by Bobby Adair
But wait...
What if all the apartments had tape across the doors?
Ugh.
Paul stuck his head out the door to look up the hall. The door just up to the right and across the hall had no tape. Good. He looked left, gasped, and nearly wet himself. There, not a dozen feet away, an officer stood, leaning against the wall, looking out through the breezeway under the stairs, watching the fence that bordered the industrial park.
Holding his breath, frightened out of his mind, Paul pushed the door shut as quickly and quietly as physically possible. He clicked the lock closed and set the deadbolt for good measure. He leaned on the wall and took several long, slow breaths. His heart was beating so hard he felt it pound in his chest. He heard the sound of blood rushing through his ears. He grinned, suddenly giddy, feeling the rush of getting away with something. After so many years of being a good citizen, he forgot how thrilling breaking the law could be. Better yet, he had indisputable confirmation that he was in the right place.
What felt like the best part but probably wasn’t, the cop never suspected that Paul was there.
With feet placed softly along the grimy carpet path, Paul walked deeper into the apartment, stopped by the kitchen, and looked over at the cockroaches, which had apparently lost their fear of him and were creeping all over the dishes in the sink, going about their business.
It seemed that everything in the apartment had a layer of dust, smashed with ground-in grime, and was coated in a sticky film of something—and that was as close as Paul could get to a description, of his surroundings. That’s the thought that irked Paul the most as he started to think through the unplanned details of what he had come to do.
How does one catch Ebola from an infected someone’s personal items? Where might the virus still be alive?
The apartment was uncomfortably warm. Dallas, like most of Texas, spent its summers under a blanket of Gulf humidity that dripped from the nose and put a wet stink in the armpits even at night. Drapes over the windows in the apartment kept most sunlight out—direct sunlight was chock full of UV rays, which could kill a virus—most of the time. If Ebola was going to choose conditions under which it might last the longest outside the body, the apartment was well-suited.
But which surface, tracked over by prickly little cockroach feet through layers of fermenting grime might be best for finding Ebola virions? And how best to get the virus off those surfaces and into his mouth?
Paul shuddered as an idea crossed his mind.
His eyes tracked a skittering roach across the counter, and he shuddered again.
Chapter 37
Paul examined the items he’d gathered from around the house: two toothbrushes and a baby’s pacifier taken from the crib in the kid’s bedroom; two forks and four spoons, all from the sink of dirty dishes in the kitchen; a bottle of some kind of nasal spray, and a thermometer from the dresser in the kid’s bedroom—pretty much anything he found in the apartment that had been in the mouth or nose of one of the victims.
A brave cockroach ran across the counter from the sink and stopped by a tablespoon that still contained small lumps of something no longer identifiable. It waggled its antennae over the spoon, ran over it, stopped on the other side, turned, and prepared to feast.
Paul shooed, but it wouldn’t go. He waved his hand closer. Again, it refused to be intimidated. He brushed it with his fingers, but instead of running, it latched on and started prickly climbing over his hand. Paul jumped away from the counter, shaking his hand and brushing frantically, trying to get rid of the bug, shivering at the false sensation of cockroaches all over his skin. In his roach panic, he bumped his back into the refrigerator and sent an empty plastic bowl tumbling. It hit his head before bouncing onto the linoleum floor.
Paul froze for a second and held his breath before dropping to his knees and looking over the kitchen counter toward the apartment’s front door. “Shit.”
He silently chastised himself. He’d come too far to screw it all up now.
After waiting for what he figured was long enough for something to happen, Paul sucked up his breath, and stood up. He now ignored every inhibition he’d learned since childhood about putting a dirty utensil into his mouth—the worst being the thought of putting another person’s toothbrush in his mouth. He tried his best to empty his brain and not to think about what he was there to do, focused only on the fact that he needed to get it done. If a viable Ebola virion was in the apartment, it would most certainly be on the items on the counter in front of him. He needed to hurry, do the deed, and get the hell out of there.
He sucked in another deep breath, picked up the first in the line of items—one of the dirty spoons from the sink—and put it into his mouth. He grimaced but kept his lips wrapped around the handle as he ran his tongue over the stainless steel, soaking it in his own saliva, reconstituting air-dried lasagna crunchies and swallowing down the loosened blobs. After leaving it in his mouth for maybe a minute, he took it out and moved on to the next item.
By the time Paul came to the last of the items, he thought he might puke, but he tried to put the multisensory memories out of his mind. Allowing himself to wretch, allowing his stomach acid to fill his throat and mouth, might kill any virus he’d just harvested.
Fear focused his thoughts externally, taking them off the taste in his mouth. He went back into the kid’s bedroom, parted the curtains, and looked outside. It was time to escape. The cop in the breezeway was a worry. Nothing could be done except to mitigate the risk. He’d be silent and keep himself out of any direct view from inside the breezeway. That was all he could do.
Paul slid the window open, stuck his head out, and saw nothing but the wide field and the vine-covered fence on the other side. The distance looked more daunting now that he knew about the cop just around the corner, not thirty feet from where Paul was leaning out the window.
He steeled his nerves and focused.
He pulled his head back in and stuck his leg out onto the ground. Paul was halfway out before he silently thanked the building’s architect for designing windows with sills low enough to be stepped over when the window was open. While glancing back and forth, he pulled his torso through and then his other foot. He planted both feet on the ground, pulled the curtains closed, and slowly, so as to minimize the sound, slid the window down. As soon as it closed, he turned and started walking at the angle he’d chosen. The first steps were the hardest to take, knowing that he was at risk of being seen by at least three separate policemen. He knew that once he was far enough away from the building, he’d go back to evasion plan A—keep his mouth shut. If no cop witnessed him leaving the scene, they’d have nothing on him. They couldn’t detain him for long on nothing.
But...
And there was a big but. If Paul had succeeded in infecting himself, he’d soon become contagious. The last thing he wanted was to be delayed so long that he’d infect someone in a holding cell.
When he was twenty steps from the window, a voice yelled, “Stop! Police!”
Chapter 38
Paul froze at the sound of the policeman’s voice behind him, spent half a second on indecision, and then bolted for the fence.
Please don’t shoot.
Options?
Climb the fence? No way. The cop would drag him off and cuff him before he got halfway up. Unless the cop was fat and slow. Paul glanced over his shoulder. The cop was lagging, at least twenty yards back, and running awkwardly, losing ground.
Paul sprinted faster. If he could make it to the corner of the property and get out of the cop’s sight, perhaps some opportunity to escape might present itself.
As Paul was two-thirds of the way across the field and closing in on the corner of the industrial park, a car engine revved loudly and a police car bounced over a curb. Paul was caught in a pair of bright headlights. The police cruiser accelerated rapidly toward him.
His options were about to disappear. He started to imagine what lies he’d tell. He started
to think what Heidi would say. He wondered if his plan to simply keep his mouth shut would work.
He spotted an opening in the chain link fence, cut a hard right, and headed directly for it. He looked back over his shoulder again. The cop on foot who’d wasted his time in calling for backup was way, way behind. The car was bearing down, but wouldn’t make it.
Paul hit the gap in the chain link fence. His shirt caught a link and tore—it cut the skin on his arm, but he was through.
Red and blue lights flashed. A siren wailed. Voices shouted.
Paul raced off between two buildings without looking back, moving as fast as he could. He turned a corner and found himself in darkness. That wasn’t going to last. Backup was surely on the way. If the cops suspected he’d been in the Ebola apartment, the whole place would be swimming with police before he caught his breath.
But what were his choices now? Hide? Run?
Give up? Hell no!
Hiding was futile. At least it always looked that way on the reality cop shows. Hiding perps always got caught.
Paul ran on, hoping another opportunity might present itself.
Throughout the industrial park he passed buildings with sheet metal torn off the sides, leaving plenty of places to sneak inside. An abundance of good spots to hide presented themselves outside among mounds of equipment and rusty machines larger than his truck. Hiding was tempting.
Kids and crackheads had likely been using the buildings for secluded underage drinking parties and whatnot. The place was probably crawling with transients. Could Paul find a group of them, and perhaps pass for one?
That might work.
Don’t be stupid. Keep running.
Paul slowed his pace and peered into the darkness of one of the buildings. The smell of urine and alcohol served both to confirm his suspicions and to give him pause. What danger might be in there? He reached for the flashlight in his pocket and realized he still had the screwdriver. That had to go. How would he explain that to the police? He pitched it into the darkness inside a building and ran on.
He came to a concrete drainage ditch thirty feet wide and sixty feet long covered over in layers of graffiti and scuffed in arcs like they’d been worn through with skateboard wheels. Down at one end, were four galvanized bars blocking the entrance to a storm drain six feet in diameter. Two bars were pulled away and one was bent out, far enough for Paul to run inside.
He stopped in a shadow. He heard voices shouting from somewhere at the far corner of the industrial park where he’d come in. Blue and red lights bounced off the buildings. Several sirens were inbound and not far away. Paul looked back at the drainage pipe.
Good enough.
He ran down the slope of the ditch, lost his footing and rolled to the bottom, earning more bruises and scrapes along the way. He didn’t take time to bemoan his new wounds or catch his breath. If the police caught him, if they decided he’d been in that apartment, that would be the least of his worries. A jail cell might be his home for some time to come.
Paul squeezed past the bent bars and ran into the pipe. Fishing in his back pocket for his flashlight, he stumbled over debris. He put a hand out to use the side of the pipe for a guide. He put the flashlight under his shirt and turned it on, allowing the cloth to damp the light’s intensity. He ran as fast as he dared.
It would only be a matter of time before the police, in their search for him, found the culvert, then shined lights down the pipe to see if he was in there. Paul needed to get out the other end or around a corner before that happened.
Chapter 39
A streetlight shining through a storm drain became Paul’s beacon for an exit. The cutout in the curb wasn’t near wide enough for Paul to squeeze through, but an iron grate that extended the drain out into the street was light enough—Paul only ruptured a single hernia moving the thing out of his way. He struggled through the gap and got himself away from the street as quickly as he could.
He looked around to see if anyone had seen him emerge and happily discovered he was alone. Around him were more apartments with windows closed against the heat and curtains drawn for what privacy could be had in a community of thin-walled apartments stacked one on top of another. After a bit of sneaking around in the shadows, he found himself just a block down from his parked truck.
God must love me.
He probably didn’t.
Paul ran around a three-story building as he saw a helicopter arrive above the spot where he figured the industrial park sat, several blocks away. More sirens wailed out of the distance. The helicopter’s searchlight pierced the darkness below. Paul reached his truck, got in, and sped away as quickly as he felt safe moving on the deserted city streets.
An hour later, Paul drove through Sherman, Texas on IH-35. Not too long after that, he crossed the Red River and passed into Oklahoma. The trip north through Oklahoma to Kansas, then west to Colorado was the long way home, but it was the quickest path out of Texas, and seemed like the best way to diminish the chance of getting caught. If anyone had spotted a truck with Colorado plates near the scene of the break-in and noticed the truck didn’t belong in the area, and if the police canvassed the area and were able to obtain this information, it was best for Paul not to be in the state when that information was disseminated to the highway patrol.
The sun rose as Paul was passing through Oklahoma City. The giddiness of having eluded the police was settling down to general nervousness, aided by enough caffeine pills to make his hands jittery on the wheel and keep him squirming in his seat.
Nine hours later, Paul entered Denver’s city limits.
When he got home and pulled into the garage, Heidi’s Murano was not parked crookedly inside. She had left, just as she promised she would. Of course, she could have simply been at work, but Paul knew he was lying to himself about that. Heidi was nothing if not stubborn. She said she’d leave if he embarked on his foolish plan. Now he was sitting in his garage with the Ebola virus replicating in his blood, and she was gone.
Paul closed the garage door, then sat in his truck for a long time, coming to grips with the consequences of his choices, mostly feeling alone because of Heidi’s absence. He thought about the grimy, roach-infested apartment in Dallas, the police tape, and the quarantine. He thought about his tidy, clean townhouse. If he went inside—hell, if he took one step out of his pickup into his own garage—nobody could come within a hundred yards of the place until after it had been decontaminated. His home, Heidi’s home, would be useless.
Heidi needed a place to come back to when her anger finally cooled. Paul needed a place to come back to if he survived—no, when he survived.
Paul pushed the button on the garage door remote and the door creaked loudly on poorly lubricated rollers as it rose. Paul started up his engine and pulled out his telephone. He typed out a text message to Heidi—I know you’re mad at me. I’m sorry we argued. We’ll talk later. I won’t be coming back to the house. I’ll find a place to stay. Come home when you’re ready. Love you.
Chapter 40
Austin’s fever broke late in the morning after his first night in the hut. It left him feeling weak. The woman and her three dead children had left plenty to keep Austin fed for a week or maybe two, should he decide to stay that long. But that wasn’t the plan. He had to get to Mbale. He had to call his dad. He had to do at least that much. His dad was his ticket home.
He also needed to get medical help for Dr. Littlefield back in what remained of Kapchorwa. As Austin looked at the family of corpses, he was disturbed by the fact that he no longer felt anguished by their presence. He realized that help was likely in short supply. Ebola was spreading too fast. Too many mothers, too many children, and too many men were dying.
Thunderstorms dumped heavy rains on Sironko for most of Austin’s second day in the hut. To his surprise, the rickety roof had only a few small leaks, one of which dripped onto the face of the younger dead girl. She might have been seven or eight, lying on her back, eyes closed, mouth
open, crusted blood under her nose and across her cheek. The drip of water, steady throughout the day, slowly washed the blood away until the girl looked to be sleeping, with her mother’s arm draped across her chest.
Austin had many moments on that second day when he thought he had the strength to hike the last twelve miles into Mbale. With strong memories of his second fever reminding him of how fragile he was, and the bodies of the children starting to rot just a few paces across the dirt floor, prudent thought won out. He needed to be careful with his health. He waited out his second day, convalescing in the hut, keeping himself fed and hydrated, swatting at a growing host of insects, and leaning out through the door to breathe air that had no fetid taste.
On the third day, with the morning sun glowing from behind Mt. Elgon, Austin filled his plastic bottles with rainwater and his bag to bulging with fruit and began his hike out of Sironko.
A blanket of gray clouds left over from the storms kept the temperature comfortable. Almost. Austin made good time, walking at a slow pace along the deserted but paved highway. He saw no cars, no buses, no bodas. He saw no bicycles, and no walkers. In the fields he occasionally saw livestock. He heard roosters crow, but saw no farmers. He saw no eyes peeking at him from the darkness inside houses along the road. He saw no doors being shut. No one yelled at him to keep moving, to go away.
Austin felt alone in the world. He’d spent two days sleeping in the company of corpses. The last living person he’d seen was the angry, wiry man glaring at him from the doorway of his hut, and that man had Ebola. He was probably dead.
Austin took a break after walking for a few hours. He sat down under a tree far from the scattered farmhouses. He felt fatigued again. He ate, drank, and watched the wind blow through tree branches across the road. He thought about Dr. Littlefield back in Kapchorwa. He wondered whether Dr. Mills had made it or whether she was still struggling. Probably still struggling with the disease, he decided. He wondered whether the disease had been contained and if he might at some point pass some boundary and walk back into civilization. He wondered about his friend Salim. Had he imagined that encounter back in Kapchorwa? Probably. Why would his high school friend Salim show up in Africa? And what about Rashid? Was he still alive? Najid had brought that doctor for him. It was possible.
