The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(22)
And here we were in Cameroon, West Africa, cut loose like the rest of the expats, scrambling to make a living, to make a permanent life and put down roots in a country where we’d expected only to have a passing adventure for two or three years. Needless to say, it had been a shock all round that we were stuck here for the duration. Not even a year had helped us get used to it.
Cameroon is a radically different culture from any in the West. You think you’ll be fine and then you get here and…well, you’re not always fine. Psychovacs hadn’t been all that uncommon among volunteers before the outbreak. They were no longer an option.
The rest of the world had succumbed so fast. But not Africa. Africa, cradle of humanity and civilization, had simply shrugged and collectively said to this latest pandemic, “You want a piece of Homo sapiens? Get in line.” And someday—maybe not so soon, but someday—we’d spread out once again and repopulate the world, pushing aside another hominid species, this time Homo mortuus. It was only a matter of time.
But now it was January, and the yellow Harmattan wind was rolling in off the Sahara, pushing the rains south and drying everything out, including the zombies. A good time for a little zombicide.
Alicia said, “We have some bad news of our own.”
Josie looked down and started scuffing the red dirt, probably not too keen to face whatever Alicia had to say. I decided to face it straight on; maybe it would hurt less. I looked back and forth between Alicia and Silas. “What?”
Silas took the plunge. “We haven’t heard from Roger and Cyndi since before you guys left.”
“I’m sorry, Bruce,” Alicia said. “I know you three have been worrying about them.”
“Uh, that was over two weeks ago,” I said, feeling my stomach clench up into some serious heartburn. I felt a sudden need for a shot of Gordon’s gin. They didn’t answer, just looked grim.
“No bush-taxi notes?” Josie asked, finally looking up. “Nothing?”
“I wanted to go out and pick them up,” Silas said, shaking his head, “but the others argued that we’d better wait for you guys, what with my bum leg. You’re the ones with the connections and experience and we only really started to worry a few days ago.”
“Shit,” I said. Josie didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. We’d had a little business going for a couple of months now, cleaning out centers of zombie infection. It kept the money coming in, so nobody complained. Silas was right. We were the logical ones to go find out what had happened to Roger and Cyndi, just like we’d been the logical ones to go down to Zombieville and reconnoiter.
“Well, we can’t go right now,” Josie said with her usual practicality. “It’s only two hours to sunset and way too hot. We’ll go tomorrow at sunrise.”
Sunrise wasn’t until six a.m., but she was right. You couldn’t get much done in the Cameroon heat after nine in the morning, especially in the north, and evenings weren’t a good time to be outside. The bandits who had infested the roads of the region for many years had been some of the first to get zombified. Like that gendarme on the road, their rotten minds kept them at their old habits. Sure, being half-dead slowed them down, but Cameroonian nights were dark. In a noisy taxi, we’d get no warning of an attack.
Josie and I only got some sleep that night because we were so tired. We tried a little fooling around, but dropped off in the middle of it. Right before dawn, in Le Grande Matin, we set off in a bush-taxi, not long after the first call to prayer for the day wailed out to the Muslims from mosques all over town. Bush-taxis looked like milk trucks with holes cut out for windows, but they were sturdier than car taxis when it came to zombie attacks. Along the way, we saw a zombie giraffe come out of the trees and stagger along the roadside in a parody of a live giraffe’s stately walk, trying to outpace us, no doubt. Most of its mottled hide had worn off in patches or was hanging in strips around its long legs. Its tendons looked so brittle it was a wonder it could keep its feet. Even so, a pride of very-much-alive lions on the other side of the road just lounged on large tree branches, wistfully observing it from a distance. They knew better than to try that kind of meat. I wondered if the virus might even end up saving the wildlife. They sure were venturing out of Waza with increasing boldness. All the more reason to persuade Roger and Cyndi to come back with us, even if it turned out they were fine.
We got hit up for a job as soon as we rolled into town around eight. The sousprefet himself met us at the little taxi park. Sousprefets were federal government officials in charge of the arrondisement around a township. A big city like Maroua had a prefet, instead, in addition to at least one local mayor and a chef for each tribe.
This guy was an Anglophone from the Northwest Region above Yaoundé, which meant he was probably even more industrious than the Muslims. The super-efficient inhabitants of the two Anglophone regions and the neighboring Francophone West Region had a mutual hostility with the other seven Francophone regions, which sometimes got Anglophone officials lynched in the south during times of unrest (like national elections). It wasn’t so bad up here, where the Anglophones and the Muslims shared a work ethic and a common cause against our now-defunct federal government. Probably why the locals hadn’t replaced this guy with a Muslim. A long-running joke was that the country would never elect an Anglophone because he’d make everybody work, and nobody wanted that.