The Ares Decision

38

Caleb Bahame slowed the jeep, increasing the distance between it and the lumbering truck turning twenty meters ahead. The terrified faces of the villagers they’d captured peered at Omidi through the holes cut in the trailer, fighting for air and trying to understand what had happened to them and their families.

All were injured, but only superficially. The seriously wounded villagers had been executed where they lay and their bodies burned. The few who had managed to avoid contact with the infected had been allowed to escape in order to spread word of Bahame’s sorcery and power.

It was the slightly injured villagers who were the unlucky ones. They had been herded into the truck to replace the infected who had disappeared into the jungle and would eventually die there, lost and bleeding.

Bahame had calculated the time to death after infection took hold and the range of one of his demons on foot — making sure to attack only villages remote enough to not allow a chain of infection.

Details, however, were not of great concern to the African. Could animals spread the parasite? Was there variation in the way it attacked the brain? Could it mutate? What if one of the infected came upon and attacked a herdsman or traveler who then returned to their village?

All these important questions were answered the same way: with assurances that his network of spies would recognize and kill anyone infected by the parasite who managed to escape his makeshift quarantine.

It was a system that would work for a time in Africa but that would be completely unscalable. No, to use the parasite in Europe or America, a good deal more sophistication was needed.

It took another half hour to reach camp, and when they finally pulled in, it was to the deafening cheers of Bahame’s soldiers. They surrounded the jeep, falling silent only when their shaman stood on his seat and raised his arms. He recounted his tale of victory, the rich baritone of his voice rising over the buzz of the jungle and the pleas of the people packed into the sweltering truck.

Omidi slipped out of the jeep and weaved through Bahame’s mesmerized troops. A quick glance behind him confirmed that it wasn’t only the ragged children who were captivated — Bahame himself seemed completely lost in his own delusions. A perfect time to exercise a bit of curiosity.

The Iranian made his way to a cave glowing with electric lights. There were two guards at its entrance, one no older than twelve and the other looking a bit queasy from the cloud of diesel fumes spewing from the generator next to him.

Omidi carefully ignored them as he approached and scowled dismissively when they started speaking to him in their native language. Both had undoubtedly noted his favored position with Bahame, leaving them wide-eyed and unsure whether to try to stop him.

The benefit of being a psychotic messianic leader was that your terrified followers were desperate to succumb to your will. The drawback was that they sometimes couldn’t be sure what exactly your will was. If they challenged Bahame’s honored guest in error, they would almost certainly be slowly and horribly put to death. On the other hand, if this wasn’t an authorized visit and they didn’t intervene, their deaths were equally assured and would be equally unpleasant.

In the end, they were swayed by his calculated confidence and let him pass into a natural corridor narrow enough that he had to occasionally turn sideways to get through. Bare bulbs hung from cables secured to the cave’s low roof, and he followed them, ignoring branches leading into the darkness. The temperature and humidity diminished as he penetrated deeper, but the stench of blood, excrement, and sweat became increasingly oppressive. Finally, the passageway opened into a broad chamber and Omidi stopped a few meters short, examining it unnoticed.

He recognized the elderly white man as the one who had arrived with the man Bahame beat to death. He was wearing a stained canvas apron and goggles as he leaned over a partially dissected corpse. At the back of the chamber was a wall of blood-spattered plastic set up in front of a hollowed-out section of stone fitted with steel bars. Inside, an infected man lay on the dirt floor, panting like an animal and watching an outwardly healthy woman sobbing in a similar cage some three meters away.

When Omidi finally stepped into the chamber, the infected man let out a high-pitched scream and rammed an arm through the bars with enough force that the sound of crunching bone was clearly audible.

The old man looked up and took a few hesitant steps back, holding the scalpel he’d been using out in front of him.

“Be calm,” Omidi said in English. “I’m a friend.”

“A friend?” the man stammered. “My name is Thomas De Vries. I was kidnapped from my home in Cape Town. I was taken—”

The Iranian held up a hand for silence as he scanned the equipment around him. It was in poor condition and a bit haphazard, but most seemed functional — including a modern microscope and small refrigerator. “What have you learned?”

“Learned? I’m not a biologist. I’m a retired general practitioner. You—”

“Be silent!” Omidi said. There wasn’t much time. Bahame’s speeches were characterized not only by their intensity, but also by their brevity.

“Help me and I’ll take you with me when I leave this place.” He pointed to the corpse the elderly physician had been hovering over when he arrived. “You must know something.”

“Yes,” De Vries said, looking around him nervously. “It’s a parasitic infection similar in some ways to malaria, but after it gets into the bloodstream it concentrates in the head — bursting the capillaries around the hair follicles and attacking the brain.”

“Is that how it spreads?” Omidi said. “Through the bleeding?”

“Yes…Yes, I think so. There are high concentrations in the blood and it enters through breaks in the skin and possibly the eyes; I’m not sure.”

“How long?”

“What?”

“How long until it takes effect?”

“Will you take me back to Cape Town? Back to my home?”

“I will put you on a commercial flight at Entebbe,” Omidi said, straining to hide his disdain for this descendant of the Christian conquerors who had subjugated Africa and the world.

De Vries nodded. “It’s a difficult question to answer. The only victim I’ve had an opportunity to observe began to experience agitation and confusion at around ten hours. My understanding is that there is significant variation, though. I would guess a range of seven to fifteen hours to the beginning of identifiable disorientation. After that, the disease appears to be very fast and consistent. Growing agitation until bleeding starts around three hours after initial symptoms and violent behavior follows almost immediately.”

“Death?”

“About forty-eight hours after full symptoms, though I’m told that most die of injuries or what is probably heart failure.”

The healthy woman in the cage sprang suddenly to her feet and started talking, wrapping her hands around the bars, unashamed by her own nakedness.

The doctor looked back at her, compassion visible in his expression despite the fact that his situation wasn’t much better. “Bahame always keeps one infected person imprisoned in here so that there’s no chance of the parasite dying out. When that one looks like he’s going to die, the woman will be infected to carry on the line.”

Omidi nodded. Again, workable in Africa but not practical for a large-scale attack on a modern country. He looked behind him to confirm they were alone and then pointed to the refrigerator. “Can a sample be frozen for transport?”

“No. It can’t live outside the body for more than a few minutes and is extremely temperature sensitive — every sample I’ve tried to refrigerate dies almost immediately.”

Footsteps became audible in the corridor, and they both fell silent. A moment later Bahame appeared at the entrance to the chamber.

Omidi tensed, uncertain how to act. Should he try to explain or just remain silent? There was no telling from one minute to the next what would cause the African to explode.

Fortunately, Bahame made the decision for him. “Get out.”

Omidi nodded respectfully and ducked back into the narrow passage, keeping an even gait as the cries of the doctor and the crash of toppling equipment echoed around him. Hopefully, Bahame would kill the old man. It was more likely that he would create unwanted complications than additional useful information.

Let him rot.