Plague

by Victor Methos

  Sam took a deep breath and began walking with Duncan to rejoin the group. She glanced back once to the hut the woman had disappeared into. There was a small child at the door, peering out and she smiled at him. He turned and went back inside.

  CHAPTER 44

  The hut was small and hot and the floors were just swept dirt but Samantha didn’t see any spiders or vermin. It was surprisingly clean considering that it had been made out of jungle plants and mud. There was one cot in the corner and another by the entrance. A small tray with a pitcher of water and a bowl was on one side of the hut and the only light came from the entrance which was nothing more than a flap of cloth covering only a portion of a large hole in the hut.

  Dinner had consisted of a chicken that the natives had killed, plucked, and gutted right in front of their guests, throwing their entrails to a few of the village dogs that were roaming around. The chicken was then cut up, thrown in a boiling pot with herbs, potatoes, roots, and a little pink flower that Sam had been told was used for sweetening. The stew was served in bowls made of large leaves and a type of beer was served with it. Sam chose to drink water from a well the village used and Duncan joined her as the rest of them got drunk and ate several bowls of the stew.

  As night fell, she rose to go back to her hut and Duncan followed her, proclaiming that he wanted to make sure she was all right. They saw Agent Donner sitting on a carved-out log, sipping beer. He smiled to them and his teeth appeared little and abnormally white in the moonlight.

  “How was the feast?” he said.

  “You didn’t eat?” Sam said.

  “I wasn’t hungry. I’ll have some rice later.” He took a long drink of beer. “You know, the village we’re going to, I did some reading up. They have a weekly, well I don’t even know what you’d call it, an orgy I guess. They get absolutely thoroughly drunk and begin having sex with each other; married or not. Then the men choose fighting partners and usually somebody gets badly hurt if not killed. I’ve never actually seen one. Should be wild.”

  “How have you been out here before?” Duncan asked. “This is the middle of BFE. How’d you get out here?”

  Donner smiled as he took another drink. “I’ve been around.”

  Sam stared at him and they exchanged glances.

  “Well you’ll have to excuse me, Agent Donner,” she said. “I’m pretty tired.”

  “Of course. Don’t let me stop you. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  She walked around him as she went to her hut, Duncan following right behind her. As she was about to go inside and say good night to him as well, he grabbed her by the waist and kissed her warmly on the mouth.

  “Sorry,” he said when they had separated, “I’ve been wanting to do that for a while.”

  She smiled playfully. “Good night, Duncan.”

  “Good night, Dr. Bower.”

  She went inside and took off her boots. Duncan was still standing outside but had turned around, looking like a sentry at a post. He was genuinely concerned about her, probably because she was the only white woman in the entire village and they didn’t know whether that was prized or not. She smiled again to herself as she lay down, falling asleep to the drunken chatter that was taking place outside.

  CHAPTER 45

  The morning came with nothing but heat and the stink of moisture soaking into the hut. It was perfectly quiet outside except for the chirp of crickets though the sun was already up. Sam rose and brushed her teeth, using a little water out of her bottle, and pulled her hair back with a rubber band.

  The village was empty; a smoldering fire and empty bowls that had contained their potent beer the only evidence that people lived here.

  She walked over to the adjacent hut and peeked in. Duncan slept next to Benjamin. There was a third sleeping bag and she was unsure who it belonged to. She heard some banging nearby, like someone was knocking on a metal door, and she walked in that direction to see Agent Donner bent over a pan that was slowly heating up over a fire.

  “Eggs?” he said.

  “Sure.” She sat down against a tree, the shade covering her entire body as she stretched out her legs in the soft dirt. “Have you had any contact with the bureau?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “I thought you guys always had to be checking in.”

  “No, they trust us. More or less.”

  They were silent a long time and he looked over to her, a grin on his face.

  “You look like you have something to ask me, Dr. Bower. So just ask.”

  “You’re not FBI. I’ve dealt with dozens of agents. You don’t walk like them, you don’t talk like them and you certainly don’t act like them. I’ve never heard of a federal agent abandoning an assignment and chasing some crazed hippie into the jungle.”

  “Maybe I’m after the crazed hippie? Maybe my assignment is to follow him wherever he goes?”

  “Bull. You have no jurisdiction here. You couldn’t effectuate an arrest if you wanted to. He would call the police and you might be the one arrested. You wouldn’t have let him out of the country if he’s what you were after.”

  He chuckled softly to himself as he flipped some sunny-side up eggs upside down in the pan. “You are clever, aren’t you, Samantha? You must get that from your mother. She was an artist, wasn’t she? And your father was brilliant too if I recall. It must be really difficult to watch one die and the other’s brain get eaten away a little bit every day.”

  She stared at him a few seconds and said, “How do you know about my mother?”

  “Leslie? I know a lot about Leslie. I even saw some of her paintings. She had talent. If she’d have been some drug addict freak instead of a normal housewife the art community might’ve taken her in as one of their own.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I, Dr. Bower, am a man who maintains balance in all the things.” He took out some olive oil from a small container and poured a little more in the pan before taking out the eggs and placing them on a paper plate. He took a slice of bread out of some tin foil, put it on the plate, and placed it in front of Samantha before cracking another two eggs and putting them in the pan.

  “What do you mean balance?”

  “Well, Duncan there is a Mormon. Have you ever read the Book of Mormon?”

  “No.”

  “Fascinating read. I’m not Mormon, mind you. But it was fascinating nonetheless. Many see it as a spiritual guidebook, but that’s not what I saw. I saw a chronicle of war. It’s filled with cannibalism, rape, murder, genocide…its essence is that without faith in God, that is our natural state. In Honolulu, for example, the strong are devouring the weak right now. That is what happens without balance. Civilization needs people that can bring balance. That can keep us from the destruction predicted in the Book of Mormon.”

  “Are you CIA?”

  He laughed. “CIA? No, I am definitely not CIA. They devoted decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to fighting the Soviets and they didn’t know the Berlin Wall was coming down until the bricks were hitting them on the head. The CIA has failed at every mission they have ever had and you know what their cover is? That we don’t hear about their successes, only their failures. Can you believe that nonsense? If their failures can leak, surely their successes would too. But we haven’t heard of them because there haven’t been any.

  “The KGB won their war. They had covert operatives in every branch of government, especially the CIA. They beat the CIA in the spy game, but then lost the politics game. Balance, you see. The Communists pushed too hard and it swung the other way. It’s people like me that cause that swing to begin.”

  Sam watched as he finished cooking his eggs and then threw dirt on the fire. He sat down, pulled out some bread, and dug into his breakfast. “I really wish I had some Tabasco sauce,” he said.

  “I think you should leave,” Samantha said. “Leave now and I won’t tell everyone what you just said.”

  “Oh? And what did I just say? A lect
ure on balance? And perhaps I should remind you that there are no police within a hundred miles of where we are and you are the only white woman in probably triple that distance. Without me here, these Indians would keep you as their sex slave until they drunkenly raped you to death one night. Then, I don’t know, they’d probably cannibalize you I guess. I’ve heard that was their custom for intruders for centuries before the Peruvian government outlawed it. But then when has the law ever stopped anything?”

  “Why are you here, Agent Donn—” Before she finished her sentence she saw the look of amusement on his face. “Of course, your name’s not Billy Donner. What are you doing here?”

  Duncan walked up from behind them. “Hey,” he said to her. “You guys got eggs? Got any left?”

  “Of course.”

  Sam watched as he took out the pan and began to make more eggs. She stood up and walked away, Duncan asking her what was wrong and she just brushing past him without a word.

  She got far enough away that she couldn’t hear what they were talking about and then wondered whether she should go back. Instead, she went to find Benjamin.

  She came to the hut and saw him standing outside in his boxer shorts, speaking with the guide. He was scratching his underarms and he glanced to her and stopped. When they had finished speaking, he walked over.

  “We got news,” Benjamin said, “a town two days from here. There’s a rumor that the population was wiped out by a sickness. It’s where that canister that Holly mentioned might be.”

  “We need to talk about Donner.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s not FBI.”

  “Shit, you just figure that out now?”

  “You knew?”

  “Hell yeah I knew. What federal agent would quit his job to follow my ass around? But the fucker’s good at just about everything. He repaired this old truck the organization had that mechanics didn’t think would work anymore. He got Cami a fake passport too.”

  “What did she need that for?”

  “She’s illegal. She’s not a doctor in the States; she’s a doctor in Mexico. Or was, until she helped out a journalist that the cartels tried to kill. They went after her and she ran and kept running until she got to the States.”

  Sam shook her head. “He’s dangerous.”

  “He’s weird, I’ll give you that, but I don’t know about dangerous. Best I can tell, he’s ex-military or something. Probably just looking for a cause and happened to find ours.”

  “No, he’s too smart for that.”

  “Oh, so now you have to be dumb to believe in what I’ve dedicated my life to?”

  “That’s not how I meant it.”

  “Well, whatever, look, I’ve known him longer than I’ve known you so you can chill out or take off. I don’t really care. We’re heading out to the village. If you’re coming, you’ve gotta pack up now. If not, I’ll ask one of the folks in the village to take you back next time they go into town. Might be a while, though.”

  He turned and walked away, leaving her standing there. She glanced back to Duncan who was sitting against the same tree she had been and eating eggs with Donner. She caught movement off to her right and saw one of the villagers glaring at her. It was a middle-aged man with darkly tanned skin and missing teeth. He was looking at her with madness in his eyes and she knew, just knew, what he was planning to do to her the second he had the opportunity. It was the man that had beaten the woman the previous day.

  She thought about it a few moments, and then went inside her hut to pack.

  CHAPTER 46

  There was really no trail as Samantha was winding her way up the mountain, behind all the others and far behind the guide and Benjamin, who were pumping their arms like distance runners and trudging up the slope. It was a five-hour journey to the village they were heading to but the five hours turned to two days because of the terrain. In many areas, you had to walk so slowly that if you didn’t keep your eyes on the ground, you couldn’t be sure you were actually moving.

  The humidity would go from completely dry to soaking wet in a matter of minutes and they were having to constantly stop and rest under the shade of a tree or next to a cool stream. They could hear the mighty river in the distance now but the guide assured them they weren’t near it.

  Duncan looked back to her and smiled, slowing his pace to allow her to catch up. She had told him earlier about the conversation with Donner and he shrugged his shoulders and just said, “Since when are they ever honest with us?”

  At this point everyone was exhausted and dehydrated. Even to Sam the question of who Donner really was and who he worked for seemed to fade in the distance. He was certainly government and he was certainly some type of law enforcement; that would have to be enough.

  They made it to the top of either a large hill or a small mountain and they rested on some boulders, the tree-top view before them a sea of green against the backdrop of a sparkling blue sky.

  Sam took out a breakfast bar and ate half, washing it down with half a bottle of water. They didn’t speak much and that was fine with her. She removed her pack, feeling the sweet release of lightening weight, and the tightness in her muscles instantly began to disappear. She felt like she could sleep right now, like she could close her eyes and lie down on the rock behind her and not wake up for years. Her stomach was queasy and had been for two days. She was concerned that she may have picked up a trematode worm from the water supply or the food. Iodine pills could only do so much.

  “All right,” the guide said in his heavily accented English, “it’s not far.”

  They continued down the path as Sam re-strapped her pack. It wouldn’t have been as bad if it was just clothing, food, and water, but she also carried biohazard gear and several laboratory kits to run preliminary tests in the field. Porters had offered their services in town for less than five dollars a day and she wished now she’d taken them up on it.

  The sun kept beating down on them but mercifully they declined in slope and were eventually on flat ground; the jungle canopy above them shielding most of the sizzling rays that were slowly cooking them.

  They hiked until night fell and they set up their tents near what could be considered a path but was little more than a worn trail where animals and people had gone down before. A stream flowed near them but the guide warned that camping next to a water source was a good way to get killed—either by native Indians or the jaguars whose roars were ever-present in the darkness.

  The morning came and Sam placed Duncan’s pack on him and he did the same for her. He looked to her and brushed aside a strand of hair that was in her eyes.

  “We need to have another dinner when we get back to the States,” he said.

  “We will.”

  They began the day’s long trek before the sun was even up but soon the rejuvenation of sleep was gone and the same exhaustion of yesterday was there.

  Sam kept checking her watch incessantly. She tried to fight it, but every few minutes her eyes would wander down to her wrist seemingly on their own. She counted three hours of torturous jungle hiking before they came to a small clearing and the guide stopped and began speaking with Benjamin. He nodded several times and then came back to speak with the group.

  “Well,” he said when everyone was gathered, “the village is just up ahead past that patch of trees. What do you guys want to do?”

  “I’ll go,” Duncan said, placing down his pack.

  “Me too,” Sam said. She glanced at Cami to see if she wanted to come but she had already sat down cross-legged on the dirt, leaning against her pack.

  “Okay,” Benjamin said, “you guys check it out and tell us when we can head up.”

  It took nearly twenty minutes for both Sam and Duncan to suit up in the yellow biohazard suits they had brought with them. The suits were thinner than those found at USAMRIID or the CDC, but they had two underlayers and thick plastic helmets that had been designed for the handlers responsible for testing chemical weapons.r />
  They walked past the group of trees and saw the outline of huts in the distance. The suits kept the heat and their sweat contained, but abandoning their heavy packs was well worth the trade.

  They didn’t speak as they neared the village. Duncan was readying sample casings, checking and re-checking the thin glass tubes to make sure any samples he took wouldn’t expose everyone else to what was inside.

  “I don’t know if I love this or hate it,” Sam said.

  “Hate it. Definitely hate it.”

  The first thing Sam noticed as they neared the village was a lack of inhabitants, and then the vegetation that engulfed the structures. It eerily reminded her of some of the buildings in Honolulu once maintenance had been halted.

  The path they were on led them to the center of the huts. There weren’t more than ten of them. It appeared less like a village and more like the encampment of a breakaway family. There were posts around each hut like there had been in the village they’d been to before, posts meant to tie up wildlife, but nothing was tied to them now, the tethers lying empty on the dirt. There was no breeze, just an unsettling motionlessness. In the distance Sam could still hear the river.

  “Well,” Duncan said, “I guess the first hut’s as good as any other.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Ralph Wilson sat on the edge of his bed and vomited into a bucket. When he was through, he lay flat on his back, in a coughing fit so violent he was afraid it would tear his esophagus.

  The coughing settled after half a minute and he breathed as deeply as he could and stared at his ceiling. He reached over and rubbed his hand over the empty space next to him, the mattress still dipping where his wife used to lie. Every morning he woke up and thought of her and every morning the pain would be so deep it would feel like hot needles in his guts.