Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

Then two more trucks came, not army trucks but flatbeds that each carried a bulldozer. The drivers of the bulldozers wore masks on their faces like the doctor and the nurse had worn. They drove their bulldozers through the village, knocking everything down and pushing all the bodies into the flames of the ruined houses. They worked for another half hour, piling dirt on top of the fires so everything was covered. They also knocked down three trees, but not the one Chinma was in.

When the bulldozers were back on the flatbed trucks, the soldier boss held up a thick wad of naira and the bulldozer drivers came toward him. The soldier boss also waved to the drivers of the flatbed trucks and they got out of the cabs and came to him. When they were all in place, the soldier boss drew his pistol and shot them all.

Chinma got pictures of them. And of the flamethrower soldier burning their bodies, too. Then soldiers got into the flatbed trucks and drove them away. Soldiers also drove away the army trucks and the robber trucks, but they left the family's truck burning.

Chinma stayed in the tree all the rest of the day, and all that night, even though mosquitoes found him and for all he knew were infecting him with sleeping sickness and malaria and every other disease. Better to die of a disease than for the soldiers to realize he was still alive and come back for him.

But they did not come back.

Chinma didn't know how many pictures the camera could hold, but the next morning when he came down, carrying the camera and his money, parched with thirst and soaked with urine, he did not let himself go to the river and drink until he had taken pictures of the burned wreckage of the houses and the charred bodies that were still visible, especially the bodies of the bulldozer and flatbed truck drivers.

Then he went to the hiding place of the notebook the scientist gave him, watching all the time for soldiers or robbers or anyone at all, but there was no one. He went back into the underbrush until he was not visible from any road, and sat for three hours, writing down everything that happened. He couldn't stop himself from writing, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, over and over, even though he knew it was not really his fault. He wasn't even sure what he was sorry for. Sometimes he was sorry for having brought the sickness to the village instead of dying quickly the way Ire had. Other times he was sorry that he had been up a tree instead of dying with the rest of his family.

He knew that he was bad at writing. Everyone said he made the letters wrong and wrote them on top of one another or even went backward on the line, but he tried very hard to keep the words in order and leave spaces between them.

When he was through writing, he put the notebook back in the plastic bag and tucked it inside the waist of his pants and pulled his shirt down over it. Then he began to walk.

He walked first to the nearest Ayere-speaking village, but exactly the same thing had happened there. He took a few more pictures and wrote a little more in the notebook. He did not bother going to any of the other Ayere villages. He knew now what the government had done. They were all Muslims and Hausas and stupid—even if they figured out that the safest villages in all of Nigeria were the Ayere villages, since the disease had passed through them first and was gone, they didn't care.They wanted to kill the Ayere, whether to stop the plague or punish them for starting it, and because they had never cared about the non-Muslims and non-Hausas, except to make sure they did their jobs, paid their taxes, and kept their mouths shut, they did not hesitate—they killed every Ayere.

Except one.

He made his way through the brush beside the highway, only coming out onto the road in order to use its bridges to cross streams or go over deep gullies. It took him till well after dark before he got to Ilorin, but that was fine with him, he did not want to come there in daylight.

Chinma did not know where to go or whom to talk to. Anybody might be working for the government. And he had no idea where to find the scientists from the World Health Organization.

So he curled up behind rusty oil barrels near the railway station and slept the rest of the night. Maybe the oil fumes kept the mosquitoes away, because he wasn't bitten any more that night, but he did wake up with a slight headache.

By daylight, he could see that Ilorin was like a ghost town. He did not know that there was a complete curfew; there was no one on the streets to tell him. Every now and then he heard a vehicle, but he always hid himself, and that was the right thing to do, because the only cars and trucks belonged to the army. The soldiers were all wearing doctors' masks.

I hope a monkey sneezes on you, thought Chinma. I hope a monkey bites you, every one of you.

Finally, he came to a huge tent that covered a parking lot, and saw people in white hazard suits going in and out. Scientists. He could trust the scientists.

But there might also be soldiers, so he found a route that kept him mostly out of sight until he could make a short dash to the tent and then slide under the edge of it instead of going through the big door.

He came up behind a stack of metal boxes that were marked with strange words in English. They might be medicines. They might be food. Chinma was very hungry, and thirsty again, too, and he knew that he smelled very bad. But he had his camera and his notebook and he had to give it to someone who wouldn't just destroy it.

So he crept out from behind the boxes and looked around. People were bustling all over, and inside the tent many of them were not wearing hazard suits, though everyone had doctors' masks on. Chinma saw that most of the faces were black, which meant they were probably Nigerians and might or might not be in the pay of the government. But there were white faces, too, and when he saw a white man sitting at a computer, typing, he made his way toward him, pulling out the bag containing the camera and the notebook and the pencil.

The man looked at him and then jumped a little, startled.

Chinma held out the plastic bag. "I have pictures for the computer," he said in his best English.

"How the hell did you get in here?" demanded the man.

"Pictures for the computer," said Chinma.

"Are you out of your mind?" the man said. "Are you trying to infect everybody?"

"I was already sick and I'm better now," said Chinma.

"A survivor?" asked the man.

Chinma didn't know that English word. "I have pic

tures for the computer."

The man reached for the bag, then jerked his hand away. He got up, walked a few paces away, and came back pulling rubber gloves onto his hands. Then he took the bag, which by now Chinma had opened.