Salim saw immediately that the tidy Arab boy’s cot was empty and the yellow HAZMAT doctor was gone. Austin was getting up on shaky knees and looking out a window when Salim arrived at his side. “Can you run?”
Austin looked at him as if he didn’t understand.
“Can you—?” To hell with it. Salim lifted Austin to his feet, and threw Austin’s arm over his shoulder. As Austin tried to stand and struggled to walk, Salim was forced to drag him toward the center aisle.
Austin pulled back and pointed at a box by the tidy boy’s cot.
Medical supplies.
Salim managed to grab a cardboard flap on the box then move as fast as he could toward the back door. Ambulatory patients understood fear and urgency, and started to make their way to the door, some shuffling slowly, most of those struggling to stay upright, a few on hands and knees.
“Margaux?”
“What?” Salim asked.
Austin repeated, “Margaux.”
The white girl.
Damn.
“I’ll try.” Salim got Austin and the box through the back door. Austin’s feet seemed to become more useful once they were outside, moving quickly past the largest pile of burning bodies. Austin stopped, jerked his arm away from Salim, and stood on his own feet. “Margaux. Help her.”
“I can’t.”
“Please. The others.”
Salim slumped. Having succeeded in rescuing Austin—a feat he didn’t expect to live through—he deflated. A second rescue would surely fail.
“Take the box. Go to the trees.” Salim turned and ran to the back door.
He didn’t see any of his brothers coming around the side of the building, but a few of the sick villagers had come out. “Run to the trees!” he commanded as he pushed past another of the patients coming through the back door.
The situation inside the ward was chaos, for as much that can be said about people who could barely muster the energy to take care of the most basic necessities in the bucket next to their beds. Several were trying to get the front door open. Some were staring out of windows. Many were yelling some kind of nonsense.
Mostly, they were just stinking and dying in peaceful comas. The disease had made sure of that.
Back beside Austin’s cot, Salim dropped on his knee beside the white girl. She was in terrible shape. Salim had seen enough of the sick to know she was destined to die. He saw her chest rise and fall, so she wasn’t dead already. He picked her up, threw her over his shoulder, and started toward the back door. A gush of hot liquid poured over his back as Margaux retched. Salim cursed, knocked another patient aside, and made it to the back door.
He heard the front door bang. The patients trying to get out inadvertently kept the jihadists out front for the last seconds he needed. He pushed through the back door and slammed it closed behind him. Anybody still inside would have to deal with their own fate. Salim knew several buckets of diesel were sitting just inside the front doors, and he knew someone would open those doors, kick the buckets over, and throw in a torch. The diesel, the bedding, and the people would flame up in seconds.
The explosion of shrieks behind him told Salim the fire inside had started. He didn’t look back.
Chapter 57
Some things just seem to take forever, and the greater the push to speed them up, the slower they seem to go. Mitch sighed loudly and looked at his watch as he leaned against the open door of the truck. He looked inside at the driver—a Ugandan who shrugged, making it clear that it wasn’t his fault. Of course it wasn’t. They both knew it.
One hundred and eighty miles from Kampala to Kapchorwa. Getting there had grown into a fiasco of wait-a-few-minutes that turned into hour-long delays that eventually burned off the whole morning. It was too late in the evening after Mitch got off the call with his boss to head out the night before. Everyone agreed on that. But the group of doctors heading to the villages north of Mbale—into ground zero of the Ebola rumors—wouldn’t go without an armed escort. Apparently two attempts by the WHO to head up the road to those villages left a single doctor unaccounted for, and another group of doctors and aid workers, as well.
Everyone anticipated trouble up that way, though nobody knew how that trouble would manifest itself.
Dripping with sweat in the sun, Mitch stood impatient and bored, glaring at the doctors. Three of them were standing in front of their vehicle that was parked behind his in a makeshift caravan. Another truck, right behind theirs, carried more people along with boxes of medical gear.
One of the doctors kept talking about machete-wielding bandits he’d encountered during a stint in Rwanda. He was certain the road north of Mbale held an ambush of just such men. One of the doctors seemed to think the best way to assuage the other doctors’ fears was to talk about how, during the 1976 Ebola outbreak in Zaire, the area around the Ebola river—for which the nasty little Filovirus was named—had turned into a veritable black hole. No word, no communication of any kind came out.
Mitch didn’t care if it was the Bermuda Triangle. He had a compact Glock in a holster on his belt, thoroughly hidden by his baggy shirt. The man in the back seat—a guy he’d used for security on more than one occasion—had an AK-47 standing on the floorboard beside him. Two more AK-47s were covered under a blanket on the other side—one for Mitch and one for the driver, who was also experienced at using it. Both carried concealed handguns. Mitch preferred to work with experienced, prepared men.
He also preferred to get things done. So whether their escort from the Uganda People’s Defence Force—the army—showed up or not, he was leaving at noon. The sound of a big diesel engine caught his attention and he looked down the street. As the dust cleared, a squad of Ugandan soldiers in a big flatbed truck appeared, only a day late.
Chapter 58
Driving through Kampala near noon left them in more traffic than Mitch had wanted to deal with. At least with the vehicle moving and the windows down, the breeze blowing in felt nearly as cool as if the air conditioner was running. With the elevation, the summer in Kampala wasn’t as hot as he’d imagined it would be before he arrived nearly a year ago.
They passed modern buildings and houses, as well as less affluent areas of town, and slums. The highway passed Mandela National Stadium as they were leaving Kampala and stretched into the smaller outlying towns. It occurred to Mitch how much the country reminded him of the rural parts of the Deep South—Alabama or Mississippi, maybe—where he could drive past a brightly colored eight-pump gas station one moment, and in the next, past farm shacks covered in flaking paint with rusting metal you-name-its in the front yard. Where chickens ran loose among barefoot kids who looked like they couldn’t care less when their next bath time arrived, and weeds as tall as the kids grew wherever their feet didn’t beat them down to bare dirt.
Eventually, the houses and businesses thinned out to farming country, and they drove past tea and cane fields stretched over the plains and up the distant hills—lush greenery growing in yellowish-red dirt. The countryside took on a sameness as they sped along a paved four-lane highway. Houses, farms, trees, hills… repeat.
A few hours into the drive, they stopped at a roadside market. Stacks of crates and tables filled with all manner of fruits and vegetables were displayed under the shade of sheets of painted tin held up on wooden frames. Several farmers’ wives ran the little market and collected money from the soldiers and doctors as they meandered through and picked out a few things to eat.
At first Mitch worried about Ebola in the fruit, but his knowledge of how the disease spread was woefully thin. In the end, peer pressure and hunger pushed him to buy a few mangos for the long ride.