by Jack Ziebell
“My sister is, was, teaching English in Taiwan. Mum died a few years back, well you know that.”
“No I didn’t, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Marius, we had a twenty minute conversation about it six months ago, Jesus do you listen to anything I say?”
“Sorry Brian, you know I’m a terrible listener. What about your Dad?”
“I haven’t seen Dad since he came-out and moved to San Francisco. I think that’s what really killed mum and why Suzanne moved to Taiwan. It wasn’t the whole gay thing; it was the way he did it. I have no interest in tracking him down.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little harsh, I mean he is your dad?”
“Look, even if I wanted to find him I have no idea where he might be or who he’s been shacking up with these days. He had his chance to make amends and he failed us, so no Marius, I don’t think it’s a little harsh.”
They were silent for a few moments, before Marius finally said, “So just us then, yah? Nobody to ride off into the sunset with and nobody we care about that we have a hope in hell of getting to within a year.”
“I don’t know about you Marius, but I do have friends you know - and no not just on the internet.”
“Any in Redding?”
“Uh no, but I have an ex-girlfriend who I do kind of still care about in Sacramento.”
“Sacramento is over two-hundred miles from here and from the looks of things we’d be lucky to make two miles with the roads as they are. Try a car, go on try it, if you think they will still run. You saw the door to the MRI room, even that was fucking fried Brian.”
He began to feel angry; with Marius; with the whole situation. “Well we should at least try to save some more people around here - the fires are spreading, the smoke is spreading - there’s enough dry trees in this town to fuck things up pretty well for these people.”
A groan came from one of the men they had dragged out of the hospital who was lying on his front ten feet from them. They both jumped and stared at him. The man was heavily built, in his mid-forties and wearing a tool belt. Brian recalled tripping over a hardhat, which had been on the floor beside him in the waiting room. The man had a large nail driven through his left hand, probably the result of some construction site accident before the swathe hit.
Without lifting his head from the floor, the man turned his head to face them, scraping it slowing across the tarmac as he did so and letting out an animalistic howl so loud that it made Brian instinctively take a step back and grab Marius.
The man slowly began to move, fingers twitching as if he’d found them for the first time. He howled again, a terrible sound; part pain, part anger, part sadness. It made Brian think of the time when as a boy he’d seen a rabid dog hit by a car. Its back had been broken and its back legs dragged behind it like useless rags; half yelping in pain its foaming mouth was snarling and attempting to bite flesh from anyone who drew too close. A policeman’s bullet ended its suffering but Brian could remember the terrified savage look in its dying eye. The man had that same look – he looked half at them and half through them, reaching out to them with his nailed and bloodied hand.
A blood-curdling scream from behind them made them turn. A young nurse had regained consciousness and was beating her fists and kicking her feet against the ground, like a demented overgrown child throwing a tantrum. More groans and wild shouts started to emerge from the now moving sea of bodies.
Brian didn’t know which threat to face. “Marius what the fuck is going on?”
“They are waking up, but what bits of them are waking up I am not sure. We should leave, now. Get the girl.”
Tabby had been kneeling by her mother twenty yards away and by the time she started screaming her screams were masked by those of a hundred others.
Brian jumped over groping hands and ran towards her, “Tabby! We have to go!”
“But Mom!” she screamed, “We have to bring mom!” She opened her mouth to say more but was silenced by a heavy hand grabbing her by the hair and yanking her head violently backwards. Brian saw the velour sleeve before he saw her mother’s grimaced face. Still lying down she had a fistful of her daughter’s hair and was shaking the girl’s head back and forth like a doll.
“Marius!” he shouted as he tried to restrain the arm while plying the fingers, “Marius help us!”
Marius ran over and grabbed the mother’s arm while Brian wrenched the hand from the girl’s hair, already bleeding at the scalp. They both jumped back out of the woman’s reach and stared at her. The mother was still grasping and rocking her bulk back and forward to try and reach them, she was crying hysterically like a baby but swiping viciously.
“Mom!” cried the girl, “Mom?”
The mother didn’t seem to recognise her daughter, but was grasping for her as if she was a toy they had taken away.
“Your mother is,” Brian paused.
“Is very sick,” said Marius, “We need to all go now and find her and these other people some help, OK, but we have to go right now.”
The girl tried to push Marius away. “I’m not going! I’m staying with Mom!”
Marius grabbed her and slung her over his shoulder. “We are leaving,” he shouted so violently that the girl was momentarily stunned into silence, before screaming and beating him on his back. He took off across the car park and Brian ran after him. The cries and screams from all around them grew louder; people waking from a nightmare to find they are somewhere far, far worse. They ran aimlessly down streets, not knowing where to turn. Some people were burning; screaming but not running from the fires that were starting to consume their bodies. The town smelled like a BBQ. Brian felt sick to his stomach and his head was starting to spin. He heard Marius shout, “To the river!” but couldn’t sense which direction they were headed. He could barely see Marius and lost sight of him altogether at times but finally the smoke cleared and they arrived at the river bank. He choked on the fumes. “Now what?”
“Now we find a boat!” said Marius, just as the girl wriggled free and ran back into the swirling smog. “Stop her!” Marius yelled but she had already run past Brian and was lost from view. Brian ran back into the smoke but knew instantly it was hopeless; even if she could find her way back to the hospital he doubted he could, and he did not want to think what would happen to her if she did make it back.
He felt a hand on his shoulder; it was Marius. “Forget it Brian, she’s gone.”
“She’s not gone Marius! She’s in there somewhere; we should go and try to find her.” But he knew he was fooling himself as he said it.
Marius looked at him and clenched his shoulder so he felt it. “If you go back in there you will most likely die.”
Brian broke down and started to cry. “Fuck!” The tears drew clean lines in the grime on his cheeks. “What the fuck are we going to do, what the fuck are we going to do?”
Chapter 18
“Look out snake!”
Tim heard Asefa in just enough time to swerve around the twelve-foot long black mamba squirming in the centre of road. He’d been too busy looking for danger in the bush to watch the way ahead. Oddly the snake didn’t lunge at him or chase him. He’d heard plenty of stories from NGO workers and locals alike about mambas that could move as fast as a racehorse; that were as aggressive as a lion; hunting a man down, following him into his house and cornering him in the dark; they would supposedly rise up to eye height and strike you repeatedly in the face or heart, when just a scratch from its fang was enough to kill you. He looked back, the creature was still writhing and he thought he saw it biting itself.
He redoubled his effort with the pedals. “We must go quickly Asefa.”
Before the snake, they had seen two more bodies of armed tribesmen lying by the side of the road, but this time they did not stop to help. They had probably gone forty miles by that point, far enough away that toxic gas shouldn’t have been an issue? He had to find out how far this thing had spread.
Sarah. He ha
dn’t been there for her once before. Well, he hadn’t been there in a sense that did any good. Five years earlier, their postings had briefly overlapped in Nairobi; Nai-robbery she had jokingly called it before that night. She had insisted they went out for dinner at some cute Tunisian place on the other side of the city. He’d tried to talk her out of it, suggesting they went to the Nando’s in one of the safely gated shopping malls. She’d said, ‘Don’t be a pussy, Nando’s is SO boring and we’ve been there ten times already!’ He should have protested more, or come up with a better option, there had to be a better place than Nando’s? But that’s what he’d suggested, hoping she’d take the hint and make a counter offer. An hour later they were in a run-down taxi driving to a run-down part of town. Tim was as concerned that they might both go down with dysentery as he was of the risk of crime. Crime in Nairobi was high, stories of muggings were a daily occurrence and up to this point they’d both been lucky. The muggings there were also particularly violent, the kind of robbery where without hesitation they would chop your arm off with a machete, then ask you to pick it up and give them your watch. He wasn’t just being paranoid, there were good reasons to be cautious and was Nando’s really that bad anyway as an alternative?
To top it off, Sarah didn’t really know where the place was and nor did the taxi driver who spoke little English. Tim had tried to make her give up and go back, but by this point it had become a point of principle and she was being stubborn, as she often could be. ‘No we’re getting out here – I know it’s around here somewhere; they said just-past-the-old-colonial-bit before you get to the Umoja district,’ she’d said, and before he could stop her she’d jumped out and flung the taxi driver some money. He had gotten out to reason with her and the taxi driver had taken off, maybe realising he’d just been overpaid, or maybe knowing the risks of hanging around in that area better than they did. Then they were alone on a dark corner and Sarah had suddenly snapped back into reality, asking sheepishly ‘which way is Umoja from here?’ He’d lost his temper and told her she was an idiot, which she wasn’t, but the sense of danger he felt made for the kind of loose talk he immediately regretted. They’d walked down several deserted streets not speaking, before she’d said, ‘If you didn’t want to come you should have just stayed at home.’ That’s when he saw them. Three men, faces concealed by the shadow of a doorway across the road. As they passed he heard them cross over and start walking behind them, whispering to each other. That was the last thing he remembered before coming to in a Nairobi hospital bed, his head aching and bandaged. Sarah was beside him. She’d told him that he’d been hit over the head and knocked out and the men had taken his wallet and her bag and run off. But something in her eyes told him there was more to the story and a few days later back at their flat he had found an empty bottle of anti-retroviral drugs; the kind you take if you think you’ve just been infected with HIV. She’d said they belonged to one of the girls on her team, he knew she was lying but he’d let her lie; he didn’t want to hear the truth. They went out to Nando’s once more after that but hardly spoke. Two weeks later she was redeployed to Cairo and he’d returned to London. He felt that they were lucky to be alive but also that he somehow should have done more. Could he have turned around and challenged the men sooner? Should he have yelled at her to run? Should he have been more forceful in stopping her from getting out of the taxi? He felt like he’d failed at his task of husband and protector, but what was worse was that he got the feeling she felt the same. He’d wanted to talk about it but could never find the right time; either things were going too well and he didn’t want to ruin the moment, or they were already too sour. He was afraid that emotions would get the better of them and a talk would turn into a screaming match, which would finish with her saying, ‘I know what you want to say, ‘I told you so!’, so why don’t you just say it?’ But what he wanted to say was that he loved her, so that’s all he had said and the rest was left buried.
He wanted to keep her safe but with the type of work she did that wasn’t an option. He told her he loved her for who she was, not what she did for a living but she had said they were the same thing. He had suggested that she take a job in London and she had told him a story about a teenage boy whose mother had kept him from going on a school skiing trip, because she was worried about him. While the boy’s classmates had been away in Switzerland, he’d been hit by a car and killed in his hometown. ‘You never know what’s going to get you and when your time is up, it’s up,’ she would say. He didn’t believe that and neither, he thought, did she. When you go on field missions, you assess the danger and you take calculated risks, you don’t live your life like an Indian fatalist, driving your tuk-tuk at sixty in the wrong lane along a cliff-edge highway, abdicating all personal responsibility for your life to some God’s busy hands. So what could he do? He couldn’t stop her and he couldn’t protect her, so he just tried to put it to the back of his mind and not think about it. Worry does not sap tomorrow of its sorrow but saps today of its strength is what his mother would have said. But he did worry and felt all the more emasculated by it.
They cycled on. The sun was hot and they had nearly finished the water they had brought with them. On the horizon, where Dire Dawa should be, they could see smoke. They stopped, feet either side of their bikes, panting from the heat.
“Looks bad,” said Asefa, “You want to go on? I feel I’ve seen enough death for one day.”
“We have to, where the hell else are we going to go? Maybe the people are OK there, we have to look. At least we should be able to find a phone or radio to call HQ in Addis or London.”
Asefa nodded. “Yeah, HQ. I’m not comfortable about going to the authorities here either; for all we know they caused this somehow.”
They set off towards the town, but they weren’t peddling as fast as they had been.
Chapter 19
The shrieks, groans and violent coughing coming out of the smoke were getting closer. Marius looked concerned. “Brian, wait here, I’m going to see if I can find a boat.”
Despite the past few minutes of crying and self-pitying gibberish, Brian had pulled himself back together. “Fuck that, I’m coming with you.”
They jogged along the riverbank, until they came to a shallow inlet. Floating a short way out was a small fifteen-foot knockabout, the kind a kid learns to sail in.
“Come on,” said Marius as he dived in. Brian followed and swam head down towards the boat. When he thought he’d made it close to the boat he paused to look up and get his bearings. Marius was already hanging on the side of the craft and struggling with a deranged looking teenage boy who must have been lying inside. The boy had a maniacal grin and vacant stare and flailed wildly at Marius who was trying to pull himself into the boat whilst defending his face and trying not to capsize them both. The boy must have lost his balance because he flew over Marius head first into the water. He did not come back up. Marius managed to clamber over the side and held his hand out to Brian.
Brian splashed over to the small craft and was just about to kick himself up when he felt something grab his ankle and hold him under. The boy must have sunk to the bottom, but the water was not too deep. He kicked but the hand did not let go. Suddenly the grip loosened and he was free. Spluttering to the surface he grabbed for Marius who pulled him aboard.
On the shore three more people had crawled, snake like on their stomachs, to the waters edge. Two were drinking, with their heads down to the river, the third was looking straight at them screaming.
They floated in the boat for some time, just staring at the shore.
“Did you see those people, did you see those fucking people.” said Brian, “They’ve lost their fucking minds.”
Marius began inspecting the rigging. “Who knows what the swathe did to them; given them dementia; lobotomised their humanity; wiped their memory banks like a credit card on a magnet? I’d love we take a closer look but I think they might rip my face off like a fucking chimpanzee, yah?”
&
nbsp; “What now?”
“Now I think we need to get somewhere pretty fucking safe, before,”
“Before what?”
“Before they become more awake. Look at the people on the shore.”
More people had started to appear including some who were badly burned. They could smell the water and howled for it, crawling closer.
“They are not walking, not standing,” said Brian
“Not yet anyway. That boy in the boat, he didn’t know what he was doing, he was just grabbing at me. He was a big lad, he could have pried my hands off the boat or hit me in the face with the ore, but he just couldn’t figure that out. Those people burning in the city, they could feel pain but they just couldn’t figure out what was causing it or how to stop it. That mean’s their nerves aren’t shot but their minds are. For now.”
“You mean they could get better?”
“Who knows? People recover from amnesia, well some don’t, but some do. But dementia, nobody recovers from that, it’s a one-way trip. And we have no way of knowing what the hell has happened to them. In the meantime they are dangerous and could get more dangerous if they figure out a little more how their bodies work.”
“Like how?”
“Like, think of a man with all his strength and desires, but without the civilizing affects of society, reason and knowledge. Not a child’s mind in a man’s body; a savage mind in a man’s body. A man like that would act without forethought or regret. I would prefer to get as far away from that man as I could before he figures out he can do more than just crawl.”
“But if everywhere is like this, where can we go? Run off and hide in the mountains somewhere?” said Brian
