“I don’t know if I need help yet.”
“He has extensive experience with different types of data. Bring him up to speed. I want regular updates on this. I’m going to send the info upstairs.”
They were on the third floor of a three-story building. Olivia understood what upstairs meant. “You think there’s something going on?”
Eric nodded.
Chapter 42
When Austin woke, he was lying on his side on a cot. Everything was still confusing, and thoughts were hard to string together through the fog and gaps in his brain. How long had he been out? Hours? A day or two? More?
One of the plastic buckets that he’d become so familiar with over the past days sat on the floor not ten inches from his head. It stank. The cot stank. The room stank.
On the other side of the bucket, on the floor, Margaux lay on her side facing him. Her face was slack, her eyes open—blood-red, not focused. They were doll’s eyes, horrible for their lifelessness. Her mouth dripped a brownish mucus—the remains of her last regurgitation. Except for the twitching of two fingers on the hand that lay by her face, she looked dead.
On Margaux’s other side, a young African woman was sprawled, with blackish red blood smeared on her face. A trickle of blood ran from her ear down to the floor where her head lay, well off her mat. One of her arms was resting across Margaux. The woman’s fingers were curled back over her palms, pulled closed by dead tendons. The woman’s chest didn’t rise, nor did it fall. There was no breath in her. Only the flies on her skin were alive, animated in hunger for her remains.
The absence of Benoit on a mat at Margaux’s side put a clear and certain thought into Austin’s mind. Benoit was dead. That meant his body was piled by the waste pit behind the hospital, waiting for somebody with enough commitment and energy to burn it.
A tear rolled out of Austin’s eye and tracked across the bridge of his nose, down the slope on the other side and across his cheek. The pain of Benoit’s death, mixed with all the other agony trapped in the confines of his skin, seemed too much to bear. And in moments of clarity, Austin knew the pain that lived behind the sallow, dejected eyes of all those third-world children on all those television commercials that begged for his latte money when he was back in Denver. With the pain branded so deeply on his own soul, he’d never look at those eyes again and keep his tears to himself.
In the next moment of lucidity, he recalled the prognosis of his predicament. Benoit was dead. Margaux was dying. Austin would soon see them on the other side and never again have to look at diseased children with big eyes and distended bellies.
It occurred to Austin in that moment that he should be dead already.
Austin felt the weight of someone sitting down behind him on the cot. With all the slow care he could use to keep his stomach from spewing whatever remained there, he rolled onto his back. One of the guys in yellow Tyvek was sitting beside him, looking down.
Through the goggles Austin saw medium brown skin, black eyebrows, and familiar black eyes. “Rashid?”
“You are Austin.” It wasn’t Rashid’s voice, but his brother’s older, harsher voice.
“Najid?” Austin asked. “Why?”
“You did me a kindness.”
Austin was confused. He was asking why Najid was in Kapchorwa with gunmen, why he’d killed Nurse Mary-Margaret—not for a moment of warm, fuzzy emotional shit. What the hell was he doing?
Najid said, “You are a friend of Rashid’s. You telephoned me out of concern for him. I returned the kindness by not having you killed.”
Austin tried to put the words “fuck you” together, but was having trouble getting his mouth to cooperate.
“Not that it matters. You’ll soon be dead I suspect. It seems that nearly all who are in the advanced stages of the disease are dying.”
Austin looked to his left to see the ward.
Guessing the question, Najid answered in a detached voice. “Forty-eight so far.” He looked to the other end of the ward. “The doctor says another ten or twelve will go within the hour.”
To his right, Austin saw Rashid lying on the cot next to his. A HAZMAT guy—the doctor, Austin guessed—sat beside Rashid doing some kind of exam.
Najid’s voice grew sad, and he shook his head. “Rashid has a better chance than the rest of you. He is getting the best medical treatment available under the circumstances.”
“But—” That was the entirety of the question Austin had the energy to put together.
“It’s not fair?” Najid shook his head, exaggerating the gesture. “No, it’s not fair. Rashid gets care that will double or triple his chances of surviving, and you—“ Najid paused, “lying right next to him, in fact, lying right next to a box that contains enough drugs to treat you and maybe a dozen others—get nothing. Do know why?”
Because you’re a piece of shit. But those words couldn’t find a voice either.
“That is exactly what is going on now. American doctors with Ebola have been flown out of Liberia and are responding well to a new American miracle drug. The supply is small and the price is high. So poor Africans don’t get it. They die. That is the world, Austin. You don’t understand it because you have been a rich American all your life, and you have had more of everything than you ever needed, while others suffered to provide it for you. At this moment, that is no longer the case. Rashid has more drugs to treat this disease than he will ever need. And you have nothing. The sadness of the world’s reality looks different from this perspective, doesn’t it?”
Austin slowly shook his head.
Najid laid a gloved hand on Austin’s arm. “I know you will not believe this, but I do hope you live. That is why I had my men carry you off the mountain. Do not run again. Our activities here must be kept secret and the value of the kindness you showed does not compare to that need.” Najid took his hand off Austin’s arm, turned to the doctor in the yellow Tyvek suit, and started speaking in Arabic.
Chapter 43
“Will he live?” Najid asked the doctor, using the convenience of his native tongue to hide the conversation from Austin.
“There is no way to tell. I do all that I can. There is no cure for Ebola, you know that.” Dr. Kassis stood up, took a syringe, and injected some medicine into Rashid’s IV. “All I can do is treat the symptoms and try to keep the symptoms from killing him.”
“What is that drug you just injected?”
“It is an anticoagulant,” replied the doctor.
“An anticoagulant? That does not make sense to me. It is my understanding that hemorrhagic fever causes one to bleed until he dies.”
“Yes, but it is more complex than that.”
“How so?” Najid leaned forward. He needed to know as much as he could about the disease he was hoping to unleash on the West.
Dr. Kassis sat back down. Without waking Rashid, he checked his temperature with an infrared scanning thermometer. “The process is complex. In the early phases of the disease, blood clots form and float freely in the bloodstream. These clots clump together and clog small veins.”
“Like a stroke?” Najid asked.
“Exactly like a stroke. That explains the dementia symptoms we see in Ebola and Marburg patients. Parts of the brain are deprived of oxygen and cease to function correctly. When the oxygen supply is cut off for too long, that part of the brain dies.”
Najid shook his head and laid a gloved hand across Rashid’s forehead.
“Just as importantly, the clots form in the liver, the kidneys, the lungs, the intestines—all of the organs, even the heart.”