Chapter Seven
The next morning, Claire rushed through breakfast, gulping down her coffee when she usually savored it. Sunday noticed, of course, and caught her at the door of the mess tent. “What’s the rush?”
She tried for a nonchalant shrug. “I have patients to see.”
“Like the white bloke you and Dayo brought in yesterday?”
“Among others.”
Sunday sighed. “Claire, I understand you have some kind of history with this man, but he’s infected. You know his odds are—”
“You don’t have to remind me.” Realizing she’d snapped, she groaned and rubbed both hands over her face. She hadn’t slept enough last night, her mind too busy racing through every possible scenario. None of them were good. “I just… He has a stronger immune system than the local population. Maybe it will help.”
“Oh, love, he’s—”
She didn’t wait for Sunday to finish and pushed through the tent’s flap door. It was raining again. Surprise, surprise. It hadn’t stopped raining for more than an hour or two since she arrived, and locals told her the monsoon season had another month at least. She lifted the hood on her poncho and sprinted across the camp to the quarantine tents.
Technically, she had other things to do first—get samples from Ebiere to send to the lab in Lagos, check the traps at the village and Egbesu camp—but she wanted to see Jean-Luc. He’d seemed so…depressed when she’d left him last night. She couldn’t blame him. He’d had a lot of bad news yesterday, and he’d been exhausted. Still, it worried her. Last night, he’d seemed to withdraw into himself, and the funny, irreverent man she met at the hotel bar in Martinique had disappeared.
She made herself slow down while donning her protective gear. The weird mix of nervousness and excitement and dread bubbling inside her was no excuse for sloppiness. She couldn’t help him if she infected herself.
Her heart thudded while she waited impatiently for the airlock to open to the hot zone, but as soon as it did—
Her heart nearly stopped beating altogether.
Jean-Luc wasn’t in his bed.
Panic sizzled through her. A sudden empty bed in a hot zone always meant the patient had died. But that couldn’t be possible. His illness wasn’t that far advanced yet, and she’d left orders with the night staff to contact her if something catastrophic happened. No one had, so he had to be okay. Or at least as okay as he could be. She just had to slow her jackhammering heart and think rationally for a moment.
He had to be here somewhere. The tent was a large, cavernous space, but he couldn’t have left it without setting off all kinds of warnings. She glanced around. Saw a few more empty beds that hadn’t been empty yesterday. Some, she knew, had died during the night. But not all. It seemed to be all the kids missing and she spotted a handful of them in the corner set up as a play area.
Calm again, she walked over and wasn’t the least bit surprised to see Jean-Luc holding court at the center of the group. Ijemma, the youngest victim, only three years old, sat on his lap laughing at everything he said, even though she doubted the toddler understood him. Machie, the teenager who had stared at Jean-Luc in awestruck wonder yesterday, sat cross-legged in front of him.
Of course he’d attract all the girls—he had a kind of magnetism about him that drew the opposite sex. It certainly had drawn Claire in when they first met, and she’d been as helpless to resist as the girls were now.
But it wasn’t just the girls. He’d drawn the attention of many of the boys and some of the adults too. Made sense, since the first white people they’d ever seen were the doctors treating them. Of course it’d intrigue them to suddenly have a blond-haired, blue-eyed white man with no protective gear in their midst.
As she drew closer, she realized their conversation wasn’t in English like she’d assumed. He spoke the local language like a native and enthralled his audience with his story.
Dr. Haskins, one of Sunday’s MSF colleagues, stopped at her side. “He’s been entertaining us all morning. It’s been a nice change of pace. A ray of sunlight in all the gloom.”
She looked over at the doctor, but because of the protective gear, couldn’t see more than the crinkle of crow’s feet around his sleepy brown eyes. “Did we lose many last night?”
He sighed heavily. “Six. We’ll lose at least two others before noon.”
“Dear God.”
“I don’t think God has much to do with this.”
Neither did she. Although she’d dutifully gone to church every week with her parents as a kid, she’d found it harder and harder to believe in a benevolent, loving god while watching good people all over the world die of horrible diseases. “This whole situation is bad.”
“The worst I’ve seen in my twenty years of working in hot zones,” Haskins agreed. He patted her shoulder twice. “My shift’s just about over. Will you be okay until the morning crew comes in?”
“Yes, go on. Get some sleep.”
He glanced over at the group gathered around Jean-Luc, then shook his head. “Doubt I will, but I’ll try.”
She knew what he meant. In cases such as this, you either passed out cold from over-exhaustion or you stayed up remembering the faces of all the people you hadn’t been able to save.
Jean-Luc must have sensed her presence because he glanced over just then and grinned. He was pale, his eyes red rimmed, and still it didn’t detract from his beauty.
She ignored the little bum-bump of her heart and walked over. “You’ve made friends.”
Machie took hold of Claire’s hand. Her eyes were wide in her thin face. “Jean-Luc says he’s from a place called New Orleans. He says it’s magic. Have you seen it?”
“I have.” She smiled down at the girl and remembered the last time she’d visited. There was no denying the vibrancy of the city. It had a feel all its own, a power, a pull. One less scientifically minded than her could even call it magical. “It is a very special place.”
“I want to see it, too,” Machie said longingly.
The words were nothing less than a spear through Claire’s chest. The pain of it left her speechless. The girl shouldn’t even be here. She lived in Port Harcourt, and she would have been safe had she not been innocently visiting her grandparents when Joyful Solomon brought the virus to the village. Her grandparents had died before MSF arrived, and her parents died shortly after. At fifteen, she was all that remained of her family.
Jean-Luc reached over with his good arm and affectionately tugged on the end of the colorful scarf wrapped around Machie’s head. “You will, catin. We gotta get better first, but then I’ll take you there.”
She shook her head. “I don’t have money.”
“Don’t you worry about that. You focus on getting healthy, and I’ll get you to New Orleans.”
The girl stared at him like she was half in love. Who could blame her? It was hard not to fall for that smile and wicked charm.
“Speaking of,” Jean-Luc said and handed the toddler off to the woman who had been caring for her since her mother passed. “We should all go back to our beds now. The doctors will be in soon to check on everyone.” He looked at Claire, and for the first time she noticed the exhaustion straining his smile. He was looking for an out.
“We need to pass out morning medications,” she told the group in her most doctorly voice. “If everyone could please go back to their beds.”
Machie was the first to move. “I’ll get better,” she said even as a thin trail of blood leaked from her nose. She swiped at it, looked at the streak of red on her hand, and set her jaw. “I will get better.”
“I have no doubt,” Jean-Luc said with another smile. “Go on now, cher.”
He waited until everyone was gone. Seemed to gather his strength before pushing out of the plastic chair. He moved slowly, like he wasn’t sure how steady he’d be on his feet.
Claire took hold of his arm to help steady him. “How are you feeling?”
“Took everything I had in me to drag my ass over to that chair this morning, but everyone was so damn sad. I had to do something.”
“You gave them a bright spot of hope. That was kind of you.”
“If they don’t have hope, they have nothing to fight for.”
She helped him over to his bed. “When did you learn the local language?”
He sat down and released a long, exhausted breath. “I studied up on the plane ride.”
She stared at him. Blinked. Realized she was staring and looked away. “You learned that much Ijaw during a plane ride?”
“No. I learned the basics. How it’s put together. Essential vocabulary words. Then I close my eyes…” He did just that. “And listen to the flow of it around me. It’s beautiful. Musical.” After a moment, he opened his eyes again. “I’m nowhere near fluent. It’d take a solid six months to a year of hard study to reach fluency.”
“Wow.” She knew five languages, but she only claimed fluency in three: English, French, and Spanish. She was decent with Portuguese, and rusty with Swahili. And it had taken her a lifetime of study to learn that much. “You have a gift.”
“Gift of gab.” A smile touched his lips, then faded. “Mamere always said so. Said I’d have been a snake oil salesman in another life.”
“Your mamere has a lot to say.”
“She had the gift of gab too, but her circumstances being what they were, she never got the education to capitalize on it like I have.”
“She encouraged you to study languages?”
“Encouraged? Hell, she gave me my first Spanish dictionary. She said I’m a danger to myself and others when I’m bored, so I should put my silver tongue to use and learn something.” He seemed to struggle to catch his breath. The short walk to his cot had exhausted him.
“How are you today? Really.” She touched his cheek and he gazed up at her through the tangles of his hopelessly matted hair.
“No worse than yesterday. Those muscle aches you mentioned? Yeah. Feels like the greatest boxers of all time took turns using me as a punching bag. Arm hurts like a son of a bitch, but that’s small potatoes.”
“No, it’s not. I’ll have some pain meds brought to you.”
Just then, a coughing fit erupted from a bed two down from his. The older man writhed in agony as he struggled to breathe.
“Give the meds to him,” Jean-Luc said, his gaze locked on the man. “He needs them more than I do right now.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but the man’s coughing grew more violent. She glanced over and realized he was in serious distress. Blood so dark red it looked black spewed from his mouth with every cough. She raced to his bedside, reaching him seconds before the nurse on duty. His lips and gums had gone blue. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen. He jackknifed off the bed with the next cough and blood splattered her respirator’s face shield.
For one heart stopping moment, she worried about the integrity of her suit—had she secured everything properly in her rush to see Jean-Luc? Had she snagged the suit on anything since coming into the hospital? But the panic was short lived. The man heaved one last time and went limp, collapsing half off his bed. She and the nurse hoisted him up on the bed, but they were too late. His eyes, half open, showed no pupil or iris. They had rolled up under the lid, leaving only the bloodshot white of his eye visible. No breath, no pulse. A trickle of blood dripped from the corner of his lips.
He was gone.
She stepped back while the nurse gently set a sheet over the body. Told herself there was nothing she could’ve done to save him. Her brain knew that to be true, but her heart screamed in protest. She could save them all. Akeso could save them all. If only she was further along in testing…but she wasn’t and using these people as guinea pigs would be unethical when they barely understood what was happening to begin with. Most of them believed the virus was some kind of witch’s curse or black magic.
She looked over her shoulder at Jean-Luc. Through the blood splatter, she saw him sitting up on the edge of his bed, his fingers dug into the mattress beside each hip. His complexion had gone white, his expression shocked horror. And then, as the realization that he was facing a similar end sank in, came the fear. It was written on his face in stark lines. Shaking his head, he lay down on his cot and turned his back to the dead man.
She had to go decontaminate, but she couldn’t just leave. She walked over to the foot of his bed. “Jean-Luc?”
He said nothing for several seconds. Then, in a dull tone: “You shouldn’t be in here.”
“What do you mean? This is what I do for a living.”
“You can’t get sick. You can’t die like…like that.”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t know that.” He rolled enough to look at her. “Please, Claire. I need you to get out of here. Go call Tuc. Let him take you someplace safe.”
“I-I can’t leave—” You, she wanted to say. He hadn’t left her in Martinique when he’d had no reason to help her whatsoever, so she wasn’t about to turn her back on him. And, if she was honest with herself, it was more than that. So much more.
He sat up and glared at her. Already sliding from denial to anger. “Claire. Pour l’amour de Dieu, leave. I’m not dying here just so you can go get yourself killed by this fucking virus. I came to protect you and if I have to make the call myself, I’ll find a way to get out of here and do it.”
The anger drained away and his eyes softened. His voice wavered. “I’m sorry. Please. Just leave. I don’t want you seeing me…” He trailed off and his gaze slid over to the sheet-covered figure. “I don’t want you seeing me like that. I want you to remember the guy at the bar in Martinique, the one who sings ‘The Piña Colada Song’ off-key. Not like…that.”
Her heart broke for him. She’d once slipped and poked her glove with an Ebola-contaminated needle, and waiting the twenty-one days to see if she’d infected herself had been the most stressful and terrifying time of her life. And she hadn’t even known if she was infected or not. He knew the virus was in him, and he’d just seen someone die a gruesome death because of it. Of course he’d be freaked out. Anybody would be.
“Claire.” Sunday was suddenly at her side, startling her. “You need to go decontaminate. Now.”
“Okay, okay.” She sent Jean-Luc one last glance over her shoulder. “I’ll come back as soon as I’m able.”
He just shook his head and settled back on the cot.