Read Online Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller: Book 2 by Bobby Adair - Free Book Online

sat—a clean bucket. With one of a dozen cups that had been sitting on the floor by the bucket, she came back across the room. She offered it to Austin.
    Austin accepted the cup with a nod and started to drink, then gulp.
    “Slow down, okay?”
    Nodding as he drank, Austin slowed. When he finished, he reached the cup back toward the woman, “May I have another?”
    Another smile hidden behind the mask. The woman took the cup and went back to refill it.
    When she returned, Austin asked, “How’s my temperature?”
    “Nearly normal,” she said.
    He looked down at himself. He flexed his hands. He wiggled his toes and slowly shook his head as he realized what this moment meant. Choking on the words, he asked, “Did I—” But that was all he could get out.
    She said, “I think you beat it.”
    After a moment of looking at the woman’s hidden, happy face, he asked, “I’m going to live?”
    She nodded.
    “Are you a doctor?” Austin asked, looking for a reason to find falsehood in his hope.
    “Yes. I’m Kristin Mills.”
    “Doctor Mills,” he said weakly. “I’m Austin Cooper.”
    Dr. Mills looked around at the charred ward. “I think under the circumstances, Kristin is fine.”
    “Kristin,” he confirmed.
    He took another drink of water. “Things have changed a bit.”
    Kristin nodded. “The soldiers who stayed helped clean up the hospital.”
    “The ones that stayed?” Austin asked.
    “You’ve missed a lot.”
    “How long have I been out of it?”
    She pointed out through the back of the hospital. “We found you out by the burned bodies four days ago. Do you remember that?”
    Austin rubbed a hand over his head, “Barely.”
    “You told us what happened. At least you tried.”
    “Tried?” he asked.
    “You were mostly delirious, and it was hard to make sense of a lot of what you said, but enough of it came across.”
    Austin set his cup on the floor and scooted himself back so he could lean against the wall. He looked over at the white guy sleeping on the floor. “There was a man with you.”
    Kristin looked at the man on the floor. “That’s not the one you talked to.”
    Austin raised his eyebrows with a question.
    “The man who talked to you was Mitch Peterson. He works for the embassy in Kampala.”
    “So the government knows?”
    “He and his men—” Kristin seemed oddly stuck looking for the right words. “They rushed back to Kampala as soon as I was able to collect some samples for him. I haven’t seen nor heard from him since.”
    “And the guy over there?” Austin pointed at the white man on the floor.
    “He’s Dr. Simmons. He came with me.” Kristin sat down on the floor in front of Austin, crossed her legs, and told the story of what had happened while Austin was unconscious.
    Once word got around among the soldiers that the burned bodies were infected with Ebola, it didn’t take more than a few hours for all the officers and most of the men to mount up in their vehicles and leave. Kristin hadn’t been given a chance to protest. She’d been counting bodies and collecting samples when she heard the trucks driving away.
    The fleeing soldiers had left one sergeant and nearly twenty conscripts behind. That night, most of Kristin’s supplies and equipment disappeared along with the last vehicle and half the conscripts. She was stranded. With the help of the remaining soldiers, she started putting the hospital into a usable state. Some of the soldiers had set out to walk to nearby villages to find transportation or some form of communication. All of those who’d returned came back neither with a vehicle nor word from anywhere further than they could walk. The one thing they did return with was news that the Ebola virus was blazing its way across the countryside, from hamlet to hamlet, village to village. Kristin’s fear was for the cities. She made guesses about Mbale and Kampala, but hoped the government roadblocks had contained it.
    In a surprise that left Austin’s