Plague

CHAPTER 45

The morning came with nothing but heat and the stink of moisture soaking into the hut. It was perfectly quiet outside except for the chirp of crickets though the sun was already up. Sam rose and brushed her teeth, using a little water out of her bottle, and pulled her hair back with a rubber band.

The village was empty; a smoldering fire and empty bowls that had contained their potent beer the only evidence that people lived here.

She walked over to the adjacent hut and peeked in. Duncan slept next to Benjamin. There was a third sleeping bag and she was unsure who it belonged to. She heard some banging nearby, like someone was knocking on a metal door, and she walked in that direction to see Agent Donner bent over a pan that was slowly heating up over a fire.

“Eggs?” he said.

“Sure.” She sat down against a tree, the shade covering her entire body as she stretched out her legs in the soft dirt. “Have you had any contact with the bureau?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“I thought you guys always had to be checking in.”

“No, they trust us. More or less.”

They were silent a long time and he looked over to her, a grin on his face.

“You look like you have something to ask me, Dr. Bower. So just ask.”

“You’re not FBI. I’ve dealt with dozens of agents. You don’t walk like them, you don’t talk like them and you certainly don’t act like them. I’ve never heard of a federal agent abandoning an assignment and chasing some crazed hippie into the jungle.”

“Maybe I’m after the crazed hippie? Maybe my assignment is to follow him wherever he goes?”

“Bull. You have no jurisdiction here. You couldn’t effectuate an arrest if you wanted to. He would call the police and you might be the one arrested. You wouldn’t have let him out of the country if he’s what you were after.”

He chuckled softly to himself as he flipped some sunny-side up eggs upside down in the pan. “You are clever, aren’t you, Samantha? You must get that from your mother. She was an artist, wasn’t she? And your father was brilliant too if I recall. It must be really difficult to watch one die and the other’s brain get eaten away a little bit every day.”

She stared at him a few seconds and said, “How do you know about my mother?”

“Leslie? I know a lot about Leslie. I even saw some of her paintings. She had talent. If she’d have been some drug addict freak instead of a normal housewife the art community might’ve taken her in as one of their own.”

“Who are you?”

“I, Dr. Bower, am a man who maintains balance in all the things.” He took out some olive oil from a small container and poured a little more in the pan before taking out the eggs and placing them on a paper plate. He took a slice of bread out of some tin foil, put it on the plate, and placed it in front of Samantha before cracking another two eggs and putting them in the pan.

“What do you mean balance?”

“Well, Duncan there is a Mormon. Have you ever read the Book of Mormon?”

“No.”

“Fascinating read. I’m not Mormon, mind you. But it was fascinating nonetheless. Many see it as a spiritual guidebook, but that’s not what I saw. I saw a chronicle of war. It’s filled with cannibalism, rape, murder, genocide…its essence is that without faith in God, that is our natural state. In Honolulu, for example, the strong are devouring the weak right now. That is what happens without balance. Civilization needs people that can bring balance. That can keep us from the destruction predicted in the Book of Mormon.”

“Are you CIA?”

He laughed. “CIA? No, I am definitely not CIA. They devoted decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to fighting the Soviets and they didn’t know the Berlin Wall was coming down until the bricks were hitting them on the head. The CIA has failed at every mission they have ever had and you know what their cover is? That we don’t hear about their successes, only their failures. Can you believe that nonsense? If their failures can leak, surely their successes would too. But we haven’t heard of them because there haven’t been any.

“The KGB won their war. They had covert operatives in every branch of government, especially the CIA. They beat the CIA in the spy game, but then lost the politics game. Balance, you see. The Communists pushed too hard and it swung the other way. It’s people like me that cause that swing to begin.”

Sam watched as he finished cooking his eggs and then threw dirt on the fire. He sat down, pulled out some bread, and dug into his breakfast. “I really wish I had some Tabasco sauce,” he said.

“I think you should leave,” Samantha said. “Leave now and I won’t tell everyone what you just said.”

“Oh? And what did I just say? A lecture on balance? And perhaps I should remind you that there are no police within a hundred miles of where we are and you are the only white woman in probably triple that distance. Without me here, these Indians would keep you as their sex slave until they drunkenly raped you to death one night. Then, I don’t know, they’d probably cannibalize you I guess. I’ve heard that was their custom for intruders for centuries before the Peruvian government outlawed it. But then when has the law ever stopped anything?”

“Why are you here, Agent Donn-” Before she finished her sentence she saw the look of amusement on his face. “Of course, your name’s not Billy Donner. What are you doing here?”

Duncan walked up from behind them. “Hey,” he said to her. “You guys got eggs? Got any left?”

“Of course.”

Sam watched as he took out the pan and began to make more eggs. She stood up and walked away, Duncan asking her what was wrong and she just brushing past him without a word.

She got far enough away that she couldn’t hear what they were talking about and then wondered whether she should go back. Instead, she went to find Benjamin.

She came to the hut and saw him standing outside in his boxer shorts, speaking with the guide. He was scratching his underarms and he glanced to her and stopped. When they had finished speaking, he walked over.

“We got news,” Benjamin said, “a town two days from here. There’s a rumor that the population was wiped out by a sickness. It’s where that canister that Holly mentioned might be.”

“We need to talk about Donner.”

“What about him?”

“He’s not FBI.”

“Shit, you just figure that out now?”

“You knew?”

“Hell yeah I knew. What federal agent would quit his job to follow my ass around? But the fucker’s good at just about everything. He repaired this old truck the organization had that mechanics didn’t think would work anymore. He got Cami a fake passport too.”

“What did she need that for?”

“She’s illegal. She’s not a doctor in the States; she’s a doctor in Mexico. Or was, until she helped out a journalist that the cartels tried to kill. They went after her and she ran and kept running until she got to the States.”

Sam shook her head. “He’s dangerous.”

“He’s weird, I’ll give you that, but I don’t know about dangerous. Best I can tell, he’s ex-military or something. Probably just looking for a cause and happened to find ours.”

“No, he’s too smart for that.”

“Oh, so now you have to be dumb to believe in what I’ve dedicated my life to?”

“That’s not how I meant it.”

“Well, whatever, look, I’ve known him longer than I’ve known you so you can chill out or take off. I don’t really care. We’re heading out to the village. If you’re coming, you’ve gotta pack up now. If not, I’ll ask one of the folks in the village to take you back next time they go into town. Might be a while, though.”

He turned and walked away, leaving her standing there. She glanced back to Duncan who was sitting against the same tree she had been and eating eggs with Donner. She caught movement off to her right and saw one of the villagers glaring at her. It was a middle-aged man with darkly tanned skin and missing teeth. He was looking at her with madness in his eyes and she knew, just knew, what he was planning to do to her the second he had the opportunity. It was the man that had beaten the woman the previous day.

She thought about it a few moments, and then went inside her hut to pack.