Bobby Adair - Ebola K

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.

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.

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.

Absently, Jalal said, “It’s beautiful.”

Though Jalal wasn’t looking, Salim nodded. “It reminds me of home.”

After a moment, Jalal asked, “The forests in Colorado are this lush?”

“The trees are different, but the mountains are the same. Whenever I stand on one and look down on the world, it takes my breath away.”

Jalal turned with a smile. “I never thought of you as the poetic type.”

Salim shrugged. “I’m in a weird mood.”

Other men shuffled in the dirt and the weeds around the vans. A few found places far enough away for private conversation but with a view of the storm over the plain far to the east.

Salim asked, “Do you ever feel like you’re a pawn?”

“A pawn? You slipped pretty quickly from poetic to trite.” Jalal smiled at Salim.

“You know what I mean.”

“I’ve felt that way my whole life,” Jalal agreed.

Nodding for emphasis, Salim said, “I thought all this would be different.”

“How so?”

“I thought maybe I’d feel like somebody. Maybe I thought I’d feel like I was doing something important, making choices, maybe even changing the world.”

Jalal laughed. “That’s what we’re doing, mate. We’re going to change the world.”

“Into what?”

That confused Jalal. “Into what? What do you mean?”

Salim looked around to make sure no one could hear what he was about to say. “What if it’s the same thing?”

“How do you mean?”

“What if we’re still powerless, invisible, disposable people, making greedy men more powerful?”

Jalal shook his head and watched the clouds grow and change. “You think too much, mate.”

One of the men in charge called to get everyone’s attention, pointed at a trailhead, and told them to get going. Everyone moved in that direction. Salim fell in line as they all headed out on foot along a trail that ran across the slope.