Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (2 page)

“Maybe not next week. We’re supposed to go
camping in the mountains again.”

“Let me know when you get back, okay?”

“Yeah. I gotta go.”

Austin walked out of the shade of the little
restaurant’s thatched roof and waived a thanks to the
proprietor.

Rashid pointed to a spot in the center of the
boda’s long motorcycle seat. “You’re riding in the middle.”

“No, I’m not,” Austin answered. “I’m
paying.”

“This is your friend?” The boda driver
asked.

Rashid told him, “He’s got the money. You
want it or not?” To Austin he said, “I negotiated. You should sit
in the middle.”

“You can get your own if you want,” said
Austin. “Your dad’s got, like, a bazillion dollars, right? It’s not
my fault you’re always broke.”

Rashid’s brow furrowed. He shook his head and
raised a finger to his lips. He leaned in close so that only Austin
could hear what he was about to say. “I told you, keep that quiet.
You could get me kidnapped.”

“Sorry,” Austin whispered back. In his normal
tone, he said, “Get on, let’s get going.”

The boda driver said, “It’s a long way to
Kapchorwa. Money first.”

Austin paid him.

“Something you should know before we go,”
Rashid said.

“Yeah?” Austin asked.

“The road is blocked.”

“It is,” the boda driver said. “My cousin
told me.”

Rashid continued, “The military closed down
that road and a bunch of others in the eastern districts.”

Austin wondered if the driver was steering
the conversation toward a renegotiation of the price. “Why?”

“Ebola,” answered the driver.

“Here?” Austin didn’t want to believe it.

Rashid shook his head and shot the driver a
look that told him to be quiet. “Rumors. The Ebola outbreak is in
Sierra Leone. Just rumors.”

“So, what are we doing, then?” Austin
asked.

The boda driver pointed north. “I know a way
on a trail.”

“How close can we get?”

“You’ll see the village from where I drop
you,” the boda driver answered.

Austin said, “I can see Kapchorwa from the
top of Mt. Elgon and that’s, like, ten miles away.”

“A kilometer, maybe less,” said the
driver.

“Okay. Let’s go.” Austin walked toward the
bike.

The driver threw a leg over his
motorcycle.

To Rashid, Austin motioned, “You’re
next.”

“I hate being in the middle,” Rashid
complained.

“Trust me. It’s just as uncomfortable for me,
but it’s what we can afford.”

Forty minutes on the dusty, bumpy, red clay
road was bad, but the single-track through the bush was worse.

The boda driver turned to yell over the whine
of the engine, “Hold on.”

They bounced over a hump in the trail and
Austin nearly went off the back.

Rashid looked over his shoulder at Austin.
“Not so tight.”

“I don’t want to fall,” Austin told him.

Rashid sneezed.

“Damn, dude.” Austin wiped his face on
Rashid’s shirt. “You got that all over me.”

“You should have let me ride in back.”

“What? You sneezed on me on purpose?”

Rashid sneezed again.

“Damn. Turn your head, Rashid.”

“I did!”

“Turn it the other way. I’m on your
left.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

The jungle on both sides of the trail closed
in. Leaves big and small brushed Austin’s knees. Thin branches
scraped. And it all grew thicker the higher up the side of the
mountain the trail wound. The boda’s engine whined as it pulled the
three young men up a particularly steep section of the trail, and
the tires skidded down muddy tracks as the driver uselessly
squeezed the brakes until the wheels locked. Miraculously, he kept
the motorcycle upright.

More than once Austin wanted to pull his
phone out of his pocket to check the time and see how much longer
they had to risk breaking their bones on the trail, but feared that
pulling one hand away from Rashid’s waist would result in him being
bounced off the back of the bike.

They’d been on the trail for at least a half
hour, maybe twice that long, when it smoothed out on a gentle
upward slope. They were going slow enough by then that Austin
figured he could have a conversation with Rashid and not have the
words lost in the wind. “Hey, what do you think of this Ebola
thing?”

“You sound scared,” said Rashid, looking back
over his shoulder with a grin.

“Worried is a better word.”

Rashid laughed. “A billion people in Africa,
and maybe a few thousand cases of Ebola ever, and you think you’re
in trouble.”

Put that way, it made Austin’s fear of Ebola
embarrassing. Nevertheless, he said, “Ebola kills everybody who
gets it.”

Rashid laughed again. “Not
everybody
.”

The boda rode up on a crest and the jungle
thinned. They were well up on the north slope of Mt. Elgon. Below,
Kapchorwa’s houses and huts seemed to grow out of the intersection
of a few dirt roads—some short, some snaking off east or west.
Paving for the roads hadn’t made it from the capital out to the
distant districts yet. And the Kapchorwa District, bordered on the
east by Kenya with its hundred thousand farmers, was just about as
far from Kampala as one could get and still be in Uganda.

The boda driver stopped and announced,
“Here.”

Austin stepped off the bike. “Thanks.”

Rashid got off, hitched up his pants, and
adjusted his man parts. “Next time, I’ll get my own boda.”

“You do that, Rashid.” Austin reached into
his pocket to pull out a few more shillings as a tip, but the boda
driver was already hurrying to get back up the trail and apparently
away from Kapchorwa. He flashed a white palm in a wave and smiled
as he revved the whiny engine to speed back up the bumpy trail.

Still thinking about the Ebola virus, Austin
said, “He got out of here in a hurry.”

Rashid watched the boda driver zip back up
the trail, not seeming to care how quickly the boda left. “It’ll be
dark soon.”

Austin looked west toward the sun sinking
over the brown and green plain. The smoke of a few fires drifted up
and dissolved in the wind. They were too large to be cooking fires,
but too small to be wild fires. Probably charcoal production. At
least, that was the guess that Austin attached to forested spots in
the distance that leaked smoldering gray into the sky. He stopped
staring at the vista and started walking down the trail. Rashid
went along.

The small town of Kapchorwa, with its hundred
or so dwellings, sheds, and businesses, seemed quiet. Looking down
the slope, Austin didn’t see anyone moving around, nor did he hear
the distant shrill sounds of children playing before dinner. He did
smell peanuts roasting—groundnuts, to the locals—along with the
savory smell of onions cooking. He realized he was hungry
again.

Down on the village’s main road, an
overturned semi-tractor-trailer still lay as it had since rolling
over during Austin’s first week of teaching. Every day since, when
it wasn’t raining, village kids played on the overturned vehicle.
And though no rain clouds were in the sky, the kids were
absent.

Halfway down the slope, they left the
meandering trail and cut across a lush sweet potato field.

They neared a house, mud-walled on a wooden
frame under a tin roof rusted as red as wet clay. It stood alone
among the crops. A rope draped with wrinkled clothes was strung
from one corner of the house to a lone tree. Plastic tubs of
different colors—all-purpose and dirty—leaned against the walls
outside. From the deep shadows inside the open doorway of the
hovel, a pair of silently wary eyes watched Austin and Rashid
pass.

Softly, Rashid said, “That man is
frightened.”

Austin looked back at Rashid. “Of us?”

Rashid shook his head.

“How do you know?” Austin asked.

“Are you joking? You couldn’t see the fright
in his eyes?”

“I think you’re reading too much into
it.”

Rashid pointed down to the village. “Where is
everybody?”

Sarcastically, Austin answered, “Maybe Ebola
killed them all.”

Rashid ignored the comment and instead cut a
path through the bushy sweet potatoes, heading toward Isaac Luwum’s
whitewashed cinderblock house on the western edge of town.

Isaac Luwum, their sponsor, maintained a
hedge of unruly native plants around the edges of his front yard.
Austin and Rashid hopped over the short hedge and tromped on the
worn, patchy grass on their way to the open front door.

“Benoit? Margaux?” Austin called as he
stepped into the main room. It was unusual for no one to be home.
“Isaac?”

“I’ll bet Isaac is drinking with that cabbage
farmer.” Rashid nodded toward the back of the house where Benoit
and Margaux shared a room. “I’ll bet I know what they’re doing.”
Rashid stopped to listen.

“No. I don’t hear anything.” Austin crossed
through the brightly painted, overly decorated living room, then
glanced in the kitchen and through the windows on the back of the
house. “She’s usually pretty noisy. You’d know already if they were
doing it.”

“Maybe they’re done and they went to
sleep.”

“Go knock on their door and see if they’re in
there.” Austin went into the kitchen and poured some water from one
of the jugs. He hollered, “We’re almost out of water and it’s your
turn to boil.”

“Nobody here,” Rashid called, his voice
notching a few tones higher as he walked toward the living room. He
was getting anxious.

“This is weird.” Austin crossed the living
room again, tossed his backpack on the worn old couch, and dropped
down beside it.

Rashid stood in the center of the living room
and looked down at Austin. “Nobody is outside. Benoit and Margaux
are gone—”

“They’re not here.” Austin shook his head
slowly and took another drink. “That doesn’t imply whatever you
think you’re implying when you say
gone
. Maybe they got
tired of doing it in the bedroom and are off in the jungle,
pretending they’re horny monkeys or something.”

“You don’t think this is weird?” Rashid
asked.

“You’re letting your imagination convince you
that something was wrong,” said Austin. “You need to be cool,
Rashid. It’s dinnertime. Everybody is at home eating.”

Rashid replied, “That’s stupid. You know
everybody doesn’t go inside and eat at exactly the same time.”

“I know. I’m just saying that you’re getting
worked up for no reason. It’s like all the business you told me on
the way here from Mbale about there being a billion people in
Africa and only a couple thousand cases of Ebola in recorded
history was just some bullshit you were telling yourself so that
you
wouldn’t be scared.” Austin grinned. “Are you worried
about Ebola, Rashid? You can tell me.”

“It’s no wonder Najid doesn’t like
Americans.”

“Your brother doesn’t like us because we’re
smartasses?” Austin laughed. “Or is it because now that he suffers
the burden of counting all your father’s oil money he’s pissed
because we won’t buy Priuses?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” said Austin. “Get a drink. Put
your stuff on your bunk and we’ll go out and see what’s up.
Cool?”

Rashid kicked a stray pillow to demonstrate
his frustration and headed toward the room he shared with
Austin.

Austin drank the rest of his water, stood up,
and looked out at the street through the front window. Still, no
one was out. It was weird. But he was sure there was an
explanation. It could be fear over the Ebola rumors. The army
had
blocked the road. That would be enough to frighten the
people of any town.

Rashid came out of the room and went into the
kitchen to get himself a cup of water. Some pots rattled as he
looked for the kettle. “I could make some tea. Do you want
any?”

“Up to you. You want to go out and find out
what’s going on first?”

Austin heard Rashid set the teakettle on the
counter. Then he didn’t hear anything. He looked back into the
kitchen. Rashid’s head was down. He wasn’t moving. Austin asked,
“Are you worried?”

“Najid called me yesterday. He says all he
sees on the news are stories about Ebola. I told him not to worry.
Ebola is in West Africa. We’re in East Africa. But he kept telling
me about all the hundreds of people who are dying and about how
this is the worst outbreak ever.”

Austin raised his hands in frustration. “You
convinced me that the odds of us getting Ebola are so
astronomically small that I shouldn’t worry about it.”

“That’s the same thing I told Najid.”

“But?”

“He worries. He told me to get on a plane and
come home. He said he had a ticket waiting for me in Entebbe.”

“When’s the flight?”

“It was this morning. He said if I didn’t get
on that plane, he’d come here and grab me by the ear, put me on a
plane, and take me home. His worries are infecting me, I
think.”

“Look, Rashid, I don’t know much about Ebola.
Somebody has to bleed on you or something. And I read it has a long
incubation time.”

“How do you know this?” Rashid asked.

“I did a little bit of research before I came
over,” said Austin. “I came across an underreported story about a
small outbreak in Sierra Leone and that piqued my curiosity. Mostly
what I wanted to know was what I could catch while I was here, and
how I could avoid it.”

“What are you telling me?”

Austin said, “We left the village last week.
Six days ago. There was no Ebola here when we left. If by some
really bad luck somebody caught it from a monkey or whatever, it
would be, like, one person. That’s it. There is no such thing as a
whole village full of patient zeroes. So if somebody got it, their
caregiver might get it, too. And so on, and so on. It could take a
month or two before enough people get it for anybody but the local
doctor to even notice.”