Read Online Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller by Bobby Adair - Free Book Online

didn’t send you anything? Did you ask
again?”
    “Don’t nag.”
    Heidi huffed. “You have to nag him
sometimes. You know how he is. This is about his safety in a
third-world country halfway around the world. Doesn’t it bother
you? Aren’t you worried?”
    “Yeah.” One word was all he could get in.
    Heidi shook her head. “I swear, Paul. You’re
lucky you have me around, or you wouldn’t know anything about
what’s happening with Austin. I’ll call Texas A&M tomorrow and
find out which summer abroad program he went over there with, and
I’ll find out who his faculty sponsor is, and I’ll find out if they
have an emergency contingency plan.”
    “Thanks.” Paul tried not to roll his eyes but
some things just happen.
    Heidi kicked him under the table again.

Chapter 18
    Several dozen five-gallon plastic buckets had
been found in one of the farm warehouses, distributed around the
ward, and placed between the beds and sleeping mats. The patients
weren’t allowed to use the outhouses behind the building—new
quarantine rules. Not that many of them could have made the walk
out behind the hospital anyway. Most couldn’t walk to the interior
restroom, which ran off the insufficient supply of water in the
hospital’s cistern. So the door to the interior restroom was
ordered locked, leaving the patients with one choice for relieving
themselves—the buckets.
    Carrying two buckets sloshing with reeking
human waste, Austin shouldered his way through a door at the back
of the dark ward. The buckets came from beside the beds at the back
of the room, from among the first of the patients who had been
admitted with high fever, headaches, diarrhea, and vomiting. Most
of those also had the rash. Hell, most of the patients
inside had the rash. It seemed to be spreading across the ward as
if it were a disease all its own. Then there were the patients who
were bleeding from the eyes, nose, or ears. To Austin, that was the
irrevocable sign of hemorrhagic fever—the bleeding.
    He crossed the grass behind the hospital and
stopped in front of the stinking pit near the tree line. Dumping
the buckets, he couldn’t help but notice black tarry lumps in the
red and brown liquid. Nearly retching, he quickly stepped away.
    “Their organs are breaking down.”
    Startled, Austin turned to look.
    Nurse Mary-Margaret, with eyes red from lack
of sleep and crying, had followed him out. She’d obviously seen
what came out of the buckets and turned away to look up at the
grayish mists floating through the tops of giant trees up Mt.
Elgon’s slopes. At twelve thousand feet the dense forest gave way
to bare rock as the mountain reached to touch the sky.
    “Breaking down?” Austin asked.
    “I started seeing it earlier today.”
    “What does it mean?”
    “The Ebola virus causes blood to clot,” she
replied.
    Austin sat the buckets down. “I’m confused. I
thought it made you bleed?”
    “Early on, the blood clots in the veins.
Those clots clump together and clog arteries. When that happens,
dead spots form because flesh that can’t get oxygen from the blood
dies. This clotting uses up all of the body’s natural
coagulants.”
    Austin couldn’t help but look down at the
residue in his buckets.
    “The body starts to slough off the dead
flesh. That’s what ends up in the buckets, dead flesh from the
esophagus or stomach when it is vomited out. When the lining of the
intestines is sloughed off it is—” she hesitated.
    Austin glanced at his buckets and looked back
at the pit—horrified. “It is Ebola, then.”
    Nurse Mary-Margaret nodded, and her face,
with her mask pulled down below her chin, was nothing but sadness.
“It still makes no sense.”
    Austin didn’t know if he wanted to ask.
“Why?”
    Mary-Margaret replied, “You mean, how did so
many get sick so fast?”
    It was a rhetorical question. Of course,
Austin didn’t know that answer. “Maybe when the doctor from the WHO
gets here, he can help.”
    “He’s