The landscape was changing quickly. The dusty steppe took on high grass. Denser trees appeared. In the distance, it looked practically lush.
“We’re not that far from the Selous Reserve. It’s where we’ve set up the perimeter,” Michael said to Lyle. Now Lyle looked up. A man in green fatigues stood beside a yellow police barrier. It looked like he was completely in the middle of nowhere, an oasis amid the brown grass and a felled evergreen. Hardly. Everyone in the truck knew that he was the last stop before death. The truck pulled beside him and slowed. Michael waved.
“Jambo. This is the doctor,” he said. It was a formality. The man in fatigues was too young to have any say-so about anything. His mere presence intended as deterrence. Who would come out here anyway? “Have some more coffee,” Michael said to the soldier as they passed.
Ahead, a small rock formation that would qualify in these parts as a landmark. Melanie watched a lizard scatter at the base of the rocks.
“It’s going to sneak up on you on the other side,” Michael said. He was saying: Brace yourself.
Lyle looked at the late-afternoon sky, pinky blue, yellows bent through the prism of wispy clouds. He scanned the rocks. Muddy water pooled at the bottom right. Maybe someone had washed there. Or people had used it for a restroom. One of the problems he often saw was that sick people did what they had to do where they had to do it—like pissing and shitting—and disease fed on it.
They rounded the corner. A small village emerged, thatched huts bisected by a footworn orange-colored dust road, more like a path. They saw the man in the middle of it. He was on all fours, crawling their direction, trying to, breathing like a dog hit by a car. An aid worker or nurse in a white suit tried to help him by the arm.
“He’s the one I need to see,” Lyle said.
The stake in the far right corner of the medical tent had loosened. Other than that, the setup was reasonable, nothing profound, as might be expected. Six victims in beds, four along one wall, two along another, getting saline drip. Two empty beds betrayed the fate of their most recent inhabitants; sweat and bowel stains, the bodies’ last expressions. It irked Lyle that there still was insufficient manpower here six days after the first patient showed up.
Michael, an edge in his voice, said something in Swahili. A nurse who looked like a beekeeper in all his garb quickly cleaned up one of the empty beds by tossing the sheets and pillow into a plastic bag. A few minutes later, the moaning man Lyle had seen outside became the makeshift hospital’s latest inhabitant.
By then, Lyle had already scrubbed in a bowl of soapy water and gloved and put on a respirator. Melanie remained in the truck. She was a nurse by training, but the risks here outweighed any help she might offer, especially before Lyle got a grasp. Besides, he’d practically begged her to stay put. In the tent, he leaned down and felt the faint pulse of a woman of truly indeterminate age; he figured her between thirty-five and sixty. Disease and sun mottled her skin, bleached her night-dark pallor near pale, obscured the truths her face might tell.
“How many days?” he asked the nurse.
“Four hours.”
Lyle blanched.
A straw rested by her lips. She lacked the strength to suck or move it. A red-and-yellow scarf tied around her forehead hung damp with sweat it couldn’t absorb. The Iraqw people, Lyle had read in his file, typically lived farther north. This was among their southernmost tributaries. He could see from the slightly narrowed shape of the woman’s eyes the Asiatic genetics shared eons ago. Spittle on her chin suggested she’d been coughing. He picked up the chart by her bed and could make out the numbers even if he couldn’t read the words. Last her temperature was taken, it had been 103.8. Another number stood out: 51. Must be her age. He patted her arm and she briefly opened her eyes and he smiled.
He stood from his bench and turned to the man from the road. He kept trying to stand up. With each tiny effort, he violently coughed. You didn’t need an x-ray. Lyle could practically see the fluid in the guy’s lungs. The nurse struggled with him for a second to put on a mask and the man finally succumbed, lacking the strength to fight.
The nurse said something and Michael interpreted. “The son of the local chieftain.”
His smooth round head shone with perspiration. He leered at Lyle and set loose with coughing. Lyle understood. This man wasn’t accustomed to being defeated. Lyle lowered his eyes and gestured to the side of the bed. May I sit? He took the nonanswer as an okay. He sat. He took the man’s long arm and felt for a pulse at the wrist. Ordinarily, ill-advised, not a good place to test. But Lyle didn’t want to reach for the man’s neck. He got what he needed: 185.
“Saline, please,” Lyle said to no one. He would bet that this man’s pulse didn’t get that high facing a mother lion. With Michael’s help, he asked questions and learned the man had been sick for a day. And didn’t want help. Lyle said he understood; he wanted to help the older folks, he said, and the children. He listened and watched and thought. Not Ebola. Maybe Lassa fever.
“You have many mice?”
“This is Africa,” Michael said.
“Sir, how many dead—like you?” Lyle asked.
“Like him?” Michael asked.
“Young?”
Four. Out of a village of only sixty.
Lyle pushed the sheet up and saw the swelling in the man’s legs. The man tried to withdraw but he coughed. Then he shouted, tried to, his words swallowed by coughing.
“What’s he say?”
“The pure breeds did it.”
“What does that mean?”
An exchange followed between Michael and the nurse. Michael explained to Lyle that a new theory had emerged among the locals that had to do, of course, with religion. The Iraqw borrowed each from Islam and Christianity. In recent months, Muslim proselytizers had visited and called them heathens, promised plague. Lyle pressed the interpreter. What had the men looked like? What had they said—exactly? These visitors called the Iraqw an abomination—chukizo, in Swahili. Hell’s plague would befall them, inshallah, God willing.
Lyle saw Melanie standing in the doorway. “Go back to the truck,” he said. She had tears in her eyes.
“Go back to the truck,” he insisted.
“Don’t tell me what to do.” But she turned and left.
Outside, Lyle asked Michael if he had Internet. Yes. On Michael’s big-screen phone, Lyle pulled up an article in Nature. The article was a controversial publication, to say the least. A rare piece of truth that almost didn’t see the light of day; too dangerous. Before delving in, he walked the empty streets of the village. A dozen thatched huts, wood booths, empty, that must’ve served as some kind of market. He asked to see the well and observed it to be clean. He asked Michael about these Muslim proselytizers. Michael said it was the first he’d heard of it. When had they last come? Michael didn’t know. Why?
Lyle, leaning against a hut, was too lost in the article to answer.
“Show me the man’s hut, please.”
There was not much to see. That was the point, Lyle said, without elaborating. A broom in the corner told Lyle much of what he needed to know. The only sign of disarray owed to a glass shattered on the ground near the bed. Where the man must’ve spilled it reaching in his febrile state.
“What are you thinking, Dr. Martin?”
No response.
“You’re frightening me.”
“Looks like Coxsackie B.” True but he didn’t really believe it.
They returned to the makeshift hospital hut.