The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(20)
Stiles made the protagonists of the story Peace Corps volunteers because she used to be one. “AIDS was already at epidemic proportions in Cameroon by the time I left in ’94, and that’s a pretty scary atmosphere to be in for two years,” she says. “So when I was hearing people talk about the zombocalypse as if it would be this catastrophic event, I kinda laughed and thought, ‘You know, I should just write a zombocalypse tale that’s a metaphor for AIDS in Africa.’ It’s not actually the first AIDS-in-Africa metaphor tale I’ve written. Probably won’t be my last, either.”
The gendarme had wandered out into the middle of the road. His already well-fleshed form had swelled to bursting, and his skin, once the color of the stash of dark chocolate we’d traded for in Yaoundé, looked almost as green as his stained army uniform. He looked like he’d been from the Bulu, a tribe down in the South Region near the port of Douala, down the railroad line from Yaoundé. He stood there, waving his arms in a parody of his old contr?le-point routine of stopping bush-taxis and other traffic to check their papers, hunt up the odd bribe.
Our taxi, a gray Peugeot, stuffed with ten live passengers and driver, cleared the hill and slammed down on all four wheels into a nasty pothole. We hit the gendarme about dead center five meters later to the tune of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” which the Hausa Muslim driver had been blasting on the Peugeot’s tape deck. The gendarme flew up over the roof, landing hard—and in pieces—on the paved road behind the car. The driver didn’t so much as ease off the gas. Just as well. We’d all sooner stop for a cobra than a zombie.
“That was pretty spectacular,” Josie said. She was a reasonably good-looking blonde and my housemate, crammed half onto my lap and half up onto the armrest of the right rear door. That might sound like a good thing, but only if you’ve never been stuck in a Peugeot with ten other people for three hours on a tropical afternoon. Our only break was the half-hour we’d spent on the side of the road to allow the six Muslims in the car to pray and the rest of us to pee.
“Yeah, pretty spectacular…if you like blood and guts splattering all over the road,” I said. “Bet he’d have stopped if the guy had been Muslim.”
“Since he was obviously a gendarme, he couldn’t have been Muslim, so I’m sure the driver thought it was perfectly reasonable to run him down,” Josie said.
Cameroon’s president just before everything had gone to zombie hell had been from the South. His predecessor had been a Fulani Muslim from the Extreme North. There’d been bad blood between the Muslims and the Government ever since. Considering this was a country where a Muslim friend had once told me that his Christian neighbors were “cannibals” because they ate cats and a good host always popped the top off your beer in front of you to prove he or she hadn’t poisoned it, it was a wonder the driver hadn’t turned around and run over the gendarme twice.
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.