I looked out over the ridge into the virgin land below. The camp river continued there, a sparkling blue stripe, eventually pooling into a soft clearing that floated hazily, like a mirage, in the emerald distance. Birds arced in slow, careless circles over pink flamingos high-stepping in the shallows.
“We can’t quarantine the entire jungle,” I said.
Peter nodded his agreement. “That is exactly what I told Krebs.”
I turned back and took a step toward him, then stopped. Dr. Martin Krebs was the director of the CDC. “When did you—”
“Earlier today. Reached him in Washington. I told him what we had. It’s over, Stephen. We’re out of here in four hours.”
The caustic smell of the bleach just then began to drift into my suit hood. “What do you mean?” I said. “These people.”
“Are dying.” His voice was flat, yet urgent as always. “The relief effort has failed. Fifteen minutes after we’re airborne, air force jets will fly in and take out everything within five square kilometers.”
“Jets?” I moved closer toward him in my suit, as though running underwater. “The Congo government would never allow—”
“The prime minister and the president have already been briefed on the outbreak. They signed off on anything that would avoid the panic of an Ebola-like winter.”
“But that kind of disruption would whack out the cave’s ecology. We’d only be escalating it.”
Peter calmly shook his head. “A few strategic strikes on the top of the rise to reseal the cave for good. The rest, a surface exfoliation. Plants, bugs, animals: every living thing.”
“But the camp people. The asymptomatics. How do you propose evacuating them?”
Peter moved on to the baboon, bleach glugging out of the upturned bottle. In the heat and sweat of my contact suit, I felt a bracing chill.
“This is the hottest thing we’ve ever seen, Stephen. You know that. It’s only a matter of time before someone slips up and draws a contamination. This bug could burn through every living thing on this planet if it gets out. That cave is simply too hot to preserve. It is the tumor of the world, never meant to be found. So we bury it. We sea] it back up, and work with the samples we have.”
“And the asymptomatics?”
He looked at me over his half mask. “You’d bring them back into the U.S.?”
“Murder,” I said. “Don’t pretend this is humane. It’s preemptive, and misguided, and premature. Murder.”
“Our job is to protect humans as a species from an extinction event such as this.”
“By slaughtering a few? Offering up the remaining healthy ones as sacrifices to the viral god?” I battled to control my breathing. “Going to Krebs without me. Without even consulting me.” Peter’s betrayal shocked me most of all.
“I knew what your position would be.”
“And so you ignored it? Went around me? Never even considered that you might be wrong and I right?”
“If you have an alternate plan,” he said, shaking out the last drops of bleach over the dead baboon, “now is the time.”
“We wait.”
“We can’t wait.”
“Let it run its course. Let it burn out. For God’s sake, Peter.”
He sounded strangely disappointed. “This is Andromeda, Stephen. The Holocaust paradigm: bombing the rail yards to cut the transport lines, martyring those already in the cattle cars to the millions who would die in the gas chambers. That’s what disease control is all about: trading the dead for the living. This is no laboratory, Stephen. Categorical imperatives are fine; it’s all right to be contemplative on the front porch some warm summer evenings. We’re facing world genocide here. Krebs understands that. I am sorry these people are sick. But I am even sorrier they are contagious. De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” Of the dead say nothing but good.
I watched him recap his bottle of bleach. “What’s happening to you?”
“You can’t save everyone, Stephen. Not even you. Mercy was right enough for the girl.”
It was all I could do to keep from ripping off my suit, as though only my self-destruction would change his mind. “She was dying.”
He was kneeling before me now, repacking his disinfectant kit. “If we don’t stop it here, cauterize it, now, it’s going to slip out of the jungle and march across this continent and the planet.”
I saw it all then, the bulletining of Special Pathogens black-baggers, his reluctance to issue an international alert. “You were going to bury this from the beginning.”
“No,” he said. “Not from the beginning. But early on.”
“I’m calling Krebs.”
“I told him to expect you. But the jets won’t be called back. The uranium mine is in violation of international treaties and the Department of Defense will strike whether we remain here or not.”
“Peter,” I said. “Listen to me. Burning these people alive...”
He snapped the kit shut and stood. “We don’t have the supplies to euthanatize everyone. But if you have a favorite or two, be my guest.”
He started away with his plastic kit like a salesman moving on to his next call, leaving me standing with the two animal carcasses. Vapor waves of bleach, formerly the essence of cleanliness, of household chores and gym socks in the wash, of pale grout and a gleaming bathroom floor — now and forever the effluvium of disease containment, of ablution.
At once I started after him. The girl with the vitiligo was watching for me at the huts, but I brushed past her grabbing arms to search the camp for Peter. I passed the trauma area and a patient cried out, and I stopped only long enough to treat him. Soon there were others calling for my attention, more than the nurses could handle. After a while I stopped looking over my shoulder. I began treating the doomed as fast as I could.
Steaming rain rang off the shanty roof and pelted into the mud. I had received no satisfaction from my terse conversation with the expedient Krebs, and the rest of the team had been informed of the evacuation and were hurriedly packing up supplies and samples.
Peter reappeared at dusk with jerricans of gasoline from the Pinzgauer and went around burning the huts. With the camp in flames, he joined me in the failed enterprise that was trauma. His head was now completely bare. No mask or shield or goggles, his mouth, nose, ears, and eyes daringly exposed, his white hair glowing under the argent rain-light of the rising moon. Only the latex gloves remained, poreless, wrinkle-free sheaths protecting his vulnerable surgeon’s hands.
Fury and despair had synergized into fatalistic resolve, and though my head pounded without mercy, my hands were steady as I worked. I was fighting the clock to treat the untreatable. Death was coming to these people either by nature’s hand or by man’s, and I was trying to provide some small measure of comfort in place of hope.
Peter was performing agonal biopsies, rapid sampling of the tissues of those closest to death. Heavy rain crashed after nightfall, but no drums, and I understood then where he had disappeared to earlier. He had gone to warn the Pygmies away.
In retrospect, Peter’s divestment now seems inevitable. But it was not his claustrophobia — a simple psychological condition, separate from his cascades — that triggered it, as I had then thought. Nor was it Africa itself that drove him to this Kurtz-ian breakdown. I learned its source as Peter worked over the carcass of a middle-aged woman, drawing bloody slush out of her brain where clear cerebrospinal fluid should have been.
“Life, Stephen,” he called across trauma, rainfall crashing outside the mosquito net hanging behind him. He set his instruments aside and crossed the corpses toward me. “Eating. Feeding. Consuming, and being consumed. The beauty of decay. All here, Stephen, all the secrets. All the questions and answers, here for the touching but for this thin membrane—” He flexed his fingers inside his gloves. “Warm, stewy. Consumption.” He nodded, stopping on the other side of my patient, smiling. “The viscera of our existence. The slime we crawled out of, claiming us back. Creation; destruction. Our end game peeking out at us from inside a cave — and you and I facing it down. Life, Stephen. In our hands alone. We are the boundary. Death. Life.”