Dust Up: A Thriller (21 page)

As we walked back through the offices, the coworkers who had greeted Regi on the way in kept their distance, as if somehow they knew what was in the bag and where we were headed. As we approached the door, one of the women called out softly, “
Bòn chans,
Regi.” Good luck.

He turned and nodded to each of them, like he was thanking them for their concern and for their service, acknowledging that he might not be returning.

I was struck by his bravery. Then I remembered I was going with him, and it scared the hell out of me.

He turned and walked out the door, and I followed.

As we drove back the way we had just come, I opened the plastic bag and pulled out several of the pages.

Regi glanced over. “Is it all there?”

“Hard to say.” I could recognize some of the documents from reading them on the plane, but much of it was barely legible now. “I’ll have to spread them out, see if I can clean them up. Dry them out.”

Between the state of the road and the state of the documents, I hadn’t managed to glean anything before we took a right half a mile before where we’d encountered the roadblock. We left the dirt road for whatever you call a road that doesn’t quite earn the name “dirt road,” and even trying to read became impossible.

I put the pages back into the plastic bag and tucked it into my shirt.

“This will get us close enough to walk,” Regi said.

The road faded away to nothing in a few spots, just dirt and rocks going through dirt and rocks, but Regi kept going as the dry grass returned on either side of us and what little road there was became visible again. We were heading around to the other side of the hilltop from the roadblock. After a quarter mile, we stopped. To our left was a raised ridge maybe twelve feet high. On top of it was a stand of small trees. To the right, the land sloped gently down. In the distance, I could see the ocean.

It was a beautiful view, and I was struck by the thought of how many places in the world a view like that would cost a million dollars.

Regi raised the hatch on the back of the vehicle and started laying out the gear. “Have you ever worn this stuff?”

I shook my head. Apart from a few terror drills, all my experiences with this type of gear had involved faceless people inside it protecting themselves from whatever I was doused with. All things equal, I’d rather be on the inside, but I wasn’t crazy about it either way.

“They are hot and uncomfortable and hard to move around in. But you must resist the urge to scratch or do anything to breach the containment, do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Good. We’ll suit up here except for the gloves and headgear, and when we reach Gaden, we’ll put those on, okay?”

Regi walked me through each step of the process. With each layer, I could feel my body temperature rising, the sweat streaming off me, trickling down to my legs. The plastic bag of documents inside my shirt felt like it was glued to my skin. Ten minutes later, we had everything on except for the gloves, hoods, and goggles. Regi put those in a trash bag and handed me one of the jugs of chlorine.

“Let’s go,” he said, and we set off up the ridge. “Careful not to tear your suit.”

I gave him a look I was glad he didn’t see and reminded myself that this had been my idea.

Once we got up the ridge, the going was easier. The terrain was level, but the undergrowth was dense. The suits seemed pretty durable, but I was paranoid about getting snagged on thorns or twigs. I kept telling myself there was no Ebola, but it didn’t entirely sink in.

Before long, we crossed through a patch of trees. Fifty yards past it was a cluster of small wooden shacks with corrugated metal roofs. On one side was a vegetable garden surrounded by a fence of plastic netting.

We stopped for a moment and looked. It was utterly still. Regi held up the bag of gear, and I stepped back into the trees, motioning for him to follow. We went in ten feet, just far enough so we wouldn’t be easily visible. Regi put his head near mine and whispered, “Just do exactly what I do.”

I nodded, and for the next five minutes, we took turns securing our hoods, gloves, and goggles. He would put his on, slowly and deliberately, letting me see how each tie was secured, each flap was affixed down, and then he would watch as I did the same, checking my closures and tightening my ties. Finally, we taped each other’s gloves at the wrist and put on our goggles. As we checked each other over, I felt bad that I didn’t really know what I was looking for, that I was receiving a level of scrutiny I couldn’t provide for Regi. But he seemed satisfied.

When we were done, we exchanged a terse nod and headed into the village.

The mask and goggles heightened my sense of isolation from the world. Instead of reassuring me, they somehow made the threat seem that much more real. Through the goggles, the world seemed scarier, more toxic. There’s a big difference between being intellectually confident something is true and testing it by putting on a biohazard suit and stumbling into what is supposed to be a hot zone saturated with one of the deadliest diseases known to man.

As we approached the rear of the closest house, the breeze picked up. I could see the leaves in the trees fluttering, and I could hear it, the hood making an exaggerated crumpling sound in my ear. But all I could feel was heat and dampness. All I could smell was plastic and my own sweat. I had a moment of claustrophobia, a panicky urge to tear it all off. But then it passed.

We walked between two houses and out onto a common area. It was surrounded by half a dozen houses, with a few others farther back.

The breeze disappeared, and again there was no movement, no sign of life, just the two of us there in our space suits. We turned to the right and looked in the first house. Two rooms, sparse and empty except for a couple of chairs, two wooden chests, and a pot rack. There was a rug on the floor and three bedrolls against the wall.

Nothing seemed amiss except that it was unoccupied.

The next hut was in a similar state, empty but unremarkable. Maybe the inhabitants had been evacuated to a hospital, I thought. But if that was the case, Regi’s office would have known, would have been involved.

I tapped Regi’s arm—time to move on—but he had seen something. He entered the hut and went over to a small wooden table next to a chair. Sitting on it was a rectangular black leather medical bag and a shrink-wrapped brick of a dozen small boxes of steroid inhalers.

He opened the bag and looked inside. In addition to the stethoscope and a few other instruments were several large Ziploc specimen bags, each filled with a dozen blood samples. “This is Portia’s bag.”

Next to it was a white paper bag, almost empty. The top of it was crumpled over. I unrolled it and looked in. It was filled with white powder.

“Drugs?” I said.

Regi looked at it, then looked at me. “Soy, I think. It looks like the bags that the other Soyagene soyflour came in.” He shrugged. “Maybe Miriam was right.”

I picked it up and looked at the bottom. It was stamped on the bottom, a barcode and GES-5322x. The code seemed familiar, and I wondered if it matched one of the product codes from Ron’s files.

I put it back next to the medical bag.

Regi went outside and paused, looking around the common area as if he thought he’d see Portia if he looked hard enough.

We moved on to the third building. It seemed much like the other two at first. Regi ducked back out, anxious to continue, but something caught my eye.

A wicker chest had been upended, spilling a tangle of brightly colored textiles onto the floor. One of the colors stood out, a deep, vivid red. Moving closer, I saw it wasn’t a textile at all. Even in the sweltering heat of the biohazard suit, a chill went through me.

Regi was standing in the doorway looking back in. I beckoned him closer, pointed at the blood on the floor. He looked at it and then up at me, then out the door at the rest of the village. I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew that just like me, he was wondering what other horrors we were about to find.

54

“Could it be hemorrhagic?” I whispered. “From the Ebola?” But I knew it wasn’t.

He shrugged, then shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

We hurried to the next house and stopped in the doorway. The walls inside were spattered with blood, three distinct sprays, crisscrossing the walls, as if from an artery.

A table was in splinters. There were bloody footprints on the floor and a red smear that started in the far corner, passed under our feet and extended out the door. We stepped off to either side, our eyes tracing the blood, out the door and across the commons, toward a blue-and-red-painted wooden house, slightly larger than the others.

Regi started running, as fast as his biohazard suit would let him. I ran too, catching up with him at the doorway as he stopped, frozen, his arms braced against the door frame.

Inside was a vision of hell, a tangle of dark-brown limbs drenched in bright red blood. There must have been thirty bodies—men, women, and children—all piled against the rear wall.

Protruding from the middle of the pile was a pair of canary-yellow sneakers, spattered with blood.

Regi let out a wrenching sob and dove at the pile, pushing corpses off to the left and right as he tried to uncover Portia’s body.

I stood there, useless, wanting to help him but knowing I would only slow him down. There was no way I’d be able to treat the dead with the single-minded disregard he was showing them right now. Any other time, he’d have been unable to himself.

So I stood back and tried not to get in his way. As he shoved each body off the pile, I saw them individually—an old woman in her seventies, a wiry man of forty, a nine-year-old boy. A pregnant woman.

They didn’t look sick. None of them did. They had each been shot in the chest.

When Regi finally uncovered Portia, he sobbed and pulled her to him, resting her back against his legs and cradling her head in his arms. There was a bullet hole between her breasts. Her shirt was soaked in blood.

Even dead, even there, her face was strikingly beautiful.

Regi was oblivious to the other bodies, leaning back against them, surrounded by them. The scene was ghastly and horrific, so tragic and evil and wrenching I looked away to escape it.

The walls were pocked with bullet holes and spattered with blood. The floor was slick with it. A puddle had formed under the bodies. Regi’s arms and legs were streaked with it.

A couple of flies appeared, then a few more. I wondered how recently this had happened.

Regi pulled off his goggles and his hood and pressed his face against Portia’s, kissed her forehead.

He sobbed uncontrollably, just for a moment. Then he clenched his jaw and stifled it, breathing deeply to get himself under control.

“That’s the first time I ever kissed her,” he said quietly, his voice tight. “She wanted to, but I said we couldn’t. I was her boss.” He looked up at me, tears streaming down his face. “I loved her, you know.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. I thought about Miriam, about Ron dying on my front steps, at my feet. In front of the woman I loved. Underneath the sorrow and regret, the sympathy I felt for Regi and for Miriam, way down deep I also felt a spark of hatred and fury in my core, tiny but white hot.

He turned away from me. “You can take off that hood,” he said. “There’s no Ebola here. Not a hint of it. None of these people show any symptoms. There’s no sign of medical care or sickness or anything, other than the inhalers and Portia’s medical bag.”

I pulled off my hood, pulled down my mask, and breathed deeply. The hot, humid air felt cool and refreshing.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The breeze picked up again. Standing in the doorway, I could feel it, hear it. As it subsided, I heard something else, as well.

Trucks.

55

“Regi,” I said quietly.

He looked up at me, crushed, devastated.

“Someone’s coming,” I said. “Trucks. We need to go.”

The noise grew louder, closer. There were voices now too, men shouting. His eyes drifted back down.

“Regi.”

He looked up at me again, his eyes now vacant.

“We need to go.”

That’s when we heard another sound—soft but powerful, a low, throaty
whoosh
. Through the door, I saw a wall of flame shooting into the sky at the far end of the village. I felt a wave of heat, although it could have been my imagination.

“They’re burning the village.”

His eyes stayed on me for a moment as he processed what I was saying. Then he looked down at Portia. Her head fell back, limp. Dead.

I put my arm on his shoulder. “We have to go.”

“But…” He looked at her with longing and regret and anguish, then up at me, questioningly, beseechingly. His brain was beyond capacity, feeling so much it was unable to think.

“We’ll come back for her,” I said. It was an outright lie. I knew there was no way, but I needed to get him out of there.

He laid her gently back upon the bodies of the people she had gone there to save. Her arms flopped out, extended at her sides, as if she were protecting the others or leading them or raising them up to heaven.

I let him take one more moment, let him absorb that last look at her. Then I heard another
whoosh,
saw another line of fire, this time closer. This time, the heat was unmistakably real.

I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him out the door and around to the side of the hut. He was in a daze, but when he looked back at the flames engulfing the first row of houses, he seemed to grasp the reality of the situation. A small group of soldiers with flamethrowers was backing toward us, spraying flames at the houses behind them as they approached.

“We have to get out of here,” I whispered loudly in Regi’s ear.

He nodded, and we slipped around to the rear of the houses and ran along the grassy space that separated the village from the trees that lined the ridge. Up ahead, I saw the jug of chlorine where we had come up through the trees.