Viral

to stand, the arrow all the way through its upper torso. The animal had raised its head and looked at him as the men stood beside it, grinning; and for days afterward, Kip Nagame wanted nothing more than for that deer to come back to life. The feeling haunted him, he said, for days and nights. He had gone hunting again, once, twice, dozens, and eventually hundreds of times. That was how a boy became a man, the elders had said; it was what everyone did. “But they were wrong,” Kip said, “it was really something else: It was the way we lost our feelings. It was how we began to arrive in darkness. I knew that, even then. But I didn’t know how to say it.”

“All of this is very simple,” he added a moment later, suddenly talking about something else. “What you see, remember. Take photographs in your head. Keep them. Okay? Once we get there, we don’t speak to one another. We aren’t seen with each other or even look at each other. Okay?”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

“Okay,” John said. “But tell me how this worked. How did you get inside?”

“Paul,” he said. “Paul got me inside. I worked for the central planning office, in Nyamejye. I helped facilitate government land deals. Seizing of properties. Re-sales and leases. They’re being purchased on a ‘predication’ basis now, all over the country. Big money in it.”

“ ‘Predication.’ ”

“Yes.”

“By whom?”

“Mostly by foreign companies. Some of which didn’t exist a few months ago. They sell them to Western investors, or in some cases Chinese investors, for a premium, with a guarantee that the sites will be vacant once they assume ownership. Some represent wealthy countries that are short on arable land. Some of them are so- called charitable foundations. That’s the ‘predication arrangement.’ It’s just the term they’re using. It means nothing. Soft words to mask harsh action. Where we’re going has all been recently purchased. The contractors will move in within a few weeks.

“I lived in the city,” he went on, his eyes watching the road. “I rented a nice apartment. But every day was a risk. I walked away to help Sandra. I’m just a witness now. To them, I mean. Nothing else, not even a human being. Just a witness.”

The road changed back from gravel to dirt, and for a while the vegetation gave way to scrub fields. Red hills and rocky bluffs appeared in the distance. They passed long, tin-roofed farm houses and seemingly abandoned shambas, family farms. For a while, Jon noticed small clusters of white rocks and shells in a bleached, dry riverbed alongside the road, although as he kept looking he began to see what they really were: vertebrae and hollow-eyed skulls, stacked two or three feet high in places. Kip kept his eyes on the road, as if he didn’t notice.

“Sandra Oku said there were three witnesses,” Jon said.

“Three that we know of.”

“Paul was one. You’re one.”

“Yes.”

“Who’s the third?”

“A woman called Anna Vostrak,” he said. “A scientist, who worked on this project.”

“ ‘Project.’ ”

“The flu. She used to work for the government. Your government. Your brother knows her very well.” Kip turned his eyes to Jon for a moment, looking him up and down. His face and bare chest glistened with a trace of sweat. “The story is what you see, though. That’s all. That’s what you need to tell. As I say, it’s very simple. Don’t lose sight of that.”

What you need to tell. Jon Mallory stared at the passing landscape. He saw a dark patch in the distance, what might have been cloud shadow or forest. The story is what you see. This was his brother talking to him, Jon realized. Talking through Kip. What you see. As they came closer, the dark patch became a dense stand of trees, which gradually engulfed the narrowing road. But Kip downshifted and he kept driving, more slowly. He stopped in front of a rusted iron gate barrier; Jon watched him swipe a metallic card across a sensor, causing the gate to open inward. On the other side, the road twisted through another tunnel of trees, ending at a basketball-court-sized dirt clearing—a parking lot, with dozens of old cars and pick-up trucks.

“This is the work site?”

“This is where we report. They take us from here to wherever we are needed,” Kip said, in his matter-of-fact way. “There are three sites right now. They may keep us until this evening, they may just want us a few hours. You’ll need your badge. When you’re done, return to the Jeep. Wait for me or I’ll wait for you. And from the moment we get out of this vehicle, we’re no longer together, okay? Don’t speak to me, don’t look at me.”

“Aren’t the workers witnesses, too?”

“Temporarily,” he said, lowering his voice. “This job site is only good for another day or two. There are no witnesses after that. The ones we see today: Four days ago they were just like us, doing the same work. Remember that.”

“How do you mean?”

“You’ll understand when you see it,” he said. “And remember this: People get shot for talking. Or for paying too much attention. Occasionally, they get shot for no reason at all. Get this out there, to the people who can do something about it.”

Kip dropped the keys on the floor mat and stepped out. He began walking toward a cinderblock building at the end of the parking lot, shirtless and barefoot, seeming assured and cautious at the same time. The air was warm, buzzing with gnats and mosquitoes and blue flies. Jon followed at a distance, joining the loose queue of men waiting to enter, his heart beating faster as he tried to blend in, surprised that no one seemed to look at him, or at anyone else.

Dozens of them pushed toward the three turnstiles that allowed entrance. The cinderblock was recently painted white and shone with the morning sun. The men shuffled, keeping their eyes down, or looking at the country or up at the sky. Never at one another. They were in their twenties and thirties, some older, wearing stained T-shirts and trousers with rope belts. Most were barefoot. Jon smelled their dirty hair and soiled clothes as he moved with them. When it was his turn, he swiped his badge and the turnstile gave. Two guards watched as the men filed in, M14 semi-automatic rifles strapped to their shoulders. Jon stepped into the crowded building—a holding pen of some sort—smelling the stink of dirty bodies. Standing there in the dark room, he started noticing things, without trying to: that many of the men were coughing, but no one spoke; and that a few of the men were actually women. Everyone shuffled slowly forward, through an X-ray scanner and toward another station, the base of a dirt road, where they waited to board pick-up trucks to the work sites.

As they passed out of the concrete building, the workers were each handed a cloth face mask, thin rubber gloves, paper towels, and a pill capsule. Jon climbed into the back of a pick-up with seven other men. Kip was already gone, two trucks ahead of him.

Several of the men tore off pieces of paper towel, crumpled them into wads, and stuffed the paper into their nostrils. The trip to the work site took another ten minutes or so, over a rocky hill trail. Jon watched the scenery, pretending not to notice things—the man coughing with a deep rattle in his lungs, or the skinny boy-man on the floor who held his arms against himself and shivered incessantly even though the air was warm now. The road climbed to a rise and then twisted downhill into a beautiful valley, where a wide-banked river wound among the maize fields.

It was as they approached the water that he began to understand what they were here to do and a shiver of revulsion raced up and down his back. God, no! This was why they had been handed the masks, and the gloves. Why some of them had shoved wads of paper towel into their nostrils. The gently sloping hillside across the water was covered with piles of dark-colored bundles. Trash bags, he had thought at first, but coming closer, Jon began to notice the body parts—awkwardly splayed arms and legs—and the picture came into focus. Piles of bodies, most of them unclothed, many of them bloated.

Jon looked back, behind them. To the east, giant sheets of mosquito netting had been draped over tall bamboo poles to form what resembled a circus tent. At the far end of the tent, a bulldozer was lifting and unloading bodies into fresh piles, and the workers were gathering them, dragging and carrying them, two men to a body, to the backs of delivery trucks. The delivery trucks, presumably, were taking them to a burial ground or