“In any case, as the good doctor’s friend, George Washington, used to say: Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pain to bring it to light. So we will see.”
And with that, he turned around and left the cell, slamming the door behind him. The rotten wood rattled for a moment and then settled back in its frame, silence and gloom returning to the cell.
Tom once was alone again with the doctor’s body in the corner, the man’s words in his mind like an old record player’s arm at the end of the disc, skipping back and replaying the last sentence in an agonizing loop. As day finally surrendered to night, the distant chugging of a rickety generator sent vibrations through the small space. Moments later, a single dust-caked light bulb flickered, casting everything in the room in a dirty yellow glow. A breeze kicked up, and the flow of cooler air from beneath the door helped disperse the funk of the stagnant room and breathed life back into Tom’s beaten body. He sat up, his eyes fixated on the doctor’s limp corpse in the corner. Moths fluttered around the dusty bulb, and their shadows danced across the dirty tarp like capricious ghosts.
It was hard to tell, but for a split second, it seemed like the fingers that protruded slightly from under the cover likewise reacted to the breeze, but Tom shook his head.
‘Preposterous.’ She had neither been bitten nor had she had any other contact with anyone carrying this…whatever it was.
Having taken stock of his injuries, he then scanned every nook and cranny of the room, before taking a peek through the narrow gap between the door and its frame. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, his escape and evasion training kicked in. It would not be an easy task. Assessing, mapping, planning, and plotting.
He spent the next hour imagining his escape. ‘Julie and Anna. Julie and Anna’. He repeated the precious mantra in his head. Their safety was paramount. Without it, there would be nothing. He had missed them terribly from the moment he had left the house in Nairobi.
‘Stop.’ Emotions were counterproductive right now. They led to rushing things, and rushing things would get him killed.
‘Shit. Shit. Shit’. He fought to shake off the tears welling up in his eyes. He couldn’t afford to come undone. Not now. Not any time soon.
Movement from the corner momentarily snapped him out of his thoughts. Sure enough, there it was again. This time more pronounced. A tap of her index finger, a slight twitch of her hand. Tom strained but managed to get to his feet. He staggered over to the motionless shape.
“Doc?” He whispered.
Drawing attention from one or more guards who surely were posted outside was not something he relished.
There was no reply, just more tapping and another, barely noticeable twitch. Tom reached down and pulled away the tarp. It slid down to her stomach, and Tom found himself surprised at the lack of visible injuries. Her body and features, apart from pale and sunken, were exactly as he remembered her. Whatever had killed her, Tom wasn’t able to tell just by looking at her.
He was about to push her shoulder and attempt to turn her slightly when her eyelids moved. His hand jerked as if he had touched a hotplate. He took a step back as her eyes opened fully. Grey and dry, with a thousand-yard stare, they were bereft of life.
He knew she was dead, and yet, here she was. Alive. Her mouth opened slightly at first, then wider as her blank gaze fell upon him. She let out a deep and harrowing moan; the hunger of the dying and the dead all exhaled in a chilling lament of suffering and lust. Her transformation was complete.
Tom moved away until he could feel his back touching the wall behind him. He watched as the doctor, her corpse or whatever the thing was that looked like her, fell forward. Her upper body almost perpendicular to the rest she started dragging herself towards him with nothing but her fingers. She beckoned him with hungry gasps, nails breaking and skin shredding, her fingers digging into the dirt floor. His heart sank.
“Oh, doc. Please, don’t make me do this.”
She was now perhaps three feet away, her leer as unwavering as her desire for his flesh.
“If you can hear me in there: you don’t have to do this, doc.”
He crouched. Now almost level with her, he desperately searched for a sign of reason or emotional response. Her index finger touched the tip of his boot, and her body seemed to quiver in anticipation. Her subdued moans turned into wails of excitement. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, as she leaned in for a bite.
The sound of Tom’s boot connecting with the base of her skull almost drowned out the crunch of her neck snapping. Her body went limp instantly as her spinal cord disconnected from the brain, and she lay there like a fish on dry land, her mouth still opening and closing, but the rest of her limbs no longer obeying her decaying brain’s commands.
“I asked you not to make me do this.”
Tom wiped his watery eyes. He bent down and ran his hand through her hair in a reluctant farewell. Her face twisted, somewhere between greed and anguish. He had killed many times before, but that had been in war. Killing friends and acquaintances was not exactly part of his repertoire. And yet, looking down at the poor creature in front of him that had been a colleague – a colleague he had actually grown rather fond of in some way - this was about to change forever. Whether he wanted it or not, it was the right thing to do. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth as he got back up and raised his knee. He brought down his foot, and the crack of her skull caving in rang out like a thunderclap in the small cell.
She fell silent with one last exhale, and all was quiet again. The monotone chugging of the generator in the distance, the sound of crickets as the moon rose, the moths dancing their dance around the yellow light.
Sweat dripped from his temples. He fought the urge to vomit. He pressed his mouth against the gap in the door frame, sucking in the air like a surfacing free diver. After a while, he could feel his heart rate and stomach settle, and his mind calm down enough to refocus. He looked over his shoulder at the doctor’s body and then down at his own. He had hoped there was something, a tool, an implement, anything he could use to improvise, but there was nothing left in his pockets. The rebels had picked him clean.
He went back to her. She had been wearing typical industry garb: cargo pants and even one of those beige Safari vests with a plethora of pockets; seldom of actual use but nevertheless the unofficial uniform of UN and aid workers on the continent. Reluctantly he patted down the corpse, looking for anything the rebels might have missed.
Going through the many pockets, zips, and hidden compartments proved more difficult than he anticipated as the dead weight of the corpse constantly worked against him. There was no way he could bring himself to turn the doctor over and look at her mangled features that were his doing. He worked silently and systematically, his mind pretending this was one of the pat-down searches he had so often completed on suspected insurgents back in the day.
He had already searched most of her clothing and almost given up hope of finding anything at all, when his hand brushed over one of her sock-covered ankles, just above the rim of her hiking boots. He ran his hand over it again. Sure enough, there was a small, hard object.
Peeling back the sock, there between two layers, was the memory stick. Tom extracted the device from its sock enclosure and held it up to the flickering light. It was the same stick the doctor had used to download the data back in the facility’s lab. Tom looked around and slid it carefully behind the tongue of his boot. They would surely search him again in due course, and he wasn’t about to give this one up at any stretch. He had come too far, and both the doctor and Emile had died in the process. If nothing else, given what they had witnessed, this would be the only evidence of what had led to their demise. It was their legacy if ever there was one.
Satisfied that he had completed his search and found nothing else, Tom wiped his hands, sat back down as far away from the doctor’s corpse as he could in the confines, and let his mind wander a little, for a brief moment allowing himself to think of happier times.
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Of Julie and Anna and how they had taken to their new home in Nairobi with great excitement, despite the hardship his assignment had initially placed on their little family, especially on his relationship with Julie, who had never seen herself as the expat type. It had been an almost magical time of discovery. Kenya had immediately grown on them. The warmth of its people and the raw energy of the place reinvigorating their resolve to discover something new and almost instantly forgetting the long and hard road they had covered to get there.
He wondered how the country would withstand all this if this thing did manage to jump the borders; or if anyone would actually realize what ‘it’ is before it was too late. It was close to a thousand miles back to Nairobi, and yet for something like this virus, it would be but a skip and a jump.
“Back to Nairobi. Julie and Anna.” Tom heard himself say out loud, repeating his mantra, his driving force until they were back in his arms, and all three of them were safe, wherever that would be. He had to and was going to get out of here, no matter what.
CHAPTER 12
The moonlight shone brightly through the penny-sized holes in the roof, the generator long having been switched off for the night, and the air still, bar the incessant noise of the mosquitos. Tom’s head bobbed up and down as he tried to wake up from the deep slumber that had overcome him, his body shutting down from exhaustion and his mind from overload.
“Are you decent?” Laughter as rough as raspy as a metal file followed the booming voice.
It was Scalp-man, as Tom had dubbed him; Gold-tooth, he had decided, sounding too glamorous for the kind of animal the man really was.
The door once again swung open with a crash, revealing the familiar outline as the man tried to take a decisive step forward in his heavy boots. His gait seemed off, though, oddly out of sync. He appeared unsteady on his feet as he swayed in the moonlit gloom. Something in his hand reflected the pale beams shining through the door behind him.
He was holding an almost empty bottle. Supporting himself with one arm against the wall, scalp-man tried to lean forward and bend down towards Tom. A loud belch broke from his mouth, his foul breath competing with the stale air in the room. Steadying himself, he brought his face closer to Tom’s, inspecting him with the robotic malevolence of a praying mantis.
‘A drunk insect is all you are.’ Tom pretended to sleep, his muscles tensing beneath his sweat-soaked clothes.
Scalp-man took another swig and was about to poke him in the arm with the bottle when Tom sprang into action. In a single move, he grabbed the man’s wrist and, forcing up his arm, smashed the bottle into his face, sending shards of glass and booze into all directions. Scalp-man’s nose broke, and a deep gash appeared at its base, instantly filling his eyes with gushing blood and tears. No longer able to stabilize himself on the wall with his other arm, he fell back. Clutching his face with both hands, his tailbone connected hard with the floor, and he let out a deep grunt.
Losing no time, Tom pushed himself off the wall and, using the momentum, planted the tip of his boot in the middle of Scalp-man's groin, sending him into a foetal position where he futilely tried to cover both his face and clutch his private parts at the same time. Scalp-man growled in agony and fury as he realized what had happened. He loosened his grip on his groin in a weak attempt to retaliate, but his fist swung into empty space as Tom swiftly moved past him.
Carefully bypassing the doctor’s corpse, he reached the door, where he spun around, bent down, and grabbed Scalp-man by the scruff of his neck. It took all his strength to drag the howling man with him and into the door frame. Scalp-man's eyes wide in the moonlight, he stared up at Tom full of hate and helplessness. It was the last look he would ever cast.
Tom took the wooden door and slammed it into the frame with all the strength he could muster. There was a loud crack, and it was hard to tell whether it came from the breaking boards that held together the planks, or in fact, scalp-man’s skull wedged in the gap.
The crumpled mess below Tom’s feet sagged, and the fire in scalp-man’s eyes died along with the rest of him. His face frozen in one last freakish grin, his dead eyes stared blankly into the night. Tom audibly exhaled as he stepped back from the big man and the tiny room.
‘Freedom.’
Now standing in the open, he raised his arms and let the night air breathe through his reeky clothes.
‘Exposure.’
His back against the cell’s exterior and careful to stay in the envelope of the shed, Tom quickly crouched and moved around the corner. He listened for noise and scanned the night for any kind of movement.
Somewhere, perhaps 30 yards away, he could hear light snoring coming from what looked like an improvised barracks. He crept forward, along the wall of what had been his prison. Now almost on all fours, he glanced around the corner towards the back. Again, nothing stirred in the immediate vicinity. There was light coming from an open-air kitchen, where a man in a wifebeater and fatigue pants was busy stirring a pot under a dim solar light.
There were no fences, no guard towers, nothing to indicate this was but an improvised camp using whatever had already been in place when the rebels took over the area.
From what he had seen and heard, these men were on the move all the time, roaming the countryside like looting Safari ants in search of anything valuable, killing, and virtually consuming everything in their path along the way.
Now they had bedded down for the night, recharging their batteries for another day of pillaging. Still, Tom thought to himself, he would have to move with stealth just in case any of them were light sleepers, let alone the possibility that other things lurked out there; wild animals being the least of his worries, at least as of late.
He bypassed the glow of the solar light in a wide arc before crossing some sort of courtyard surrounded by a small number of huts and buildings, not unlike the village they had arrived at that first day.
’That first day.’ Tom suddenly realized he had no idea how long he had been out, let alone kept in the shed.
He had come to less than 24 hours earlier, but what happened in between the facility and waking up in the cell was a complete mystery. The urge to run, run towards in whatever direction was Nairobi, where Julie and Anna waited, almost took overland he had to hold himself back not to lose all composure. Another spasm of pain shot through his head, reminding him that he was far from Ok.
Taking deep breaths, he got onto his belly and crept forward through the dirt and grass, thistles stinging his arms and legs and burdock clinging to his hair and clothes. He moved slowly, deliberately, frequently turning his head as far as the pain would allow. Making sure nothing or nobody had sensed his presence and was stalking him in the night, his progress was slow. The occasional rustle from the bush behind the camp fuelled his suspicion that indeed he was not alone. Recklessness now would lead to certain death. Who or what would be its harbinger didn’t really matter in a world where everything now seemed hell-bent on either shooting, stabbing, or eating him.
After what seemed like an eternity, Tom made his final push forward and reached the underbrush, gathering his mind and taking deep breaths as he took shelter in a depression in the dirt that reminded him of the kind of the burrow he had seen warthogs dig back in Kenya.
The dug-out almost ran the entire length of his body, and he felt almost relaxed as he lay flat in the dusty soil, peering over the edge and back into the camp. He was unsure how far away dawn was and with it the discovery of scalp-man's body and his own escape, but the air had decidedly grown cooler and heavier with moisture, indicating that it was certainly past 2 am.
A deep tiredness again fell over him, and he had to fight with all he had left not to let his eyes close, which somehow seemed to have a mind of their own. The cover of the underbrush above him, the warm soil below and the blanketing feeling of safety the borough gave him, all made him want to stay right there and rest, however long it took for things to get back to normal or for him to pass on and becom
e part of the dust, man himself, as they say, had come from. His breathing slowed, and his mind began to settle into an almost dreamlike state, his head resting against the comforting contours of a smooth rock to his side. In an endless reel of his private head cinema, images of Julie and Anna continued to flicker through his mind; memories and moments so brief it was hard to grasp how they could remain embedded so vividly. Images of scalp-man’s last stare competed for screen time.
Tom could feel his swollen tongue stick to the roof of his mouth. His throat was raw from lack of water. Somewhere deep inside, the voice of reason slowly returned. He knew he was severely dehydrated, and before long, the movies that played in his head now would become a permanent fixture as the lack of water would take its toll, first on his mind and then the rest of his body. He shook his head to snap out of the daze, only sending more pain through his head.
‘Can’t win.’ Tom smiled to himself. He was about to turn around to begin what he estimated would be a painful crawl of another 50 yards or so before he was completely clear of the camp when the snap of a twig sent him lying back as flat as he could. He listened, pressing himself into the bottom of the borough.
There it was again. Another snap, this time followed by a shuffling step. Something was out there. Human, animal, or recently risen, it was hard to tell. It was coming from somewhere in front of him, in the bush leading away from the camp. Unless it was one of the rebels taking an early morning leak, there weren’t too many guesses what it could be. Another shuffle, then another, then a pause as if whatever was out there was sniffing out its surroundings. It was just one. That much, Tom was sure of. Unease rose with renewed intensity. He would have to act soon or risk getting trapped between whatever was in front of him and the soldiers behind him. He felt unprecedented frustration welling up, threatening to burst his veins and send him forward with an almighty battle cry. He was tired of feeling threatened, of finding himself on the back foot and staring into the barrels of enemies he no longer had the tools to fight.
The Virophage Chronicles (Book 1): Dead Hemisphere Page 11
