by Matt Killeen
The Mouse was fading.
“Keep writing, it’ll help you figure things out,” she interrupted. “Do you like kittens or puppies best?”
“I don’t—”
She was gone. The room grew darker and darker until Sarah could see nothing.
TWENTY-ONE
October 16, 1940
EVEN CONSIDERING THE weather conditions, it was unbearably hot in the apron, gloves, mask, boots, and goggles. Sweat ran freely down the inside of Sarah’s clothes, finally collecting, squelching, and sloshing around the soles of her feet. The mask stank of bleach and disinfectant where its insides had been soaked in caustic liquid. It made her nose and mouth burn. The eyepieces kept steaming up, and Sarah had to constantly remind herself not to wipe at them with her oversized gloves. They flapped as she hobbled along in boots four sizes too large.
Then they reached the village, and she forgot all about that.
Clearly this had once been a thriving hamlet with dozens of large huts, made of intricately woven raffia with a high, rolling thatched roof that dropped to the ground on either side. Behind each house was a fenced-in vegetable garden or a small orchard.
The mission’s temporary structures and shelters, uniformly white and hammered into the ground like a nail into soft plaster, looked like parasites or infections on the surface of the living village.
But the village was living no more. No one moved in its streets, the gardens were overtaken with weeds, and the fruit on the trees was unpicked and turning. It would have been easy to assume that the community had fled, except for one thing.
Above it all, there was one long, continuous vocalization, as the remaining inhabitants moaned, gasped, cried, and sobbed, jointly and alone.
It came from the huts, it came from the people lying under the canvas shelters, it seemed to inhabit every piece of the clearing.
Clementine was busy taking photos and counting her remaining shots. Sarah wanted to make her stop but wondered if they’d be all that was left of the village in a week’s time.
Through the mask, through the chemical sting, the smell was an assault. There was all the sewage and vomit stench of a bad hospital, but added to this was rotting vegetation and something else, something sweet and repellent. Something that made Sarah want to stop and turn back.
Sarah had expected beds, chairs, curtains, the equipment of a hospital, but the shelter was just twenty or more patients lying on blankets in ordered rows. Lisbeth knelt down next to one, murmuring to him and gently taking a pulse. The man looked at her, but through her, as if she was not there.
He was bleeding from his nose, mouth, ears, and eyes . . . eyes that were no longer white but a putrid red.
The blood seeped around his face and gathered in a dark, sticky puddle underneath him, stretching from his head to his hands and on to his feet. Flies buzzed about him and feasted in the pooled fluids.
Lisbeth flapped at the insects to move on, before turning to the visitors and beckoning them close. She made a not now gesture to Clementine as she raised her camera to her eye. The woman’s voice was muffled through the mask, and she had to shout to be understood.
“They get a headache, they get tired, then they get a fever, they vomit, then they start to bleed, inside and out. Anyone unprotected who touches them catches it. Wildfire,” she added.
“How is it transmitted?” the Captain called out.
“Blood, fluids, definitely, but I think we have to accept now that it’s airborne.”
“Airborne?”
“Like the flu. Didn’t used to be. That’s what everyone wants though, isn’t it? A good weapon?” she sneered. “Can you stop?” she called to Clementine, who was leaning in to another patient to take a shot.
“What can you do?” Sarah asked.
“Fluids, maintain blood pressure, morphine for the pain . . .” She brushed a finger softly along his cheek, an affectionate gesture. He did not react, and the skin moved unnaturally like it wasn’t attached to the head beneath. “But they all die in the end.”
She shook her head and climbed to her feet, wiping her hands on a soaked cloth.
“Did anyone not catch it?” Claude grunted.
“They’re infectious for two to three days before showing symptoms. We quarantined the healthy, then took out the sick, quarantining fewer and fewer each time. We have two left,” Lisbeth called, pointing up the hill to a distant tent in the tree line.
Sarah was looking at a large pile of woven material behind the farthest hut. There were lots of blues, reds, and yellows in the mound, it was the brightest part of the village. It seemed to shimmer. Then she saw the foot . . . then all the feet and arms. All the feet and arms.
The sparkling was a cloud of insects whose buzzing was lost in the noise of the living.
Lisbeth stood in her way, hands up, as if to block the view.
“We’ve been taking the bodies away and burning them, but we can’t spare the gasoline anymore. It makes no odds at this point, sorry,” she apologized.
“They want the dead . . .” Sarah said, pointing to the horror. “Millie wants to do the rites of passage—”
“They are just bags of infection now, it’s not safe,” Lisbeth interjected.
“But—”
Sarah was interrupted by a small shriek from a nearby shelter.
“What’s that tent?” Sarah pointed to the tent. Inside there was feverish activity around a high table.
“The morgue, post-mortem . . . that’s really dangerous. I can’t let you in there,” Lisbeth stated, shaking her head.
“What was that noise?” the Captain asked.
“The nurses are very frightened. If they get upset from time to time, I let that go,” Lisbeth said firmly.
Claude looked at the village, hands on hips.
“These people don’t work for the French, then?” he asked.
“The Bateke are very independent. They stay out of the way of the French.”
“That’s very convenient,” Clementine mumbled into Sarah’s ear.
* * *
The quarantine tent was large, and the fact that just two men sat on the ground in one corner was chilling.
Seeing the visitors, one of them, little more than a teenager, jumped to his feet and walked toward them. He began to talk, incessantly, strenuously, and with no little fear. The language was swift and insistent, with a syncopated rhythm and punctuated with small explosions of syllables. It reminded Sarah of jazz music.
“I don’t speak Kiteke, but he wants to leave. That much is clear,” the approaching nurse called.
Claude yelled at the man. An order. He pointed to the blankets and held his finger there, part command, part warning. The teenager stopped talking like he had been struck and retreated, a mixture of anxiety and rebellion in his eyes.
“You keep them here against their will?” Sarah asked.
“Otherwise they’ll leave, they’ll infect another village, and this goes on forever,” the nurse complained.
“How many have you saved this way?” Sarah demanded.
The nurse’s eyes narrowed behind the goggles, and he turned away.
Clementine snorted. “No one,” she growled.
“This strain is so infectious, we’ve lost everyone, every time.” Lisbeth’s shoulders were sagging as she talked. “But Kubsch is right. We are at least stopping it from spreading.”
Sarah watched the nurse preparing to take some blood from the other patient. This man was approaching middle age, dressed in a simple, patterned wraparound fabric that showed muscles beginning to lose their definition. His expression was too complex to read, complicated by a scar on his right cheek, but the sorrow sat upon him like a lead weight. He had not surrendered, but his will to fight lay under that handicap. Sarah wondered if he was resigned to his isolation, or saving his strength.
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He barely flinched as the hypodermic needle slid into his forearm. It was an aging steel syringe, well worn. Sarah was struck by the complexity of some of the equipment that the mission needed, over and over again. She thought of touching the syringe, touching the sick, touching others, the impossibility of not spreading whatever this was.
“How can you keep everything clean out here?”
“Chlorine bleach is powerful stuff; it gets a scrub between uses,” Lisbeth asserted.
“End of every day,” chimed in the nurse, squeezing the drawn blood into a bottle.
“But each syringe gets cleaned after each use,” Lisbeth added, her eyes narrowing behind the goggles.
“Yeah, mostly—” the nurse burbled.
“What do you mean, mostly?”
“Well, mostly. We’re going through a lot of needles, we haven’t time . . . and your father—”
“You mean, here or there?” Lisbeth pointed back down to the village.
“Well, I mean, ideally they’re separate—”
“Ideally?” Lisbeth screamed.
The teenage patient watched this exchange, not following the words, but the tone. He became increasingly agitated until the doctor’s explosion. At that moment he bolted for the tent flap, hanging open where the visitors had come in.
“Stop him,” howled Lisbeth, but he was out of the tent before anyone reacted.
By the time the party was outside, the patient, who was young and fit, was halfway down the hill and heading for the path to freedom.
“Kubsch!” called Lisbeth, and the nurse stepped forward.
He pulled a machine pistol from under his apron, raised it, and aimed. Clementine raised her camera.
“No!” screamed Sarah and rushed forward.
The Captain wrapped his arms around her and dragged her out of the way.
“No!” she screamed again.
The youth had reached the path.
Kubsch pulled the trigger, and the gun made a snapping noise.
The top of the teenager’s head vanished, and he crashed to the ground, a mess of arms and legs, finally sliding to a stop.
The buzzing vocalization had stopped. The jungle all around answered with a burst of howling, hooting, and distress calls.
The medical staff stood, staring at the corpse, before turning as one to look at Lisbeth.
She doubled over, fists balled, before she began screaming.
“Scheiße, Scheiße, Scheiße . . .” she hissed, before turning on Kubsch and slapping him chaotically. He staggered back, covering his head with his arms. “Look what we did! Look at him! Just because you couldn’t be bothered to wash the needles every time. How many others are dead because of that?”
Eventually one of her punches made contact with his chin. There was a crack and he fell.
Lisbeth stood over him, rubbing her hand. For a moment Sarah thought she was going to kick him, but instead she turned and marched toward them. She seized Clementine’s camera and shoved her over onto the ground.
She swung on her heel and strode down the hill to the village, pulling the film out of the Leica in a series of violent actions and dropping the camera on the ground next to the corpse. The waiting medical team, who had been watching this unfold, suddenly found things to do.
TWENTY-TWO
THE BLEACH DIDN’T hurt, at first, and everyone was just happy to take off the protective gear. But in the few minutes it took to get back to camp, Sarah’s skin had begun to flake. The joints in her fingers grew red, cracked, and sore. It was oddly excruciating, like nails bitten down too far.
“It’s an occupational hazard,” Lisbeth said sadly. “Come with me.”
Sarah looked back to Clementine, who could barely control her rage. Sarah made an apologetic face but followed the woman.
The inside of Lisbeth’s tent was much the same as the one Sarah had slept in, except this shelter was home to a huge dressing table and mirror, bigger than anything her mother had owned at the peak of her success and wealth. The table was laden with pots, bowls and tubes, sponges and brushes—the tools of high fashion and the theater.
As Sarah entered, Lisbeth was already seated in front of it, having lit some candles, and beckoning her in with a wide and conspiratorial smile. She glanced at her reflection and swore softly as she noticed that her goggles had made marks in her makeup. Sarah sat on the cot next to her and took the jar of cream that she was offered. She scooped a few fingers full of the oily white substance and began to wring her hands with it.
The cream stung dully as Sarah worked it in. Lisbeth chuckled at her expression.
“You have to force yourself past that, it’ll get better, I promise,” she said, leaning into the mirror and smoothing out the goggle marks. She was silent for a few moments as she worked, then stopped and looked at Sarah’s ashen face, still in shock at what she had seen.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Lisbeth said after a moment. “This place is too dangerous, you all have to leave—”
“My uncle would say, not without you and your father,” Sarah managed. She was shaking now, the rush of fear and shock beginning to seep away. “We’ve a job to do.”
“So have I,” Lisbeth said with finality. “I’ve people to take care of, a problem that has to be solved.”
Sarah sat, unable to create an opposing argument, uncertain even what they really needed to do for the best. She knew that being close to Lisbeth was advantageous, to learn what she could, but everything she had seen was occupying too much of her mind, forcing her thoughts into blind corners. Part of her demanded that she find the flamethrower and destroy everything and everyone, right now, so this would stop and never happen again. But Sarah knew that she lacked the ruthlessness to make that happen, to torch the innocent and the guilty as one.
Be the little girl, she thought. That’s your job. Do it.
“Is all that makeup?” Sarah asked.
“The very best that money can buy . . . actually no, that’s a lie. It’s the second or third rate at best, but you can’t do this work and expect the Hollywood treatment. I’ve heard about some new stuff created by Max Factor, called Pan-Cake. Promises to get rid of the ‘flexible greasepaint’ forever. Once I get my hands on that, all this goes in the garbage.”
“All this is American?”
“Some of it. Presents from my father’s friends.” She turned. Her skin was once again flawless. In the candlelight it was eerie. “Want me to make up your face?” The conspiratorial smile returned.
Sarah’s strategy was working—they were growing closer. But she felt a little thrill that made her suspicious and uneasy.
“Yes—I think.” Sarah laughed. Never once had her mother offered to show her how. In fact she remembered once having applied her mother’s lipstick as little more than a toddler and being beaten for it.
She allowed Lisbeth to tie her hair back with a head scarf and then waited while the woman fussed over her pots and tubs.
“Who are they exactly? Your father’s friends, I mean,” Sarah ventured.
“I don’t know really. They’re true believers of a sort. They believe the United States should be joining the war on the side of the new Reich and seem pretty intent on it.”
“Why are they interested?” Sarah asked.
“Who knows? I think they don’t like the Jews very much . . . but who does?”
Sarah closed her eyes, not certain she could keep the reaction from her face.
Little monster. Dumb little monster.
“I think they like what Herr Hitler has achieved,” Lisbeth suggested. “They think that America should follow his example.” She began to dab something onto Sarah’s face. Forehead. Nose. Cheekbones. “I don’t care as long as I get to do what I need to do. What do you think of the Führer’s work?”
“I don’t . . .” Sara
h began, her head abruptly full of street beatings and broken glass.
Little monster.
Lies will tie you up and eat you.
“You know,” Sarah said after a pause. “I go to the meetings and sing the songs and throw the books on the fire, but . . .”
“I know what you mean.”
“You do?”
“Politics . . . just causes trouble, doesn’t it?”
Sarah smiled and started to nod, then stopped herself.
Politics was ordering the Jews of Berlin into the street at midnight, one suitcase each. Politics was rounding up villagers in Poland and shooting children. Politics was turning girls into women like the Ice Queen. No one had the luxury of dismissing politics as troublesome and ignoring it.
“Do you think reusing the syringes has really killed people?” She was still irritated as she spoke but regretted what amounted to an accusation the moment it left her mouth.
The woman exhaled and began smoothing the cream into Sarah’s face.
“Yes, it probably did. It may mean that it isn’t airborne after all. Lost research, lost people.” Lisbeth paused and sighed. “You were very smart to spot that. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t occur to an experienced medic, but you thought of it straight away, didn’t you?”
Sarah quivered her shoulders noncommittally, as she couldn’t really move her face. Lisbeth had begun another layer of something else, but it vexed her.
“Gottverdammter, Leichner,” she hissed, waving the stick of Leichner greasepaint at Sarah. “Piece of Scheiße. You know that Leichner left Max Factor waiting in reception all day when he came to see them in 1922, so Max stopped selling their crap and made his own. Who’s laughing now? Max Factor was a Verflixter Pole, you know? Look what the United States did with him, what we could have had a piece of. And look what the Reich is currently making.”
Lisbeth dropped the stick of greasepaint onto the dresser with a clatter.
“Just makeup, though, isn’t it?” Sarah winked.
