by Bobby Adair
Something hit him hard in the back of the head and he fell forward. Heidi’s body rolled out through the dirt and grass in front of him. A boot landed on his back.
Scanner man prattled something, ordering and yelling.
Paul no longer cared. He no longer cared about anything. He only wanted to bury his wife. He wanted a place to come and to say his goodbyes for as many days or years as that might take. With a heavy boot on his back and Heidi’s plastic-wrapped corpse in the dirt, he tried to sob out his explanation, over and over. If he said it enough times, maybe—just maybe—they’d hear.
A gloved hand touched his shoulder and patted him, and as the boot lifted, he suddenly realized how much he missed the gentle touch of another human being.
“Look, mister,” a voice said beside him, “I know this is hard for you. This is hard for all of us.”
Paul turned his head to look. A masked and goggled policeman said, “Let me help you get your wife to the anonymous grave, okay? I’ll get you the information on the grave number. We’ll get her added to the list. There won’t be a marker today, but it’ll get there. Okay? Maybe in a week or two. It’ll be there. I promise.”
Paul nodded.
“You gonna be all right?” the policeman asked.
Paul nodded again, though his tears still flowed.
The cop put a hand under Paul’s arm and helped him to his feet. Heidi was still on the ground, dirt all over her clean plastic wrap. The cop knelt down to pick up her body.
“You don’t have to—” Paul started but the cop already had her in his arms. He turned and Paul put his arms out to take the weight of Heidi’s corpse. “Thank you. Thank you.”
“C’mon. I’ll walk you over.”
Chapter 95
Mitch said, “I talk with Mathew almost every day.”
“Good,” Olivia responded absently.
“He’s a good guy. He seems to have a thing for you.”
Without the energy to smile, she said. “Yes, he does.”
“None of my business, of course.”
Olivia laughed, but it was so hollow, it sounded forced, even to her. “It’s okay. You and I have probably broken half the secrecy laws on the books. If we can’t be confidants, who can be?”
“Then you won’t mind my saying so, but you sound off.”
“The world,” Olivia mused.
“Ebola has been making a mess of things for a while now. If it’s because of Austin—”
“No,” Olivia told him, “I...it’s my dad and stepmom, and—”
Mitch drew an audible breath. “I don’t have to tell you this, and I know it’s no comfort, but you knew things could get bad. Everybody is catching this thing.”
“Everybody but you,” said Olivia.
“Lucky, I guess. Tell me about your folks.”
“I probably didn’t tell you this, but my dad caught Ebola and recovered.”
“That’s great.”
“Yeah,” Olivia said, but in a tone that didn’t convey any of Mitch’s enthusiasm over the point. “My dad called and told me my stepmom, Heidi, was murdered.”
“People can be shitty. Really shitty. Were you close with her?”
“Not really, not at first I guess. It took a while but we became friends.”
“I only talked to her a couple of times, but she really loved your brother.”
“I know.”
“Are you dealing with it okay?”
Olivia thought about it for a moment then stopped. That was how she was dealing with it. She was hiding. She was numb. She just had to keep working, keep moving. “My dad’s not taking it well. I think he never got past Austin. He never believed that he might still be alive.”
“About that,” said Mitch.
Olivia gulped. “If you have bad news just tell me.”
“No, nothing like that. Before I tell you, though—”
In more of a command than she intended, Olivia said, “Just tell me.”
“As much as I wanted to stay in Kapchorwa and ride this thing out, Dr. Wheeler has had me running all over Uganda and Kenya, trying to learn what I can. What else am I gonna do? I think everybody at Langley who knew I existed caught Ebola and died. I just hope payroll doesn’t forget who I am.” Mitch laughed.
“Are you actually in a good mood?” Olivia asked, “Or are you pretending, just to cheer me up?”
“Good. I got into Mbale today. This thing is bad here, Olivia. Before I got to Mbale, I hadn’t seen a single living person in four days.”
“I’m missing something,” said Olivia.
I’m getting to it,” said Mitch. “I was in the hospital, and I ran into a Dr. Kristin Mills.”
“Is she cute?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. Two important things came out of that conversation.”
“If you don’t just tell me—”
“She was one of the doctors I told you about that I left in Kapchorwa.”
Olivia stopped breathing.
“She caught Ebola while she was caring for your brother. She said he made it.”
Olivia’s preferred numbness crumbled and she started to cry. “I swear to God—”
“I’m serious. She said there’s another guy, a Dr. Littlefield, who treated her. He was in Kapchorwa all along, through the whole epidemic. He knows Austin. I haven’t caught up with Littlefield yet. She said he’ll be in the hospital later today. He’ll know more, but she said he told her that your brother came to Mbale to get help for them.”
“So he’s in Mbale?” Olivia asked through her tears.
“Nobody’s seen him since Kapchorwa, so don’t get your hopes too high yet. All we know is that he survived the virus.”
Olivia gathered her composure and said, “Thank you, Mitch. Thank you so much. You don’t know how much this means.”
Then, she just cried. Too much pent up pain over too many awful things finally found a release.
To his credit, Mitch said nothing until she reached the end of her tears. “You know,” he said, “if I run over on my minutes, the phone company charges me extra.”
Olivia laughed. “You must be a real catch.”
“I guess,” Mitch laughed. “Here’s the other thing I mentioned.”
“Yes?”
“Dr. Mills was with another doctor in Kapchorwa besides Littlefield. She said a dozen or so Ugandan soldiers stayed with them, and every one of them got sick.”
“Okay.” Olivia wasn’t surprised. “Everybody catches this thing. Everybody but you.”
“Yeah,” Mitch chuckled. “I’m immortal.”
“That’ll be funny until you get infected. You be careful. Okay?”
“Yes, mom.” Mitch got back on track. “This thing is killing over ninety percent, right?”
“Those are the numbers I’m hearing,” Olivia agreed.
“Only that other doctor and four of the soldiers died.”
“Wait. What?”
“I told Dr. Wheeler about it a couple of hours ago. He said it’s statistically possible for a small pool of cases to show a low mortality rate. He also said it was possible the airborne strain mutated again but with an attenuated mortality rate.”
“My God. That could be huge.”
“Absolutely,” said Mitch. “It’s all preliminary at the moment, but he said he was going to see what he could do about getting a jet sent this way to collect samples.”
“Then you’ll have a ride home.”
“Or I could stay and look for your brother.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Olivia told him. “Now I’ve got some news for you. I’ll apologize first, because it’s not as good as what you told me.”
“Shoot.”
“I got this from Barry, a coworker of mine. He’s in contact with somebody at Langley who’s not dead yet. They got information that Najid Almasi is alive and recovering from his wounds in Dubai.”
“I—” Mitch choked on something that sounded like anger. “Killing him won’t change any
thing now, but that piece of shit needs to suffer and die.”
Olivia said, “I saw an assessment report this morning estimating that twenty-three percent of the global population now has Ebola, or has already died. Half of the infections occurred in the last seven days. You’re smart enough to know what that says about where we’ll be next week. Africa, the Asian subcontinent, and the Far East are getting hammered the worst. Some of it sounds like your experience in Nairobi. The infection rates in India are shocking. What I’m getting at is yes, I couldn’t agree more. Najid Almasi needs to pay for what he’s done. I’m only afraid that with the state of things, that might never happen.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Chapter 96
Paul drove the pickup into the garage, squeezing in beside Heidi’s crookedly parked SUV. Heidi was a terrible driver. She’d always insisted the opposite, so she and Paul often argued about it. Such is marriage.
Paul turned off his engine and closed the garage door. In the dim light coming in through the closed window blinds, he sat. He wondered what he should do with Heidi’s car. He only needed one. He thought about giving it away. He remembered Austin’s little pickup, still parked out at the curb, collecting dirt and rusting. It hadn’t moved since Austin left for Africa four months ago.
So Paul had three cars: his, his dead wife’s, and—
He didn’t want to think about it.
He reached into his pocket for his phone. He wanted to call Olivia and tell her he’d buried Heidi, but saw that he’d missed another call from her. He dialed her back, but his signal dropped. He’d have to go upstairs. It was the only place in the house where the cell phone signal didn’t get randomly dropped.
Paul stared at the garage wall a little while longer, not feeling enough motivation to do anything, wondering how long he could sit in the dim comfort and pretend life didn’t hurt. He wondered how long he could hide from the guilty suspicion that Heidi’s death was a result of his choices.
Someone drained her blood when they killed her. Only one reason existed for that behavior and it came back to Ebola immunity. If that was true, then a series of tautological steps traced back squarely on Paul. It was his fault and nothing could be done now to change it. All he could do was pay for his sins with his tears.
It was the missed call from Olivia that finally gave him enough motivation to get out of his truck.
He took his AR-15 out of the cab and carried it with him into his desperately silent house, losing track of what he was thinking about in the garage, forgetting even about the call to Olivia.
He thought about preparing himself something to eat as he stood with rifle still in hand. It was well after noon, and he hadn’t eaten anything all day. Feeding himself seemed, at the moment, like an onerous, pointless endeavor. Standing in the kitchen, he was able to see most of the living room and a good part of the dining room. He looked up toward the top of the stairs. So much space, for just him and his ghosts.
He looked across the dining room and thought about his empty front porch, empty of all but that black flag of a T-shirt that he didn’t need anymore—refused to have anymore. There was no Ebola in Paul Cooper’s house and there were no dead.
Fuck the government. Fuck the neighbors. The T-shirt had flames in its future.
Paul stomped across the dining room, and flung the front door open.
“Freeze!”
Startled, Paul faced policemen on his porch. They were wearing black riot gear, gas masks, and thick gloves, standing in a shoulder-to-shoulder wall behind their rifle barrels and pistols, all pointed at him.
“Drop the gun! Now!”
Paul was confused and didn’t move.
“Drop it!”
Paul’s attention locked on his AR-15—solid, lethal, a conduit for all the anger anyone might deserve. And these cops standing on Paul’s porch, they wanted a dose. They needed a dose.
He looked back up at the gun barrels pointed at him, and in his mind, he imagined himself dodging those bullets long enough to bring his untested weapon to bear on the offensive pricks. He saw himself shooting them down with bullets wrapped in his hate. He saw them suffering, gasping, and bleeding. And somehow, he imagined that those bullets ripping their flesh would make him feel better.
“Don’t do it,” a voice behind one of the gas masks ordered. “Drop the weapon.”
The rational Paul knew he’d be dead before he fired one bullet. If he tried to raise his AR-15, he’d have so many bullet holes in his chest, neck, and face, that he’d never feel the pain. He’d die before he hit the floor where Heidi had taken her last breath.
Maybe raising the AR-15 was his best option.
Maybe that was the best way to end his deep, empty sorrow.
“Drop the gun, right now.”
As he thought about Heidi, he thought about the kind cop at the interment center, who’d helped him there, at the end. He knew that each of those thirty rounds in his magazine was just a new sin, waiting to be added to his debt of tears. His hands relaxed. The AR-15 hit the floor, and just that quickly, Paul was on the floor as well.
Chapter 97
Paul was no longer in control of his body. His hands were cuffed behind him, and he was seated on one of his own dining table chairs. Strong hands held his shoulders still.
The black-clad posse—he wasn’t even sure how many there were—fanned out into his house, knocking things over, stomping up the stairs, kicking in doors that could easily have been opened with the turn of an unlocked knob. They yelled a lot at the empty house. All warnings and threats. They hollered at one another, their standard form of communication, macho fucks wagging their Kevlar-protected little dicks.
A guy in a suit—protected with the usual gear, of course—asked, “Are you Paul Cooper?”
Paul said nothing.
“Are you Paul Cooper?”
A hand dug into Paul’s pants pocket and produced his billfold. Paul smirked. The billfold was empty of everything except some cash and Heidi’s credit cards. All of Paul’s stuff had been incinerated with his telephone.
One of the macho cops thundered down the stairs and jogged across the kitchen in boots that must have been weighted. He handed a passport to the suited questioner.
The questioner gave it a look and then held the photo up beside Paul’s face. “You’ve put on weight.”
“Your mom always makes me cookies when I come over to fuck her.” Junior high snark seemed appropriate.
Unfazed, the guy said, “Me, too. She’s nice like that.”
Everybody laughed, though it was clear nobody found it funny.
The questioner asked Paul to confirm his social security number and his date of birth. Paul didn’t cooperate.
The suited guy said, “You are Paul Cooper. You have contracted and survived Ebola. I am Lieutenant Harper, Douglas County Sheriff’s Department. In compliance with the United States Ebola Resources Act, all blood sera previously the personal property of any Ebola survivor has been designated a strategic resource.”
“What?” Paul shouted.
“You, being a human,” the Lieutenant Harper continued, “and a living person, are not separable from your blood serum, and you continue to produce blood serum. You are hereby notified that you are to report to a strategic resource extraction facility until such time as The United States of America has deemed your blood serum to be of no more strategic importance. Do you understand?”
Shaking his head and weighing the price he’d have to pay in punches for pointlessly spitting onto Lieutenant Harper’s gas mask, Paul said, “I do not understand. Why don’t you get the fuck out of my house?”
Lieutenant Harper looked down at Paul through his gas mask lenses, and Paul imagined that Harper was glaring, so Paul glared back. When Harper raised a hand, Paul expected he’d get punched, maybe he just hoped for it. Instead, Harper waved a hand to brush away the hands holding Paul’s shoulders.
“Don’t get up,” Harper told Paul. Harper’s ton
e held no threats. He grabbed a chair and scooted it over in front of Paul. He sat down and looked silently at him while men continued ransacking the house.
“What are they looking for?” Paul asked in a civil tone.
The gas mask shook back and forth. “Blood plasma. People have been selling it online. Can you believe it?”
“No.”
“Crazy times bring out the crazy people. If there’s any serum here, we’ll find it.”
Paul thought about Heidi. He looked down at the spot on the floor where he’d found her, bloodless. All resistance in Paul drained away. He didn’t care what happened to him.
Harper sighed in what sounded like a long metallic hiss through his gas mask. He grabbed the front of the mask and pushed it up off his face. He looked to be about Paul’s age—haggard, and frayed, no longer a robotic government thug, but a tired man, a neighbor even, just doing his job. He said, “I hate this shit. Sorry if they bruised you up a bit.”
Paul shook his head feebly. With no energy left to hate, he said, “I’m fine.”
“My partner got shot the day before yesterday,” said Harper.
Paul looked over at his AR-15, which leaned in a corner. “What happened?”
“Same as you, a survivor.” Harper reached up to rub his gloved hand over his sweaty face, froze, looked at the glove as if it were a poisonous snake, and put his hand back down. He attempted a pained smile. “Old habits.” He looked at his hand again and shook his head. “We’ll probably all kill ourselves before this is over. It was a guy with a hunting rifle who shot Bill when he was getting out of the car. We never even got to the door.”
“How’s...Bill?”
Shaking his head, Harper said, “Couldn’t take him to the hospital. No room there. No doctors available, even if we could. No way he’d live through that, anyway. Too much Ebola there. The men call it the petri dish, you know.” Harper chuckled at the joke, but only in the most perfunctory way. “The petri dish. That’s a one-way ticket now. You go there, you bleed out. I guess Bill should have gotten there first, like you did.”