Patient Zero

Chapter Twenty-Two

Balkh, Afghanistan / Five days ago

THE TOWN OF Balkh in northern Afghanistan was once one of the great cities of the ancient world. Now, even with a population of over one hundred thousand the town is largely in ruins. The Iranian prophet Zoroaster was born there and for centuries it was the center of the Zoroastrian religion. Now, like much of Afghanistan it varies between poverty and desperation, with some rare spots of music, color, and the laughter of children too young to grasp the realities of the life that awaits them.

South and a little east of the city is the small town of Bitar, a village caught like an eagle’s nest in the spiky crags of a mountain pass. Only one serpentine road led up into it and a worse one wound down. Camels manage it because they’re stubborn, but even they slip once in a while. There are eighty-six people living in Bitar, most of them childless parents whose sons have died fighting either for the Taliban or against them; or who have gone off to work the poppy fields and never returned. A few of the youngest children walk seven miles to go to school. There are only thirty camels in the whole town. The chickens are all skinny. Only the goats look hardy, but they are a hardy breed used to very little. For plumbing the people have well water that smells of animal urine and old salt.

Eqbal was sixteen and his parents had not yet lost him to the poppy fields or the wars. Eqbal was destined to service Allah through service to his family. It was his qawn identity, he was sure, to be a farmer and in that way both preserve old ways and yet provide for the future. Despite war and strife, Eqbal believed in the future and to him it was bright with promise. Wars pass, but Afghanistan, graced by the love of Allah, endures.

Every morning Eqbal would rise with the day, clean himself, and then dress in loose robes and place a kufi cap on his head so that he would be ready to say his first prayers of the day, following the precise requirements of salat. First standing and then kneeling and finally prostrate in humility before the grace and majesty of God.

Though a young man of uncomplicated faith and one who had dedicated himself to the simple rigors of the farm life there in the dusty desert, Eqbal was not a simple-headed youth. As he tended his flocks or did chores around the farm he was often deep in complex thought, sometimes wrestling meanings out of the passages in the Qur’an; sometimes working to understand the complexities of delivering a breeched goat without losing either mother or kid. He did not think fast, but he always thought deep, and when he came to a conclusion he was generally correct.

Had he lived Eqbal would have very likely become the headman of the village, and certainly a man to be counted. But Eqbal did not live. Eqbal would not live to see his seventeenth birthday, which was eight days away.

“Eqbal!” called his father, who was laid up with a broken ankle. “How is that goat coming along?”

The young man crouched over the gravid goat, who was crying out in pain as Eqbal worked his hands inside the birth canal to try and turn the kid. The other goats picked up her nervousness and the air was a constant barrage of snorts and baas. Eqbal’s hands were red with blood and mucus and sweat shone brightly on his face as he worked, brow knitted, his clever fingers feeling along the tiny legs of the unborn goat.

“I think I have it, Father!” he called as his fingertips encountered the soft ropy length of the umbilical cord. “The cord is twisted around the hind legs.”

He heard the scrape of a crutch as his father shuffled toward the open window. “Be gentle now, boy. Nature does not want you to hurry.”

“Yes, Father,” Eqbal said. It was one of his father’s favorite sayings, and it matched the slow process of thought and action that made Eqbal his father’s son. Patience was as valuable to a farmer as seeds and water.

He curled one finger around the cord and gently-very gently-pulled it down and over the kid’s legs, then felt inside to make sure that there was no other obstruction. With great care he pushed on the kid to turn it inside the mother, who continued to bleat and cry.

“It’s clear, Father.”

“Then step back and let her do her own work,” his father advised, and Eqbal glanced up to see his father’s face in the window. He, too, was slick with sweat. The pain of his broken leg-shattered in a terrible fall on the cliffside-was etched into the lines on his face. His color was bad, but he was smiling at his son as Eqbal slowly withdrew his hand from the goat and sat back to watch.

The bleating of the goat changed in pitch as the baby began to slide along the birth canal. It was still painful, but now the goat did not sound desperate, merely tired and sore.

Within two minutes the wet, slime-slick little body slid out of her and flopped onto the straw-covered ground. Immediately the mother struggled to her feet and began licking at it, sponging clear her baby’s nose and mouth and eyes.

“A female, Father,” said Eqbal, turning again to look at his father. He froze, confused at the expression on his father’s face. Instead of relief or joy, his face stared at him with a an expression that was a twisted mask of shock and horror.

“Father ”

Then Eqbal saw that his father was not looking at him but behind him.

Eqbal whirled, thinking that it was one of the men from the Taliban group in the caves to the south; or a collector from the poppy farms come to take someone else off to work in the fields. Eqbal’s hand was straying toward his shepherd’s crook when he froze in place; and he could feel his own face contorting into lines of dread.

A man stood behind him.

No not a man. A thing. It was dressed like a man but in strange clothes-light blue pants and a V-necked short-sleeved shirt. Eqbal had seen TV, he had been to the clinic in Balkh, he knew what hospital scrubs were; but he had never seen them out here. This man wore them now, and they were dirty and torn and stained to a dark shining purple wetness by blood. Blood was everywhere. On the man’s clothes, his hands, his face. His mouth. His teeth

Eqbal heard his father scream and then his whole world was torn in red madness and pain.

EL MUJAHID SAT comfortably in the saddle of his four-wheeled ATV, leaning back against the thick cushions, heavy arms folded across his chest. Three hundred yards up the slope the screams were already starting to fade as the last of the villagers died. He did not smile, but he felt a strange joy at so much death. It had all worked so well, and so quickly. Far more quickly than the last time. Four subjects, eighty-six villagers. He checked his watch. Eighteen minutes.

His walkie-talkie crackled and he thumbed the switch and held it to his mouth.

“It is done,” said his lieutenant, Abdul.

“Are you tracking all four subjects?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the villagers.”

“Five have already revived,” said Abdul, and the Fighter thought he detected a slight tremble in the man’s voice. “Soon they will all be up.”

The Fighter nodded to himself, content in the knowledge that Seif al Din, the holy Sword of the Faithful, was in motion now, and nothing could deny the will of God.

In the village the rattle of gunfire seasoned the air like music.