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

here already. He got here about fifteen
minutes ago.”
    Austin perked up. “I didn’t see him.”
    Nurse Mary-Margaret shook her head. “You’ve
been working so hard in here all day. By the way, how are you feeling?”
    “Like shit.”
    Nurse Mary-Margaret laughed. “I’m not one to
use that word, but I might. We all feel bad. We need help
here—thank you for pitching in. But how’s your fever?”
    “Stable, I guess.” Austin touched the back of
his forearm—the part above the glove—to his forehead. “I don’t feel
any hotter. I think the work helps. I don’t know.”
    “You’ll end up sick if you push yourself too
hard.”
    “I’m already sick, will it make a
difference?”
    Mary-Margaret tried to look hopeful. “I wish
I could tell you.”
    “Then I’ll keep going as long as I can.”
Austin looked back into the ward. “You said the doctor from the WHO
is here?”
    “We’ve set up another ward in the
school.”
    “Another ward?” And before Austin could think
that it was a stupid thing to say, he said, “We’re so crowded in
here. We should move some of these patients—”
    Mary-Margaret’s old face stretched sadder
with a slow shake, and that answered the question.
    “There’s no room in the other ward?” Austin
asked as though he hadn’t already guessed the answer.
    “No.”
    “My God.” Austin shook his head. “How many
are sick?”
    “Three hundred and eleven, at last
count.”
    “How is that possible?” he asked.
    “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
    Austin stepped back so that he could see part
of the town around the hospital building. “I wonder how many are
sick in their homes, afraid to come for help.”
    “We have volunteers out now, checking.”
    “Do you think there could be a lot?” Austin
asked, shaking his head without meaning to. The hopelessness of the
absent, red eyes in the ward was infecting him.
    Mary-Margaret said, “There might be more sick
people in their homes than here. This isn’t Denver. People here
don’t trust hospitals like they do in the states.”
    “Jesus.” Austin paused and tried to tamp down
the frustration coming out in his tone. “Is everybody in the
village going to get it? How many people live in Kapchorwa?”
    “Maybe eleven or twelve hundred within a mile
of the center of town,” she replied.
    “So between the hospital, the school, and any
who are in their houses and afraid to come out, how many do you
think are infected? Half? More?” Austin didn’t want to believe
it.
    Large numbers of dying people spread across a
desert refugee camp was an easy thing to depersonalize when seen
from the perspective of a couch in an air-conditioned room on the
other side of the world. Dying people who could be smelled, who
could be touched, whose tears flowed out of empty eyes—close enough
to wipe away with your own hand—that kind of dying was real in a
way that few people have the misfortune to understand. And all
around, people were dying—the ones Austin could see and many more
that he couldn’t.
    He asked, “How is it possible that so many
could contract it so fast?”
    “We don’t know.” Mary-Margaret shook her
head. She looked defeated. “That’s why Dr. Littlefield thought at
first it might be typhoid.”
    Austin looked down at the bucket to make his
point. “But now we know that’s not true.”
    Nodding on autopilot, Mary-Margaret softly
confirmed, “We know that’s not true.”
    Austin squatted to stretch his legs—in a
way—to get closer to the ground, so when he passed out and fell
over it would hurt less. “So, somewhere between sixty and ninety
percent of all of those people are going to die?”
    “Depending on which strain of Ebola this
is.”
    Austin thought about all the people he’d seen
on the streets, everyone he’d talked to, and those he’d befriended
since coming to Kapchorwa—most of them were going to die. And not
just die, but gruesomely waste away as their bodies