Page 3 of Soul on Fire
Three had crashed and bled out, soaking the plastic laid beneath their mats with their hot, virus-laden blood. Two more were still, staring at nothing, blood streaming from their eyes and down their cheeks. Only one seemed to be recovering, a young boy who’d come out of the forest with his two brothers. His brothers had died the day before. But now he sat up, sucking his thumb, his skin bruised and bloody, but his eyes clearing.
“How are you today, Ekumanyi?” He knelt down and peered into the boy’s eyes. The boy stared back, his gaze clear, his eyes bright. He blinked.
“I want my brothers.”
“I’m sorry, Ekumanyi.” He reached out, his instinct to comfort. Rubber gloves and layers of plastic crinkled as he moved. Ekumanyi shied away, his eyes wide and filled with fear. Ikolo dropped his arms. He sighed, and it came out like a hot wind swirling around him. A wave of dizziness hit him hard, and he braced himself with one hand on the dirt. “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “Your brothers were very sick. Very, very sick. They did not get better.”
Ekumanyi glared, and hot tears, free of blood, welled in his eyes. “What did you do to them? Where did you take them?”
Men dressed like Ikolo cleared the dead from the tent every day, wrapping them in their plastic shrouds and carrying them to the fourth tent: the morgue.
What did a little boy imagine was happening? A boy who’d walked out of the forest, he and his brothers the only survivors of a rebel attack on their village who then had been struck down by the sickness. Did they catch the virus on their flight into the forest? Or had their village already been infected?
And what did Ekumanyi think of the men in plastic space suits who couldn’t touch him, and the patients who surrounded him, silent aside from their moans, their raspy breaths, or the sounds of their bodies giving up and giving in, letting loose their lives in blood, vomit, and feces.
Ikolo wouldn’t trust a word those space men said either.
If Ekumanyi survived, he’d be passed to the UN, registered as an orphan, and put into a camp for unaccompanied children. He’d be another of the millions of war orphans across the Congo, lost children, children whose lives were shattered before they began.
He wanted to promise Ekumanyi that things would be okay. That things would get better after this tent. That this, lying in the same room with the dead and the dying and watching his brothers bleed out and be taken away in plastic sheeting, never to be seen again, was the worst his life would ever get.
But he couldn’t make that promise.
He was going to be sick.
Ikolo squeezed Ekumanyi’s little leg, the reassurance more for him than for Ekumanyi, and strode away. His heart was pounding, thundering, racing—God, it was going to rip out of his chest. He grabbed for it, clutched the layers of crinkling plastic as he dove out of the tent and into the decontamination zone.
He couldn’t breathe, and he wanted to rip off his hood, rip off his mask, suck down air that wasn’t there. His vision swam and he doubled over, almost falling, but hands grabbed him, held him up.
Water sprayed over him, hoses rinsing him with a chlorine mixture hand-pumped from buckets as his decon team forced him upright. Water ran over his goggles and down his hood. The world tilted. Blackness ringed his vision, a tunnel that was racing for him.
“Take off your outer layer.”
He had to do it himself. No one could help him. He fumbled, tugging off the rubber gloves, the goggles, the hood. Stepping out of the boots. Everything was rinsed again and set aside. It would be washed, sterilized, boiled.
The process repeated with each layer, until finally he was able to pull his mask off, double over and breathe, drag in gasp after gasp.
He smelled chlorine. He smelled diarrhea. He smelled blood and decay and the pungent, sharp burn of fear. Beneath it all, he smelled death and failure.
Ikolo closed his eyes.
* * *
Chapter Three
Deep in the Forest, Ituri Province
The Congo
“Do you have what we bought?”
Idrissa nodded, his eyes shielded behind mirrored sunglasses. A black skullcap clung to his shaved head. In the humidity of the forest, his dark skin shone with sweat, clinging to his strong arms corded with thick muscle.
It was rare for a Congolese man to be so strong. Most childhoods were filled with famine and malnourishment spotted with years of eating only cassava and bushmeat. There wasn’t enough protein or vitamins in cassava. Many of the children were shorter, slighter, and they grew into lean teens and then slender men and women.
But Idrissa was from Nigeria. He’d never lacked for anything in the West African country and had gorged himself on luxury and Western excess in Lagos. There was money to be made in Nigeria. Lots of money. He bought and sold from every black market in the world, moving stolen Nigerian oil and blood diamonds smuggled out of Liberia and Sierra Leone out of Africa and moving weapons in. So many weapons to so many different factions.
He’d had beautiful women, beautiful cars, and a fury of drugs to make his days pass in a kaleidoscope of color. His nights were fueled with sex. He had the world in his hands.
