The Virophage Chronicles (Book 1): Dead Hemisphere

by Landeck, R. B.

  He smiled, wondering if Amadou had already drifted off to sleep, a trait he had observed a few times now. Amadou’s ability to nod off at the drop of a hat, whatever the circumstances or surface, had made Tom envious during the sleepless nights they had spent gaining distance from the camp.

  “Damn right. So you should,” Amadou replied sleepily.

  He turned to face the chassis and curled into a ball.

  “Now sleep. We will figure things out in the morning.”

  And with that, Tom found himself alone in the dark with his thoughts, sitting in the driver seat of what he feared had become little more than a heavily armoured sarcophagus. A coffin that would imprison them until they lost their minds or died from dehydration, whichever would take them first. He looked back up at the moon and wondered whether Julie might be doing the same at that very moment. He pictured Anna sleeping beside her, peaceful and untainted by the vile thing that was taking over this part of the continent, first the dead and then the living.

  He wanted to bang his fists against the metal just like all the creatures outside. But instead, he screamed in silence, then buried his head in his arms against the wheel.

  ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat.’ He closed his eyes.

  Exhaustion grabbed hold and finally took the toll it had already taken on those around him.

  CHAPTER 17

  The girl’s screams nearly caused Wanjiru to drop the hot pan onto the tiled kitchen floor. She had been working for this family and many like them for years now, but the lack of discipline in Western children was something she would never get used to. With a deep sigh, she picked up a pancake that had slipped over the edge.

  “Miss Julie, Miss Anna! Come and eat your breakfast!”

  Another scream from the girl made her jump, just as the two rounded the corner from the dining room to the kitchen, Julie grabbing Anna from behind and tickling her wildly. The girl let out another shriek of delight.

  “I got you, I got you!” Julie whispered into her ear as the girl writhed and struggled, trying to get away from the play-fight.

  She broke free and bent over, resting her hands on her knees.

  “I give up, mum. I am done.” Anna panted, trying to catch her breath.

  “I win!” exclaimed Julie in a pretend victory dance.

  “You two, now sit down. Wanjiru hasn’t spent the last hour making this just so it can get cold.” The housekeeper reprimanded in a grandmotherly tone.

  A woman in her mid-fifties, she had been a housekeeper most of her life, or at least since her arranged marriage fell apart back when she was but in her late teens.

  Her husband had been a drinker, and a gambler and the few cows they had had to provide for their future were quickly snapped up by debtors who were as frequent visitors as angry in-laws who kept berating her for not being a good enough wife.

  She had never been able to have any children, and for a while, she had thought herself better off for it, as they surely would have suffered a terrible upbringing in a household that saw her husband in charge. As soon as he disappeared along with the last of their savings, she had broken all tradition and left the house one night, taking the first matatu to Nairobi and swearing to herself to never look back.

  She had been a bitter young woman back then. Angry at her family, at his, at the world, and even at God himself. But she had eventually found solace in the fact that so many others around her in this city where the poor and the desperate outnumbered the lucky ones a hundredfold, were so much less fortunate than herself. It was her drive and unwavering tenacity that landed her job after job, each time improving her life a little, until one day she found herself working at an Ambassador’s house, surrounded by staff she commanded and a family that loved her as if she were one of their own. She had stayed with the residence for over a decade, being handed from family to family like a much-loved piece of the furniture and yet she had never questioned her position or her standing in life, as each day her shopping trips to the markets and through the rough streets of downtown reminded her of just how far she had come and where she could easily return to if she lost her way.

  From the outside, she was contented, but deep inside, she knew that the fear of renewed loss had kept her from achieving the things she had always wanted. And with that came a profound sadness which she kept to herself, having mastered the art of keeping up appearances in decades of serving Westerners who relished being catered to by stereotypes they associated with colonial-era literature and movies that depicted Africans only too happy and even thankful merely for being allowed to be in their presence.

  She had come to hate them to the same extent that she loved them, like two sides of a coin she could never allow to tip into that direction. And besides, as much as Kenya had achieved independence, the new elite and those who thought themselves part of it, had but taken the place of their former Mzungu rulers, not only continuing but perfecting their legacy.

  Now she was serving breakfast to Anna and Julie, both giggling like little kids, still excited from their run around the large house they had only recently moved in and were still very much getting used to.

  “Sorry,” offered Julie. “This one here and I, we lost our way in this big old house!”

  Wanjiru’s warm smile glowed as she filled their plates with stacks of pancakes and syrup, the recipe for which she had learned from an American diplomat and which has always proven a hit with anyone she had served them to.

  “These are the best!” Anna exclaimed, stuffing a big piece of pancake dripping with syrup into her mouth.

  “Careful, dear.” Wanjiru cautioned, handing her a tissue as syrup dripped from the side of Anna’s satisfied grin. “You’re going to choke in a minute.”

  “Yum, yum, YUM!” Anna retorted with a full mouth.

  Julie, lost in thought, stabbed listlessly at her plate.

  “He is OK, you know? Mr. Tom. He is Ok.” Wanjiru tried to comfort, pushing the plate a little closer towards her.

  “It’s been over a week that he’s been gone.” Julie looked up at Wanjiru, a woman she had instantly liked, the moment she had walked through the door.

  “I know he is ok, and he knows how to look after himself. But this…this Ebola thing has me worried.” For Anna’s sake, Julie hesitated to say more than she already had.

  Wanjiru understood. Julie got up and walked over to the sink, placed her still-full plate next to it, and looked out the window into the small back yard and across the perimeter wall from where she could see the nearby roads and the local forest in the distance.

  On the main road traversing right outside the property, life seemed to go about in its normal fashion. People walked to work, colourful but decrepit matatus, 14-seater minibuses, beeped their horns and touts hung out their open doors, yelling out destinations in an attempt to lure passengers. People pushed carts laden with water containers and timber and sugar cane, and the wealthy zigzagged through it all in their 4-wheel drive vehicles and luxury sedans. And yet, something seemed out of place, something Julie wasn’t quite able to put her finger on. But it was definitely there.

  “They said on the news that the WHO was establishing screening centres in Nakuru,” she said without turning back towards the table, where Wanjiru, busy entertaining Anna, sat in the breakfast nook of the large kitchen.

  “They say that it has spread to Uganda and other neighbouring countries,” Julie continued, deeply worried about what might happen next in an environment where reliable facts and news were as rare as hen’s teeth.

  “Ah, don’t worry, Miss Julie,” Wanjiru feigned cheer. “The news people get paid to say bad things. It is how the rich people keep us from worrying about things they don’t want us to think about.”

  She was, of course, right, Julie thought. Trump’s presidency might have coined the term, but when it came to spreading Fake News, this country’s administration reigned supreme. The media here and everywhere else had become a corporate-sponsored puppet of the very people an
d conglomerates responsible for much of the suffering that flickered across screens on a 24-hour basis. It was also very much the sentiment, she reminded herself, which had brought them here.

  Tom had been a loyal military man all his life and had defended most of the foreign policies that led to his tours with a fervour that had often antagonized even their closest friends. He had done his duty each time and without question, and she remembered well the long nights where they had stayed up fighting over him flying out yet again, leaving her to cope with baby Anna and a mother-in-law who was less than shy in coming forward about the disdain for her son’s choice of partner.

  But they had pulled together each and every time, and become part of the not-so-secret society that was servicemen’s families, although she had always shied away from actually becoming one of them, with their picnics and quiz nights and lonely wife’s coffee meets, as they used to call their afternoon gatherings.

  It was Tom’s last tour in Afghanistan that had changed everything, at least for him. He had never really talked about it, but when he returned alive with much of his own unit in boxes, she knew by the expression on his face that whatever it was that had transpired during their deployment, at least for him had gone well beyond the death of his teammates.

  He had never been the same since, and within a short period of time, he resigned and left the one thing that had set the backdrop to what had been their lives for so many years.

  Their relationship, at least for a little while, was in free-fall until Tom had, if not come to terms with what had happened, at least accepted that their lives would need to change if they were to survive as a family. He had clammed up for the longest of times until one night all hell broke loose when he watched a TV commercial for a corporate she knew had been involved in development work in Afghanistan in some way or fashion.

  All her life, she had stayed away from politics and from asking Tom too many questions, knowing full well that his clearances wouldn’t allow him to say much. And when he was finally home after a tour, the last thing he wanted to do was to discuss the finer points of the government’s involvement.

  That evening though, he had gone off like a powder keg and apart from kicking over their brand-new flatscreen TV, had smashed just about everything in reach before storming out of the house in a flurry of profanities. She had never seen him like this, and she had sensed there and then that a job change probably wouldn’t solve anything and she had feared for their future.

  Tom had gone quiet after his outburst and spent night after night in front of his laptop. What he was looking for, she had had no idea, until several evenings later he had dropped a few pages of printouts in front of her; much to her surprise, all job applications with humanitarian agencies. They had fought over this change in career path, and what she was certain would mean a life in squalor and away from everyone they knew and loved.

  Now, looking out the kitchen window, she smiled as she took in their surroundings. Squalor certainly wasn’t part of their lives and being away from family and friends, many of whom even saw Tom as some kind of traitor, had turned out a blessing since their arrival in Nairobi and the Dark Continent, as many of her friends had joked when they heard about the move.

  They had been happy to make the fresh start, including Anna, who had wasted no time to announce to her schoolmates and anyone else that would listen, that she was going on an extended safari. Happy, that was until Tom had been sent on this latest assignment to assess ways to help people survive an enemy they could neither see nor hear. An enemy that invaded their bodies and made them bleed out of every orifice until they died.

  Tom knew how to handle a weapon and an assailant or two if it came down to it, but this was something he had neither been trained for, nor had much experience with, and it worried her that, knowing his enthusiasm for his mission, he would put himself into the kind of danger that would eat you up and spit you out without blinking, let alone care about an ex-military boy from the North of England.

  “Will you go and get a few things for us today?” Julie said, still half in her reflections.

  “Yes, Miss Julie. I was planning to go to the market and the butcher’s,” Wanjiru replied. “Is there anything, in particular, you want me to get?”

  “It’s Ok. Nothing Special. Just be sure to make it a quick trip, ok?” Julie heard herself say, still trying to get a bearing on what it was about the neighbourhood today that was nagging at her with a persistence that made it impossible to ignore.

  Wanjiru raised an eyebrow, took Anna’s empty plate, and walked over to the sink next to Julie.

  “Are you alright, Miss?” She hesitated, but then placed a hand on Julie’s.

  Julie shivered, and she fought the tears threatening to derail her composure, but then settled and resumed what Tom had called her thousand-yard wife-stare. A stare, according to him, as impenetrable as a Taliban fortress.

  “I’m fine, Wanjiru, really. I’m fine.” and with that, Julie turned away and left the kitchen, with Anna’s eyes following her every step.

  “Don’t worry, little Miss Anna. Mum is just fine. She misses your father as much as you do.”

  Anna didn’t respond. Instead, she jumped off the bench seat and left the kitchen, following her mother into the living room.

  “Mzungus!” Wanjiru rolled her eyes, shook her head, and finished clearing the table before checking the pantry and fridge for supplies.

  Back in the living room, Julie switched channels back and forth between news agencies in the hope of seeing anything the news ticker hadn’t already been saying for the last 24 hours. In local news, reports of violent crimes abounded, one governor out west lamenting the recent spike, which as always, was attributed to the influx of people fleeing from Uganda. The actual news were obscure, infused with, and blurred by a mix of superstition and folklore, telling stories of the bogeyman or bogeymen as was the case now.

  Anna took a seat beside her and watched, although nothing that the people onscreen said made any sense to her. She could feel the worry within her mother, and that was enough to make her feel insecure herself. She cuddled, seeking closeness to Julie and the comfort that came with it.

  “Please, do make it a quick trip, will you?” Julie yelled out into the hallway where she could hear Wanjiru getting ready to leave the house.

  Moments later, the front door slammed shut, and Julie cringed, wondering if ever there would come a time when the door handle would actually see some use. Irritated, she turned back to the news, which now showed a man in a ballistic jacket and a Kevlar helmet giving his report from Nakuru. The situation there apparently had worsened, and in the background, running battles between violent protestors and riot police were underway.

  Once or twice, the camera lost focus as it zoomed in past the reporter and quickly panned across the scene, only for a technical error sign to appear seconds later, along with the message that they would soon resume normal programming. It was not unusual for this to happen at any given stage of the broadcast or on any given day, but moments before the channel went off the air, Julie thought she saw something strange in the shaky shots of the blurry focus of the camera.

  There was something odd about the protestors, Julie wondered. Scenes like these were run-of-the-mill in a country where marching the streets and setting the occasional shop or car on fire was a rather common way of voicing opinions and violent exchanges between protestors, and the brutal response units occurred almost on a weekly basis. From what she was able to see, though, these protestors seemed different from any of the ones she had seen before.

  Ordinarily, they threw rocks or bricks or anything else they could lay their hands on, barricade roads, and set things on fire as they marched. At times they ran through the streets, pursued by uniform-clad men with giant batons and guns, firing teargas and even live ammunition at anything that moved or didn’t get out of the way quick enough. The people she had seen in these few frames though, neither seemed agile, nor particularly fearful of
the heavily armed police. In fact, if she hadn’t known any better, Julie would have said they were actually a rather dull crowd, slow-moving and with nothing but the sole determination to break through the line of officers trying to repel them. People were being clubbed but didn’t seem to mind much. Instead, they just stumbled forward, some so angry you could even see their teeth through the blur. This was no ordinary protest.

  ‘And why did these people behave so weirdly?’ Julie couldn’t help but wonder how it was all connected.

  “What is going on, mum?” Anna’s voice brought her back.

  She had been sitting quietly next to Julie, her eyes darting back and forth between the screen and her mother, and her usually playful demeanour had changed to one of worry as she tried to grasp what was happening.

  “Oh, nothing, munchkin. Just that stupid Ebola thing. People are crazy. Don’t you worry about anything,” Julie replied with a wry smile and cuddled Anna as she always did.

  “I tell you what,” Julie attempted to change the subject. “How about we get a few things together to decorate the house for when daddy gets back? It’s been a week, and I am sure he’ll be home any day now.”

  She could see the excitement building within Anna sweep away the look of concern as she jumped up and danced around the room.

  “Come on, then, energizer bunny, let’s go upstairs.” She turned off the TV, and they both went to rummage through the cupboards, some of which still had boxes left behind by the previous owners, turning the search, at least for Anna, into something of a treasure hunt.

  “Oh, Tom…” Julie glanced back at the blank screen as they left the living room, still wondering what it all meant and, above all, why she had ever agreed for him to get involved in the mess that was building and by all accounts was heading their way.

  They spent the next couple of hours going through the inbuilt wardrobes and cupboards and even ventured up into the attic, which hadn’t been accessed for years, if not decades. It had little to offer other than cobwebs, a handful of dead insects, and the mummified remains of a mouse.