Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller: Book 2 (15 page)

Still standing in the center of the intersection, Austin was in the midst of deciding whether to leave Mbale. Should he take the long hike back to Kapchorwa, or sneak around town and see if he could find a phone, a hotel, a boda, something? He looked in the direction of the park. He gulped. A gang of armed, angry-faced men wearing shabby military garb was coming up the road—whether toward him, or just coming in his direction, he wasn’t sure. Healthy fear told him not to wait to find out.

Austin looked around for a good place to run. He saw two olive drab military trucks drive onto the roundabout by the clock tower and stop
. The army
. They looked to be his safest option. Austin picked up his pace and headed in that direction.

Where the boys were still beating the Mercedes, Austin kept to the far side of the street. They didn’t notice him. He looked behind him and saw two of the paramilitary gang stopped in the intersection where he’d been standing just moments before. They were looking around, pointing and talking. Whatever their deal was, it had nothing to do with him. He hurried past another block and then crossed the street to get to the opposite side from the looters.

The last two short blocks were relatively clear of people. He jogged for a bit and then slowed to walking, not because he felt safe, but because he simply couldn’t jog anymore. His body hadn’t the stamina for that level of exertion yet.

At a cross street he looked right and saw two men—ordinary looking men—using sticks to beat another man. He saw more people far down the road, all carrying pots, bags, and baskets, running as if their burdens were stolen.

Austin stepped over a long, rounded curb at a corner, the top edge lined with dozens of pairs of shoes—black and brown leather, used but shined, elegant as though purchased from a Wall Street lawyer’s estate auction, all ready for sale, with toes hanging out over the gutter. No merchant was in sight.

He hurried on.

Austin made his way down the length of the last block, dragging his feet, each breath burning his lungs. The wind made a slow shift in direction, and the black smoke from the bonfire poured between the two big army trucks and floated over Austin. It reeked with a rotten, bitter taste, and Austin almost gagged. He put a hand over his mouth, squinted to keep the soot out of his eyes, and pressed through.

Finally stepping off the curb that circled the roundabout’s perimeter, Austin walked around the front of the first army truck and stopped, horrified. The bonfire was built of corpses with blackened limbs that reached out as though trying to escape.

The soldiers, eight or nine of them, wore green rubber gloves up to the elbows of their yellow Tyvek suits which were spotted with strips of tape to cover holes. Most wore olive-colored gas masks. A few wore filthy, damp cloths the color of dirt wrapped around their faces. All were taking bodies off the backs of the trucks—some in bags, some not—and heaving them onto the pyre.

Austin fell to his knees and threw up. He caught his breath and spit the acrid flavor out of his mouth. Suddenly, feet were on the ground in front of him. He looked up.

One of the soldiers glared down. Silently, he pointed up the road.

Austin looked to see what the soldier was pointing at. It could have been anything, hooligans, looters, an abandoned car. Or he could have been pointing at nothing. Austin looked back up at the soldier, and asked, “What?”

“Go,” he said, shaking his head. “Go.”

“Where?” Austin pleaded.

“Go.”

Austin looked past the pointing soldier to find an officer or sergeant—anyone who might be more helpful.

The soldier took a half step forward, and raised his arm, still pointing. “Go. Now.”

Austin nodded, accepting the imperative, but having no idea where to go. He started walking away, slowly and tentatively. He thought of the little restaurant where he stopped in for a plate of ugali nearly every day when he was in Mbale. It was just a few blocks to the east. Surely the owner would remember him and might even have a phone Austin could use. Hell, even a friendly face and a moment of respite would do.

Despite the taste of burned bodies in his mouth, hope renewed Austin’s energy, and he headed north on the highway through the center of town, away from the clock tower. He passed the body of a teenage boy lying in a gutter. A woman was sitting on a curb beside it, weeping into her hands. Two men were squaring off to fight as one kept attempting to grab a sackcloth bag away from the other. Three men chased another across the street and disappeared into an alley. A wood-frame building several blocks down had just started to burn. Somewhere, a group of men was chanting some kind of tribal war cry. And every so often, a car screeched out of a side street, slalomed past the road debris, and sped away. North or south, it probably didn’t matter.

He turned left off of the Mbale highway, arriving at the street where the little restaurant was located, and kept to one side of the road. He heard a woman loudly wailing as he passed an open window. He hurried.

Gunshots.

Austin froze and then fell to his knees. More shots echoed through the streets as he looked around for the source. He didn’t see any rifles, but he now knew it had been a mistake to come into Mbale.

He slinked around the corner of a building and dropped down behind a decrepit tin fence to collect his thoughts. The gunshots had rattled him. Well, that and everything else he’d seen since foolishly coming into the city.

The restaurant was just another block down and across the street from a bright yellow two-story building.

Would the owner let him in when Austin knocked? Would he even open the door? Or would he pretend not to be home? His wife and kids were probably in the house behind the shop. Austin had to ask himself, would he let a stranger inside under the circumstances? No. That was the simple answer. Austin wondered if he had enough cash to bribe the restaurant owner. No.

Austin realized that going to the shop would be a waste of time and could expose him to more risk.

Other options?

He knew that a river wound its way through the city from northwest to southeast. He wasn’t sure where it ran through this part of town, but he was guessing it couldn’t be more than three or four blocks north. If he could get to the river, he could easily make his way down along the bank and escape the city in the cover of the trees and thick underbrush. No one would see him. If no one saw him, no one would decide that he was a threat and come after him. And that was Austin’s biggest fear at the moment. He wore a solitary white face in a city full of very frightened, dark-skinned people.

If anyone of them imagined—for whatever reason—that Austin had carried Ebola into Mbale, he wouldn’t get out of the city alive.

Unfortunately, no alternative plan for meeting any of his goals presented itself. He could wander around eastern Uganda looking for a phone until he stumbled into enough bad situations that he wound up dead, or he could go back to Kapchorwa.

Eventually, Ebola would run its course, fear would subside, danger would abate, and some kind of new normal would reorder Ugandan society. Austin might have to wait until then before leaving Kapchorwa again.

Coming out from behind the tin fence where he’d been hiding, Austin cast a final glance at the bright yellow building, shaking his head as he did.
Get out of town
, he said to himself.

He crossed the street and looked back toward the center of town.

Oh, no.

Several men in fatigues—some of the same he’d seen coming out of the park on the other side of town—were standing in the road looking at him. The one with a pistol reached up, pointed a finger, and shouted. The ragged young men with him were already racing in his direction.

Austin instincts took over. He ran.

“You’re lucky.”

Salim looked at a familiar, plastic-draped nurse with the name
Alison
written with a marker on her suit where a breast pocket might have been on a shirt. He tried to reason out why he was the lucky one. He couldn’t.

Alison said, “You’re AB negative.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your blood type,” she said. “It’s the least common blood type.”

Salim looked at her blankly.

“This was all explained to you.”

Salim shrugged. It did have a familiar ring.

Alison looked over her shoulder as though someone else might have snuck into the room. No one had. She said, “I told them you didn’t understand most of what he was telling you.”

“The doctor?” Salim asked.

“Doctor Huntley,” she said. “He’s in charge of your care.”

Salim nodded as that name clicked into a slot in his memory. Of course it was Dr. Huntley. He wouldn’t have been able to provide the name if asked—still, he knew it was correct. Dr. Huntley, a cold, tactless man had been coming in to see him regularly. “What did he tell me?” Salim asked.

“The only American survivor so far is a doctor who’d been in Liberia.”

Salim waited for more.

“His blood type is the same as yours, AB negative. Only about one in two hundred have that blood type. Dr. Huntley used his blood serum to…to give your immune system a boost.”

Salim lifted his head from the pillow and looked down the length of his body. He felt better than he had in days. “I guess it worked.”

“His blood serum already had the antibodies to defeat the virus, so it gave your immune system the help it needed until it could manufacture enough to defend itself.”

“I’m going to make it, then?” Salim asked, surprised and starting to feel the gravity of the moment. He didn’t feel like he was dying. He reached up and touched his ears, his nose, and pulled his hand away to look for the blood. His fingers were clean. He wasn’t wasting away like those villagers in Kapchorwa.

Alison looked over her shoulder again. “It seems so. You’re doing better. Your body is responding and—”

Alison’s sudden stop raised Salim’s concerns. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Alison stepped closer. “I’m not a doctor so you should take my opinion with a grain of salt.”

“Okay,” Salim agreed.

“They sent your blood samples off to the CDC. They ran tests. You and the doctor who recovered in Atlanta don’t have the same strain of Ebola.”

“The surviving doctor from Liberia?”

Alison nodded. “Some of the doctors are saying you survived
despite
the serum, not because of it.”

“If I’m surviving, it doesn’t matter to me.” Salim half smiled.

“That’s why they keep coming and asking you so many questions. They’re trying to figure out where you contracted the strain you have.”

Salim knew the answer. Kapchorwa.

“Other patients are coming in now.”

“Others?” Salim asked.

“A lot.”

Salim frowned.

“If more than one strain of Ebola is out there, it’ll make fighting this more difficult.”

Salim’s frown stayed on his face. Something didn’t seem right about this conversation, but he couldn’t put into words what it was.

“What?” Alison asked.

“Why does it matter where I contracted Ebola?” Salim asked.

Alison stepped back from his bed and put her hand on her hip, making a show of thinking about the question and being a little put off that he’d asked it. “I’m just a nurse. I don’t know that.”

Emboldened and thinking clearly for the first time in days, Salim asked, “If the doctors at the CDC have to test me for my strain of Ebola, won’t they have to test everyone?” Salim wanted to pat himself on the back. It sounded like the kind of question one of his smart friends from high school would have asked. “I don’t understand why the origin of my infection is necessary.”

With her tone shifting from friendly and conspiratorial to authoritative, Alison said, “Tracing the disease back to where you got it, and where that person got it, and where that person got it, is how we get control of Ebola. For all we know, the person who you contracted it from is still out there, giving it to others.”

If she wasn’t lying about that, then Salim’s knowledge of Kapchorwa had value, maybe even enough value to be bargained for amnesty. On the other hand, if Nurse Alison was sincere, would withholding the information be the cause of more death?

Salim looked Alison up and down. He looked at her mask, her eyes, her empty hands. It occurred to him that she never seemed to be doing anything with those empty hands. She’d been in his room dozens of times, always talking, always asking questions. Sure, she fluffed his pillow and straightened his sheets, but she never injected anything into his IV. She never gave him any pills. She never emptied his bedpan. She never helped him to that weird little chemical toilet in his room now that he was able to get out of bed.

The other two nurses did those things.

Salim suddenly came up with the suspicion that Alison wasn’t a nurse at all but an interrogator in disguise.

“What?” she asked, almost angry.

Salim was more certain than ever that he needed an attorney.