Wearing full biohazard gear, a tall doctor named We Kayembe came out of one of the hospital rooms. He went into the temporary shower that had been set up in the bathroom, and Samantha heard the water bouncing off the biohazard suit.
Dr. Kayembe came out in sweatpants a short while later and sat down about fifteen feet from her, behind the transparent plastic barrier that had been installed the night before.
He had been infected with Ebola and was beginning to look worse. Nineteen patients, all with confirmed Ebola, were in this wing of the hospital, and Dr. Kayembe continued to treat them. Samantha knew he wore the suit just to avoid cross-contamination in case they were carrying anything other than Ebola. She appreciated the fact that he was concerned with such things, considering that when she’d arrived, the Ebola patients had filled beds in the emergency room, without barriers around them.
“You look tired,” he said in his deep voice that was accented heavily with French. “Have you slept?”
“Not for thirty-six hours. You?”
“No. I can’t sleep. I have nightmares.”
She was silent a moment. “Do you need anything?”
“A new body?” he joked.
She smiled out of obligation, but humor was the last thing she felt.
In the past thirty-six hours, she had seen a woman vomit so much black blood that her skin had turned a pasty white before death and she didn’t have enough left in her body to fill a syringe. She had seen a young boy of no more than twelve tear open the skin on his legs and torso by doing nothing more than sitting up in bed. His skin had liquefied and slipped off his body, and he’d bled to death. And she had seen a pregnant woman lose her baby one day and her life the next.
And Dr. Kayembe, who was newly infected, displayed pharyngitis, a severe inflammation of the throat, as well as an irritation of his eyes’ mucous membranes, abdominal cramping, and vomiting, though he had not yet begun to vomit blood.
“You know, I learned English in school,” he said. “I never got to see the United States, though.”
“Your English is very good. Better than mine, actually.”
He smiled. “I love English, but French I love more. Even when you swear and talk about wiping your ass, it is like poetry… Do you have any children?”
“No.”
“Have children. Plenty of them. That is my most profound regret. That I did not have any. No one will remember me after this.”
She was quiet. “I’ll remember you.”
He smiled weakly and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’m going to go lie down.”
“It’s not a hundred percent fatal,” she blurted out as he rose, regretting doing so as soon as the words came out, but it was too late. He was looking at her. “Ebola’s mortality rate is around seventy percent. It’s not a guaranteed death sentence.”
He nodded and then went into a room at the end of the hall.
Samantha exhaled and leaned her head against the wall. The outbreak had been contained after leaving forty-two people dead and nineteen more that would probably die in the next week or so. She was there to fill out paperwork and submit her findings to the CDC, which would then submit them to the World Health Organization.
Her cell phone buzzed and her boyfriend’s name appeared on the screen.
“Hey,” she answered.
“Hey,” he replied after a slight delay from the distance. “How’s everything there?”
“As awful as you’d think. I don’t want to talk about here, though. Tell me what’s happening there. What happened on Game of Thrones yesterday?”
“A lot of nudity and violence.”
“I’ll take that over what I’m seeing any day.”
A pause. “I shouldn’t tell you this. We’re… well…”
“What is it?”
As a researcher with the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, Duncan, from time to time, had information that no one, not even the CDC, had access to.
“Your sister’s in California right now, right?”
“Yeah, Disneyland.”
“How long is she going to be there?”
“I’m not sure, couple more days, I guess. Why?”
Duncan paused. “Get her out now.”
“What d’you mean ‘get her out’?”
“I mean call her right now, right after you hang up with me, and tell her that she has to be on the next plane out. If she waits until morning, it’s too late.”
“Why? What’s going on, Duncan?”
“Not on the phone. When are you going to be home?”
“I have a flight in a few hours.”
“Come see me first thing.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t talk right now. Please come see me right away. And call your sister.”
She hung up the phone with a tightness in her guts she hadn’t felt for a while. She rose and looked for the doctor, but he had shut the door behind him. She wouldn’t get to say goodbye. Grabbing the one gym bag she’d brought with her, she walked out of the psychiatric wing and took the elevators down to the main floor.
3
When Samantha’s plane touched down at Thurgood Marshal International Airport outside Baltimore, she had logged fourteen hours of flying time. As she walked into the terminal, her legs hurt, her back hurt, the atrocious food she had eaten sat in her belly like a lump of coal, and she had a migraine that was pounding ceaselessly against her skull.
Her car was back in Atlanta, so she waited on the curb outside for Duncan to pick her up. She felt bad that he had to come to the airport at five in the morning, but he said he was usually up jogging at that time anyway.
Before long, a gray Lincoln pulled to a stop in front of her, and she threw her gym bag into the backseat and climbed into the passenger seat. She kissed him and anticipated that, for a fraction of a second, he would hesitate to kiss her back since she’d just gotten back from an Ebola outbreak, but he didn’t. Both of them worked with hot viruses, and he had grown accustomed to the roulette they played every day.
“How was Africa?”
“Hot. And the insects are the size of my head.”
“Did you call your sister like I asked?”
“Yes, but she didn’t answer. What’s going on, Duncan?”
He was quiet as he pulled out of the airport and made his way to the interstate. “What did they tell you after the last outbreak of black pox?”
Images flooded Samantha’s mind-patients turning to jelly and entire hospital staffs unwilling to treat them, a gymnasium full of patients because the hospitals didn’t have enough room, and a man in her house who had nearly killed her.
She’d spent nearly a week in the hospital after the break-in. Two weeks after her release, she’d returned to her job and had been informed that the outbreak had been contained to Hawaii and South America.
“They told me it’s over.”
“Have you talked to your sister since she went to California?”
“No, she’s been there a week. Her in-laws are there.”
He paused. “Samantha, it was never contained.”
“What do you mean?”
“It got to the mainland. California. We think some of the infected snuck onto flights out of Hawaii and landed at LAX. There’re over a hundred reported cases. The problem is that they’re spread throughout the state and are difficult to contain. Someone higher up than me made the call that California can’t be contained.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means they’ve been closing all the bridges and highways in and out. Shipping’s stopped, and flights were grounded this morning. No travel to or from the state. They’re imposing martial law today.”