“I’d like to take blood samples from you, if that’s okay.”
“Sure thing, Doc, if it helps the others.”
“You both seem unaffected physically.”
The older one, Ned Ludlum, rapped his knuckles on a wooden tent pole, superstitiously. “Knock wood. But every day we check each other over, inch by inch.”
“Any idea why you stayed healthy?”
“Luck,” said Ned.
“Prayer,” said Brad Colbert, the other guy.
“Have you eaten anything the others haven’t… Got different vaccinations before you came to Africa? Different medicines you’re taking? Maybe you’re on antibiotics for something else?”
“I’m taking Cipro, sir, for a cold I caught in Nairobi,” Brad told me, holding up the pill vial.
“Nothing for me,” said Ned.
“How about before you came? Do you have your immunization form? Special shots? Preventative medicines?”
I checked the stamps and notations on their yellow immunization forms. They’d received standard prep for Americans visiting East Africa. Antimalarials. Yellow fever shots. Anticholera. Tetanus. Gamma globulin against hepatitis.
I noted that both their cots were protected by pink mosquito netting. But many of the sick people had netting over their cots as well. Neither man showed sores anywhere on their bodies. Temperatures normal. Mouths unremarkable. Movement natural. Sleep irregular, they said, but it was hard to sleep regularly when your friends and neighbors were sick all night.
Ned said somewhat apprehensively, “Are we going to be okay?”
“I hope so.”
“Can you cure our friends?”
“I’ll do my best.”
I left them in their tent, and they started singing again. Hope worked for them as well as preventative medicines, I guess. I just wished they weren’t so off-pitch. Those voices would drive anyone crazy after a while. They were grating on me, too.
I hoped nobody would say something over my radio to set off Hassan or his militia. If shooting started, we had no place to run.
“I started this,” the girl sobbed. “It’s my fault! My God! I started this and now I’m better and they’re worse.”
Kate Detrich lay in tent seven, alone, because her tent mate had died. The face of the twenty-four-year-old grad student was slightly red and scaly, but the symptoms were fading, she said. Her speech was clear. If I hadn’t seen the others, I’d think she had a bad skin condition. Her agitation was so extreme that she was shaking, from emotion, not disease.
“I caused this sickness! Me!”
She was someone who liked to fix up living quarters, no matter how temporary. The cot had a colorful woven blanket over it, and I saw watercolor sketches of African plants hung up: a fat baobab tree, a myrrh tree, a phoenix cactus, with purplish flowers. The milk crate night table had a Coleman lamp on it, and a photo of smiling parents with a happier Kate. Strawberry blond in the shot. About five foot three. Pageboy-cut hair. Pretty green eyes in a plain, intelligent face. The photo had been taken at Sea World. Behind the vacationing family, a leaping killer whale.
I’d noted, into my neck mike, “Glazed eyes, stuffy nose, slight hoarseness.”
Now my heart began pounding at her confession. “You started it, Kate? What do you mean?”
“It was an accident!”
“What kind of accident, Kate?”
Wilderness Medicine 101. Always call a patient by their name. It helps keep them calm.
Fresh tears ran down her cheeks, soaked a stained pillow. I saw in her face what I saw in my mirror back home on sleepless nights — self blame. This woman knows something, I knew.
Kate blurted out, “I promised I wouldn’t tell!”
Hassan is hearing this, I thought. He’s looking for an excuse to blame someone. Hassan will unleash those militia if he thinks someone here is killing his brother on purpose.
But I gentled her. “Why don’t you tell me what you think you did. You can help everyone else if you tell.”
“No! It’s too late!”
I took her hand. It felt like a claw. In the glass covering her family photo was superimposed the reflected girl, head averted with shame.
“Kate? Breathe. Slowly. You know, good people always blame themselves for things they have no control over. Why, I bet that’s the case here.”
“It’s not fair. They’re dying and I only got it a little bit! I want to be dead!”
“You don’t mean that. Tell me what happened.”
Her voice fell to a whisper. But at least she kept speaking. “He was so attractive,” she said. “He made me feel wonderful.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Tim’s from Oregon. His family owns a farm there. They grow apples. Sweet gala apples, he said.”
Get to the point, I thought.
“He said we’d live there when the project is up. He said I could probably get work at the university in Eugene. He said it’s a good place to… oh God… have a baby!”
She broke out sobbing. The heat in my suit was rising. Sweat formed at my scalp and ran down my chin. It poured from my armpits. There was a sour smell in the suit. I cursed the designer of the thing.
Kate said, “I slept with him! Had sex with him! I know it’s wrong! I promised the Lord not to have sex until I’m married but I thought… I mean… I didn’t… I mean…”
I did not understand where she was going with this so I asked, “You caught something from this boy, you mean?”
“No! It’s punishment! Affliction! God struck me down because I broke my vow. Sex without marriage is abomination!” Her face spun to me, blazing. “I know what this sickness is. It’s leprosy, out of the Bible! Right out of the Old Testament! Like God gave Naaman!”
She started hyperventilating, but not from illness. I told her she was wrong. I said that her sex habits had nothing to do with the outbreak, although, for all I knew, that was one way it could spread. I told her that leprosy took a long time to take effect, and didn’t spread through groups. I did not tell her that I had no time for God, faith, or miracles. That to deny science is to deny truth. That faith is for fools.
I smoothed her brow. There was still a possibility that she’d given me a clue, though. “Kate? Are you telling me that God gave you this disease and the others caught it from you? That you were the first to get it?”
“I was bad! Bad! Bad! But I wasn’t the first, no. God struck down this whole camp because of me!”
I heard Hassan exhale loudly in my earpiece. His breathing joined mine for a moment. At least, for an instant, we were in sync in frustration.
“You people are all crazy,” Hassan said.
Person after person, and the answers were the same.
“Fifteen-centimeter lesions,” Eddie recited as we worked together in the mess tent on the last two victims, a Somali cook and a Somali guide.
“Erythematous plaque, with well-defined outer margins,” I said, scraping samples.
“The center’s flat and clear, hairless. No pigment.”
“Get bits of normal areas, Eddie.”
“Look at the foot drop, One. The foot just dangles.”