Everyone else in the truck was silent as they drove around an armored vehicle parked in the road with a man standing up through a hole in its roof behind a machine gun. Soldiers were milling around or searching through the remains of burned houses.
At the intersection of two dirt roads that was the center of the tiny town, three military vehicles were parked. Four men who appeared to be the officers in charge stood engaged in discussion. Mitch had the driver stop the car near them. He got out with Dr. Mills in tow, skillfully handling the introductions, making it clear that he was the American Cultural Attaché from Kampala, here to find a missing American college student, and that the doctors were present to search for signs of an Ebola outbreak.
Mitch then asked what had happened. The soldiers had only secured the town a half hour earlier, killing nine Arab gunmen in the process. Aside from the obvious—that the place had been systematically burned—no one knew what had transpired or why.
With a clear warning to Mitch and the doctors that the army couldn’t be responsible for their safety, the army officers went back to their business.
Mitch turned toward Dr. Mills, seeing past her that his hired gunmen were out of the cars, casually holding their weapons, ready for whatever might come. Mitch looked around at the blackened walls and collapsed roofs. The whole place smelled of ash and smoke. He coughed. “I don’t know where to start. Any ideas?”
Dr. Mills was looking up a road that seemed to point toward Mt. Elgon’s peak before curving to the east a few hundred meters up. She pointed. “I think that’s the hospital. You can still see most of the word painted on the front wall.”
Mitch looked. Indeed she was right. Several of the letters were obscured by black burns and smoke stains. “Are you thinking that if there was an outbreak here, we’d see some evidence of it in the hospital?”
“Exactly,” Dr. Mills confirmed.
Mitch had four of his men head up to the hospital to make sure it was secure. “Let’s give them a moment.” He turned to address Dr. Mills. “Once they get up there, we’ll drive the trucks over.”
She nodded. “After yesterday, that sounds fine to me.”
While they waited, Dr. Mills added, “If you can look past the destruction and forget about how many dead there must be—”
Mitch looked at Dr. Mills, “What?”
She was shaking her head. “I was going to say, it’s beautiful here, but it was a stupid thought. It was beautiful here. Look at the houses, the huts, the buildings. Somebody systematically burned this whole town.”
Mitch looked back at the charred structures. He looked up the street to see his hired gunmen checking inside houses and behind walls as they went. They were careful with their lives.
“I can’t imagine how many died.” Dr. Mills apparently couldn’t stop thinking about the death toll. “How many people lived here, do you know?”
“A thousand, maybe, but most of them probably ran off in the fields and the forests before the fire. People aren’t as helpless as they seem sometimes, and uneducated doesn’t mean stupid. They can still see trouble and know how to get away from it.” Mitch squinted up the street. His men were at the hospital, and one was waving for them to come. “I don’t think we’ll find as many dead as the destruction suggests.”
They got back into the trucks and slowly rolled up the dirt road toward the hospital.
The smell of ash took on a different character as they passed what looked like a schooclass="underline" three rectangular buildings arranged around a central courtyard, dirt worn by the running feet of playing children. Through the broken out windows, Mitch saw charred, misshapen chaos. Tables, shelves, books, ceiling supports, and a couple of soccer balls among other bits of rubble—or so it appeared.
At the hospital, Mitch got out first and conferred with his man in charge. Reality was ready to prove wrong his calculation that there wouldn’t be that many dead. Even as the man told him what was inside, Mitch looked over the concrete front porch that stood level with his chest, and through the burned door. The hospital’s roof had not collapsed, though it had burned through in several sections, allowing sunlight to pour in on the blackened horror inside.
Mitch understood the change in the smell as he saw the bodies, charred in a crust of black, contorted, with arms and legs sticking at angles as though the people had been frozen mid-task. Fingers were spread wide. Horror stretched petrified faces. And Dr. Mills was beside him, mouthing something about the barbarity. Her coworker, Simmons, fell to his knees, pulled his filter mask away from his face and retched on the pavement.
Staring in through the doorway, view blocked only by metal hinges bolted to small pieces of a burnt wooden door, Mitch couldn’t begin to guess how many bodies lay inside. The whole village? Was that possible? He thought about the three school buildings and looked at them over his shoulder as he lifted a foot to the next of the steps. Were those shapes he’d seen through the windows of the school burnt bodies as well?
Dr. Mills passed him on the way up the steps and waded into the ash-layered ward, careful not to disturb the dead. Mitch came in behind, noticing the ashes weren’t hot. Nothing smoldered.
“My God,” Dr. Mills muttered.
Mitch just shook his head.
“Could they have been that afraid of the disease?” she questioned.
After a moment of quiet thought, Mitch replied, “You think these people were dead before they were burned?”
Shaking her head, Dr. Mills countered, “I think these people were burned alive.”
Mitch looked at the countless dead. “How do you know?”
“Look at them.” She pointed. “These people died in agony, trying to run, trying to escape. Dead people—that is, people who died prior to being burned—would not have been burned in these positions.”
Mitch understood. “What about Ebola?”
Dr. Mills walked further into the blackened ward, shaking her head. Mitch didn’t know if that was an answer to his question or an expression of despair at the brutality of man against man. He couldn’t bring himself to follow her through the room. He turned and went back out onto the front porch, then looked around at all the burned structures down the slopes.
He looked at one of his men and motioned to the houses along the road up to the hospital. “When you guys were checking, were there burned bodies in those?”
The man nodded. “Some.”
Mitch shook his head, thinking of the scale of the massacre.
One of the mercenaries came running around the corner of the building, speaking rapidly in a tongue Mitch didn’t understand. But he caught one familiar word: mzungu.
The man standing beside Mitch turned toward him, pointing through the hospital. “They have found two whites near the trees.”
They ran.
Chapter 62
Mitch knelt beside the boy. He was in his late teens, maybe early twenties, and in really bad shape. The girl lying a few feet away was clearly dead, though not burned. Her eyes were open. Blood had crusted around her mouth and nose. Her cotton blouse and pants were stained. Her mouth hung open, buzzing with flies and crawling with small insects. There was no hint of motion—she was gone—but the boy was at least breathing.
Mitch touched a hand to his mask, making sure it still covered his mouth and nose. “Go get the doctor,” he told the man who’d come back with him. He put a gloved hand to the boy’s shoulder and shook.
The boys red eyes snapped open and he coughed.
Mitch told another of the men to get some water for the boy. He then turned his attention back to the young man. “Can you hear me?”