Containment: The Death of Earth

by Charlee Jacob

  Aziza slammed on the break, throwing everyone forward.

  None had noticed that they had arrived.

  The buildings were a frightful series of burned-out skeletal structures. There was no smoke; there were no embers. Not a recent tragedy.

  Everywhere were shallow graves. It had been long enough that the vegetation had crept in, slowly taking over…a profusion of vines, flowers, and short saplings.

  Aziza hit the horn, scattering the various carrion eaters.

  Louise struggled to get out of the small vehicle, not yet used to her extra weight. Ubani scuttled from the back seat to help her.

  Louise stared in shock. How could she not have known this had happened? How was it that neither Sam nor Aziza had heard news of it, no matter how far the school was from home?

  Perhaps none had lived to tell. Or the phones had been smashed or stolen. Yet the families of the other girls…many must have noticed when they didn’t hear from their children. What about the Diocese? Didn’t they investigate when they couldn’t contact the nuns?

  Louise called out hysterically, “Asali!” She moved as quickly as she was able past the graves, each adorned with a single flower. There were no crosses, no markings to indicate who was there. “Asali!”

  Birds shrieked as they shook off the leaves for flight. Monkeys shouted indignities as they climbed from branch to branch. Some had babies clinging fast to them.

  “Asali!” Aziza cried out, also exiting the car, gun in hand in case any predators felt emboldened.

  Louise crawled on her knees, laying her palms flat on each mound of earth, believing her motherly intuition would tell her if the child was there.

  How many dead children did the world demand before it was satisfied?

  (A voice whispered into her ear, when it has finally had them all…)

  “Nyumba ya watawa—palipo nadhbabu kanisai,” Louise spoke softly yet in outrage. “Mafundisho ya imani yasiyopatana na yali yaliyotangazwa m Kanisa kuwa kweli! Shetani! Shetani!”

  This had been a convent,

  a sanctuary.

  Heresy!

  The Evil One! The Evil One!

  What murder wasn’t the act of a heretic? To the north—even through the woods—Louise saw the horizon glowering an angry red. Yet the sun stood at midday. The sky should be red everywhere with the blood of so many innocents.

  “Asali, Kipenzi!” Louise wailed, beating her cheeks and mouth with her fists.

  She’d heard some speak of the ‘end times’, but Louise knew. It had always been this way, everywhere there were people. There were no hyenas, no crocodiles, no spiders so cruel.

  “Where is Ubani?” Aziza asked, noticing that the sixteen year old was gone.

  “Nipo! Here!” Ubani sang out, emerging from the forest, her arm supporting a small pitiful figure. “I followed the freshest footprints and found her sleeping beside a grave. She will not let go of the spade. Is this your Asali?”

  “Asali! Audhu bilahi!” Aziza shouted, joy and sorrow. For the child had one arm off just above the elbow. And she limped, a deep scar in her leg. The reason Ubani half-carried her.

  “Mama Mzazi? Bibi?” The exhausted girl whispered.

  Her head seemed very round. Other children had often laughed at her, saying she looked like a cartoon kid.

  Si Kitu.

  Like the number zero.

  Louise stood up, unable now to speak. She wept that moisture the earth craved more than blood. Not only had her daughter been maimed, but her stomach was now as round as her head.

  “The rebels came. I… I buried everyone. It took me a long time but I just finished the last grave. Well, animals dragged some of them off. I couldn’t stop them,” Asali recounted, eyes black with strain. “Besides, I—I couldn’t dig very deep.”

  Aziza had last cut Asali’s hair very short before they sent her to the convent. The child complained it only made her head into more of a circle.

  “Circles are sacred,” Aziza had told her grandchild as she’d clipped and snipped. “When you get to the school you will find the others will also have their hair this way.”

  Now, months later, Asali’s hair was to her shoulders. She couldn’t braid it with one hand but twisted flowers into it. She had little to wear but a dirty shirt that fell to her knees, something probably belonging to one of the nuns. She wore boots too big for her, stuffing the toes with wadded cloth.

  Asali looked her mother and grandmother up and down. She giggled and said to Ubani, “They both got fat, like me. I haven’t had much to eat since…but see how much weight I gained?”

  Louise hugged her, not able to let go.

  “Do you know why you have such a tummy?” her grandmother asked as delicately as she could.

  Asali shook her head. She thought it strange that heartbreak was visible in their eyes. Weren’t they glad to see her?

  “You are going to have a baby. You are too young, although it isn’t unheard of. I am too old but I am going to have one,” Aziza told her, holding her head high and refusing the appearance of tears.

  A proverb stated that nothing wiped your tears away but your own hand. Aziza needed both her hands to serve the child. She could cry later or not at all. “We are going to have babies together, you, your mother, and I.”

  Ubani, feeling very out of place, withdrew to sit on the ground behind the car.

  Asali appeared confused. Then she frowned. “No! Nobody did that to me. They shot us, hacked us, threw our bodies in pits. They did that to many of the nuns and students. But I was under many bodies and I never lost consciousness. Not even after they cut off my arm and almost took my leg. They thought I was dead but I remember every awful moment. They didn’t do that to me. No one has.”

  She was emphatic. Yet how else?

  Asali was only ten. A few girls might mature that early but not Asali. Aziza was sixty-seven, many years past wakati wa mwanamke kuingia ugumba. Louise had been so ill-used, what remained of her womb had to be surgically removed.

  None of them could be pregnant.

  Asali rubbed her abdomen. “Chikua mimba?”

  Louise still couldn’t speak. Tears were a problem she could not exile. Her daughter squirmed out of her arms.

  Aziza whispered to Asali, “Tango utoto.”

  Be with child, from a child.

  Finally, Louise asked, “You’re sure none of the men…?”

  Asali snorted, offended. “My head may be shaped like a zero, but that doesn’t mean I have zero for brains. Really!” She rolled her beautiful eyes.

  Louise fainted. When she came to, her head lay in Asali’s lap as the child’s one hand caressed her mother’s face.

  “How did you eat for half a year?” Aziza asked the child.

  Ubani rubbed Louise’s swollen feet in silence.

  “The nuns had us all planting gardens, tending fruit trees. It’s overgrown now but I had food. And the nuns that were German had all these cans of sauerkraut. I thought I’d fart to death.”

  Asali and Ubani wrinkled noses, then burst out laughing.

  But Aziza persisted. “Your injuries were severe.”

  “I bled until I knew I would die. Oh, Bibi, I was very weak. Then a lady came up the road. She stopped the bleeding.”

  Aziza’s eyebrows went up. “What lady?”

  Why did this good Samaritan help a little girl just to leave her alone, maimed, among no one else but the dead, hungry animals all around?

  “I think she was a ghost,” replied the child.

  Louise blinked up at the face of her daughter. “What makes you think she was a ghost?”

  Asali shrugged. “Well, for one thing she didn’t quite hang together right.”

  Ubani shivered, then asked, “Was she the color of mangoes?”

  “Yes.”

  Now Aziza was barely able to speak. “Ubani, how did you know that?”

  The young woman looked at the surprised faces of the older ladies. What was the big deal? “I know my mother was
really too young to remember but I believe her. It was during the Adango War, between the Kifo and the Kufa. Her parents were Kifo farmers. One day their Kufa neighbors attacked. Everybody was killed but my mother who wasn’t more than two years old. A woman beat her mother to death and almost killed her also. She went into the forest and the mango woman found her, making her well, then lead her to a Kifo village. My mother’s face was scarred so she never found a husband. She couldn’t get any work except at a bar. She was eighteen years old when she bore me.” Ubani toyed with the necklaces, given to her by Louise.

  “Where is she now?” Aziza asked, her eyes lowered, hands trembling. “And what is her name?”

  “She cut her own throat when she was twenty-five and I was seven. Nobody wanted to look at her. The man would cover her face with her dress.” Ubani tried to smile as she removed the necklaces and put them around Asali’s neck. “Her name was Nyota Ncema.”

  She continued removing rings, earrings, bracelets until the only thing left was the dress.

  “Thank you,” Ubani told Louise. “But, you see, I don’t deserve these things.”

  Aziza buried her face in her hands and finally wept.

  ««—»»

  Louise felt snakes crawling all over her.

  Inside her.

  Hissing the sound of fat thrown in the cook pot.

  Because she’d been in a coma so long—maybe this was why—she hadn’t slept since reaching consciousness. This couldn’t be a nightmare. It had taken two partial days and a night between them on bad roads, dodging truck caravans of feral insurgents, to reach the convent ruins. Not a wink, although she had driven as Aziza and Ubani slept.

  Pythons, adders, cobras, mambas, sidewinders. Wipers that crawled out of boroughs and boomslangs that drop down from trees. Serpents that saw everything you did because they never closed their eyes, and serpents so large when they mated beneath the ground the earth shook upon the faults of their serpentine lengths, opening up.

  Nothing got her, there came no sting of venom. She wasn’t squeezed until her eyes popped from her head to then be swallowed whole and alive. No flickering tongues, fangs, sinuously steel muscles.

  Uwezo leaned over her. Her Uwezo, not Nyoka, the rebel name his kidnappers had given him to make a snake of him.

  “Mama Mzazi, don’t be afraid. Your sins are my sins.”

  He gently kissed her forehead, then stood up and walked into the forest. She saw no snakes at all, now not even tattooed on him.

  Lightning crackled across the whole of the sky. Brush caught a slim and splintered blue bolt. Nearby trees and bushes juggled strange balls of it. It spread quickly until even the buried dry bones in the graves jumped up, ablaze.

  “Mwako! Fire! Wake up!” Louise cried.

  Aziza commanded, “Everyone in the car!”

  The car was gone. All four had settled down right next to it. Not even sleepless Louise had seen it vanish—or be taken. There were no tire tracks. Not even footprints…none belonging to anyone who could possibly have lifted it to carry it silently away, nor of three women who walked miles to find a child.

  “It’s here,” Ubani insisted, seeing its shape in curves of light and bending sparks. “Somebody just changed its time so we would have to…”

  “Run!” Louise shouted.

  Asali wailed. “Which way?”

  In a shimmering electric ribbon that appeared in a color Louise had never before seen in storms—neither gold nor red nor even amber, but sweet mango—a slender arm gestured.

  They followed even as a furious male voice cursed them from an invisible yet reachable place. They were careful not to go in that tangible nothingness of his, for that way was fire and the end of all their earths. To go with the mango woman was only to heed death—not court it.

  Chapter 11

  ————

  “Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.”

  – Nikola Tesla

  ————

  Laura had been in the hospital since the morning after Adam left for Paris. She had fallen asleep, waking to a great deal of blood between her legs. She asked a neighbor to watch the cat.

  A second surgery.

  Her roommate had the television on, watching news. Laura gave up yesterday in trying to find out what was going down there…Adam…

  “Reports of bizarre physical phenomena in the wake of the eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius on Monday are not only exaggerated but downright bogus. The Italian government has issued a statement requesting—in the name of humanity—that people stop trying to cash in on or make light of this tragedy. The death toll is presently standing at over 200, and expected to rise. Many thousands are homeless. Survivors say they will rebuild on the volcano’s historic slopes. And, gosh, folks, get a life, lend a hand, and set down the video cameras already.”

  The anchor turned to the weatherman. “What’s up, Dan?”

  “Hot and dry across all the lower 45 states. It’s hot and dry in Europe where relief efforts are busy in Naples. But it’s cooler in parts of South America. The tip of that continent currently experiencing winter…”

  “Wait…why is it winter down there and summer up here?” she asked, confused, apparently chosen by the network for her looks rather than her brains.

  “Uh…because it’s south of the equator,” the weatherman replied. But IQ tests weren’t part of the requirements to be a reporter or anchor. They also didn’t need to show much education on their resumes (although he had to have a degree in meteorology). “They have winter while we have summer because of the sun…”

  She cut him off, tilting her head and asking in a squeaky voice as if she was 12 years old: “You mean, like, you can ski down there and everything?”

  The weatherman seemed at a loss for words. Laura burst out laughing. Her roommate turned off the television.

  Laura shook her head. I should’ve gone for a job like that, instead of constantly switching my majors.

  She had already written passages about her camp life for her book, but she hadn’t been able to compose an opener. She’d brought her laptop with her and tried to work on it now. It kept her mind busy so she didn’t worry.

  First she typed in: I have never known who I am. I have never known where I came from.

  Laura sighed. Hell, most people didn’t know who they were. Come to think of it, most had only fantasies concerning the full revelation of their roots.

  She deleted of the two lines and began again. Pacifica totally screwed up my life.

  And everyone else’s on the planet, duh.

  Delete.

  She was angry with herself. She’d had no trouble with the beginning up to most of the middle of From Behind the Wall. But she was struggling with the Texas government and the Feds over records dealing with her early time there. For example, she couldn’t get the transcripts released on the trial and execution of one of the camp’s guards, Diego Archila. Did his family have a connection with Laura? Her maiden name was Archila. Were they relatives? Why were her origins changed on what paperwork she had seen from ‘unknown’ to ‘Pacifican’?

  State secrets, national security, no reason.

  She writes:

  I have always been a failure.

  Failures look to their past to try and either place blame for their predicament, tragedies, the unbearable—or just to grasp an uncomplicated understanding of complicated fate.

  As I write this I am lying in a hospital bed, the last adventure of almost bleeding to death sutured and medicated.

  (‘Call me Ishmael’?) flitted across her brain, drowsy on morphine.

  Then she realized her laptop was infuriatingly cheerful as it sang out, “You’ve Got Mail!”

  “It must be Adam…!”

  Excited for the first communication from him since he left five days ago, she hurried to exit and save her book, and open her e-mails.

  She didn’t recognize the e-mail address. Nor
did it wait for her to pull it up. She rarely received e-mails, not really having any friends. In the camp, it was best for personal survival to maintain a low profile (i.e. be an invisible, miserable loner) or be a bully. She’d never been big enough or strong enough to push to the front, so…

  Dear Laura,

  How is Adam?

  Do you know? Has the CDC even called you?

  Providing you are curious, try reading the real deal from any of these blog sites. Oh and remember the number 5.

  It was not signed.

  “Please don’t tell me this is a virus and my computer is going to crash like a plane flying through a pyroclastic cloud.” She mumbled.

  But she immediately scrambled to check these blogs… ‘immediately’ being relative to first making certain her laptop hadn’t bellied up in a hacker’s pond that reeked of dead mackerel.

  One by one the sites disappeared. It must be a virus.

  Groaning with fury, she checked her guardian software, then the rest of her computer. They were fine, fully operational.

  Then she understood.

  It was the government shutting them down, blacking them out. Which government or governments-in-collaboration she didn’t know and didn’t care. What were they hiding, convoluting and any farce of free speech and free press, and… How. Dare. They.

  A nurse entered the room with a tray of meds.

  “Hello,” he chirped. “It’s time. Sorry, there’s no sugar to make the medicine go down!”

  Laura glared, no invisible loner now. “Get out of here, you hairy Mary Poppins!”

  He stopped, his jaw dropped, then replied as if trying to reason with a child. “If it doesn’t take its meds, it won’t get better.”

  Laura shouted, “And if it doesn’t get the hell out, it won’t live to eat the green lime and pea Jell-O in the cafeteria at lunch. Now scoot!”