"We lost Mrs. Mbeze."
Dr. Stephanie Carter felt something in her wither and shrivel at the words. She didn't let any of it show on her face, however, as she looked up from the microscope that she was using.
"When?" she asked, her voice placid.
"Just half an hour ago," said Jessica.
The new doctor looked painfully young to Stephanie, even though she knew that the difference in their ages wasn't all that dramatic. Sometimes, Stephanie felt as if she were a million years old, far older than everyone around her. Some days she felt as if she was older than the continent on which they stood.
"And was it the same as the others?"
Jessica nodded.
"Exact same symptoms, exact same boils. So, that makes four all together."
I ate dinner with Mrs. Mbeze and her family last week, Stephanie thought numbly. I got to pet her pretty honey-colored dog, and I sat with her grandson in my lap. She smiled and told me how I was cooking yams wrong, and that I should come back so she could teach me how to do it the right way, the Tanzanian way...
Stephanie refused to let any of that show in her face. She was as still as a glacial pond, cold and remote. From the slightly apprehensive look on Jessica's face, she could tell that the younger doctor was at least a little intimidated by her. Good. A little bit of healthy fear kept everyone in line, especially in an outfit as small and remote as this one.
"All right, that's that, then," said Stephanie. "As of this point on, we are under quarantine conditions. We're going to need to spend some time examining all the other villagers. We want to establish treatment protocols for the ones who are sick, as well as preventative education for those who aren’t. Let’s keep those who aren’t symptomatic as healthy as we can for as long as possible."
A part of Stephanie, the part that had worked for the WHO for a decade, knew that this was uncommon procedure. She had been at the forefront of enough forays against disease that this one was just one more. However, there was another part of her, one that had just started making itself known a short time ago, one that she thought might have been shut up tightly in a box all her life, that was protesting.
This will be so much agony, that insistent voice argued. There is going to be so much pain and fear and misery, and at the end of it, you will be just a little more broken than you were before.
Stephanie shrugged that voice away, but she couldn't help the feeling that it was becoming more persistent over time.
Jessica was looking at her with something strange in her eyes, and Stephanie frowned.
"Well, what is it?" she snapped, and she saw the younger doctor flinch.
"This... this is going to be serious, isn't it?" she asked. "Those tests that I brought... they just confirmed it, didn't they?"
Stephanie hesitated for a moment. There was something about the younger doctor that Stephanie rather liked, but she was new to camp, unlike some of the other staff who had been working with Stephanie for years.
No one who knew her would have called Stephanie a gambling woman, but the truth was that she was a risk-taker by nature. You couldn't spend years going to hotspots all over the world that had been designated high risk without being so. She took chances.
"Can I trust you?" she asked, and when Jessica automatically nodded, Stephanie snorted and seized her by the arm. Jessica bit off a gasp and looked up at Stephanie, startled. God, she looked so young.
"I mean it," she said. "What I tell you, you can't repeat to anyone beyond our staff. Not even that man that you keep sneaking off to meet."
The look of pure shock on Jessica's face nearly made Stephanie laugh.
"Look, I don't care if he's a local man, or a bush pilot or a smuggler or what. What I need from you is your word that you are not going to reveal to anyone else what I am about to disclose. Is that clear?"
"Crystal," Jessica said, and Stephanie relaxed her grip.
The truth was that she didn't care to say it aloud, not really. She wanted to put it off, deny that it was happening. She hadn't gotten as far as she had in her career by denying reality however, and Stephanie took a deep breath.
"We're looking at something that's entirely unfamiliar to modern medicine," she said quietly. "Especially to modern medicine as we know it. It looks like nothing I've ever encountered before, and we are going to have to pray like hell that this condition responds to something we've got in our tool kit. Otherwise, at the rate at which people are falling ill and dying..."
"It might be unstoppable," Jessica said with wide eyes, and Stephanie nodded grimly.
'That is correct. Now, is there anything else before I continue with my work?"
She had thought that her acid tone would have driven the girl off, but Jessica seemed to be made of a sterner stuff than some of the newbie docs Stephanie usually got sent in the jungle. Instead of scuttling off, chastened, Jessica looked at her speculatively.
"I have a colleague... she's a friend too... but she's a specialist in blood and blood borne pathogens. She's working at the CDC in Atlanta right now. If she could get WHO clearance..."
Stephanie nodded.
"If she could, she might be invaluable here. In all fairness, though, I wouldn't expect too much. Researchers don't spend a lot of time on the ground; they're usually a little too arrogant to mix it up with the people who are actually using the blood that they’re studying.
Jessica grinned, an unexpected gesture that took her from merely cute to beautiful. With her short black hair and slender frame, it was hard to remember that Jessica had not only survived a plane crash, but then traversed miles and miles of hostile terrain with a bush pilot.
"This one might surprise you," she promised, and then she was gone.
After she was alone in the medical tent, Stephanie stopped for a moment. Stillness was a state that was more than a little foreign to her. When she was working, she had to be on top of things, always alert for the next disaster. Right now, her hands stilled, and it was almost as though her body robotically came to a gentle rest.
I am so tired, she thought, and then she forced herself to get back to work.
*
Stephanie thought that at night, no matter what was going on, medical camps like this one found a different sort of life. During the day, it was all about a hustle for survival. After all, no one called in the World Health Organization when everything was hunky-dory, as a colleague had wryly commented once, and Stephanie knew that was true enough. She and those like her often felt more than a little bit hopeless, carrying the banner of survival just a few feet in front of what felt like terrible suffering and torment nipping at their heels.
At night, most camps felt soothing, if exhausted. No matter how frenetic things had been during the day, twilight brought something restful about the camp.
Not tonight.
Tonight, the camp buzzed with a low-level of terror. She could see people frowning more nervously about what the morning might bring. Enough of them had seen the ravaged bodies of the newly dead to be very concerned.
Stephanie had to say that she herself had never seen anything like it. First there was a fever and a sense of being crushed. Then, boils appeared all over the body, dark and almost obscenely shiny. After that, there was a period of everything being paused and in suspense that usually lasted for no more than twenty-four hours, and then massive organ failure set in.
Stephanie had seen it happen first hand three times now. Mrs. Mbeze would be number four, and that meant that the first duty that she shared with the other medical professionals in the field was to alleviate suffering and to work towards finding a cure. The WHO had been briefed on everything that was going on in the remote area of Tanzania, but she knew that their help might be sporadic. For the foreseeable future, they were on their own.
Stephanie received her food, and suddenly found that she couldn't stand camp for one moment longer. It was too much tonight. There was a camaraderie that the camp shared that she could not, simply by virtue of being the woman in charge. She did her job and she did it well, but there was a part of her that resented it. Right now, with the controlled panic thrumming through the air and all looks being thrown her way, Stephanie knew that she had to get out of the camp for her own sanity.
She dumped off her plate with a clatter, and without a single look back, stalked off into the trees.
The village and the camp were situated on the tree line between the jungle and the grasslands. On one side, there was a dark jungle, one where animals stalked under the canopy of thick leaves and lush vegetation. On the other side was the open grassland, rolling underneath an enormous dark blue sky. This far from the cities, the blackness of the night sky was absolute, but the moon was already rising. It was almost full that night, would likely be full by the next night.
If she waited another half hour or so, she knew that the moon would light the land up nearly as bright as day, but she didn't know if she could take the light right then. It would have sounded silly if she’d said it out loud, but the thought occurred to her that she simply didn't want to be seen at all. She wanted to hide out, no, to disappear.
There were a number of trails leading into the jungle that the locals used, slender paths that resembled deer trails more than anything else. She found one soon enough, and even though she knew how dangerous a solo walk could be, Stephanie stepped onto the trail without a moment’s hesitation.
I'm not running away, she told herself, even if she, herself, was not necessarily convinced.
When she stepped under the dark canopy of the jungle, it felt to Stephanie a little bit like she was being swallowed. Right then, however, that felt just fine.