But the guard wasn’t standing. He was sitting with his back to the wall and his AK-47 across his lap, resting beneath limp hands.
Austin’s first thought was that the guard was dead, but that made no sense at all. How would that have happened? Austin looked to his left. The first guard was out of sight. He looked back at the second. Was the guard asleep?
That was more than possible. It was probable. Austin felt sure that if he sat down, it would only be a matter of seconds before unconsciousness set in. Could it be that much different for the guard? How many hours had they all been on their feet?
But what to do? Walk over to the guard? Say something to see if he was asleep and chance waking him? Put all his chips on the guess that the guard might be sleeping and run for the tree line?
Austin looked left again. The longer he stayed out back, the more likely it was that the other guard would come around the corner to see what was going on.
Austin thought about what he knew and what he didn’t know, and it all came down to one thing. His odds of surviving Ebola were maybe as low as ten percent. He recalled what Najid’s man had done to Nurse Mary-Margaret, and though he had no idea why Najid hadn’t just killed them all—driven by whatever was driving him—he felt sure that his odds of living past his usefulness to Najid were zero.
Ten percent seemed huge compared to zero. So, with buckets in hand, Austin shuffled toward the tree line. He hoped that a shuffle would earn him a warning from the guard instead of a bullet, if it turned out the guard was awake. The guard didn’t move, not in the slightest. Austin shuffled faster.
When the trees were just a step or two to his right, Austin quietly sat the empty buckets on the ground. The guard did not react, so Austin ran for the trees, crashed past some bushes, and nothing happened. No gunshots followed him.
Out of breath and weak—whatever he was infected with stole his stamina—he tore off his mask so he could breathe. After a moment, he ran.
With the fever and the fatigue, Austin couldn’t sustain a running pace. Within a few hundred yards, he was jogging and feeling enough pain with each step that he might have stopped had he not been sure that angry men with machine guns would soon be on his heels.
He came to a fork in the trail. The path to the right led down the hill and eventually to a speck of a village called Chebonet. The left led up the mountain. There was one thing he could be sure of. Once the guys in yellow Tyvek suits realized he was gone, he wouldn’t be able to outrun them. He’d have to outsmart them.
Putting himself in their shoes, he guessed they’d follow the downward path, thinking that he’d do the same. After all, no one in Austin’s condition, even acclimated to an elevation of six thousand feet, would make the choice to head up a path toward Mt. Elgon’s crater, fourteen thousand feet up from sea level.
Austin trudged on, thinking of alerting the authorities and trying to figure out how he was going to do that. His phone was crushed. If only he still had that. From up on the mountain he could have picked up a signal from one of the cell towers down in Mbale. He realized he was walking and dragging the toes of his shoes with each step. Setting thoughts of alerting anyone aside, he breathed deeply, painfully, and focused on moving forward, escaping.
Chapter 35
He’d been off the path for a few hours. Running, by that time, was an activity he only aspired to. Even walking fast was too much of an effort. He managed to work his way through the dense forest slowly, the only speed at which it could be transited. That took the running advantage away from his pursuers. So, doing his best to keep quiet, he kept going up, driving himself on through the power of a single hope, that he was outsmarting Najid’s HAZMAT guys.
Austin became confused as he climbed the forested slope, working his way around trees as tall as buildings, with trunks as wide as cars, brushing away nettles that stung his skin, staying off the game trails that always looked like the easier path. He was sweating. He was dizzy. No matter how rapidly he breathed, he couldn’t get enough air.
Thankfully, he came to a place where the trees grew sparse and the ground leveled. He found himself walking down a row of cultivated plants, waist-high on both sides. The sun was up in the late morning sky, and though a cold breeze was blowing, sweat was rolling down his face and stinging his eyes.
Austin tripped and landed face first in the dirt. In his mind he knew he had to keep going. But when he stood, the mountain was gone. Instead, he looked down a long lush slope and out onto a plain far below, checkered with cultivated fields, speckled with green copses, and veined with rivers.
Where did the mountain go?
In his confusion, he slowly spun around and saw the mountain again. He pushed himself to move, only making it a few more steps before everything went black.
Chapter 36
Eight men—men just like himself, Salim assumed—were in the van already. By the time the van had stopped at two more corners and picked up four more men, Salim dozed off, hypnotized by the hum of the engine beneath his seat.
When he awoke again, they were so far out of the city that the paved highway had turned to dirt. The sun was up and shining brightly through the van. Salim’s head bounced against his window as he thought about the map of Kenya he’d seen on the airplane. Nairobi was in the south central part of the country. To the east and north of the capital was the Rift Valley. He didn’t know much of anything else about Kenya, except for the fact that it was a popular place for safaris, mostly of the photographic type. He’d seen countless allusions to the Rift Valley and its abundant wildlife while channel surfing late at night back when finding something to watch among a few hundred cable television channels had been his biggest problem.
As the morning wore on, the van passed through ever-shrinking towns, over rougher and rougher roads. Great swaths of farmland spread out in all directions. And eventually a lone mountain rose up out of the horizon until it dominated the western view.
A few times when they were in some deserted part of the road, the van pulled over. The men relieved themselves in the bushes and walked around to stretch. Among them, there were a few whispers between men who seemed to know one another. Beyond that, there was no talking.
Late in the morning, they were fed a simple meal of sun-dried fruits and nuts. But never a word was said about where they were going, how long it would take, or what they would do when they got there. The men were all heading into ambiguity, based on nothing more than faith in their god and their masters.
It was when they were driving north, with the big mountain’s thickly-jungled slopes on the left, that the van took a sudden turn onto a narrow path of a road squeezed between the trees and bushes. For five or six miles the van lumbered over rough rocks and large holes, while branches screeched across the paint.
When they’d zigzagged five hundred or a thousand feet up the slope, the van came to the end of the road. Three other safari vans were already parked there, all empty. Waiting in the shade by the vehicles were two menacing men armed with the very familiar AK-47s.
Everybody got out of the safari van. The driver and his partner removed their own AK-47s from luggage bins. Instructions were passed. Drink if you need it. Relieve yourself if you need to. Prepare to hike.
Salim wandered around the clearing, getting the knots out of his muscles after so many hours spent sitting numbly, drooling in his sleep, with his head banging against the side window. He breathed deeply of the cool thin mountain air and found himself walking up next to Jalal, who’d perched himself on the edge of a drop off with a view between the crowns of trees. Twenty, or fifty, or maybe a hundred miles across the plain, a mountain of clouds was building, stretching to the horizon while pouring rain and lightening into the black shadow below.