Josie and I were the only nassaras (foreign whites) in the car. Technically, I was Chinese-American, not white, but Cameroonians didn’t make those distinctions with Americans—except when they expected me to do kung fu like Bruce Lee. Didn’t help that my name really was Bruce, or that I’d clear six feet easily in my bare feet. They got a lot of martial arts flicks over here—used to, anyway. Before.
Running over the gendarme may not have been such a hot idea. His guts had gotten snarled on the roof of the car and now dangled through the driver’s-side window like a sausage brand of fuzzy dice and bumped against the driver’s shoulder. They smelled—literally—like shit. The driver ignored them. He’d probably smelled worse.
We rolled across the bridge over a river of sand and into Maroua, provincial capital of the Extreme North Region of Cameroon. If you had to get stranded someplace during a zombie epidemic, you could have done worse than Maroua. The place looked like a city out of Arabian Nights. The local Hausa and Fulani Muslims were friendly, rich and regionally well-organized. They lived in large, walled compounds along tree-lined streets, the walls whitewashed or cement-crépissagé mud-brick, with wells inside and fruit trees. Some of those civic features had helped save most of the city’s population, that and the usually dry climate—mixed savannah and desert. During the initial outbreak, we’d all just shut ourselves up and waited. We’d only gone out, heavily armed, for food and other necessary supplies. Many nights I’d lain in bed, listening to the zombies claw and bang on the tolle gates. In the morning, we’d venture out to club and burn any walking dead in sight. Nobody took them on at night, even now.
The taxi bumped past the main taxi park, an open, flat place of beaten red dirt near one of the round hills that just popped up out of the landscape this far north. The taxi park was surrounded by dusty green trees with low-spreading limbs. We were only a day’s journey south of Lake Chad, not all that far from the Sahara.
As we passed the park, I spotted two men torching a zombie dog. They had it staked down with a spear and were burning it in sections, from the tail up. I could see its dry ribs shining in the afternoon sun all the way from the taxi. The dog snapped at its tormentors as they danced around it. I loved animals, and I pitied what that dog had been, but there was no way I would have tried to save it now.
The driver dropped us off at our compound in the “safe” part of town. Josie and I peeled ourselves out of the taxi along with the rest of the passengers. After stretching the kinks out of our backs, we snagged our equipment from the overstuffed-and-strapped-down trunk. The passengers stood by looking over their shoulders as the driver handed out the machetes, matches, and canned goods we’d looted during our “shopping” trip down south. Even with the curiosity that anything we nassaras did generated, our equipment post-outbreak was too ordinary to mark.
Josie banged on the gate. No one answered, but that wasn’t uncommon. She got the tin gate open while I hauled out our bags. The driver took off as soon as he’d cinched things back up with strips of black rubber inner tube called caoutchouc. Josie and I liked to joke that the entire country was held together with it. Keeping an eye out, we tossed the bags in through the gate quickly and slammed the door behind us.
The virus had raged during the rainy season the previous year and had gotten into the water supply. The traditional clearing of the savannah brush by fire in December at the beginning of the Dry Season had helped considerably with suppressing the initial epidemic. Christmas had passed fairly uneventfully. With the end of January and the reheating of the weather, though, some isolated outbreaks were starting up again. Josie and I had come back from Yaoundé, the country capital not far north of Douala, just in time.
The compound’s dogs, Cujo I and II, came bounding up to us for a head-rub as soon as we came in. Like most Cameroonian dogs, they barely came up to Josie’s knees. They reminded me with a twinge of the zombified dog I’d seen in the taxi park. A tawny cat from our small colony lazed on a chair on the porch. We’d had some feline mortality initially, but they’d learned fast to avoid zombie rats and the like. They mostly stayed inside the compound now. The day guard, Adamou, woke up in his chair near the cat and came down off the porch, scratching his head and yawning.
“Bonsoir, Adamou,” I said. He nodded and waved distractedly, then went back to his nap. He wasn’t big on helping out with heavy lifting.
“We’re here!” Josie shouted toward the house. It was a cement, ranch-style structure with a tolle roof, barred windows and an open front porch. Nothing you’d ever see in Out of Africa. Buckets and panniers were lined up under all the eaves from the last rainy season. We had a well, and running water still ran in the pipes sporadically, but less and less often since the beginning of the outbreak. We kept the water in big containers and we always boiled it before we drank it or bathed in it. That cut a bit into our supply of propane tanks, and the rate of indirect infection from the virus, in strict epidemiological terms, was pretty low, but nobody wanted to end up like that gendarme from brushing their teeth in the morning.
Two of our group came out onto the porch. There were still nine non-missionary foreigners that we knew of in the region—five volunteers from the Peace Corps (three of us here in town), two Italian aid workers and a couple of young tourists who’d just been passing through when everything had gone to a hot place in a hand conveyance back home. Cyndi and Roger had decided to stay in their village up near Waza National Park. The rest of us had wanted everybody to stick together. We’d heard rumors that poachers had spread the virus to some of the animals in Waza. Facing off with a zombie elephant? No thanks. But Roger and Cyndi felt differently.
Personally, I thought Roger was just being his usual antisocial asshole self and that Cyndi stuck with him out of loyalty. She was still dating him, after all. But it wasn’t my decision, or anybody else’s but Cyndi’s and Roger’s. With everything we’d lost, we weren’t about to curtail each other’s freedom on top of it.
“How was Zombieville?” Alicia, one of the Italians, asked. She meant Yaoundé, after Brazzaville in the Congo. But it could have applied to any large city, even Maroua, just eight months ago. She was a tall, thin brunette who smoked a lot, more now than before the outbreak.
Josie and I looked at each other. We didn’t much want to talk about our trip, especially considering we’d barely made the last train to Ngaounderé that was liable to leave Yaoundé for a while. But our buddies needed a report.
“Messy, as usual,” I replied. “Whole sections of the city are overrun at this point. Everybody who’s still got a pulse has gone back en brousse, as far as we could tell, though the Muslims are still running a closed marché and the like. The Peace Corps Admin office is picked pretty clean, but we found some meds—Chloroquine and Mefloquine—and some antibiotics that we don’t think are too spoiled.”
“How’s the situation back home?” That was Silas, our third volunteer. He was a big black guy in his forties who looked like he’d been born in the Marines. He’d have gone with us if he hadn’t broken his leg in a motorcycle accident a few months back. He’d left family back in the States—hadn’t we all—but he’d probably been the least homesick of us until the outbreak. Now, he spent a lot of his time working a two-way short-wave radio he’d found in the marché while laid up, burning through car battery after car battery, hoping to get an answer. Sometimes he did from the oddest places, like Siberia or Bosnia or Cape Cod, but most of the time he just got static. Nobody told him to give it up. We were all hoping along with him. I hadn’t heard from either my mom or my sister in San Francisco since before the outbreak. Didn’t expect to, either, but you know, you like to hope.
Josie shook her head to Silas’ question. “It’s total radio silence. The last anybody heard, things were getting pretty ugly, nothing your contact on the Cape hasn’t already told you about zombies hating salt water. That was before the Rainy Season began…end of February or March, maybe. Who knows what it’s like now?”
“Now”
was January. If we hadn’t heard from anybody else in the U.S. by now, that meant we probably never would; the country was gone. And Italy. And the rest of Europe and the Americas. And Asia. And Australia. All gone, at least as far as civilization was concerned. Drowned in an apocalyptic flood of mostly dead carrion beasts with the shelf-life of rotting hamburger.
And here we were in Cameroon, West Africa, cut loose like the rest of the expats, scrambling to make a living, to make a permanent life and put down roots in a country where we’d expected only to have a passing adventure for two or three years. Needless to say, it had been a shock all round that we were stuck here for the duration. Not even a year had helped us get used to it.
Cameroon is a radically different culture from any in the West. You think you’ll be fine and then you get here and…well, you’re not always fine. Psychovacs hadn’t been all that uncommon among volunteers before the outbreak. They were no longer an option.
The rest of the world had succumbed so fast. But not Africa. Africa, cradle of humanity and civilization, had simply shrugged and collectively said to this latest pandemic, “You want a piece of Homo sapiens? Get in line.” And someday—maybe not so soon, but someday—we’d spread out once again and repopulate the world, pushing aside another hominid species, this time Homo mortuus. It was only a matter of time.
But now it was January, and the yellow Harmattan wind was rolling in off the Sahara, pushing the rains south and drying everything out, including the zombies. A good time for a little zombicide.
Alicia said, “We have some bad news of our own.”
Josie looked down and started scuffing the red dirt, probably not too keen to face whatever Alicia had to say. I decided to face it straight on; maybe it would hurt less. I looked back and forth between Alicia and Silas. “What?”
Silas took the plunge. “We haven’t heard from Roger and Cyndi since before you guys left.”
“I’m sorry, Bruce,” Alicia said. “I know you three have been worrying about them.”
“Uh, that was over two weeks ago,” I said, feeling my stomach clench up into some serious heartburn. I felt a sudden need for a shot of Gordon’s gin. They didn’t answer, just looked grim.
“No bush-taxi notes?” Josie asked, finally looking up. “Nothing?”
“I wanted to go out and pick them up,” Silas said, shaking his head, “but the others argued that we’d better wait for you guys, what with my bum leg. You’re the ones with the connections and experience and we only really started to worry a few days ago.”
“Shit,” I said. Josie didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. We’d had a little business going for a couple of months now, cleaning out centers of zombie infection. It kept the money coming in, so nobody complained. Silas was right. We were the logical ones to go find out what had happened to Roger and Cyndi, just like we’d been the logical ones to go down to Zombieville and reconnoiter.
“Well, we can’t go right now,” Josie said with her usual practicality. “It’s only two hours to sunset and way too hot. We’ll go tomorrow at sunrise.”
Sunrise wasn’t until six a.m., but she was right. You couldn’t get much done in the Cameroon heat after nine in the morning, especially in the north, and evenings weren’t a good time to be outside. The bandits who had infested the roads of the region for many years had been some of the first to get zombified. Like that gendarme on the road, their rotten minds kept them at their old habits. Sure, being half-dead slowed them down, but Cameroonian nights were dark. In a noisy taxi, we’d get no warning of an attack.
Josie and I only got some sleep that night because we were so tired. We tried a little fooling around, but dropped off in the middle of it. Right before dawn, in Le Grande Matin, we set off in a bush-taxi, not long after the first call to prayer for the day wailed out to the Muslims from mosques all over town. Bush-taxis looked like milk trucks with holes cut out for windows, but they were sturdier than car taxis when it came to zombie attacks. Along the way, we saw a zombie giraffe come out of the trees and stagger along the roadside in a parody of a live giraffe’s stately walk, trying to outpace us, no doubt. Most of its mottled hide had worn off in patches or was hanging in strips around its long legs. Its tendons looked so brittle it was a wonder it could keep its feet. Even so, a pride of very-much-alive lions on the other side of the road just lounged on large tree branches, wistfully observing it from a distance. They knew better than to try that kind of meat. I wondered if the virus might even end up saving the wildlife. They sure were venturing out of Waza with increasing boldness. All the more reason to persuade Roger and Cyndi to come back with us, even if it turned out they were fine.
We got hit up for a job as soon as we rolled into town around eight. The sousprefet himself met us at the little taxi park. Sousprefets were federal government officials in charge of the arrondisement around a township. A big city like Maroua had a prefet, instead, in addition to at least one local mayor and a chef for each tribe.
This guy was an Anglophone from the Northwest Region above Yaoundé, which meant he was probably even more industrious than the Muslims. The super-efficient inhabitants of the two Anglophone regions and the neighboring Francophone West Region had a mutual hostility with the other seven Francophone regions, which sometimes got Anglophone officials lynched in the south during times of unrest (like national elections). It wasn’t so bad up here, where the Anglophones and the Muslims shared a work ethic and a common cause against our now-defunct federal government. Probably why the locals hadn’t replaced this guy with a Muslim. A long-running joke was that the country would never elect an Anglophone because he’d make everybody work, and nobody wanted that.
The sousprefet seemed happy to see a couple of Western nassaras and chatted for a little while with us in English. Then he told us he needed our services even before we mentioned our own mission.
The job would pay our rent for the next couple of months—40,000 CFA or its equivalent in supplies to burn out a house of zombies. You’d think people wouldn’t use paper money or coins anymore. But you can’t carry that much in supplies everywhere you go and there was no way in hell anybody would take credit the payer probably wouldn’t honor. So, money still got passed around, increasingly tattered and with different countries on it, but still useful. A bit like the bottles people still brought to bars in exchange for beer and soda because some enterprising souls were still making both. The sousprefet and his gendarmes could have done the job themselves, but this was in the compound of a local traditional chef. Nassaras were good for the more delicate zombicide jobs. Being from a foreign tribe, we weren’t supposed to have a stake in the local politics, so we had a rep for being impartial.
Josie and I discussed it. We wanted to get over to see Roger and Cyndi right away, but we already knew from experience that whatever condition they were in, they’d probably been in it for two weeks already. Besides, we could really use the money and the sousprefet’s goodwill if things had gone sideways with them. We agreed to do it.
We stocked up on kerosene in the marché, buying it in old, plastic palm-oil bottles. There was red sediment at the bottom of each one. Any petroleum product was strained through a cloth to get out the dust, but that wasn’t 100 percent successful. That would matter for a car, but not for our purposes. Zombies would burn just as well with dirty kerosene.
They’d shut up all the infected, living and dead, inside a large hut in a compound. Nobody had been out for seven days. That made the job a simple one of torching and watching it burn, slicing and incinerating the zombies who tried to escape. The only glitch came when a woman burst out of the burning hut, clutching a baby. We nearly hacked her before she screamed and the baby started howling.
Zombies don’t talk. They can make a weird sort of grunt, with air coming out through the vocal cords, but they can’t talk. Or scream.
We doused both woman and child with gin (my own way of dealing with the outbreak, so I always had some on me) to disinfect them as best we could. Th
en we pronounced mother and child “clean.” This practice didn’t usually thrill the local Muslims, but they were fine with the logic of cleaning off zombie virus as long as the booze didn’t make the person drunk. Judged living again by the nassara zombie-hunters, both survivors were taken away gently to be fed and given a real bath.
And that was the job. We’d insisted on the 40,000 CFA up front. That would have been not quite a hundred bucks American if the U.S. still existed. Normally, we’d have pocketed it and gone back to Maroua in high spirits.
But we weren’t here on business, or fun. We were here to check up on two of our own.
The sousprefet grabbed two gendarmes and led us there himself. He seemed to know what we were in for, but, our friends being nassaras, he’d probably been hesitant to go in.
“If you find anything, we’ll pay the usual rate,” he said. This seemed awfully generous until he took off down the road with the two gendarmes without paying us first. Figured we wouldn’t get any backup, though I could see the hold-off on payment. Roger and Cyndi might be okay. And if they weren’t, he might want the house after we burned it out. The cement walls wouldn’t be damaged, nor the tolle roof.
The compound was ominously silent as we let ourselves in through the gate with a little machete-prying. We went in machetes-first. Once we established that the coast was apparently clear, we brought in our bottles of kerosene. We laid them out along a line on the dirt path up to the cement porch, dropping small matchboxes as we went. We’d long since learned how to play zombie-hunting like a video game. You wanted to lay down ammunition coming in along the routes where you’d be most likely to come hell-for-leather back out, screaming and scrambling to avoid those clutching hands and snapping teeth. Zombies weren’t too fast and they weren’t too bright. They didn’t last all that long, either, maybe six months. But once they got fixated on you, they’d keep coming and they’d run you down if you didn’t burn them, pin them or find sanctuary.
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