by Bobby Adair
“Only happy thoughts,” Paul told her.
Dr. Bowman excused himself and left the room, presumably into a decontamination area.
Heidi, finding a stable place in her emotional moment, said, “If you ever do anything like this again—”
Paul shook his head then caught himself before he answered, knowing he could never talk about the truth anywhere but in the most private circumstances. “I can only think I caught it from the guy I helped with his tire when I was driving up to Lake Granby.”
Heidi paused before she said, “Everybody’s looking for him. People on the news are saying he might be the cause of all the cases in Denver.”
“What?” Paul hadn’t wanted that, and had taken precautions to avoid an outbreak. He was coherent enough to know that his Liberian tire changer was a phantom, and yet was humane enough to feel guilt over the possibility that the outbreak in Denver was his own fault.
“Other news channels say the cases are tied to an airline passenger.”
“How many cases?” Paul asked.
“Twelve so far, I think,” answered Heidi. “Most of them are at this hospital. Dr. Bowman has been researching an Ebola drug at CU. You were lucky to get it.”
“At CU?” Paul asked. “Colorado University? I’m in Denver?”
“Of course. What’s wrong?”
“I—” Paul started. “I thought they’d move me to Omaha. They can handle Ebola better there.”
Shaking her head, Heidi said, “No, they were overwhelmed with patients from the Dallas outbreak.”
“How many?” Paul asked.
“I don’t know how many went to Omaha, but Dallas has a whole hospital dedicated to Ebola now. More than a hundred patients, I think. The news has been pretty sketchy on the details lately, and half of what you try to find on the Internet turns into a 404 error.”
A lot had happened since Paul went down with Ebola. He asked, “Are the other patients getting the new drug, too?”
“I don’t know.”
Paul and Heidi looked at one another through the glass in a silence that was comfortable only because they felt so comfortable together. Heidi finally said, “I’m sorry we fought. If I’d have known this would happen—”
“You’d have upped the life insurance first.” Paul grinned.
Heidi rolled her eyes again. “Wow, you’re getting back to normal.” Dryly, she added, “I’m thrilled.” Changing the subject, Heidi said, “They expect—or maybe I should say, they hope—that you’ll be virus-free in a couple of days.”
“No shit?”
Heidi nodded. “You got lucky.”
No, Paul didn’t agree, but nodded anyway. What Heidi called luck, Paul called careful planning and execution.
Now, he just needed to protect her. He’d had plenty of time to think during his stay at the petri dish hotel. Heidi would need to stay in solitary confinement in their house. Then Paul simply had to keep the house secure and make sure that he sufficiently decontaminated himself when he came and went. He already had all the food or any other supplies they’d need to survive until vaccines were available.
Now he just needed to convince Olivia to return from Georgia before it was too late. She could stay sequestered with Heidi. Paul had already lost a son. He could bear to lose no more of his family.
Heidi said, “They’re planning to move you out of this room and into isolation for twenty-one days—”
“Twenty-one days?” Paul asked, a little angry, even as he was accepting it. He hadn’t expected isolation to last that long.
“It’s a precaution.” Heidi’s tone was firm. “They need to make sure you’re not going to infect anyone else. It won’t be as bad as this. They set up a rec room. You’ll be able to walk around, watch TV, read a book.”
Nodding, Paul said, “Will I be able to use a real phone. I’d like to call Olivia.”
“Don’t worry about her, okay? She and I have been talking every day. She’s fine. You scared her to death, Paul. You should know that.”
Paul understood exactly what she meant. His stupid, selfish choices had effects on other people. “Yes, dear.”
“Have you seen the news?”
Paul shrugged, without thinking that the gesture was nearly lost since he was lying on his back in a bed.
“You’re something of a celebrity.”
“What?”
“For stopping to help the Liberian man,” said Heidi. “You did a good deed, and now you’re fighting for your life because of it.” Heidi dramatically rolled her eyes. “With all the bad news, I think the local stations are infatuated with your story because it’s uplifting.”
“I’d rather they left me out of it.”
“Reporters want to interview you,” said Heidi, “I’ve been putting them off. With you being in the hospital, it’s easy so far.”
Paul shook his head. He hadn’t planned for the possibility of media interest.
“There’s something else.”
“Yes?” Paul asked.
“The police are probably going to come and talk to you today.”
That made Paul nervous. He’d done plenty of things that they might want to talk to him about. “Why?”
Nodding slowly to emphasize her point, she said, “They want to ask you about the Liberian man, I think.”
Chapter 55
Crumbled plastic wrappers, dirty sheets, and other clutter gathered on the hall floor, kicked to the sides by the feet of the busy. The trash bins in Salim’s room went un-emptied. His isolation room had no running water, so no proper bathroom facilities, just some kind of chemical toilet that was in danger of overflowing. It hadn’t been emptied in a week. Nurses came by to check on him with decreasing regularity. In the halls, people passed by his window but they were either draped in protective garb, or were patients being wheeled toward a room. Too frequently, they wheeled other patients away, clearly dead.
From his window on the fifth floor, Salim saw the police cordon all around the property. Police in riot gear walked the perimeter or faced off against mobs of protestors that grew in number and grew in their anger each day. At first, the picketers appeared to be hospital workers, and their signs spoke of unsafe working conditions. The protest changed as locals joined in. They didn’t want the infected in the hospital to be there at all.
At first Salim thought the crowd was protesting his presence. As the hospital filled with a sporadic but growing stream of new patients, Salim worried he was witnessing Kapchorwa all over again—only on a grand, modern scale. The protestors outside were shouting their messages but the only thing that really mattered was the emotion that drove them—fear. Fear that Ebola had come to decimate their city.
Salim felt sad for them. They should have worried about annihilation.
Two days before, Salim had taken the chance to leave his room, just to see what would happen. At first, nothing did. He made his way through an anteroom and into the hallway without anyone taking notice. It wasn’t until he neared a centrally located nurse’s station that one of his nurses in head-to-toe protective gear told him in harsh tones to get back to his room. She then went back to whatever she was doing behind her desk. Salim accepted his scolding and complied. On the way, he passed an open hamper marked with a biohazard symbol overflowing with sheets, gloves, goggles, and bloody gobs of things that in a previous life Salim wouldn’t have touched on a dare.
The situation was different now.
Salim rifled through the bin and gathered up all the pieces he needed to construct his own biohazard suit. Back in his room, he stuffed the suit into a plastic trash bag and stowed it in a cabinet that seemed to have no purpose. That next night, after his nurse’s evening rounds, he removed his biohazard gear from the cabinet and went to work cleaning it with alcohol wipes.
The biohazard suit turned out to be his ticket to freedom, at least within the hospital. He donned the gear, wrote the name Dr. Jalal across the forehead of his suit with a discarded permanent marker he’d
found, and walked through the hospital unquestioned. He was a doctor, the top of the hospital’s social hierarchy.
What Salim found in the hospital was troublesome. He covered three of the hospital’s eight floors, and every one of them was the same as his. The only people moving about wore full biohazard gear. He peeked into a dozen rooms, even speaking to a few of the patients to ask how they were doing. His pretense grew easier with each visit. He wasn’t qualified to diagnose any of the sick, but he’d seen enough of the dying in Kapchorwa—with their bruises, bloody eyes, bleeding noses, and empty, hopeless stares—to know that all these people had the same disease.
Before going back up to his room, Salim walked into a lounge a few floors down from his own. He found an arrangement of worn couches and stained chairs. The vending machines were a disappointment, with dispensing rows cluttered with those off-brand potato chips that are always stale because nobody buys them, and chocolate bars with unusual names that are so old they’re covered in that powdery crust of brown dust.
Just as well, he had no coins to spend. He had no money at all, nothing but his off-blue gown and his newly acquired spacesuit. He leaned against a wall and looked out a window that faced the backside of the hospital. He saw dumpsters and big yellow arrows painted on the concrete to direct trucks into the loading dock. He saw refrigerated delivery trucks—six of them—of the kind they parked behind restaurants for dropping off frozen fish or hamburger patties. Salim felt their idling diesel engines vibrate through the glass.
A handful of people in biohazard suits milled around behind them, seeming to have no purpose other than to look bored. The group perked up and came together. A gurney rolled out from the hospital loading docks, followed soon by a second, each pushed by a pair of plastic-clad people who were obviously tired. On each gurney lay a body bag with what could only be a human corpse.
One of the people who’d been lingering pulled a ramp out from under the back of a truck, walked up, and rolled the door open. Body bags were stacked inside from the floor up to the height of a man. The bodies on the gurneys were hauled up the ramp and added to the piles inside. The rolling door was closed. The gurneys returned to the loading dock.
As he stood there, staring at the truck, watching the men go back to loitering and waiting for the next gurneys, Salim realized the trucks might all be stacked full. How could a modern country develop a problem with corpse disposal so quickly? It shook Salim’s sense of security.
Chapter 56
Austin spent most of his first day as The General’s houseboy, thinking. In reality, there wasn’t much for him to do. The General had a chamber pot—a rectangular plastic pail with the remnants of a mayonnaise label peeling off the side. The General expected Austin to empty the bucket every time he pissed or defecated.
The only significant thing Austin did was to construct a broom from materials he found in the forest close to The General’s hut. With that broom, fashioned from a long stick and some leafy tropical plants bound to the end, Austin swept The General’s dirt floor. It was an activity meant to demean rather than to clean. At least, that was Austin’s guess.
The General dismissed him late in the evening. Austin walked across the dark camp, seeing only a few shadows of rebels; some squatting in the darkness by their huts, some smoking and walking the perimeter. Austin thought for the hundredth time that day of quietly running into the trees and losing himself in the night. Each time he entertained the fantasy of escape, he also thought about the hostage who’d lost half his foot that morning. That bleeding stump of a foot was a powerful deterrent. That and the periodic, mournful moaning of the mutilated man who shared the hostage hut—with the others.
As Austin approached his new home, he noticed two guards sitting with their backs to a tree a short distance across the clearing. No one could enter or leave the hut without being seen. The guards’ interest seemed focused on their conversation and some trinket they were showing one another. Neither did or said anything to indicate that they noticed Austin entering the hut.
Inside, a kerosene lamp hung from the ceiling, casting a dim light and dancing shadows across the faces of the hostages. A Chinese man sat on one side of the hut, his butt on his bedding, eyeing Austin suspiciously. The man who’d had his foot hacked lay on his own bedding mat, with bloody, crusty bandages wrapped over his stumped foot. A frail Chinese man was soothing and trying his best to care for the wounded man. The white man—the last of them—sat across the hut from the glaring Chinese man.
Austin looked around. There appeared to be enough mats only for the men already there. All were occupied with the exception of an empty one beside the angry-looking Chinese man’s mat. From the way the man glanced at the mat and then glared back up, Austin understood the mat was taken.
Austin looked at the white man and asked, “Where do I get a mat to sleep on?”
The white man pointed to the man with a stump for a foot.
Austin looked at the crippled man, then back at the guy who’d pointed. “What?”
In accented English, he said, “Take his, or wait until he dies, then take it. You decide.”
“Take it?” Austin shook his head and glared at each of the sitting hostages before turning around and going back out through the door. Immediately upon stepping outside, the two guards showered him with angry words. Austin stopped. He tried to speak, but both guards jumped to their feet and their words grew angrier as they advanced.
“I need a mat,” Austin said, pointing back inside the hut, “a sleeping mat.”
When he looked back up, one of the guards punched him in the face. The other punched him in the stomach. Austin fell to his knees. A boot kicked but glanced off the side of his face and hit his shoulder, knocking him back into the hut. One of the guards leaned in, shouted something Austin didn’t understand until it was punctuated with “Stay.”
The guards went to their place by the tree. Austin touched a hand to a bruise swelling on the side of his face. He pulled his hand back but saw no blood. He rolled over onto his knees. Outside, the voices of the two guards returned to the low tones of private discussion that they’d been using before coming over to give Austin a lesson in the rules.
He wondered how many rules he’d have to learn.
The guy with the cut foot cried out in a particularly pained series of moans, then hushed.
The white man in the hut said, “We’ve only got four mats. That’s it, no matter how many of us are in here.”
“Four,” Austin nodded. “And don’t go outside at night. I guess that’s a rule, right?”
The white man nodded.
Austin crawled over to an empty spot along the wall of the hut near the other white man. “If I sleep here, will they beat me? Is there a rule about where I sleep?”
The man smiled and almost laughed. “They don’t care what we do in here as long as we don’t go outside until morning.”
“Got it,” said Austin.
The man pointed at the crippled man. “You should take his mat. He won’t live.”
The man soothing the invalid turned and gave Austin a look that dared him to try and take the mat.
Austin replied, “I’ll sleep in the dirt.”
The white man shrugged.
Austin reached out a hand to shake. “I’m Austin Cooper.”
The man looked at the hand as though going through some lengthy evaluation on whether to commit to the handshake. In the end, he did. “Sander Desmet.”
“Desmet?” Austin asked. “Where are you from?”
“Belgium.”
“I’m from America.”
“I know.”
“From my accent?” Austin asked.
Sander didn’t answer. He looked over at the Chinese and back at the dying man. “You should take his mat. His effeminate friend won’t do anything.”
“I won’t,” Austin reiterated. “How long have you been a hostage? What’s the deal here?”
In a tone just above a whisper, Sander
said, “When I said the guards don’t care what happens in here, I should have added they sometimes get perturbed if they hear loud talking. Best not to agitate them, yeah?”
Austin nodded.
“The General treats it like a business.”
“The kidnapping?”
Sander nodded. “If he gets his money, he sends you home.”
“How long does it take?”
“A month or two, sometimes three.”
“Did he tell you that?” Austin asked. “How long have you been here?”
“Eight months.”
Austin slumped along with his hopes.
Sander pointed at the wounded man, “That’s Tian. His boyfriend there is Min.”
Min looked over his shoulder and nodded at Austin. Austin smiled in return.
“The silent one over there is Wei. He’s always pissed, so he won’t say much. They arrived together about a month ago. They work for a mining outfit across the Kenyan border. Too many Chinese are crawling all over Africa right now, trying to schmooze the governments and lock up natural resources. Their companies pay the ransom and they’re usually gone inside of a month or two. The General knows that, so he likes to grab the Chinese as much as he can. It’s easy money for him.”
Austin didn’t care about any of that. “If Tian’s ransom was going to get paid, why’d he try to run? That is why The General chopped his foot off, right?”
Sander nodded. “He should have stayed but the guards beat him a bit. Maybe a lot.”
“Why him?”
“Watch them two,” Sander nodded at Min and Tian. “You’ll figure it out.”
Austin asked, “Why have you been here for eight months?”
“The General likes to grab whites, too. He thinks we’ve all got rich families.”
“We don’t,” argued Austin.
“You don’t feel rich, but to them, you are,” said Sander.
“Is yours not rich enough?” asked Austin.
“My mother’s got no money. My dad passed away a long time ago. The General asked for something like a million in US dollars to give me back. He likes to start high. Now he’s down to ten thousand. If he can come down to a thousand, like I keep telling him, my mother can pay it. Until then, I’m stuck here.”