“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.
Josie shook her head to Silas’ question. “It’s total radio silence. The last anybody heard, things were getting pretty ugly, nothing your contact on the Cape hasn’t already told you about zombies hating salt water. That was before the Rainy Season began…end of February or March, maybe. Who knows what it’s like now?”
“Now” was January. If we hadn’t heard from anybody else in the U.S. by now, that meant we probably never would; the country was gone. And Italy. And the rest of Europe and the Americas. And Asia. And Australia. All gone, at least as far as civilization was concerned. Drowned in an apocalyptic flood of mostly dead carrion beasts with the shelf-life of rotting hamburger.
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.”