by Bobby Adair
The thought of Najid stirred Austin’s impotent anger, but he had no desire at the moment to indulge in any Almasi death fantasies.
Finally, boredom set in. Austin figured he was as refreshed as he was likely to get. He stood up, situated his belongings, and started the next leg of his morning hike.
South of Namusi, walking up a long, straight stretch of road, Austin spotted something far ahead that shouldn’t have been there, something in the road too distant to make out. Wary about what it might be, Austin walked out of the road’s center and to the edge of the asphalt. He’d have walked on the shoulder had it not been muddy from the previous day’s rain.
It only took another five or ten minutes of walking for Austin to understand what it was he saw. Parked across the road were two trucks painted military green. A roadblock.
The military must have quarantined the area when word of the Ebola outbreak reached Kampala. Austin walked off the road and leaned against a tree. Initially distressed by the sight of the roadblock, he decided it was a good thing. Containing the Ebola virus in the Kapchorwa and Sironko districts was good, not so much for the people within, but for everyone outside. That also meant that the government and the international community were coming to the aid of these people. With any luck, it also suggested that Najid had been stopped and detained at just such a roadblock.
That left Austin with a dilemma.
If Najid was detained, then it might be information Austin could provide that would lead to Najid’s punishment for his crimes. Austin would need to make sure that the right people heard what he had to say. The best way to do that would be to talk to the US Embassy in Kampala. The guards at a roadblock in the middle-of-nowhere Uganda would be in no position to have any idea of what Austin was talking about. They would only turn him away.
That left Austin only one choice. He needed to leave the road and start out across the fields. He knew that Mbale was south of him, and with Mt. Elgon as a guiding landmark, he knew he could keep himself moving in the right direction.
Austin crossed the shoulder and stepped into a lush field of waist-high tea bushes.
Chapter 41
Early that summer, Paul and Heidi had spent a weekend at a remote cabin up in the mountains near Lake Granby. Paul gave a thought to driving up there. It would get him away from his house and get him pretty far away from other people.
Paul’s second thought was that Lake Granby was a few hours up into the mountains. If he fell ill there, what hospital would he end up in? Paul didn’t know. What he did know was that he couldn’t chance falling ill and waking up in some Podunk hospital with a doctor who earned his degree from a fourth-rate Caribbean island medical school. He had taken an enormous chance by purposefully trying to contract Ebola early. He couldn’t afford to negate the advantage of being an early adopter by putting himself under incompetent care.
He needed to stay in Denver.
Inspiration hit.
Paul pulled out of his garage and drove his truck toward Interstate 25.
When he’d first moved to Denver, Paul had been forced to stay in a hotel for two months while he shopped for a house. The hotel he’d stayed in looked nice enough on the outside, and the long-term rates were affordable. The rooms weren’t a lot cleaner than the cabby’s apartment in Dallas. He’d gotten in the habit of never going barefoot indoors for fear of what he might catch from putting his bare feet on the carpet. He’d have moved out after that first night had he not prepaid for the entire stay. The manager had been a total ass about refunding Paul’s money so Paul was stuck for the full two months.
Well, that manager, if he was still there, would earn Paul as a repeat customer, and his putrid little hotel would get itself an industrial-grade decontamination when Paul moved out this time.
Chapter 42
After breakfast on the fourth day of Paul’s stay in the petri dish hotel, just as he was starting to worry whether all of his troubles had been for naught, he started to feel feverish. He didn’t take any aspirin. He didn’t want to mask his coming symptoms. He wanted to be sure he was sick when he made the fateful call.
By lunch, the pain in his head was trying to claw its way through the bone. His muscles knotted themselves into fists of ache, and every organ squirmed through briars and sand. Between trips to the bathroom that were increasing in frequency, he sat on the bed, held his telephone in his unsteady hands, and reviewed his story in his head.
He dialed.
After a single ring, the telephone call connected and the voice said, “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
Paul quickly provided his name, address, the hotel name, his room number, and then said, “It’s possible I have Ebola.”
A long pause followed. “Sir, making false statements to the police is a punishable offense in the state of Colorado and is pursued vigorously.”
“I understand,” said Paul. “Will you please send an ambulance to my location and warn them that I may be infected?”
A sigh and a huff followed from the voice. “Are you able to transport yourself to the hospital?”
“Possibly,” said Paul. “I have a fever and the worst headache I’ve...I feel dizzy when I stand.” Paul decided an exaggeration was in order. Well, not much of a stretch. “I don’t think I can drive.”
“Why do you think you have Ebola?” The operator let her tone convey the accusation in the question. She thought she was being pranked.
“Are you sending an ambulance?” Paul asked.
“Yes, one is on the way.”
A new voice—a man—came on the line. “Mr. Cooper, why do you believe you have Ebola?”
Paul said, “I think I’ve been exposed.”
“How so?”
Time for the big lie. Paul replied, “The day after my wife and I had an argument and I left—”
“Is your wife with you now? Is she all right?” the man asked.
“She’s fine. I think she flew to her mother’s house in Texas after I moved into the hotel.”
“But she’s in good health?” the man persisted. “Not in any danger?”
“She’s fine,” Paul told him, thinking that perhaps he was providing too many details. Simple lies are always easier to support.
“Why do think you were exposed?”
“I was driving up Highway 40 toward Granby and I came across a car with a flat tire. The guy didn’t look like he knew what he was doing, so I stopped and helped.” Paul paused to calm his nervousness.
“And why do you think you have Ebola?”
“Um,” Paul said, “He had a Liberian accent.”
“And what does a Liberian accent sound like?” the man asked.
“Is the ambulance coming?” Paul demanded. He needed to get better at lying.
Chapter 43
As was her new thrice-daily habit, Olivia dialed the number, and as usual, the CIA operative at the other end did not pick up. She didn’t expect him to, but wasn’t ready to give up on the endeavor just yet. The phone rang eight times and disconnected. No surprise.
Olivia put the telephone back in its cradle, wondering if she’d have better luck calling from her cell phone, rather than a company line. She looked back at her screen. She’d been working an item from the queue—some person she’d decided to call Blogger X—who had been posting through an anonymous server domiciled in a Norwegian data farm.
Blogger X’s posts were written in distinctly American English, with plenty of poor grammar, slang, and R-rated language to prove it. The tone was generally livid with distrust. He believed the government was repressing news about the Ebola outbreak and was trying to drum up public passion to do something—call a congressman, email the White House, something.
Unfortunately, as Olivia knew too well, Blogger X was right.
Olivia knew that Blogger X had been shut down twice already. She’d tried to track him down once, as had someone else who worked the queue out of Phoenix. Olivia took a moment to link all three cases together in the appl
ication, then called up all the versions of his page cached in the system.
Outside of his seemingly poor mastery of the English language, Blogger X had put together a pleasing color palette, with a nicely limited set of font choices. Graphics on the page were effective, but not obnoxious. She wondered if Blogger X’s day job was in graphic design. That was a clue that might help in tracking him down.
More importantly (for Blogger X, not for Olivia’s task), he’d done a fantastic job putting together a time-lapse animation of a global map showing round, red circles over white continents surrounded by teal-colored oceans. A click on the play button started a date counter that coincided with a pinprick of red in Western Africa, the first reported Ebola outbreak.
Visually, it was much more engaging than the version of the same information she’d put together for herself at Barry’s behest over a week ago. She watched the video as the pinprick in West Africa grew and multiplied. The size of the spots indicated the number of cases, and she could mouse over any spot to get the date and the count of cases on that date for that spot. A pinprick of red was a single case. A large red spot like the one over Monrovia represented thousands of cases.
Two new enhancements to Blogger X’s video had to do with scaling and color. Ebola cases in the new strain were represented by yellow pinpricks and yellow spots. Olivia made a note to look into which information on which strain was public and which was not.
Additionally, at a certain date of the animation, all of the spots shifted to one tenth their previous size to indicate a new scale. A big spot that represented a thousand cases one instant shifted down to the size of a spot that had formerly represented a hundred. It was an unfortunate necessity in order to accommodate the scale of the epidemic, primarily as it was spreading in Nairobi where the case count had just topped forty thousand, though everyone believed the number was higher.
Forty thousand in Nairobi. Olivia took a moment to think about that number and tried to come up with some reason why it shouldn’t carry the most ominous ramifications for the rest of mankind.
In the two and a half weeks since Olivia had come back to work, the case count in Nairobi had grown from a few hundred to that staggering forty thousand number. The pictures, videos, and stories coming out of Nairobi were medieval. Bodies were lying in the streets. Hospitals were cesspools where the infected waded in to die. Corpses were stacked in piles of Holocaust proportions. Pyres burned hundreds in squares where markets once thrived. The air was thick with death while armed bandits roamed the streets, victimizing the weak. The police and the army had melted into the chaos.
Olivia wondered if some professor somewhere had put together a measure of social stability for countries around the world, a kind of metric for how resilient a society might be when calamity struck. In other words, what percentage of a city’s citizens needed to die in the street before social order broke down?
More to the point, how many Americans needed to be dead before Olivia needed to think seriously about barricading herself in her apartment with a gun?
Olivia felt embarrassed for entertaining the thought. Things couldn’t get that bad. Not here.
While mainstream American news still reported on the crisis in Africa, the worst of it was repressed. Little mention was made of the distinction between the new strain and the old. Nowhere were deaths counts reported publicly—thanks to Olivia and people like her. That wouldn’t last though. They couldn’t stifle the information forever.
Already ten thousand had died in Mumbai, and it seemed the first case had just been reported a week prior. Beijing’s number carried with it a range of estimates, both on the same scale as Mumbai. Not surprisingly, the Chinese government was doing a better job than the Americans at keeping a lid on the scary numbers. Sometimes censorship had its benefits.
Olivia moved the date slider bar back five days to a time when Frankfurt, the worst-affected Western city, had only—only—three hundred cases of the new strain. She let the animation run forward again and watched the few yellow pixels on Frankfurt blossom to a spot that represented over two thousand.
That was what Ebola K looked like in a modern Western city with a proactive government and world-class medical care. Olivia asked herself how long it would be before it looked like Nairobi.
She restarted the animation and watched. The red dots of the first Ebola strain smoldered menacingly but slowly through West Africa. At a point just over two weeks ago, the yellow dots blazed a sudden and spidery path across the globe that made the red dots seem stagnant.
It frightened Olivia as she extrapolated the growth of the yellow in her imagination. It frightened her more because she knew Blogger X’s data was accurate.
Chapter 44
To circumvent the roadblock the day before, Austin had exhausted himself trudging through muddy fields that left his shoes caked with wet, red clay that glued his feet to the ground with each step. By noon, he’d found what he could only guess was a barn for some farmer’s goats. Its chest-high walls looked like they might collapse in a good wind, and inside, it smelled of manure. It was empty. Austin spent the night.
When he woke in the morning, Austin felt stronger than he had since before Ebola ravaged his body. He fed himself and began early. He crossed a field that was starting to dry out after the rains and came to a road somewhere south of Namusi. The road led southeast, and Austin figured it would either take him into Mbale or to the highway just north of town.
He followed.
Along the way, his spirits lifted. He saw his first sign of normal life—a farmer toiling in his field. Further along, he saw other people both in their fields and working near their homes. He saw a boy herding his family’s goats. A car full of people sped by—the roof stacked high with all manner of goods. Later, two more vehicles drove cautiously by on their way out of Mbale.
By noon Austin was nearing the outskirts of Mbale and watching a wide column of tan and gray smoke grow into a crawling stain through the cerulean sky.
Across several fields he saw the Mbale road. At the point where it reached the edge of town, he saw the source of the fire, the Islamic University. At least two of its academic buildings were aflame as were several of the hostels south of campus. People milled about. He heard faint, angry shouts.
Best to steer clear of that area.
Austin left the road and took off across another field toward some neighborhoods on the northeast edge of Mbale. He came to a narrow dirt road and started toward town until he noticed that the road was blocked with debris just where it passed between the first two houses in the neighborhood. He saw the heads of several people behind the barricade. More than one shook a stick at him.
He cut across another field, hoping that whatever unrest was troubling Mbale, it was limited to the northern parts of town. When he saw more pillars of smoke rising from a spot a mile or two to the southeast, he started to doubt that hope.
Staying in the fields, he skirted the barricaded neighborhood and headed south. That’s when he saw the source of the second column of smoke, the Catholic University.
Religious unrest?
Austin stopped in the field and watched the smoke rise as he thought again about his options. None of them were particularly rosy. He was just a mzungu in the middle of Africa, and the closest thing to civilization he’d seen all week appeared to be tearing itself to pieces.
Austin looked in the direction of the center of town. Through a haze of smoke from the large fires at the universities, he couldn’t tell if anything was burning over there. He listened for the sound of gunfire, more than half expecting to hear it. There was none. He had no doubt the fires at both the Islamic University and the Catholic University were related. One was probably revenge for the other. It was more than possible that the first fire was an accident. Fear, already heightened by the Ebola epidemic in the countryside and the sight of soldiers setting up roadblocks, had turned a previously stable situation volatile.
Austin gave a thought to avoidi
ng Mbale and going—
Going where?
Austin really had almost no other choice. Mbale was the only sizable town within a hundred miles. It represented his only real chance to get in contact with the rest of the world. It represented his only chance of getting help for the survivors in Kapchorwa. He had hoped Mbale would be his first step in getting back home.
No choice but to proceed.
Austin gave the burning Catholic University a wide berth and cut across another field. Near the houses bordering the field he saw more signs of life. Some people were outside their houses watching the fires. Some watched from windows and doors. He started to see people walking on the streets, some in groups, talking, looking almost normal, others carrying goods. He saw a few riding bikes. He even caught sight of a boda.
If he could hire a boda his troubles would be in the past. On the back of one of those motorcycles he could get as far as Kampala and to the American embassy if he had to.
At the southern edge of the field, Austin passed into a densely forested park and felt safe amongst the trees. His worries about Mbale started to recede. When he was deep enough into the park, he took a break to drink some water, eat a snack, and rest. To his surprise, he recovered quickly from the morning’s walk. It made him hopeful. His health was moving in the direction of normal.
At the park’s southern boundary, he crossed a road and continued south, staying close to a tall hedge of native shrubs along one side of the road. The people he saw were nervous but not threatening.