Outbreak

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Having already spent one night in the jungle, Ben was used to certain things: the increased activity just before nightfall, the sudden and relative silence once the light had faded. But nothing, he thought, would ever make him get used to the complete and utter blackness.

He was hungry too, he realized once they halted for the night. Achingly hungry. But he knew better than to suggest to Halima that they forage for food; if she had seen anything edible, she would no doubt have pointed it out. And Ben wasn't likely to start eating strange berries and vegetation out here without knowing what they were. He'd just have to get used to the constant clamours of his stomach for food.

As soon as the blackness descended, his ears became superbly sensitive to every sound, and the dangers near and far became magnified in his mind a hundredfold. Every rustle was a silverback gorilla; every slither a black mamba rearing up to attack. He found himself unable to lie down, remaining instead in a sitting position, his arms held firmly around his knees.

'Are you awake?' Halima's voice was close and comforting.

'Yeah.'

Silence.

'Halima?' Ben said after a while. 'What was it like when your parents died?' As soon as he asked the question, he realized that it might have been somewhat insensitive. 'I mean… you don't have to tell me if you don't want to. I just wondered.'

Halima thought before answering. 'It was like a nighttime that did not end,' she said quietly. 'They suffered very much. You are thinking of your father, yes?'

'A bit,' Ben said in a small voice.

'He is not African,' Halima said with sympathy. 'My parents were thin and often ill. He is stronger. Maybe he will survive.'

'Maybe.' Ben had seen the desperate state his dad had been in before he left. He wasn't convinced. 'Do you think Abele will be OK?' he asked, to change the subject.

'If what you say is true, Ben, I do not think anybody will be OK.'

She was right. Even if they succeeded in raising the alarm – and that was a big if – the village would have to be isolated. Nobody would be allowed in or out until the virus had run its course, killing those who were susceptible to it, sparing those who weren't.

Aside from being jungle-weary, Ben felt well enough; but he knew that that didn't mean a great deal.

'Abele can take care of himself,' he stated. Of that, at least, he was reasonably confident.

Abele was cold. He didn't understand why, as it was such a warm night. He watched his hand shaking in the dim light.

The wooden hut with its corrugated-iron roof in which he found himself would have been as dark as the rainforest had it not been for the smoky yellow light of a single candle. As night fell, Abele had thought it strange that he was being given this small creature comfort, but he soon understood that it was not out of concern for his well-being; it was so that, if they needed to check on him in the night, he would not be able to attack them under the cloak of darkness. If the glow of the candle from beneath the door disappeared, they told him, they would open up and fire randomly into the hut. And they said it like they meant it.

The door was locked – he knew that because he had heard the clunking of the padlock after he had been shut in – and he had heard the Kalashnikov-toting guard being relieved of his duty and replaced by someone else. How long ago that was, he couldn't tell. He knew there was no point calling out – down here, on the outskirts of the mine, there was no one to hear him – so he stood still, his brow furrowed in silent fury. Occasionally he would pace up and down the room to stop his limbs from becoming stiff. But only occasionally.

They would kill him sooner or later. He was sure of that. Suliman, that dog, had had a look of such contempt on his face that he knew he would take pleasure in doing it personally. He was only being kept here as bait – bait for Ben Tracey, who was up to something he didn't understand. He couldn't let it happen. If he was going to die, he wanted to die trying to escape, rather than on the whim of these men who had sold their souls to Kruger's wallet.

But that was easier said than done.

Abele enumerated his weapons. One candle, and the clothes he stood up in. It wasn't much, but slowly an idea started to form in his mind. It was risky. He might come off worst. But he had no other choice. He was desperate.

He removed his shirt, folded it neatly, then rolled it into a tightly wound cylinder. He then unthreaded a worn lace from his prized but beaten-up leather boots and used it to tie the shirt in place. Picking it up, he saw with a nod of approval that it would not now unfurl. Then he moved over to the candle, took a deep breath and lit the end of the shirt. It started to smoulder and the acrid smell of burning cloth filled the hut. Gently, so as not to extinguish the small flames that had started to appear, he moved it over to the opposite wall, next to the door, and placed it on the ground.

The wood from which the walls were made had been baked dry by the sun. It wouldn't take long, he hoped, for it to ignite. Then he would be in the hands of the gods: either the guard would rush in and try to rescue him, in which case he would have to fight him for his life; or, more likely, the guard would leave him in there to die, in which case he would have to wait for the wooden wall to burn sufficiently for him to hurl his way through it. As long as he wasn't roasted alive first. Or suffocated.

The fire began to crackle and already Abele's eyes watered with the smoke. He ripped a piece of cloth from his thin trousers and placed it over his mouth and eyes, taking slow, infrequent breaths in an attempt not to breathe in too much smoke. Then he crouched down by the opposite wall, and waited. The wood was like kindling, and soon half the wall was covered in bright yellow fire. What Abele had not counted on, however, was the iron roof; it reflected the heat back into the hut like an oven, and within minutes he found himself clenching his teeth against the intolerable heat. He could not break out yet; the wall would still be too strong.

Just a few more minutes.

Outside he heard a shout of surprise from his guard, but it was difficult to tell what he was saying or how far away from the hut he was above the crackle of the fire. He realized that the padlock would now be too hot to touch, so there would be no chance of the guard coming in, even if he wanted to.

His skin was scorching.

He held his hand up to his hair; it was too hot to touch.

He couldn't bear any more of this heat. He was going to have to break out.

Just another minute.

The air burned the inside of his nostrils as he breathed in. He started to choke. There was nothing for it. It was now, or…

'Aaaarrrggghh! ' he yelled at the top of his voice as he stood up and threw himself towards the burning sheet of flame in front of him. He felt the hot shock of a piece of burning wood splintering into his cheek. His whole body shrieked with pain as his skin came into contact with the fire; but the wall gave way against his formidable bulk, and as he burst through, he heard the roof collapsing behind him. He was out.

The guard was only a few metres away, his face confused and his rifle trained directly at the door. When he saw Abele burst through the wall to the side, he shouted in surprise and turned his gun towards the roaring prisoner. But he was too late: Abele was upon him. His already impressive strength compounded by adrenaline, Abele knocked the guard's rifle out of the way; it fired a chugging round, but the ammo spat harmlessly into the burning hut. Still holding onto the barrel of the gun, Abele knocked it forwards so that the butt sank sharply into the guard's stomach. He spluttered, winded, before being floored by a brutal punch to the side of his face that exploded in a shower of blood the moment Abele's clenched fist connected.

He was out cold.

Abele pulled the Kalashnikov from over the guard's neck, then detached the ammo belt, moving quickly because he knew it would not be long before the burning hut served as a beacon to his accomplices. His hands were still shaking, and the rifle felt heavy in his hands. He aimed it at the man lying unconscious on the floor. One squeeze of the trigger was all it would take; one squeeze, and the man who would have killed him without a second thought would be with the ancestors.

Suddenly, though, the image of Ben popped into his head. The look of shock and horror that had crossed his face when he realized that Abele intended to kill the bandit who had attacked them the day he arrived.

Abele's lips curled into a sneer. He turned and left the man lying there.

It was a struggle to find the road that led into the village. Abele couldn't understand it – it wasn't like he didn't know the area well enough, but somehow he couldn't focus on where he was. He stopped for a moment and looked down at his arm. It was burning with an intense, white pain, and he could see a series of ugly burn blisters appearing along its length. As he looked at it, though, he felt his head spinning and a wave of nausea crashed suddenly over him.

The road, he told himself. I have to get to the road.

He looked around in confusion. 'That way,' he murmured under his breath.

By the time he reached the road, the nausea was allconsuming, making him forget even about the burns on his skin. He staggered along for perhaps fifty metres before he realized he could go no further. By the side of the road was a small copse of trees. He would be hidden there, so he stumbled towards them.

Immediately he was under their protection, though, he felt his legs buckle underneath him. He tried to take a deep breath, but he felt as though his airways were blocked. He coughed. A dreadful, racking cough.

A cough like the one he had heard coming from Russell Tracey, only a few hours before.

Ben awoke with a start.

For a couple of moments he looked around, not fully understanding where he was, confused by the ringing of the rainforest's early-morning noise in his ears. But then it all came crashing back.

Halima was stirring too; she opened her eyes and smiled at Ben, who was massaging a knot out of his neck and trying to forget about how hungry and thirsty he was. 'Bacon and eggs, anyone?' he asked with a sigh.

Halima looked puzzled. 'What is bacon and eggs?' she asked.

'Never mind,' Ben told her. 'Come on, we'd better get moving.' He consulted the compass and pointed in the direction they needed to go.

By mid-morning Ben started to notice that the foliage was thinning out a bit, and he had even seen a few stumps where trees had been hacked down. He gestured at Halima to stop. 'I guess this means we're getting close to an inhabited area,' he whispered. 'And we're less hidden now, so we need to be extra careful.'

Halima nodded her agreement. 'I do not think it is far to the river now.'

They continued to walk, their eyes darting all around them as they kept a lookout for Suliman's men. Soon, through a gap in the trees, Ben saw the twinkling blue of the river. He and Halima nodded at each other, then hurried towards it. As they reached the bank, Ben looked to the other side. Rising from the trees, a little distance away, he could see tendrils of smoke.

The village.

The place they were trying to get to; and the last place Ben wanted to be.

This time round, Ben knew better than to obey his body's urge to rush to the water's edge and drink. There were no animals sipping on the bank, and in any case there was less of a shoreline here, more of a mossy, treacherous bank forming a sheer drop down to the water. The river itself seemed stiller, calmer than it had further along; for some reason that just served to make Ben more nervous.

But as they stood there looking across, a horrible realization dawned on him. They had been so caught up in their desire to get to the river that they had not considered how they were going to cross it. Surely they couldn't swim – who could tell what dangers lurked beneath that still surface?

As though echoing his thoughts, Halima spoke. 'We need to find a boat.'

Ben looked left and right. There was no sign of anything. 'How are we supposed to do that?' he asked.

Halima shrugged. 'By looking.' She strode off along the river bank, with Ben following behind.

They spent the next half-hour searching along the bank for a boat. It was treacherous work, as they kept losing their footing on the mossy boulders, and all of a sudden the humidity had seemed to double in intensity. 'The rains,' Halima murmured at one point. 'We need to cross before they come.'

'Fat chance,' Ben said, knowing that he was sounding a bit surly. 'Look, Halima. Everyone lives on the other side of the river. Why would they leave a boat here-?'

He cut himself short as Halima looked at him triumphantly. There, a metre or so below the high bank on which they were standing, water lapping against its sides, was a small wooden boat. It was an insubstantial thing, rickety and unimpressive, but it was a boat nevertheless. Ben grinned as he felt relief surge through him.

It was short-lived. The instant his eyes fell on the boat, he heard a shout behind him. He spun round and, a sickness rising from his stomach, saw the sight he had been dreading: Suliman's men, twenty metres away, emerging from the forest, their guns pointing in his direction.

'The boat,' he yelled at Halima. 'Get in the boat! Now!'

His shout was punctuated by the sound of gunfire. Half expecting that he had been hit, Ben grabbed Halima and they jumped into the boat. It was barely big enough for the two of them, and as they hit the decks it wobbled precariously, water sluicing in and settling in the bottom of the hull. There was one oar there; Ben grabbed it and used it to push against the bank as hard as his strength would allow. The boat shot out a few metres into the river before slowing down to a gentle drift as the pair flattened their bodies into the bottom of the vessel, vainly attempting to hide from the onslaught of bullets as Suliman's men fired at them from the river bank.

But the sound of bullets never came. Instead, there was a short, muffled scream.

Gingerly, Ben looked over the side of the boat towards the bank. What he saw, he knew he would never forget as long as he lived.

One of the men – the smaller of the two – was already down, floored by an enormous silverback gorilla who had evidently attacked them from behind. Now the gorilla was dealing with the taller man. With one swoop of his enormous arm, he sent him crashing to the ground. The man weakly tried to get up and gain control of his gun, but he was too slow; the gorilla was beside him, raising both hands into the air, then thumping them down with brutal efficiency onto the man's chest. Again and again he beat him, roaring deeply each time he did so and inflicting the blows so hard that blood started to explode from the unconscious man's mouth and stick to the animal's long fur.

The gorilla continued his work long after it was clear to Ben that the man was quite dead.

When he had finished, the silverback turned his attention back to the smaller man, pummelling him repeatedly to make sure he would never get up again either. And then, without even seeming to acknowledge the presence of Ben and Halima, he turned and disappeared into the bush, growling deeply as he did so.

Maybe Ben was fooling himself, but he almost thought the animal seemed satisfied with his work.