Josie and I were the only nassaras (foreign whites) in the car. Technically, I was Chinese-American, not white, but Cameroonians didn’t make those distinctions with Americans-except when they expected me to do kung fu like Bruce Lee. Didn’t help that my name really was Bruce, or that I’d clear six feet easily in my bare feet. They got a lot of martial arts flicks over here-used to, anyway. Before.
Running over the gendarme may not have been such a hot idea. His guts had gotten snarled on the roof of the car and now dangled through the driver’s-side window like a sausage brand of fuzzy dice and bumped against the driver’s shoulder. They smelled-literally-like shit. The driver ignored them. He’d probably smelled worse.
We rolled across the bridge over a river of sand and into Maroua, provincial capital of the Extreme North Region of Cameroon. If you had to get stranded someplace during a zombie epidemic, you could have done worse than Maroua. The place looked like a city out of Arabian Nights. The local Hausa and Fulani Muslims were friendly, rich and regionally well-organized. They lived in large, walled compounds along tree-lined streets, the walls whitewashed or cement-crépissagé mud-brick, with wells inside and fruit trees. Some of those civic features had helped save most of the city’s population, that and the usually dry climate-mixed savannah and desert. During the initial outbreak, we’d all just shut ourselves up and waited. We’d only gone out, heavily armed, for food and other necessary supplies. Many nights I’d lain in bed, listening to the zombies claw and bang on the tolle gates. In the morning, we’d venture out to club and burn any walking dead in sight. Nobody took them on at night, even now.
The taxi bumped past the main taxi park, an open, flat place of beaten red dirt near one of the round hills that just popped up out of the landscape this far north. The taxi park was surrounded by dusty green trees with low-spreading limbs. We were only a day’s journey south of Lake Chad, not all that far from the Sahara.
As we passed the park, I spotted two men torching a zombie dog. They had it staked down with a spear and were burning it in sections, from the tail up. I could see its dry ribs shining in the afternoon sun all the way from the taxi. The dog snapped at its tormentors as they danced around it. I loved animals, and I pitied what that dog had been, but there was no way I would have tried to save it now.
The driver dropped us off at our compound in the “safe” part of town. Josie and I peeled ourselves out of the taxi along with the rest of the passengers. After stretching the kinks out of our backs, we snagged our equipment from the overstuffed-and-strapped-down trunk. The passengers stood by looking over their shoulders as the driver handed out the machetes, matches, and canned goods we’d looted during our “shopping” trip down south. Even with the curiosity that anything we nassaras did generated, our equipment post-outbreak was too ordinary to mark.
Josie banged on the gate. No one answered, but that wasn’t uncommon. She got the tin gate open while I hauled out our bags. The driver took off as soon as he’d cinched things back up with strips of black rubber inner tube called caoutchouc. Josie and I liked to joke that the entire country was held together with it. Keeping an eye out, we tossed the bags in through the gate quickly and slammed the door behind us.
The virus had raged during the rainy season the previous year and had gotten into the water supply. The traditional clearing of the savannah brush by fire in December at the beginning of the Dry Season had helped considerably with suppressing the initial epidemic. Christmas had passed fairly uneventfully. With the end of January and the reheating of the weather, though, some isolated outbreaks were starting up again. Josie and I had come back from Yaoundé, the country capital not far north of Douala, just in time.
The compound’s dogs, Cujo I and II, came bounding up to us for a head-rub as soon as we came in. Like most Cameroonian dogs, they barely came up to Josie’s knees. They reminded me with a twinge of the zombified dog I’d seen in the taxi park. A tawny cat from our small colony lazed on a chair on the porch. We’d had some feline mortality initially, but they’d learned fast to avoid zombie rats and the like. They mostly stayed inside the compound now. The day guard, Adamou, woke up in his chair near the cat and came down off the porch, scratching his head and yawning.
“Bonsoir, Adamou,” I said. He nodded and waved distractedly, then went back to his nap. He wasn’t big on helping out with heavy lifting.
“We’re here!” Josie shouted toward the house. It was a cement, ranch-style structure with a tolle roof, barred windows and an open front porch. Nothing you’d ever see in Out of Africa. Buckets and panniers were lined up under all the eaves from the last rainy season. We had a well, and running water still ran in the pipes sporadically, but less and less often since the beginning of the outbreak. We kept the water in big containers and we always boiled it before we drank it or bathed in it. That cut a bit into our supply of propane tanks, and the rate of indirect infection from the virus, in strict epidemiological terms, was pretty low, but nobody wanted to end up like that gendarme from brushing their teeth in the morning.
Two of our group came out onto the porch. There were still nine non-missionary foreigners that we knew of in the region-five volunteers from the Peace Corps (three of us here in town), two Italian aid workers and a couple of young tourists who’d just been passing through when everything had gone to a hot place in a hand conveyance back home. Cyndi and Roger had decided to stay in their village up near Waza National Park. The rest of us had wanted everybody to stick together. We’d heard rumors that poachers had spread the virus to some of the animals in Waza. Facing off with a zombie elephant? No thanks. But Roger and Cyndi felt differently.
Personally, I thought Roger was just being his usual antisocial asshole self and that Cyndi stuck with him out of loyalty. She was still dating him, after all. But it wasn’t my decision, or anybody else’s but Cyndi’s and Roger’s. With everything we’d lost, we weren’t about to curtail each other’s freedom on top of it.
“How was Zombieville?” Alicia, one of the Italians, asked. She meant Yaoundé, after Brazzaville in the Congo. But it could have applied to any large city, even Maroua, just eight months ago. She was a tall, thin brunette who smoked a lot, more now than before the outbreak.
Josie and I looked at each other. We didn’t much want to talk about our trip, especially considering we’d barely made the last train to Ngaounderé that was liable to leave Yaoundé for a while. But our buddies needed a report.
“Messy, as usual,” I replied. “Whole sections of the city are overrun at this point. Everybody who’s still got a pulse has gone back en brousse, as far as we could tell, though the Muslims are still running a closed marché and the like. The Peace Corps Admin office is picked pretty clean, but we found some meds-Chloroquine and Mefloquine-and some antibiotics that we don’t think are too spoiled.”
“How’s the situation back home?” That was Silas, our third volunteer. He was a big black guy in his forties who looked like he’d been born in the Marines. He’d have gone with us if he hadn’t broken his leg in a motorcycle accident a few months back. He’d left family back in the States-hadn’t we all-but he’d probably been the least homesick of us until the outbreak. Now, he spent a lot of his time working a two-way short-wave radio he’d found in the marché while laid up, burning through car battery after car battery, hoping to get an answer. Sometimes he did from the oddest places, like Siberia or Bosnia or Cape Cod, but most of the time he just got static. Nobody told him to give it up. We were all hoping along with him. I hadn’t heard from either my mom or my sister in San Francisco since before the outbreak. Didn’t expect to, either, but you know, you like to hope.