Page 38 of Soul on Fire
It was slow going. The track closed in on their motorbike, dream root vine and strangler fig sweeping above them, drawing the overhanging branches even closer in. Elephant palm shimmered with dew and drenched them when they swept past the leaves. Buttressed roots crawled over the track, the snaking shallow roots of the giant trees hunting for fresh earth to dig into. The mist turned to a wet heat that seemed to fall both down and up at once; falling from the sky and evaporating into humidity that they breathed in. The road became worse, if possible, a hellscape of muddy divots and the trickling tributaries of streams that snaked through the forest toward the Congo River.
Ikolo slowed and sped up, slowed and sped up, maneuvering as best he could. When they came to the rock-filled streams, they both had to climb off the bike and carry it over the slick, boulder-strewn water. Elliot slipped and gashed his arm, split it open when he fell. He waved Ikolo off and pulled his shirt down his arm.
At the next crossing, they found a man face down in the water with his throat slit. Blood poured from his opened throat and emptied into the stream, ribbons of crimson that twirled between the rocks and disappeared into whirlpools and eddies.
They pulled him out of the water and laid him on the side of the road. His body was stiff, not cold, but not warm with life either. Nothing could ever be cold in the pressure cooker heat of the forest. His skin was almost gray. He’d bled out nearly completely. He had nothing on him and wore a shirt and trousers, nothing else.
“What do you think?” Elliot asked Ikolo.
“Could be a hundred different things. Could be the Mai-Mai, though usually they will cut off part of the dead. They like to keep trophies. Could be a robbery, but most people don’t have anything to steal out here.”
A half mile down the track, they found the dumped remnants of a bicycle pusher, bushmeat and palm fronds, tossed to the side of track. There was a blood smear on one palm fan, bright red and vivid against the world of green and brown.
“The dead man must have been pushing his goods on his bicycle,” Elliot said, spinning the palm and watching as the blood stuck to each leaf.
“The palm could have been sold for thirty dollars. A fortune in the Congo, and enough to return to his village with food and more for an entire year.”
“Are murders like this common in the bush?”
“Like this, killing a single man and throwing away his belongings? No. Rebel violence, yes. But not this. The rebels would not discard his things like this.”
“Whoever killed him was after the bicycle.”
Ikolo nodded. “I think you know who did this. We are on the right trail.”
They kept riding.
Villages appeared in openings between the trees, groves set back from the track and hollowed out from the forest. Huts were clustered around campfires, women harvesting cassava plants or cooking by the fire, their warm voices rising up the vines in song as they worked. Children stared as they zoomed past, eyes wide and frozen. Miles would pass without a hint of life, no sign of humanity. And then, out of the trees, another village would appear.
Many villages they passed were desolate and void of life, some with dead bodies lying still, face-down on the ground. They could tell they were approaching a death village by the sound of the flies buzzing over the bodies, as loud as chainsaws, and the stench. Putrescence and rot, the heat of the forest rushing the bodies’ decay along. In some places, bones were all that was left, a skull on its side and staring at the track.
“It’s the sickness,” Ikolo said. “It’s Ebola. It’s burning through the forest. Distance is the only thing that is saving some of these villages.”
One village they passed was ash, nothing left but the rings of former huts burned into scorched circles on the earth. The detritus of the destroyed village was strewn on the ground, clothes and washing buckets and patched bicycle tires, jerry cans and cooking pots, scattered cassava and sugar cane and kola nuts spread haphazard in the dirt. A bicycle, lying on its side. All of it, thrown between the black circles of ash.
The sour tang of scorched palm and burned flesh hung in the air. Smoke still wafted over the wreckage.
Ikolo throttled up, speeding past the village. “We do not want to be here.”
Elliot clung to Ikolo’s waist, and as the day dragged on, their bodies were slick with sweat, dripping from their foreheads and chins and running down their arms, mixing with the humid rain that had soaked them earlier. The sweat stung Elliot’s gashed forearm, but he ignored the burn. Eventually, the heat made Elliot dizzy, and he rested his forehead on Ikolo’s shoulder. Closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, the light had dimmed, the sun lower in the sky, somewhere outside in a world where there was sky. In the forest, the canopy was so thick and choked, the sun never made it from the treetops to the ground. Rays spilled down vines and teased the upper branches, and rainbows glittered off the humidity hanging in the air, but the forest floor never saw the sun. Instead, light seeped in sideways and left the same way, withdrawing in tendrils that traded places with ribbons of dusk, slipping between trunk and vine, frond and palm. The forest darkened like a lens closed, blackness wiping away the edges until the only illumination left was the track and the edge of things unseen in the last of the twilight. Spider webs invisible in the sun glowed in twilight, the forest’s version of a moon, the massive silk nests reflecting the final rays of light.
The Congo’s rainforest had been called one of the earth’s lungs, but deep inside, it felt like anything but. Elliot could barely breathe, every inhale heaving as if he was trying to suck oxygen out of the ocean. His head ached. Every part of him felt lead-lined, as if he were sinking through the ocean on a deep dive.
“Where are we?”
“We’ve gone a little over two hundred kilometers. The sun is setting. We need to find shelter. There are things that happen in the Congo night that we must avoid.”
Elliot couldn’t think straight. His head swam, the forest a blur of green, every shade and shape of green there was in the world. He clung to Ikolo’s hips. “Where?” he rasped.
“I’m looking for a village. We can stay with them if it is safe.”
“What if there’s Ebola there?”
“We will be all right.” Ikolo’s voice rumbled through his chest and into his back, and the soft rumble lulled Elliot back into a hazy unconsciousness.
He came to when Ikolo stopped the motorbike on the edge of the track, night nearly closing her fist around them. Something burned on his right, but he couldn’t lift his head. “Elliot? You need to drink water.” Ikolo passed the water can to Elliot and helped him to hold it when Elliot’s arms shook.
