hemorrhagic?” I whispered. “From the Ebola?” But I knew it wasn’t.
He shrugged, then shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
We hurried to the next house and stopped in the doorway. The walls inside were spattered with blood, three distinct sprays, crisscrossing the walls, as if from an artery.
A table was in splinters. There were bloody footprints on the floor and a red smear that started in the far corner, passed under our feet and extended out the door. We stepped off to either side, our eyes tracing the blood, out the door and across the commons, toward a blue-and-red-painted wooden house, slightly larger than the others.
Regi started running, as fast as his biohazard suit would let him. I ran too, catching up with him at the doorway as he stopped, frozen, his arms braced against the door frame.
Inside was a vision of hell, a tangle of dark-brown limbs drenched in bright red blood. There must have been thirty bodies—men, women, and children—all piled against the rear wall.
Protruding from the middle of the pile was a pair of canary-yellow sneakers, spattered with blood.
Regi let out a wrenching sob and dove at the pile, pushing corpses off to the left and right as he tried to uncover Portia’s body.
I stood there, useless, wanting to help him but knowing I would only slow him down. There was no way I’d be able to treat the dead with the single-minded disregard he was showing them right now. Any other time, he’d have been unable to himself.
So I stood back and tried not to get in his way. As he shoved each body off the pile, I saw them individually—an old woman in her seventies, a wiry man of forty, a nine-year-old boy. A pregnant woman.
They didn’t look sick. None of them did. They had each been shot in the chest.
When Regi finally uncovered Portia, he sobbed and pulled her to him, resting her back against his legs and cradling her head in his arms. There was a bullet hole between her breasts. Her shirt was soaked in blood.
Even dead, even there, her face was strikingly beautiful.
Regi was oblivious to the other bodies, leaning back against them, surrounded by them. The scene was ghastly and horrific, so tragic and evil and wrenching I looked away to escape it.
The walls were pocked with bullet holes and spattered with blood. The floor was slick with it. A puddle had formed under the bodies. Regi’s arms and legs were streaked with it.
A couple of flies appeared, then a few more. I wondered how recently this had happened.
Regi pulled off his goggles and his hood and pressed his face against Portia’s, kissed her forehead.
He sobbed uncontrollably, just for a moment. Then he clenched his jaw and stifled it, breathing deeply to get himself under control.
“That’s the first time I ever kissed her,” he said quietly, his voice tight. “She wanted to, but I said we couldn’t. I was her boss.” He looked up at me, tears streaming down his face. “I loved her, you know.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. I thought about Miriam, about Ron dying on my front steps, at my feet. In front of the woman I loved. Underneath the sorrow and regret, the sympathy I felt for Regi and for Miriam, way down deep I also felt a spark of hatred and fury in my core, tiny but white hot.
He turned away from me. “You can take off that hood,” he said. “There’s no Ebola here. Not a hint of it. None of these people show any symptoms. There’s no sign of medical care or sickness or anything, other than the inhalers and Portia’s medical bag.”
I pulled off my hood, pulled down my mask, and breathed deeply. The hot, humid air felt cool and refreshing.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The breeze picked up again. Standing in the doorway, I could feel it, hear it. As it subsided, I heard something else, as well.
Trucks.
55
“Regi,” I said quietly.
He looked up at me, crushed, devastated.
“Someone’s coming,” I said. “Trucks. We need to go.”
The noise grew louder, closer. There were voices now too, men shouting. His eyes drifted back down.
“Regi.”
He looked up at me again, his eyes now vacant.
“We need to go.”
That’s when we heard another sound—soft but powerful, a low, throaty whoosh. Through the door, I saw a wall of flame shooting into the sky at the far end of the village. I felt a wave of heat, although it could have been my imagination.
“They’re burning the village.”
His eyes stayed on me for a moment as he processed what I was saying. Then he looked down at Portia. Her head fell back, limp. Dead.
I put my arm on his shoulder. “We have to go.”
“But…” He looked at her with longing and regret and anguish, then up at me, questioningly, beseechingly. His brain was beyond capacity, feeling so much it was unable to think.
“We’ll come back for her,” I said. It was an outright lie. I knew there was no way, but I needed to get him out of there.
He laid her gently back upon the bodies of the people she had gone there to save. Her arms flopped out, extended at her sides, as if she were protecting the others or leading them or raising them up to heaven.
I let him take one more moment, let him absorb that last look at her. Then I heard another whoosh, saw another line of fire, this time closer. This time, the heat was unmistakably real.
I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him out the door and around to the side of the hut. He was in a daze, but when he looked back at the flames engulfing the first row of houses, he seemed to grasp the reality of the situation. A small group of soldiers with flamethrowers was backing toward us, spraying flames at the houses behind them as they approached.
“We have to get out of here,” I whispered loudly in Regi’s ear.
He nodded, and we slipped around to the rear of the houses and ran along the grassy space that separated the village from the trees that lined the ridge. Up ahead, I saw the jug of chlorine where we had come up through the trees.
We ran up to it, but Regi paused, looking back. “Portia’s bag,” he said, his eyes momentarily clear. “The samples. We have to get them.”
He took off running, between two of the houses. I followed against my better judgment. The air was thick now with the smell of fuel and smoke. When we peered around the front of the houses, we saw the soldiers with the flamethrowers dowsing the blue-and-red house, where the bodies were. Where Portia was.
Regi froze, watching, trembling. I was scared to leave him alone, afraid he might go after them, attack them, try to stop them from incinerating the woman he loved.
But we needed those samples. I didn’t quite know why, but I understood that it was true.
I crawled through a window into the house with the bag. It was right there, on the table with the inhalers and the soyflour. As I grabbed it, the bag of flour fell to the floor, sending out a little jet of white powder. I picked it up and jammed it into the medical bag.
As I wheeled around, the doorway erupted in flames. The heat was intense. Instinctively, I raised my arm to shield myself from it and felt the plastic of the biohazard suit melt against my skin. I dove for the window just as another blast of fuel splashed into the hut. As I tumbled onto the ground, a gout of flame followed me through the window.
Regi was standing to my right, near the front of the building, mumbling to himself, his eyes tightly clenched. At first, I thought he was praying, but then I got the impression he was arguing with himself about whether or not to attack the flamethrowers. I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away, just as the next burst of flame enveloped the entire building, and a cascade of flames came over the roof right where we’d been standing.
Regi was in shock, but once we started running, he kept up. By the time we got back to the tree line, the entire village was in flames. I pulled Regi into the trees, twenty feet, but we could still see the village. Through the gap between the two houses closest to us, we could see the flames rapidly enveloping the big blue-and-red house.
Regi stood there, mesmerized as I opened the jug of chlorine and poured it over his biohazard suit. We both knew the Ebola story was bullshit, but there was so much blood. I didn’t want to risk the exposure on the remote chance we were wrong. He moved his head away from the splashes of chlorine, away from the smell of it, all the while watching as the flames engulfed the building where his beloved lay.
I wiped down my own suit with chlorine, as well. Then I tugged at the tabs and zippers and flaps, tearing the plastic as I pulled the thing off me, peeling it away from my skin where it had melted. Then I tore Regi’s suit off him.
Once I got him moving again, he seemed to snap out of it, but I could tell he was in a precarious mental state. We scrambled down the incline toward where we’d left the car, but as we drew nearer, I stopped and pulled Regi back.
Inching forward, I peered over the ridge, down at the car. It was surrounded by half a dozen Interior Ministry soldiers. One of them was lying across the hood. A couple of them were smoking. They were laughing, joking, either oblivious to what their comrades were doing or indifferent.
Regi stared down at them, and I could feel his rage. I worried once again that he might plunge forward, engage the overwhelming enemy, and vent his fury before they killed him.
I pulled him farther back from the ridge and gave him a gentle shake. “We need to get out of here,” I told him quietly. “So we can take them on another day. So we can stop whatever it is they’re doing.”
He stared at me for a second, then he nodded and took the lead, grabbing me by the shoulder, pulling me through the trees. We crossed the road around the bend, where it was barely a cow path. Then we plunged into the dense green growth on the other side.
56
The terrain was hard, with lots of up and down, even after we found a semblance of a path. Behind us, black smoke drifted into the sky.
We’d traversed a couple of miles when we came over a slight rise and saw ocean below, maybe two miles away. A small cruise ship was anchored in the bay. A sliver of white sandy beach was dotted with umbrellas, a jumble of low, red-roofed buildings, and in the middle of it, a sleek glass hotel. It looked oddly out of place, more Bahamas than Haiti.
I guess I stopped walking to look at it, because Regi looked over and said, “Labadee.”
“What?”
“That’s Labadee down there.”
“That’s it? Where the summit is?” Partly I was curious, but I also wanted to keep him talking, hoping that if I kept him engaged, he wouldn’t slip into shock or despair.
He pointed to a little cove off to the left. “Over there is Labadie, ending in ie, a very nice but very humble little seaside village. No roads go there because of the terrain, so it’s like an island. Very hard to get to except from the water.” He pointed at the white beach and the hotel. “Over there is Labadee, with two e’s at the end. It was built by a cruise line, a self-contained little bit of manufactured tourist paradise. The cruise ships dock there and drop off a couple thousand tourists at a time, and they play on the beach and in the water for a few hours. Then they would get back on the boat and go off to their next destination because there was no place to stay. The hotel is brand new. The Ministry of Tourism gave them incentives to build it so the tourists will stay a little longer. The whole place is surrounded by a huge wall topped with barbed wire, to keep out the Haitians, so they don’t ruin the rich people’s vacations.”
“Are you s
erious?”
He nodded.
“Jesus, that’s messed up.” Something about the cruise ship in the bay looked familiar.
He shrugged. “It is and it isn’t. It brings in some foreign investment and spending, employs some Haitians, which is a good thing.” He allowed himself a slight smile. “But it is very, very strange.”
“I see the cruise ship, but I don’t see any people down there.”
He squinted. “That’s not a cruise ship. The resort is closed to host the summit.”
“Why are they having it there?”
Regi shrugged. “To show it off. To attract more foreign investment. But also, if there’s instability in the wind, this way they can remain apart from it.”
That’s when I noticed the helicopter perched on the back of the vessel.
“That’s Archie Pearce’s yacht,” I said, almost to myself.
“Who?”
“Archie Pearce, the head of Stoma Corporation. That’s his yacht. I’ve seen it before. On Martha’s Vineyard.”
“It’s a nice boat. That would make sense. Stoma is very involved in the effort to gain greater access in the region for their biotech products, their genetically modified seeds and such.”
I felt a chill as it sunk in that it was Pearce. He’d gotten away with some very shady stuff the last time I’d encountered him. He was very rich and very powerful. And very dangerous.
The path descended into a little hollow, but before the ocean disappeared from sight, I turned back for one last look at Archie Pearce’s yacht.
As we continued on, a dozen different types of insects found us. Or at least found me, buzzing around my ears. The heat was getting to me, as well. Once we had put a little more distance between us and Gaden, I sidled close to Regi. “We need to figure out what’s next.”
He turned to look at me, taken aback, like he wasn’t expecting to be making that decision. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we have a lot to do, and I don’t know how to go about doing it. I’m not from around here.” I barely understood how things worked in my own country. “I guess the first step is testing those samples. We need to figure out where and how.”