by Deon Meyer
He drank water from a full one-litre plastic bottle. It wasn’t long before he had emptied it.
An hour later we stopped at the special place. I forgot about the feeling of doom that had been with us the whole morning. I cried out like a child half my age, in total wonderment. It was so amazingly beautiful, so unusual and so loud – a bridge, a dam wall and a tremendous thundering. To the left lay the dam, perfectly calm, a huge outstretched expanse of water. To the right was the deep gorge of a river, veiled by the mist of water vapour, rising like smoke from the torrents roaring down the sluices.
Pa stopped the lorry in the middle of the massive concrete dam wall. He opened both windows. The sound of the mass of falling water filled the cab. It made the whole truck vibrate.
Pa had to raise his voice, as he pointed at the mirror of water: ‘This is the Vanderkloof Dam.’ Then he looked at the deep canyon: ‘And that is the Orange River.’
‘Jissie.’ Yesterday forgotten, I was totally enchanted.
‘I think they left the sluices open. After the Fever. Just as well.’
I stared in amazement. Until I realised that Pa had said the words ‘the Fever’ in a strange way. Not like he always did. Quietly, quickly and reluctantly, as though he didn’t want to draw attention to it. I looked at him, but he avoided my eyes. ‘Come, let’s make coffee,’ he said briskly.
We kept a gas stove and a big moka espresso pot under the bed, behind the seats. Along with a pack of biltong, sweets and rusks – the dry biscuits we dunked with our coffee. I clambered to the back, and got the process of brewing under way.
Usually we got out to eat, when we were on the road. But now Pa remained in his seat. He was being careful, after the dogs.
I passed him the rusks. He took only one. I ate three rusks, suddenly ravenous.
The moka pot sputtered. The aroma of coffee filled the cab.
I poured Pa’s first, he drank it black and bitter. I liked mine with two spoons of sugar, and Cremora.
‘Here, Pa.’
He turned to face me and I waited for him to say ‘While we can.’ He said that every morning, when we drank our coffee. He raised the mug high, as you do when you say ‘cheers’ and smiled crookedly. Because some time in the future the coffee supply would run out, and before it ran out it would grow stale, not taste as good, and that day was approaching. That’s what Pa had explained to me, the first time he said ‘While we can.’
This morning he didn’t say it.
I noticed his hand was shaking. Then I saw the perspiration on his forehead, how red his face was. And his eyes, dull and out of focus.
Suddenly his silences, and everything, made sense. The shock of it, the fear, made the tears well up.
‘It’s not the Fever,’ he said. ‘You hear me?’
The fear was no longer just a shadow, it was all of me.
‘Nico, listen,’ said my father, his voice just as desperate as yesterday evening, with the dogs. It made me swallow back my sobs for a second.
He put the coffee mug down on the dashboard, and hugged me. I felt the heat burning him up. ‘It’s not the Fever. It’s the dogs. It’s just an infection from their bites, it’s bacterial. I have to take antibiotics, and lots of water, and I must get rest. You hear?’
‘You’ve got the Fever, Papa. I can tell.’
‘I promise you, I’ve got a different kind of fever, on my word of honour. You’ve also had a temperature, from flu or a cold, from teething when you were little, there’re many kinds, this isn’t the one that everyone . . . The dogs weren’t getting fed by people. They were eating carrion, or rotten meat, and then they bit me, and those bacteria are in my bloodstream now. That’s where this fever comes from. I’m just going to be sick for a short while. I promise, Nico, I promise you. We’ve got the right medicine, I’m going to take it now.’
We drove up between the hills, into Vanderkloof town. It was an odd little place, a narrow higgledy-piggledy settlement next to the dam, sprawling high up into the koppies. Pa was looking for something. He found it deep in the deserted town, as silent as the grave. A modest house, paint peeling from the woodwork, a big steel security gate in front of the door, and burglar bars on the windows. Opposite it there was the only parking space on the street for our lorry.
Pa stopped. He got out, taking a pistol and a hunting rifle. I had to wait in the Volvo while he went to look in the house. I sat watching the front door. I was afraid he would never come back. What would I do then?
Everything was different now, after yesterday, after the dogs. And now, with Pa’s fever.
But he came back. As he approached the truck, I could see he was unsteady on his feet.
‘This place is good enough,’ he said. ‘Come, bring your books.’ I put them in my rucksack, and climbed down. Pa walked slowly now, and he did everything gingerly and carefully, unlocking the back of the big trailer, pulling the ladder down. The contents of the trailer told the story of our life. It was an ever growing inventory, neatly packed and tied; we knew where every item was. Nearest the door were the boxes of tinned food and rice and flour and pasta, powdered milk, coffee, Cremora, hundreds of bottles of water. Then, in no specific order: books, hand-picked like the food wherever it was safe to browse. Do-it-yourself books about repairs and personal recovery and veld survival and The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Guns: A Green Light Shooting Book from which we had both learned to shoot. Story books and school books and recipe books and how-to-slaughter-an-ox and how-to-treat-snakebite books. There were rifles, pistols, ammunition, hunting knives and slaughtering knives and kitchen knives, our equipment to pump fuel, and water purification filters. Medicine, bandages, ointments, sunscreen. A small tent, camp chairs, inflatable mattresses, camp beds, two folding tables, two large umbrellas, never used, still in their plastic Makro packaging. Three petrol power generators, ten fifty-litre jerry cans. Toiletries: more toothpaste than we could use in our lifetime, shampoo, soap, deodorant, toothbrushes. Washing powder, bleach. Laptop computers, printers. Cutlery, crockery, hand tools, power tools . . .
Pa assembled a few cartons of provisions, and he searched until he found the correct medicine. He climbed down, pushed the ladder in again, locked the trailer’s back doors carefully. We carried the cartons into the house. The place was empty, and tidy, as though the people had cleaned up before they died. Every empty house we had been in had its own smell. Some were pleasant, some bad. This one smelled a little bit of rubber. I don’t know why.
‘The stove works with gas,’ said Pa. I nodded.
‘And there’s water.’ He meant the taps still worked.
Pa went back to our truck and locked the cab as well. He came inside again, locked the security gate of the house, then the front door. He gave me the pistol.
‘Nico, I’m going to clean all the dog bites again, and I’m going to take the medicine. I have to sleep. There, in that room. Don’t go out. If you see or hear anything, come tell me, straight away. Get yourself something to eat, there are tins, take your favourites. And biltong and biscuits. And soup. I’ll have some soup with you tonight; come and wake me when the sun starts to set. I know you’re scared now, Nico, but I’ll just be sick a day or two, you hear?’
I touched him. He was fiery hot.
I didn’t cry. I just nodded.
‘How do we stay safe?’ he asked.
‘We trust only each other.’
‘That’s right. Come and look, so you can see where I’ll be lying. If I’m still asleep when it gets dark: remember, no lights.’
He read something in my face. ‘Everything is going to be fine,’ he said.
Everything wasn’t fine.
I unpacked some of my books. I sat in the sitting area of the open-plan living room. It was part of the kitchen and a dining room too. After what seemed like an eternity I couldn’t stand it any more. I walked to the bedroom. Pa lay under the blankets. He was shivering uncontrollably, but it wasn’t cold. He didn’t even know I was there.
; If he was going to die I didn’t want to watch it. I walked slowly down the passage. I heard noises, in the roof of the house and outside. I tried to look out, through the other bedrooms’ windows, but everything was quiet again.
In the sitting room I saw a movement through the lace curtain, an animal trotting down the street outside. Fear gripped me; was it a dog? I went and stood at the window. I saw that it was a bat-eared fox, tiny, with silver in its pelt. It halted suddenly, and stared at the house. It raised its muzzle, as though it had scented something. Then it trotted briskly away again, as if it were late for some appointment.
Dragging my feet in dread, I crept back to the bedroom. Pa was still breathing.
The house was laid out simply, a long rectangle, with the living area at the front door, three bedrooms and two bathrooms at the back. I explored all the other rooms of the house thoroughly, opened cupboards, looked under beds. There were no toys in the cupboards, there were no bookshelves on any of the walls. There were magazines in a wooden box beside a chair in the sitting room. Sarie and Rooi Rose and You magazine. I didn’t like reading those because all the people in them were dead now; all the TV stuff and movies didn’t exist any more. The whole world has changed.
I didn’t dare look in the fridge, because as Pa and I knew, there was stuff that had gone rotten in all the fridges; it was better just to leave them closed.
High in a food cupboard were two large packs of Simba chips. Smoked Beef. I preferred the chutney flavour. A big slab of Cadbury chocolate. I tore open the chocolate wrapper. I knew it would have gone grey-white and unpleasant, but still I was hoping, because I was thirteen years old.
The chocolate tasted weird.
I ate a whole packet of chips. They had gone a bit stale, but they were crunchy and filling. I ate the other packet too.
I went to check on Pa. He had stopped shivering. He had thrown off the blanket and was sweating profusely now. The dog bites were fiery red and swollen.
I sat down against the wall of his room, and watched him. It was terribly quiet. Pa’s breathing was the only sound. In and out. Too fast.
The fever had him in its grip.
Chapter 4
The man under the mango tree
They knew the Fever came out of Africa. They knew it was two viruses that combined, one from people and one from bats. In those days they wrote a lot about it, before everyone died.
One doctor wrote in a magazine that nobody knew exactly how it all began, but this is how they thought it might have happened: a man somewhere in tropical Africa lay down under a mango tree. The man’s resistance was low, because he was HIV-positive and not being treated for it. There was already one corona virus in the man’s blood. There was nothing strange about that. Corona viruses were quite common. In the era before the Fever they knew of at least four that caused flu and cold symptoms in people.
Corona viruses also occurred in animals. Mammals and birds.
In the mango tree there was a bat, with a different kind of corona virus in its blood.
The bat was sick. Diarrhoea caused it to defecate on the face of the man under the tree, his eyes, or his nose, or his mouth. The second corona virus was now in the man’s blood, the two viruses multiplying together in the same cells of the man’s windpipe. And their genetic material combined. A new corona virus was born – one that could infect other people easily when inhaled, and with the ability to make them extremely ill.
The man under the mango tree lived in a poor community, where people were crammed together, and where the incidence of HIV was high. He quickly infected others. The new virus spread through the community, and kept on mutating. One mutation was just perfect. It spread easily through the air, taking long enough to kill for each person to have infected many others.
One of the family members of the man under the mango tree worked at an airport in the nearby city. The family member was incubating the perfect virus. He coughed on a passenger, just before the woman took the flight to England.
In England there was a big international sporting event.
All the first-world countries had a protocol for deadly, infectious diseases. Even most of the developing countries had extensive plans for such an incident. There were guidelines and systems for an epidemic. In theory, these should have worked.
But nature paid no heed to theories. And nor did human fallibility.
Chapter 5
21 March
I sat on the floor beside the bed where my father lay fighting his fever and somewhere late in the afternoon I must have fallen asleep.
Something woke me. I heard a car. At first I thought it was my imagination. The sound grew louder. Quickly, but silently, I walked to the front room.
It really was a vehicle, the engine high-pitched as it raced up the hill to the town.
I ran back to the bedroom.
‘Pa.’
He didn’t hear me.
‘Pa,’ I said louder and more urgently. ‘I can hear a car.’
Pa was breathing rapidly, his mouth open. He didn’t move. I wanted to shout at him, I wanted to yell at the top of my voice, don’t die, I’m scared, there’s a car outside, we can only trust each other. Come back from the fever, I’m too small to be alone, Pa, please, just don’t die.
But I was still shy about last night, about calling for my mother. I just stood there and stared and my father didn’t wake up.
The car came closer.
I ran back into the sitting room. Outside the shadows were long, the sun dipped low. The car came closer and closer. It was moving slower now, I could hear. It was in the town.
I wanted to run outside, and say to them, ‘Come help my father, he’s sick.’
We trust only each other. Pa and I had decided that, after the people had tried to rob us, the other side of Bultfontein, five weeks ago. I couldn’t go out.
The car came round the corner. It was out front now, in the street.
A black Jeep Wrangler, with an open top. It raced past. It looked like three people were in it. Then it was gone, down the street.
I ought to have stopped them, I thought. Pa was seriously ill.
I listened; the Jeep was coming back. I saw it stop opposite the Volvo, in the street in front of me. A man with very long black hair switched off the vehicle. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, just trousers. He was lean, his chest hairs were dark and dense. He jumped out, and walked over to our truck. He had a gun in his hand.
I was going to call them. I was going to ask them for help. For me and my pa. I went towards the door.
I saw a woman in the back of the Jeep. Her head drooped forward. She had brown hair, very tangled. Her hands were tied to the roll bar. She cried out, as though she was very scared.
I stopped.
The other man, still seated in the front of the Jeep, was wearing a T-shirt with no sleeves. He had muscular arms. He hit the woman with the flat of his hand and she started to cry. He yelled to the man at our Volvo. ‘When did we last come past here?’
‘A week ago?’ the one with long hair shouted back.
‘This lorry wasn’t here then.’
Long Hair climbed up to the Volvo’s cab, tried to open the door, but it was locked. He climbed down again. He put a hand on the exhaust. ‘It’s cold,’ he called to the Jeep. ‘Are you sure? We were drunk, that time. It might have been here all along.’
Muscles laughed. ‘That’s true.’
I sat down on the chair, and looked over the couch, through the window, at them. People who would tie a woman to a car were not good people. I couldn’t trust them.
Muscles got out of the Jeep. He said something I couldn’t hear. He looked at our house, he looked straight at me. I sat dead still. I knew he couldn’t see me through the lace curtain, but it felt as if he could.
Long Hair walked down the length of the trailer. He tested the door at the back, tried to open it.
‘It’ll do no harm to check,’ Muscles called. He kept staring at the sitting-room window. Pe
rhaps he could see me? Eventually he turned away, to the bound woman, and jerked on her arms. He called to Long Hair, ‘I’m going to take a look in this house, you look in those.’ He pointed at the houses across the street.
‘Okay,’ said the other one.
Muscles approached our front door. He had a big shiny silver revolver on his hip.
The woman in the Jeep suddenly began to jerk at the roll bar with her hands. I could see her face now. There was blood on her cheek, and on her hair, just above her forehead.
Muscles laughed. ‘You won’t get loose.’ He stood watching her, until she stopped struggling, and only made little whimpering noises, as if her heart was broken. He climbed up the steps of our veranda. He rattled the security gate loudly. I was frightened, but I kept completely quiet.
Our pistol lay on a low table in the middle of the sitting room, between the chairs facing the TV. I picked it up, held it in my hand, and sat down again.
Muscles came to the sitting-room window. He pressed his face against the glass, and cupped his hand to shade his eyes from the sun. I slid off the chair and lay flat, the arm of the couch between him and me. He couldn’t see me, he couldn’t see me, it was too dark here inside, I was sure. I stayed flat on the floor, until I heard him pulling at the security door again. I sat up. I saw him take a step back, take out his revolver, aim at the security gate lock.
The shot was very loud. This time I think I must have made a sound.
The bullet splintered the wood of the door and embedded itself in the sitting-room wall, just to my left.
Muscles wrenched at the steel gate. It wouldn’t open.
‘Don’t worry,’ he shouted to Long Hair. ‘I’m just shooting off the locks.’
Then he fired again.
I held the pistol firmly in both hands. I shifted rearwards, so that my back was against the lounge chair. I raised the pistol. When he came through the door, I would have to shoot at him. If I could.
I heard him tug at the security gate, which screeched as it opened. Then the front door handle, turning as he grasped it. But the door was locked. He would try to shoot that open too.