Thinking about it for a moment, Jimmy took the bottle, poured himself a tall one, and downed it in one gulp.
“OK, but this is strictly on the low-down.” Jimmy leaned across the table and whispered. “You know them Nazi’s back in the day? You know how they did some really weird shit to people? Like medical experiments and all kinds of abnormal stuff?” He grimaced at his own words. Tom’s stomach turned in anticipation.
“You think this here is some kind of Mother Theresa outfit, lettin’ you in and lookin’ after y’all for nothin’ but outta the goodness of their hearts? Well, think again, partner. And pour me another!”
Tom could see Jimmy was getting ready to let loose. It took a lot for the man to get going, but when he got pissed, he could tear up a place single-handedly.
“No, no, no!” He began slapped his forehead in desperation.”Ya see, I shouldn’t a told you anything. I don’t even wanna know myself.”
“Jimmy, Jimmy! Look at me. It’s me: Tom. You know you can tell me anything.” Tom placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder in encouragement. Jimmy, close to tears, wiped snot from his nose.
“I mean, it ain’t like you and yours have anything to worry about with them red wristbands, you hear? I mean, it ain’t like they was green or yella or something.” He shook his head, reliving some kind of memory.
“Jimmy, you need to tell me what is going on here. Why don’t you start from the beginning, huh?” Tom moved closer and held his friend’s forearms.
After a few moments, Jimmy’s breathing normalized, and his eyes cleared. He gazed at Tom, his face pale and sweaty.
“Ok, then. Here it goes…”
Their deployment had started just like any other in the past. Orders had come to reroute their carrier to the Gulf of Aden and then further south along the coast of Somalia. A ‘maritime security mission’ it had been dubbed, and given the region’s history of piracy and terrorism, nobody had asked twice about its legitimacy. They were soon joined by a MEU, a Marines Expeditionary Unit, the first inkling that this would go beyond a purely maritime security deployment. When they reached their initial destination, word had gotten round that some disease was out of control in the Congo. ‘Big deal’ most of them had thought, not least since most didn’t have the first idea about where the Congo actually was. Navy command stayed mum throughout.
“Mushroom stuff,” Jimmy shook his head. “You know: feed ‘em shit, keep ‘em in the dark.”
Then, suddenly, their mission was rebranded as a large-scale joint anti-terror exercise, with Kenya and other AMISOM countries, working with the Marines and other Special Forces Units providing much of the ground elements. Fighters flew night missions, and soldiers on land did what soldiers do, but there was another dimension to this, which Jimmy and many of his fellow crew had been unable to decipher.
As they sailed further south and got closer to the port of Mombasa, they noticed an armada of container ships, cruise vessels and a myriad of smaller luxury boats converging on the area, while hundreds of barges bearing Eritrean and Saudi Arabian flags were offloading steel plates, rebar and thousands of bags of cement. For all intents and purposes, it looked like some gigantic construction project had just kicked off. But it was the presence and the odd mix of military and civilian assets that didn’t fit the official narrative. Construction crews and Seabees worked feverishly through the nights, and returning pilots were starting to tell strange tales about what they had seen during their many sorties. The usual shore leave passes were cancelled and the aircrews quickly sworn to secrecy.
Rumours began to circulate of civil war of some kind having broken out and that thousands were on the march towards the coast.
Then Al-Shabab attacked one of their support vessels. Nothing dramatic, just a small skiff loaded with explosives and its crew disguised as local traders insisting to pull alongside, before blowing themselves up. The Navy vessel stayed afloat and its crew suffered minor injuries, but it gave credence to the innuendo that war was either afoot or actively occurring. It was when CNN began showing footage of what had happened further inland that the true picture of what was going on emerged.
Command couldn’t hold back the information any longer and by the time Jimmy and his crew came ashore, things were already almost at tipping point. AMISOM had done its best to contain areas of what was now simply called the ‘outbreak’, although nobody really knew what kind. The only thing news footage showed were people apparently rioting and attacking others in acts of extreme violence. People were shot, yet kept on coming despite at times horrific injuries. CNN still talked about Ebola, but by now everyone on the ground knew this was something else; something that needed dealing with if they didn’t want it to come knocking on doors back home.
The governments of the affected countries had turned to the international community in the early stages of what was now a broad scale crisis, and they got the US military in response. Once the US threw its weight behind the effort, the Brits had no choice. They deployed one of their carriers, the HMS Queen Elizabeth and, upon specific request by the East African Union, the HMS Vanguard, a ballistic missile sub.
“Once ICBMs are requested, you know things a been knocked cattywampus by someone.” Jimmy scratched his head. “For the better part, we’s were still tryin’ to figure out what was happening on account of all the who-shot-john we was getting from upstairs. Confused as a fart in a fan factory, I tell ya.” Jimmy, on the back of his Southern heritage, had always had a way with words, to the point where more often than not, people had to ask him to rephrase in plain English, something that would usually trigger an even greater tirade of slang.
Tom knew better and decided to go with the flow instead.
The logistics crews were called to shore to coordinate support for the numerous units, both their own and AMISOM, who were busy establishing a perimeter around the entire county while creating a fortified fallback position: the area Tom and the other survivors had landed in. As it turned out, though, the East Africans didn’t do a particularly good job at containing the outbreak, and before they could say ‘Ebola,’ masses of evacuees and the sick were heading south on a rumour that a safe zone had already been established.
They worked in shifts, 24-hours a day, to create the setup Joint Command had ordered, but it was not enough. By the time the spearhead of the exodus reached Mombasa County, they had barely secured half of it. It was then that Al-Shabab, already exploiting the AMISOM withdrawal from Somalia by launching heavy attacks on Mogadishu and then to the south on the port city of Kismayo, crossed into Kenya and, in something of a Blitz hurled everything it had at Mombasa.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that with the Congo, Uganda, South Sudan, and parts of Tanzania already in the grip of this new disease, the coast would become one giant bargaining chip. It was their chance to finally establish their caliphate and secure themselves a seat at the negotiations table.
With two different kinds of war fought on two separate fronts, resources were stretched a little, to say the least, and AMISOM suffered heavy losses in their battle against both enemies. At first they had thought they could simply set up screening centres just like back in the Congo and along the borders and separate the sick from the healthy that way. But the sick dying, coming back to life and eating the living was neither part of the equation, nor had the possibility ever been captured in any of their crisis management protocols. From onset to death, at least for the very young, the elderly and the already infirmed, it was sometimes a matter of 24 hours; and for their return anything from three to twelve. The dead came back faster than they could deal with the sick or the healthy for that matter, and what had been envisaged as screening centres, with their fences and checkpoints and crowded camps, quickly became death traps for all involved.
Eventually all they did was to herd a bunch of people together and then look on helplessly as they turned on each other before marching towards their next living targets, which now happened to be amassed in Mombasa.
What Tom and the others were able to ‘enjoy’ now was the product of a massive battle, the remnants of which they had seen on their way in. With the veil of confusion lifted, Western governments quickly changed gear. This thing didn’t care much about borders, land, water or otherwise, and it wouldn’t take long before it would hitch a ride on a commercial flight, via people smugglers or by virtue of evolution, all on its own. It didn’t matter much which way, but something needed to be done about it.
“I guess they figured bringing that thing into their own labs back at the CDC or wherever was way too risky. Plus finding any volunteers to test vaccines on…well, you’d be SOL, wouldn’t you?” Jimmy shrugged.
Instead, he continued, they had decided to solve the problem on-location, right here in East Africa or, more specifically, by creating the necessary facilities in Mombasa. If they succeeded, they could withdraw and leave the Africans to deal with the whole thing, while they themselves would make sure they inoculated their own populations and shored up their domestic defenses. If they failed, they could at least get out of Dodge and then try to take care of the problem the conventional way. A few nuclear missiles, strategically launched against large concentrations of the virus and its carriers, would buy enough time for the West to fortify itself, finally making good on the promises of isolationist policies populists had already been campaigning on for years.
Following initial construction of the perimeter and establishment of the military hardware, supply chain, and infrastructures necessary to sustain an effort Command now estimated to be at least medium-term, Jimmy had been reassigned to support the Joint DoD-CDC setup of medical facilities aimed at finding a vaccine. At first, it all seemed legit, and people, civilians, queued to be tested and then participate in the program, as they called it.
“The Program. Hah. What a bunch of baloney!” Jimmy shook his head as he recalled the experience.
Taking one final sip of whiskey, he continued in hushed tones. When he had first started delivering supplies and organizing the program’s waste management, there had been nothing noteworthy at all. People in full-body suits went to work in their container labs and sick bays where quarantined arrivals were held, while in others test subjects received their doses of whatever the suits had cooked up. Helicopters with uniformed government officials and scientific delegations would arrive and depart daily. Everyone seemed positive and was patting each other on the back as far as Jimmy could tell. It was when several new wings were added to the existing facilities that things took a turn for the sinister.
“I guess they had more test subjects than they needed, sooo…they decided to branch out. You know, expand their research, as they put it.” Jimmy again grimaced as he reluctantly got to the final part of his story.
“They started separating people according to some kind of internal system. Even families. They all went to different areas of the compound, where they stayed and were tested without contact with each other. Their clothes and other belongings were kept at first, but it just became to dang hard to sanitize everything, so we were ordered to torch it all. Most people were dirt poor to begin with, so what they carried meant something to them, you know? But we burned it all. Of course, constructing separate mess halls, toilet blocks, showers, and so on for all these different groups was too much effort. Just not enough men, land, resources…you name it. They were able to keep’em separate while in the lab or at the dorms, but controlling movement to and from the toilets and at mealtimes…it was a mess. So, in the end, some clever person above my pay grade came up with the idea of the wristbands.” Jimmy again pointed at the red hospital tag around Tom’s wrist.
“No problem so far, I thought, when they started rolling these out. That was until I noticed that most of the corpses we were disposing of - you know, there were always a whole bunch of people who ended up being sick and dying or simply dying of stress or other stuff. In any case, most of these corpses were wearing either green or blue wristbands. We rarely saw any reds or yellows. Now, as you can imagine, this made me curious about what was happening, but of course, none of the suits would talk, and Command were too busy fighting dead people and terrorists. So one day, just before staff dinner time, when most of the suits are chomping at the bit to get out of their full-body condoms, me and my buddy we sneak into the facility. We snuck right past the guards and into the heart of the darn thing. I mean, people looked sickly anyways, you know. But what we saw there was downright wicked. It was so far on the wrong side of wrong, I can’t even find the words. Children cut open. Men, dead men, chained to the wall with their arms cut off and women…Experiments, is all I’ll say. Sick stuff. That ain’t no god-damn research. It’s them damn Nazis all over again. Anyways, I don’t wanna talk about it no more.” Jimmy had had enough.
He was at the end of his tether. He crushed the cup in rage and his tearful eyes begging Tom, someone, anyone, to make the images in his head go away.
“It’s Ok, Jimmy.” Tom tried his best to sound calm, his mind already wandering back to Anna and the others. “Tell me more about the wristbands. Just that. Nothing more. Please?”
Jimmy took a deep breath and straightened in his chair, his hand gripping the edge of the table tightly.
“Ok, Ok. But then we’re done here for the day.” He exhaled as he tried to gather his thoughts. “The red ones, like the one you have on. We never saw those beyond day two, three, maybe. They were all white folks, all foreigners. All people with representation back home if anything happened to them here. That’s why I said you guys are lucky. You will be out of here and on your way home in no time. Guaranteed. It’s the green and blue ones that ain’t so lucky. You get green, and it’s pretty much curtains right away. I mean, they don’t waste time trying to cure the incurable. So if you have cancer, diabetes, HIV or some other dang disease, they ain’t got no use for you. You get fed for a day, maybe a couple, and then it’s off to ‘Research B.’ That’s where all the cutting is done. Nuff said. You get blue, and you get to hang in there a little bit longer, but in the end, y’all end up on the same meat wagon. Blue ones are the vaccine people. But with an oversupply of specimen, the suits can try all sorts of things, even when they already know chances of whatever they put in you working are none to bupkis.” Jimmy looked angry now, and Tom decided he had heard enough.
He berated himself already for not having checked what designation had been given to the others. There would be enough time to catch up with Jimmy the next day, but for now, he needed to know what the researchers had in store for them.
The two embraced briefly, sharing their respective pain in a hearty hug, before calling it a night. They agreed to meet again the next day at breakfast. The whiskey creating an uncomfortable cloud in his head, Tom hurried back to the dorms and immediately woke the others. Still half asleep, they were barely able to follow his story at first, but when Tom frantically tried to pull up sleeves to get a good look at their wristbands, they quickly came round. Anna presented hers, and his heart sank. Blue. Amadou was next. Blue. Nadia. Red. Mama Samaki. Green.
Tom stared at them in disbelief. They were imprisoned to be exterminated one way or another. Live long enough to be vaccinated, and your chances were slim. Wear green, and they could come for you any minute and conduct whatever experiments they had in mind that day. Nadia and he were the only ones that would be left to tell, but he doubted whether Joint Command would ever let that happen. Besides, he would rather swap bands than leave Anna behind with these animals. But they weren’t there yet. It would be a last desperate option. For now, their best chances laid in the fact that they knew what was going to happen. Perhaps not the when, but at least the what. Tom moderated his story as best as he could, not least for Anna’s well-being. There was only so much the others needed to hear. With elimination hanging over everyone’s head, the situation’s gravity was self-evident. They would need to find a way to escape. Where to, was another question. For now, they just needed an avenue out of their current predicament. They sat up until
the early hours of the morning, looking for a solution.
Nadia opined that sneaking out and procuring an alternative means of transport would be their best option, and although Tom agreed in principle, they agreed their lack of area knowledge would leave them wide open to discovery at the drop of a hat. Amadou suggested seizing the guards’ weapons and conducting a more kinetic breakout, but again, Tom questioned where they would go once past the first fence and faced with the might of an entire army of professional soldiers. Mama S proposed to play along and then somehow fight the suits once in the lab, which seemed to make sense since none of the technicians carried weapons and the suits restricted their movements. On the other hand, the laboratories were under constant guard and Tom doubted whether patients were allowed to move freely inside. In all likelihood they would be strapped down, sedated, or both. It quickly became clear that if whatever the plan were to stand any chance of success, they would need help. It was a long shot, but seeing how Jimmy had reacted when telling him the truth about this place, Tom figured that with enough pleading he might get his old friend to provide just the edge they needed.
Enjoying the refreshing morning ocean breeze before having to suit up again in stifling plastic, the suits, according to Jimmy, rarely started their shifts before mid-morning. If they came for Mama ‘S’, it would thus not likely be before noon. He looked at his watch. At worst, they had a mere nine hours to convince Jimmy to help, plot, and execute their escape. And at best? He didn’t really know.
There were no questions, no small-talk, just incredulous looks, and anger. For now, everyone went back to their bunks to make use of the few good hours of sleep they might be able to get for a while.
“Dad?” Anna began when he turned off the lights at the main switch, the pale moon casting a chalky light through the window grilles. “Does that mean we are in danger again?”
The Virophage Chronicles (Book 2): Dead Hemisphere [Keres Rising] Page 24
