Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (25 page)

More turbulence but the speaker caught
himself on a seat back and smiled confidently. “Otherwise, enjoy
your Western lives. Eat at restaurants. Spend the money. Smile,
just like holiday travelers. Talk with other passengers, get to
know them. The hard part is behind you. From here forward, your
main purpose is to fit back into the country you came from. Don’t
spend any time worrying about when you will be called up for a
mission. That day is far in the future.”

Mitch spent the evening and the night in the
hospital. His first impulse was to leave the doctors and aid
workers there with their wounded man, pull some strings to get the
Uganda People’s Defence Force in gear, and go back to the village
that night. The more he thought about it, the more he came to
believe whatever was going on up the road had to do with the Ebola
outbreak. And as much as his intuition told him Ebola and terrorism
were intersecting up that road, it was his task to find proof of
that. He was a disgruntled, self-proclaimed embassy playboy, out to
do his part in the War on Terror. The agency must have been taken
by surprise to dump all of this in his lap.

With his options waning, he stayed in the
hospital and befriended the woman who’d been near him when her
coworker was shot. The woman, a Dr. Mills from Tampa, Florida, was
young, dark-haired, and athletic—exactly the kind of girl he’d try
to bed. But that wasn’t why he’d cozied up to her. If terrorists
were up that road to Kapchorwa fiddling with a way to weaponize
Ebola, he’d need help from at least one doctor in putting those
pieces together.

The wounded guy died sometime around three
a.m., putting the doctors into a frenzy of heated arguments and
phone calls. Mitch—by then on a first-name basis with the
survivors—stayed on the fringes and nudged them to go back. He
tried convincing them that they needed to find out what was
so
important up that road that it needed to be
protected.

In the end, he won. Not completely, but
enough. Dr. Mills and another doctor named Simmons agreed to go
back with Mitch, provided the army went first and secured the
village. On that particular point, Mitch had been assured by his
boss that the UPDF was heading up that road in force at sunup.

So after sleeping too few hours, and eating
something from a food vendor on the street, Mitch loaded his two
doctors into a truck, along with his two men from the day before,
and four more armed contractors in another vehicle which took the
lead.

Six menacing, quiet black men with guns made
the doctors feel more secure. Knowing the army had gone ahead
several hours earlier helped a lot with that feeling.

When they finally drove into Kapchorwa, Dr.
Mills quietly shuddered, “My God.”

Everyone else in the truck was silent as they
drove around an armored vehicle parked in the road with a man
standing up through a hole in its roof behind a machine gun.
Soldiers were milling around or searching through the remains of
burned houses.

At the intersection of two dirt roads that
was the center of the tiny town, three military vehicles were
parked. Four men who appeared to be the officers in charge stood
engaged in discussion. Mitch had the driver stop the car near them.
He got out with Dr. Mills in tow, skillfully handling the
introductions, making it clear that he was the American Cultural
Attaché from Kampala, here to find a missing American college
student, and that the doctors were present to search for signs of
an Ebola outbreak.

Mitch then asked what had happened. The
soldiers had only secured the town a half hour earlier, killing
nine Arab gunmen in the process. Aside from the obvious—that the
place had been systematically burned—no one knew what had
transpired or why.

With a clear warning to Mitch and the doctors
that the army couldn’t be responsible for their safety, the army
officers went back to their business.

Mitch turned toward Dr. Mills, seeing past
her that his hired gunmen were out of the cars, casually holding
their weapons, ready for whatever might come. Mitch looked around
at the blackened walls and collapsed roofs. The whole place smelled
of ash and smoke. He coughed. “I don’t know where to start. Any
ideas?”

Dr. Mills was looking up a road that seemed
to point toward Mt. Elgon’s peak before curving to the east a few
hundred meters up. She pointed. “I think that’s the hospital. You
can still see most of the word painted on the front wall.”

Mitch looked. Indeed she was right. Several
of the letters were obscured by black burns and smoke stains. “Are
you thinking that if there was an outbreak here, we’d see some
evidence of it in the hospital?”

“Exactly,” Dr. Mills confirmed.

Mitch had four of his men head up to the
hospital to make sure it was secure. “Let’s give them a moment.” He
turned to address Dr. Mills. “Once they get up there, we’ll drive
the trucks over.”

She nodded. “After yesterday, that sounds
fine to me.”

While they waited, Dr. Mills added, “If you
can look past the destruction and forget about how many dead there
must be—”

Mitch looked at Dr. Mills, “What?”

She was shaking her head. “I was going to
say, it’s beautiful here, but it was a stupid thought. It
was
beautiful here. Look at the houses, the huts, the
buildings. Somebody systematically burned this whole town.”

Mitch looked back at the charred structures.
He looked up the street to see his hired gunmen checking inside
houses and behind walls as they went. They were careful with their
lives.

“I can’t imagine how many died.” Dr. Mills
apparently couldn’t stop thinking about the death toll. “How many
people lived here, do you know?”

“A thousand, maybe, but most of them probably
ran off in the fields and the forests before the fire. People
aren’t as helpless as they seem sometimes, and uneducated doesn’t
mean stupid. They can still see trouble and know how to get away
from it.” Mitch squinted up the street. His men were at the
hospital, and one was waving for them to come. “I don’t think we’ll
find as many dead as the destruction suggests.”

They got back into the trucks and slowly
rolled up the dirt road toward the hospital.

The smell of ash took on a different
character as they passed what looked like a school: three
rectangular buildings arranged around a central courtyard, dirt
worn by the running feet of playing children. Through the broken
out windows, Mitch saw charred, misshapen chaos. Tables, shelves,
books, ceiling supports, and a couple of soccer balls among other
bits of rubble—or so it appeared.

At the hospital, Mitch got out first and
conferred with his man in charge. Reality was ready to prove wrong
his calculation that there wouldn’t be that many dead. Even as the
man told him what was inside, Mitch looked over the concrete front
porch that stood level with his chest, and through the burned door.
The hospital’s roof had not collapsed, though it had burned through
in several sections, allowing sunlight to pour in on the blackened
horror inside.

Mitch understood the change in the smell as
he saw the bodies, charred in a crust of black, contorted, with
arms and legs sticking at angles as though the people had been
frozen mid-task. Fingers were spread wide. Horror stretched
petrified faces. And Dr. Mills was beside him, mouthing something
about the barbarity. Her coworker, Simmons, fell to his knees,
pulled his filter mask away from his face and retched on the
pavement.

Staring in through the doorway, view blocked
only by metal hinges bolted to small pieces of a burnt wooden door,
Mitch couldn’t begin to guess how many bodies lay inside. The whole
village? Was that possible? He thought about the three school
buildings and looked at them over his shoulder as he lifted a foot
to the next of the steps. Were those shapes he’d seen through the
windows of the school burnt bodies as well?

Dr. Mills passed him on the way up the steps
and waded into the ash-layered ward, careful not to disturb the
dead. Mitch came in behind, noticing the ashes weren’t hot. Nothing
smoldered.

“My God,” Dr. Mills muttered.

Mitch just shook his head.

“Could they have been
that
afraid of
the disease?” she questioned.

After a moment of quiet thought, Mitch
replied, “You think these people were dead before they were
burned?”

Shaking her head, Dr. Mills countered, “I
think these people were burned alive.”

Mitch looked at the countless dead. “How do
you know?”

“Look at them.” She pointed. “These people
died in agony, trying to run, trying to escape. Dead people—that
is, people who died prior to being burned—would not have been
burned in these positions.”

Mitch understood. “What about Ebola?”

Dr. Mills walked further into the blackened
ward, shaking her head. Mitch didn’t know if that was an answer to
his question or an expression of despair at the brutality of man
against man. He couldn’t bring himself to follow her through the
room. He turned and went back out onto the front porch, then looked
around at all the burned structures down the slopes.

He looked at one of his men and motioned to
the houses along the road up to the hospital. “When you guys were
checking, were there burned bodies in those?”

The man nodded. “Some.”

Mitch shook his head, thinking of the scale
of the massacre.

One of the mercenaries came running around
the corner of the building, speaking rapidly in a tongue Mitch
didn’t understand. But he caught one familiar word:
mzungu
.

The man standing beside Mitch turned toward
him, pointing through the hospital. “They have found two whites
near the trees.”

They ran.

Mitch knelt beside the boy. He was in his
late teens, maybe early twenties, and in really bad shape. The girl
lying a few feet away was clearly dead, though not burned. Her eyes
were open. Blood had crusted around her mouth and nose. Her cotton
blouse and pants were stained. Her mouth hung open, buzzing with
flies and crawling with small insects. There was no hint of
motion—she was gone—but the boy was at least breathing.

Mitch touched a hand to his mask, making sure
it still covered his mouth and nose. “Go get the doctor,” he told
the man who’d come back with him. He put a gloved hand to the boy’s
shoulder and shook.

The boys red eyes snapped open and he
coughed.

Mitch told another of the men to get some
water for the boy. He then turned his attention back to the young
man. “Can you hear me?”

The boy nodded, barely.

Mitch asked, “Are you Austin Cooper, from
Denver?”

Austin tried to smile. His teeth were caked
with blood and the remains from the last time he’d thrown up.

“Can you talk?”

Just then, the man arrived with a plastic
bottle, half full of water.

Austin croaked unintelligibly. Mitch took the
bottle and poured some into the boy’s mouth. Austin closed his eyes
and red-tinted tears flowed. He tried to speak again, but the words
wouldn’t come. Mitch poured a little more water into his mouth.

Dr. Mills came running up and dropped down at
Austin’s other side. “Oh, my God,” she said. To one of the men, she
instructed, “Go get Dr. Simmons.” She put a gloved hand on Austin’s
face, and turned to Mitch. “He’s got a fever.”

“Ebola?” There was fear in Mitch’s voice.

She looked down at Austin. She looked at the
girl. She looked a back up at Mitch and nodded.

“Can you tell me what happened here?” Mitch
asked Austin.

“Yes,” Austin answered in a raspy voice.

Book 2 in the Ebola K Trilogy will be out in
late autumn of 2014.

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On that whole question of
reviews…

Every time a reader leaves a review, an
aspiring author gets a new pencil.

Yeah, I know that line sucks but I’ve been in
front of my computer proofreading for something like fourteen hours
straight trying to get this book published before midnight and I’m
half brain-fried. Eh, maybe I’ll edit it out later with a better
line. But, the whole point of this part is to beg for a moment of
your time for a review.

I know, the word review is kind of
intimidating but don’t be intimidated. Any little bit of blabber
qualifies. In fact, you can copy and paste this line, “This was the
best book in the whole wide world!! It goes really well with the
Ebola Virus Plush Toy
here on Amazon!!”

Reviews help out indie authors more than you
know. My landlord likes it when I pay my rent on time. Reviews
(especially the good ones) help make that happen.

Thanks for reading! – Bobby

Slow Burn: Zero Day, book 1

Slow Burn: Infected, book 2

Slow Burn: Destroyer, book 3

Slow Burn: Dead Fire, book 4

Slow Burn: Torrent, book 5

Slow Burn Box Set: Destroyer and Dead
Fire

And coming soon…a joint collaboration with
T.W. Piperbrook