Silas took the plunge. “We haven’t heard from Roger and Cyndi since before you guys left.”
“I’m sorry, Bruce,” Alicia said. “I know you three have been worrying about them.”
“Uh, that was over two weeks ago,” I said, feeling my stomach clench up into some serious heartburn. I felt a sudden need for a shot of Gordon’s gin. They didn’t answer, just looked grim.
“No bush-taxi notes?” Josie asked, finally looking up. “Nothing?”
“I wanted to go out and pick them up,” Silas said, shaking his head, “but the others argued that we’d better wait for you guys, what with my bum leg. You’re the ones with the connections and experience and we only really started to worry a few days ago.”
“Shit,” I said. Josie didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. We’d had a little business going for a couple of months now, cleaning out centers of zombie infection. It kept the money coming in, so nobody complained. Silas was right. We were the logical ones to go find out what had happened to Roger and Cyndi, just like we’d been the logical ones to go down to Zombieville and reconnoiter.
“Well, we can’t go right now,” Josie said with her usual practicality. “It’s only two hours to sunset and way too hot. We’ll go tomorrow at sunrise.”
Sunrise wasn’t until six a.m., but she was right. You couldn’t get much done in the Cameroon heat after nine in the morning, especially in the north, and evenings weren’t a good time to be outside. The bandits who had infested the roads of the region for many years had been some of the first to get zombified. Like that gendarme on the road, their rotten minds kept them at their old habits. Sure, being half-dead slowed them down, but Cameroonian nights were dark. In a noisy taxi, we’d get no warning of an attack.
Josie and I only got some sleep that night because we were so tired. We tried a little fooling around, but dropped off in the middle of it. Right before dawn, in Le Grande Matin, we set off in a bush-taxi, not long after the first call to prayer for the day wailed out to the Muslims from mosques all over town. Bush-taxis looked like milk trucks with holes cut out for windows, but they were sturdier than car taxis when it came to zombie attacks. Along the way, we saw a zombie giraffe come out of the trees and stagger along the roadside in a parody of a live giraffe’s stately walk, trying to outpace us, no doubt. Most of its mottled hide had worn off in patches or was hanging in strips around its long legs. Its tendons looked so brittle it was a wonder it could keep its feet. Even so, a pride of very-much-alive lions on the other side of the road just lounged on large tree branches, wistfully observing it from a distance. They knew better than to try that kind of meat. I wondered if the virus might even end up saving the wildlife. They sure were venturing out of Waza with increasing boldness. All the more reason to persuade Roger and Cyndi to come back with us, even if it turned out they were fine.
We got hit up for a job as soon as we rolled into town around eight. The sousprefet himself met us at the little taxi park. Sousprefets were federal government officials in charge of the arrondisement around a township. A big city like Maroua had a prefet, instead, in addition to at least one local mayor and a chef for each tribe.
This guy was an Anglophone from the Northwest Region above Yaoundé, which meant he was probably even more industrious than the Muslims. The super-efficient inhabitants of the two Anglophone regions and the neighboring Francophone West Region had a mutual hostility with the other seven Francophone regions, which sometimes got Anglophone officials lynched in the south during times of unrest (like national elections). It wasn’t so bad up here, where the Anglophones and the Muslims shared a work ethic and a common cause against our now-defunct federal government. Probably why the locals hadn’t replaced this guy with a Muslim. A long-running joke was that the country would never elect an Anglophone because he’d make everybody work, and nobody wanted that.
The sousprefet seemed happy to see a couple of Western nassaras and chatted for a little while with us in English. Then he told us he needed our services even before we mentioned our own mission.
The job would pay our rent for the next couple of months-40,000 CFA or its equivalent in supplies to burn out a house of zombies. You’d think people wouldn’t use paper money or coins anymore. But you can’t carry that much in supplies everywhere you go and there was no way in hell anybody would take credit the payer probably wouldn’t honor. So, money still got passed around, increasingly tattered and with different countries on it, but still useful. A bit like the bottles people still brought to bars in exchange for beer and soda because some enterprising souls were still making both. The sousprefet and his gendarmes could have done the job themselves, but this was in the compound of a local traditional chef. Nassaras were good for the more delicate zombicide jobs. Being from a foreign tribe, we weren’t supposed to have a stake in the local politics, so we had a rep for being impartial.
Josie and I discussed it. We wanted to get over to see Roger and Cyndi right away, but we already knew from experience that whatever condition they were in, they’d probably been in it for two weeks already. Besides, we could really use the money and the sousprefet’s goodwill if things had gone sideways with them. We agreed to do it.
We stocked up on kerosene in the marché, buying it in old, plastic palm-oil bottles. There was red sediment at the bottom of each one. Any petroleum product was strained through a cloth to get out the dust, but that wasn’t 100 percent successful. That would matter for a car, but not for our purposes. Zombies would burn just as well with dirty kerosene.
They’d shut up all the infected, living and dead, inside a large hut in a compound. Nobody had been out for seven days. That made the job a simple one of torching and watching it burn, slicing and incinerating the zombies who tried to escape. The only glitch came when a woman burst out of the burning hut, clutching a baby. We nearly hacked her before she screamed and the baby started howling.
Zombies don’t talk. They can make a weird sort of grunt, with air coming out through the vocal cords, but they can’t talk. Or scream.
We doused both woman and child with gin (my own way of dealing with the outbreak, so I always had some on me) to disinfect them as best we could. Then we pronounced mother and child “clean.” This practice didn’t usually thrill the local Muslims, but they were fine with the logic of cleaning off zombie virus as long as the booze didn’t make the person drunk. Judged living again by the nassara zombie-hunters, both survivors were taken away gently to be fed and given a real bath.
And that was the job. We’d insisted on the 40,000 CFA up front. That would have been not quite a hundred bucks American if the U.S. still existed. Normally, we’d have pocketed it and gone back to Maroua in high spirits.
But we weren’t here on business, or fun. We were here to check up on two of our own.
The sousprefet grabbed two gendarmes and led us there himself. He seemed to know what we were in for, but, our friends being nassaras, he’d probably been hesitant to go in.
“If you find anything, we’ll pay the usual rate,” he said. This seemed awfully generous until he took off down the road with the two gendarmes without paying us first. Figured we wouldn’t get any backup, though I could see the hold-off on payment. Roger and Cyndi might be okay. And if they weren’t, he might want the house after we burned it out. The cement walls wouldn’t be damaged, nor the tolle roof.
The compound was ominously silent as we let ourselves in through the gate with a little machete-prying. We went in machetes-first. Once we established that the coast was apparently clear, we brought in our bottles of kerosene. We laid them out along a line on the dirt path up to the cement porch, dropping small matchboxes as we went. We’d long since learned how to play zombie-hunting like a video game. You wanted to lay down ammunition coming in along the routes where you’d be most likely to come hell-for-leather back out, screaming and scrambling to avoid those clutching hands and snapping teeth. Zombies weren’t too fast and they weren’t too bright. They didn’t last all that long, either, maybe six months. But once they got fixated on you, they’d keep coming and they’d run you down if you didn’t burn them, pin them or find sanctuary.