“Those are questions I can’t answer.”
Odongo turned the scalpel over and used the blunt end to pry the carotid artery from behind the sternoclydomastoid muscle. It was shriveled and tortuous. He pinched it between his fingers, inverted the scalpel, and cut straight down its length to reveal the hollow lumen.
“There is no blood.” He let the animal roll back onto its side and slashed its belly open in a display of frustration. “Not one drop.”
“It’s a hemorrhagic virus,” Byrne said.
“We can’t afford to jump to any conclusions. The last thing we need is panic like we had with Ebola.”
Odongo turned the camera on himself. His dark skin was beaded with sweat and his eyes were so bloodshot it appeared as though he hadn’t slept in days. The screeching of the monkeys grew fevered. He glanced back at the trees, then into the lens once more. It shook so badly in his hands that he became a blur. He said something in the other language and another man took the camera from him, steadying the image.
“It is our concern that if this disease is viral, as I suspect, it could cross the barrier between species and trigger a spillover event.”
Reilly stopped the recording, closed the file, and launched another containing six thumbnail images. She clicked the first and it expanded to fill the whole screen.
“These satellite images were taken just over twenty-four hours ago.”
The first showed a town surrounded by tropical forest. The buildings and roads were too small to demonstrate any kind of detail and must have been included to establish scale. The subsequent images each zoomed in a little more until an area defined as one hundred square meters was visualized. The buildings were slightly grainy and their edges indistinct, but there was no mistaking the shapes of the bodies lying in the streets.
Byrne leaned closer to the screen. His pulse thrummed in his ears. He looked back at Reilly. Her expression confirmed his suspicions.
“When do I leave?”
There were more bodies than he could count. For as many of them as there were in the streets, he could only imagine how many lay dead inside their homes or in the various other buildings. The individual remains became so pixilated when he zoomed in on them that all detail was lost. There appeared to be some unquantifiable amount of blood on the ground surrounding them, but it was simply impossible to tell for certain.
Byrne couldn’t afford to make any assumptions about their collective cause of death. He needed to consider every conceivable scenario, especially in an area surrounded by so much violence and political upheaval. He was far better prepared to handle a viral outbreak than an assault by a militant jihadist faction like Boko Haram.
The buildings were in such a state that disrepair could easily be mistaken for the residua of a violent siege. There were holes in the rusted tin roofs and entire sections of structures had collapsed in upon themselves. What appeared to be a market was concealed beneath rows of cloth and wooden awnings, the aisles between which were completely empty.
Byrne leaned back and tapped his teeth with the end of his pen. There was something about that observation…
The streets in which the majority of the corpses lay were main streets. Others were residential, as evidenced by the animal pens behind the main dwellings. The concentration of human remains was the key to the revelation. Whatever fate befell the population had come at night, when people were in their homes or the town center. While that didn’t necessarily preclude viral involvement, it did support the alternate narrative that an attack had come under the cover of darkness.
Byrne rubbed his eyes and looked out the window. The sun set over the Atlantic, imbuing it with a crimson glow that sparkled upon the waves.
There was something he was missing. He could feel it.
He closed his eyes and imagined Dr Odongo entering the clearing with the baboon carcasses. They’d been dead for less than twenty-four hours, yet looked as though they’d been deceased for much longer than that. Something about it bothered him, beyond the obvious. Something that was staring him right in the face.
He pictured the flies crawling all over their faces, into orifices they’d been unable to explore while their meals had been alive.
And then it hit him.
The carcasses were intact. The baboons had been dead for nearly a full day and not a single scavenger beyond the flies had made any attempt to consume their remains. There were no wild dogs fighting over the bodies or jackals laughing at a distance. There hadn’t even been evidence of vultures. The trees had been filled with screeching monkeys, not carrion birds, which would have pecked out the moist orbital globes first, then the bloated bellies and tender tongues.
Byrne opened his eyes and again scrutinized the images on his laptop.
The resolution wasn’t sharp enough to tell if there was any evidence the human corpses had been scavenged, but it was good enough to see there were no carrion birds perched on the rooftops or the telephone wires. There were no dogs roaming the streets. The only sign of life was a small herd of cattle clustered to one side of a fenced pasture. They were thin and had long fur, and were packed so closely together that it was impossible to tell one from the next, which begged the question: why were they alive while all of the men were dead? Had other species of livestock survived inside their pens? More importantly, why had the baboons died while whatever species of monkey shrieked from the trees survived?
Viruses could be finicky when it came to interspecies transmission, but he couldn’t think of a single one that drew a distinction between species as closely related as primates.
Again, he found every piece of evidence contradicting the next. Had an attacking force used a chemical weapon? That would explain the lack of scavengers, if not the survival of the bovines. Surely an agent like that would leave traces behind, which he supposed he’d find out soon enough.
Byrne scrutinized the forest encircling the Sierra Leonean town and realized just how easily the entire place could have been surrounded without anyone knowing. Heck, it could still have been surrounded when the picture was taken, for all he could see through the trees.
He again looked at the cattle. They were at the edge of the field farthest from the jungle, their hind quarters crammed into a corner, their heads aligned to form an imposing wall of long, curved horns. They all faced uphill toward the dense canopy from which Byrne could almost hear the screaming of monkeys.
Byrne had never experienced free fall, nor had he ever had any desire to do so. Until they fastened him into his harness, a part of him had genuinely believed they were just screwing with him and they’d end up landing on some gravel airstrip in the middle of nowhere, not hurtling through the darkness with the wind peeling his cheeks back to his ears. It was all he could do to keep from screaming and embarrassing himself in front of men who already made no secret about how little they thought of him. He was unlike them in every way, although if the man to whom he was harnessed didn’t pull the cord on the blasted chute soon, no one would be able to tell them apart after they hit the ground.