Chapter 02: Nightfall
Elizabeth Bower was doing all she could to maintain the stoic, stiff upper-lip for which the British were renowned, but the radio broadcast had shaken her. It wasn’t so much what was said as what wasn’t. There were so many questions, so few answers. The frustration of being isolated from the civilized world weighed on her mind. She wondered about her parents and her sister, wondering how much more they knew. Somehow, there was solace in knowing. It was irrational, really, she thought, and yet confidence had always come from knowledge. Even a condemned man could be at peace if he knew the schedule by which he’d be executed. Not knowing was torture.
Bower had thought she was ready for anything. Ever since she was a child she brimmed with confidence, but now uncertainty clouded her thinking. Having spent a couple of years in Malawi, she thought she’d seen the worst the civil war could produce. She’d never been on the front line, but she’d treated those who had been. She liked to think nothing could shake her, and yet now her world seemed to tilt sideways, like the deck of the Titanic slowly slipping beneath the waves.
Bower busied herself by organizing patients, assessing who could flee with the villagers and those that needed specialized care. She moved between them, talking with the remaining few patients as they lay on mats stretched out on the grass, waiting for the evacuation to begin. Most of those that were able had hobbled off with the rest of the tribe along with several she’d expected to stay. One man with tuberculosis shouldn’t have been going anywhere, but he felt he was better off with his family.
The village chief said he expected the rebels to torch the huts and was going to take his people into the bush.
Physically, nothing had changed since this morning, and yet nothing seemed the same. Bower’s hopes of packing up the hospital and relocating seemed futile. The UN would not be back, not any time soon. Jameson said they should leave the hospital tents standing and give the rebels something to burn, something to focus their frustrations on. Ultimately, he expected the rebels to be lazy. If they had easy targets they’d attack, but if they had to work for their prey they’d soon tire. With the villagers going bush for up to a week, he figured the tribe could avoid hostilities and then get on with rebuilding their homes.
The village was almost empty.
Outside the hospital there were three nurses, an orderly and a dozen patients waiting for the trucks. One of the patients had a broken leg, several were recovering from malaria, while another was recovering from a severe bout of dysentery and had lost a lot of strength. She was improving though, and once she regained her muscle-mass she’d be fine.
Bower’s eleven AIDS cases, all with advanced symptoms, had left with their families. They said, if they were to die, they wanted to die where they were born, not hundreds of miles away. One of her patients was a sixteen year old girl with a premature baby born at roughly thirty weeks.
The baby was doing well but should have been in an intensive care unit. His breathing was shallow. His tiny hands moved in spasms rather than in a coordinated motion, and Bower feared there had been some brain damage from oxygen starvation during the protracted delivery, but such an accurate diagnosis was beyond the reach of her equipment. Quietly, she hoped he’d show signs of normalizing as he grew in size. For now, it was a case of waiting, keeping him on a drip feed and keeping his environment sterile. His young mother, still very much a child herself, rarely left his side.
Bower buried herself in the concerns of her patients and not in her own worries, even though her nurses were quite capable of caring for the handful of patients by themselves. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was trying to distract herself from the implications of being abandoned as the world turned its focus out into space.
Bower sat down with Alile, watching as Kowalski finished packing medical supplies.
“The nurses are talking,” Alile said. “They say there’s a spaceship from another world.”
“Apparently there is,” Bower replied with a smile. “It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?”
Alile nodded, asking, “Do you think they’ll be friendly?”
“I hope so, but I really don’t know. We’re in uncharted territory.”
“In Africa, we have a saying,” Alile said. “To get lost is to learn the way.”
“Well,” Bower replied. “I like that. When it comes to dealing with creatures from another planet, we are most certainly lost, so I guess you’re right: we’ll learn along the way.”
Bower turned to Alile. As they were so physically similar she saw a lot of herself in the young lady, a desire for knowledge, a desire to help others, a desire to change the world, even if it was only one person at a time.
“The funny thing is,” Bower continued. “I’ve been in Africa for five years, mostly in Kenya, but in the almost two years I’ve been in Malawi I’ve barely thought about home. Not the place, not the people, not even my family. Oh, sure, I get letters from them and the odd present comes through the mail, but all of a sudden some spaceship arrives from another planet and I can’t stop thinking about home. How strange is that?”
“It is not strange,” Alile replied. “Water that runs slow runs deep.”
Bower wasn’t sure what Alile meant by that, and was going to ask her to elaborate when Elvis pulled up in the squad Hummer, pulling a truck with a tow rope.
“We’ve got problems,” was all Bower overheard as the private spoke with Jameson.
Bower felt she needed to be involved, even though there was nothing she could do and she’d probably only get in the way. All this was her fault, or so it seemed in her mind, and she wanted to fix things, only this was no broken leg she could set.
“There were three trucks, none of them in working order. We salvaged what we could and dragged the best of them here, an old Deuce. Smithy reckons the transmission is gone, and there’s a crack in the engine block, but she says she can get her working again.”
“How long?” Jameson asked.
Elvis turned to Smithy as the young female private walked up beside them. “Three, four hours, if everything goes well.”
“OK, so worst case, eight to ten hours. Looks like we’re going to be here for the night. We’re going to need to set up some defensive positions. Doc, you’re going to want to get your people into the village, behind the low stone walls. If we get into a firefight, keep your head down.”
“Understood.”
Bower felt an immense sense of gratitude for the soldiers. It was reassuring to see how calmly they dealt with the possibility of violence. Their confidence gave her comfort, and her mind boggled with the realization that her headstrong thoughtlessness could have seen her and Kowalski stranded.
Several hours passed idly by.
The odd villager moved between the huts, either hiding possessions or packing up cooking equipment. In the distance, most of the villagers were walking down a grassy slope with their meager possessions wrapped in bundles on their shoulders or balanced on their heads. The men herded cattle before them, kicking up the dry dust as they slapped the ground with sticks, the sound driving the cattle on.
Elvis used the Hummer to pull the truck onto a dusty patch of ground normally covered in market stalls. He and Smithy worked on the engine, lifting the hood and crawling underneath the old truck as they sought to fix what looked like a classic American army truck from World War II. It couldn’t have been that old, Bower thought, although in Africa anything was possible. Certainly, Elvis didn’t look out of place standing next to the drab olive truck with its knobby tires and high wheel arches.
Bower could hear Smithy and Elvis joking with each other as they worked on the truck.