Chapter Four
Coordinating Ebiere’s return to the field hospital was more time consuming than Claire anticipated. Sunday was as thrilled about the survivor as Claire had been. There were questions to ask, an exam to perform, blood to draw. Three hours after Ebiere was given her own cordoned off space within the hospital, the thrill had worn thin, and Claire was restless to check out the Egbesu camp. It took far too much time to gather rattraps and supplies for any sick they might come across. Sunday insisted she take more protection than Dayo with her, and so now three local police escorts huddled in the back of the truck, hunched into their jackets against the driving rain.
The ride to the camp felt endless. She’d never been one of those children to ask “are we there yet?” every five minutes during a road trip—mainly because her parents would never do something as low-class as a road trip—but she had to refrain from it now. She all but twitched with restless energy.
Dayo smiled over at her. “You believe we’re on to something here.”
“I know it.” She realized she’d been tapping her foot on the underside of the dashboard and made herself stop. She looked out the window at the passing tropical foliage. In some places, it was so thick, she couldn’t see beyond the edge of the road. “Have you ever heard of Joyful Solomon before?”
“No, but I wasn’t raised here. My village is more west. Closer to Lagos.”
Claire heard the worry in his voice and set a hand on his muscular arm. “It hasn’t spread that far yet.”
“I hope not.”
“It hasn’t, but it will if we don’t get ahead of it. We need more information.” She dropped her hand and gazed out the windshield. The rain seemed to be letting up. Less downpour and more steady drizzle. It was the best she could hope for at this time of year in Southern Nigeria. “Joyful Solomon is definitely our first case in the village, but we need to know if he was patient zero or if someone else gave it to him while he was at the camp.”
Dayo’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. “We will run into resistance with the Fighters. They won’t want to help you.”
She made a noncommittal sound. She wasn’t going to say it out loud, but she suspected they wouldn’t find anyone alive at the camp to resist.
They rode in silence until Dayo pulled the truck to a stop in the middle of an overgrown, barely there road. “We have to go on foot from here.”
Claire pushed open the door and jumped out. “Everyone, listen up. Masks, face shields, and gloves from here on out. You may feel like you’re suffocating, but do not take any of the equipment off until I tell you we’re clear.” She studied the three police officers. They all wore uniform shirts, but that was the only thing that indicated they were police. One was in shorts, another in flip-flops, and the third had on rubber rain boots. She shook her head and pointed at the trio. “If we come across any bodies, you are not to go anywhere near them.”
…
It took another hour of walking before they reached the camp, and Claire’s clothes were soaked through with sweat under her protective gear. Her facemask kept steaming up, turning the already muggy air unbearably oppressive. She wanted the bottle of water in her backpack, but didn’t dare drink it this close to the camp. At least not until she got a look at what was going on within its borders. If what she suspected turned out to be true, they were entering a very biologically hot zone.
Dayo held up a hand, indicating they should stop, and took cover behind some foliage. Claire crouched by his side. The three officers stopped moving and dropped the rattraps they carried with a clatter of noise.
Claire shushed them, then turned her attention back to Dayo. He scanned the clearing up ahead with a pair of binoculars. If his mask was as clouded as hers, she didn’t know how he could see anything. It also didn’t help that fog had rolled in from the river, giving everything an eerie, dream-like quality.
“What do you see?” she asked.
He replaced the binoculars in his pack. “Nothing.”
“I’m not surprised. Your mask is clouded and the fog—”
“No.” He turned to her. “I don’t see any movement. There should be movement. This time of day, there should be smoke from campfires. They would be making dinner. It’s quiet.”
“Like the village?”
He gave a solemn nod. “Exactly like the village.”
Their gazes locked and held for a beat. In his dark eyes, she saw sadness and also anger. He knew what was coming as well as she.
Behind them, the officers chatted and joked like they weren’t standing on the edge of a terrorist organization’s camp. One laughed loudly enough to startle a flock of birds into the air. Claire and Dayo both glanced back at the trio, then looked at the camp again.
Waited.
Nobody came to investigate the noise.
Claire huffed out a breath that fogged her mask and pushed to her feet. “I don’t think we need to worry about being shot. Either this camp is abandoned or…” She let the thought trail off as Dayo’s jaw tightened. His expression was one of thinly veiled rage. She couldn’t blame him. It was hard not to get angry when you felt so powerless. She turned to the officers. “Bring the traps. Set them around livestock and food storage areas. And be careful not to disturb the bodies.”
The officers’ smiles faded and they looked at each other.
“Bodies?” one asked.
Sure, now they understood the gravity of the situation. “We don’t know if they’re still contagious. Do not put yourselves at risk.”
She left the officers sharing concerned glances and marched out into the cleaning. The camp sat right on the edge of the Niger River. The buildings were mostly wood with palm frond roofs, though she noticed one covered with a green tarp instead. Despite the rain, the air smelled strongly of oil, and the mud beneath her boots was black with it. They passed several large metal vats and oil drums, dented and burned.
“What is all this?” Claire asked.
“A refinery,” Dayo said. “They were bunkering—siphoning oil from the big companies and refining it themselves.” He stopped moving and gazed down into a barrel of crude oil. “It’s the only work available to people here. The only way they can survive, feed their families.” He looked up, eyes wet with tears. “These aren’t bad people, Claire. They’re desperate.”
Claire glanced around. The refinery was a giant scar on the land, everything around it blackened, oil-slicked, and burned. It looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie. “Desperation can make good people do bad things.”
In a shocking burst of temper, Dayo kicked over the barrel. Oil gushed across the ground like blood from a fatal wound. “Doesn’t matter now, does it? They’re all dead.”
“We don’t know that—”
He snatched a rattrap from one of the officers and stalked away.
Claire took a breath. Even behind her mask, the smell of oil was strong enough to make her eyes water. But under that was a scent she recognized. Rot—the particular odor given off by human remains.
This was going to be bad.
She closed her eyes, gave herself a moment, then pushed back her shoulders and followed. The first body she found was a young man, barely out of his teens. He sat slumped over in a rickety plastic chair near one of the huts. That was one of the most disturbing things about hemorrhagic viruses. The virus killed slowly—until it didn’t. One minute, a victim could be talking to you. The next, they’d be gone. The kid probably never even realized he was dying when he sat down there.
She peeked inside the nearest hut. More bodies, all of them young men. She guessed the oldest of them had been maybe twenty-five, twenty-six. Some of them still clutched guns in their hands as if they could fight off the virus with bullets. Some looked nearly alive, while others had been dead long enough that they no longer appeared human. The smell was horrendous. Her eyes filled with tears and she blinked hard to hold them back.
She didn’t want to see more, but she made herself move methodically from one building to the next, counting the dead and checking for survivors. They could use more survivors like Ebiere, but if there had been any from the camp, they were long gone.
How many other frightened young men had run home sick and dying, carrying the virus to their loved ones like Joyful Solomon had? How many other villages or camps had been wiped out? Had it already spread too far for the medical teams to have any chance of successful containment?
She walked over to the next hut in the line, and was just about to look inside when a commotion on the far end of camp caught her attention. She ran toward the noise and found the police officers wrestling with a fourth man. Definitely not an Egbesu Fighter, or even a local. He was white with blond hair that hung in limp, dirty tangles over his shoulders. His clothes were stained and torn, and he wore no shoes. He held his own against the officers, but he favored one arm and his movements were growing sloppy. It wouldn’t be long before they overpowered him.
The rain picked up, and the blond man slipped in the mud. As he fell, he ripped off one officer’s mask. The officer let out a scream of rage and kicked him. The others joined in.
“Stop!” The downpour drowned out her command. She took a step forward, but suddenly Dayo was there. He put a hand on her shoulder to stop her, then waded in to break up the fight himself. The officers were all skinny, and the three of them together weren’t as big as Dayo. Thankfully, things ended quickly.
Claire rushed to the white man’s side. He hadn’t moved since going down. She set a gloved hand on his shoulder and very carefully rolled him to his back.
Shock sizzled through her. The face was leaner, the angles of his jaw and cheekbones sharper, but she still recognized him. How could she not when his face had haunted her dreams for weeks?
He’d come for her. She hadn’t fully believed he would.
She swept a knotted strand of hair back from his face. “Jean-Luc?”
He opened gunmetal-blue eyes and blinked up at her as rivulets of rain streamed over him. She leaned over, using her body to shield him. He stared at her for a long moment like he couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing, then his lips spread in a grin that was a shadow of the one she remembered.
“If you like piña coladas,” he sang softly, “and getting caught in the rain…”
She laughed around the lump rising in her throat. The first time they’d met two months ago, the night he’d saved her life, she’d scolded him for being off-key while singing that song. “You’re still off-key.”
“Am not. I’ll have you know my mamere always said I’m an excellent singer.” He turned his head to the side and coughed hard. When the fit passed and he smiled at her again, blood stained his lips and teeth.
Her heart nosedived into her stomach.
He was infected.