Cold Silence (5 page)

Rot again, but different. It wasn't just vegetables now. I'd smelled this on battlefields.

The Technical in front of us hit a rut so deep that the chassis bounced, and Eddie and I winced, watching the gunner's hands squeeze the dual handles.

Then we topped the rise and a hundred scrubby yards ahead saw the deserted-looking research camp . . . about one acre in diameter, a collection of sun-bleached, rain-washed canvas tents.

“I don't like this. Where's the people, One?”

The camp lay inside a man-made barrier of rolled thorn bushes, nature's concertina wire, to keep lions and hyenas out. Rectangular two-person tents ringed the inside perimeter, flaps closed. A larger dining or research tent centered the lot, with an area outside for cooking, long picnic-style tables and benches, and a stovepipe sticking above the tent, not emitting smoke. Lionel had told me that researchers here studied sediments, ground layers. Lionel had said that due to warfare in Somalia, important work on African climate, evolution, and ocean current patterns had stopped for the past twenty years. Lionel had said that his expedition opened a new era of cooperation, albeit one that had been bought by hefty bribe payments. Looking at the silent mass of tents, I knew that everything Lionel had told me was wrong.

As we drew closer, our escorts broke away to join a half dozen other vehicles surrounding the camp.

They would go no farther. Only we doctors could do that.

“Where is everyone, One?”

“Inside the tents, I guess. Sick.”

Eddie nudged me and pointed. The first body—a woman from the size and long hair—lay half sprawled on the picnic table. A second—a fat man—lay draped over the thorn barrier, as he'd been crazy enough to try to climb over it instead of walking out. Maybe he'd tried to escape at night, to get away from the militia.

Eddie pointed at a tall tree. The branches were moving. They were covered with vultures, I saw, scrawny, gizzard-necked scavengers. All seemed focused on the bodies below.

“Blow the horn, One. Get them out of here.”

I did. The birds did not leave.

Eddie said, “Shit. You think they're all dead?”

I reached back for my biosuit. The stillness seemed exaggerated. But then a couple of flaps moved on the sleeping tents. Slowly, figures began to emerge into the day. It was hard to believe what I was seeing.

Eddie whispered, horrified, “Jesus Christ, Uno. Lionel said that all of this happened in under
two
weeks
?”

I was so stunned by the spectacle in front of us that at first I missed the clues behind. The heat, the palm trees, the camel caravan in the distance, the white beach a quarter mile off, and the blue ocean all added to the sense of disembodiment. I was cast back in time. I was witnessing something I'd not seen since boyhood Sunday school. Only too late would I remember the metallic clicking and growl of engines, the arguing militia behind.

“My God, what the hell . . . it looks like
leprosy
,” I said to Eddie over the neck mike, stunned at the number of sick people we faced. At first glance, it looked like at least three quarters of the population of this research camp.

“In two weeks? In a group? Never! Gotta be some kind of chemical blistering agent, you ask me. Or something in the sediment they pulled up, some toxin out of the ground.”

“We
were
sent here to look for something new.”

“We need to call in the cavalry,” Eddie said, meaning more people.

“You heard Hassan. Won't happen.” We started forward.

Ahead, more canvas tent flaps had opened, and one by one, men and women were still emerging into the gray light, in a sight I associated with Sundays back in Massachusetts, with Pastor Brad in the Smith Falls Protestant Church droning on about Jesus while I cringed at drawings in
Bible Images for Kids.

Some of the ill leaned on makeshift crutches—a crooked tree limb, a tent pole swathed in a towel. Healthier people helped the worst ones, but the most extreme cases came by themselves, crawling, hands rising and falling like crash victims in a desert, more tropism than human.

But the juxtaposition of twenty-first-century clothing—Gap blue jeans, a T-shirt reading GREAT DANE
 . . .
UNIVERSITY AT ALBANY
,
aviator sunglasses, and Day-Glo Reebok running shoes—none of it went with the associations in my head.

Our biosuits sounded like crumpling cellophane. Moon men, that was us. We sweated inside Nebraska Center's mandated protection for Ebola workers. Baby blue plastic gowns and double glove layers; plastic hoods over our heads and necks; goggles and fluid-resistant leg and shoe coverings. But the suits were designed for an air-conditioned hospital, not a desert country where the mercury could top ninety degrees in the shade.

“At least we're wearing only level twos,” Eddie said. Threes would have stuck us inside sealed hoods, breathing through pack filters, temperature rising inside the taped-up body suit and rubber gloves. We'd have only twenty minutes before we either needed water, or had to get the hood off before our sweat made us blind.

“Remember the Cameroons, Eddie?” Volcanic lakes in that country had suddenly erupted with poison gas bubbles a few years back, wiping out a village of three hundred people.

The lead man dragged himself through the thorn bush barrier opening, his face so swollen and red that it was hard to see his eyes.
They seemed buried in folds of skin, with patches peeling away, showing gristle, meat, a fly in the wreckage, crawling. The eyes looked like a prizefighter's after a tough bout.

“This is like Lourdes,” Eddie said, over the creaking of hand-cut crutches, the moaning and coughing. He referred to the French town in the Pyrenees where, in 1858, rapt fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous told townspeople that the Virgin Mary, a “beautiful lady,” appeared to her in a vision. Since then, two hundred million pilgrims have visited the site, and five million more come each year, deluded supplicants the way I see it, desperate and praying for miracle cures for their cancers and deformities, prayer against virus, hope against prognosis,

As a boy I'd believed in this trash. But I knew better now. I knew this after what had happened to Karen. I believed in guns, germs, and laboratories now. Not in hope, prayer, or friendly gods.

Wilderness Medicine 101. Get splints on the injured, but the very flesh seemed to be melting off these people. Administer appropriate antibiotics, but we did not know if a microorganism was involved, or whether it would respond. Call for medevac, but that was impossible. What we knew here was even less than in most extreme emergency cases. We knew nothing. Only bits of truth, of possible analysis. To prematurely choose a cause could be fatal. But to do nothing seemed like it would produce the same result.

My earpiece whispered out the low voice of Hassan, the militia leader, over our shared comm-system.

“My brother is in there. He helped your people find special places, the special rocks,” Hassan said.

“Special how?”

“They are old.”

“Old
how?
”

“They were the rocks near the ruins.”

“What ruins?”

“Roman.”

“Hassan, I don't know what's happened, but we'll do our best to find out.”

“My brother was a wrestler. A powerful man! Look at him now! I have never seen a disease like this!”

“Have any people outside the compound fallen ill?”

“Not yet. I wish to keep it this way.”

Eddie and I shuffled into the compound. Our air filters allowed in some odors now: rot, grease, shit, Lysol.

Hassan's voice hardened. “You will take tissue samples. You will give the medicines. When you are done, you will strip off all clothes and leave them on the ground. You will be naked. You will not take anyone out with you.”

Uh-oh.
“I thought you wanted these people evacuated.”

“We will discuss that later.”

The fighters behind us were spreading out, the Technicals moving right and left as vehicles took up new positions. This adjustment placed the entire compound at the intersecting trajectory of at least fifty pointing guns.

“Hassan, there are too many sick here for just two doctors. I need more.”

“No tricks. Just you.”

“We don't have enough medication for all these people.”

“Ah! You do know what this sickness is, then? The proper way to treat it! Tell me what they have!”

“We don't know yet. Hassan, one of these people is your own brother. Don't you want him to have the best care?”

He cut me off angrily. “Go to work.”

We closed the last few feet. I have to admit, as a doctor I've seen many horrible things, but this, the sheer number of people, the mass of deformity, produced in me the greatest revulsion. I wanted to turn away. I was eight years old, with my parents, watching an old wide-screen rereleased 1959 Technicolor movie at the multiplex in Pittsfield,
one Easter. The leprosy scene. The sick women coming out of caves in a Mideastern valley, in
Ben Hur
. Shunned. In rags. Hiding their faces.

As a boy, I had squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see those horrible Hollywood special effects. I had asked my mother, when the film was over,
Can that happen in Pittsfield?
And she had said,
No, it's an old disease. It doesn't harm people here anymore. It's from Bible times, Joe.

Bible times.

Well, in
Ben Hur
the sick did not wear short-sleeved shirts that
read
TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS
and khaki slacks from Costco
.
They wore clothing from the time when Jesus walked the earth and Roman armies conquered Jerusalem, a time when the existence of bacteria was unknown and the greatest doctors believed illness came from witchcraft or vapors or punishment from gods.

Eddie's eyes sought mine over our masks. Hassan would hear everything we said. Eddie's expression contained the message:
Hassan's lying about something.

I nodded.
I know. But we do our job.

—

The first man in line was a white guy who looked about sixty, his back bent, his face swollen, breathing raspy, hair patchy like mange on a dog, mouth eaten away on the left side so severely that I saw white teeth, red gums.

“Colonel?” the old guy rasped. “It's me.”

I hope I hid my shock. Wilderness Medicine 101. Make them comfortable as possible. And calm as possible. Get information as fast as you can, once they're calmed.

I managed to keep my voice light. “Hey, who ever figured I'd run into you here, Lionel.”

“Yeah,” he rasped. He tried to smile, looking more like a skeleton. “Big surprise.”

“Lie down.” I indicated a picnic bench. He struggled to do it and I helped. I said, “How long have you been a scientist?”

His words came out slowly, forced.
Vocal cords affected.
“I went back to school after the Marines. Got my Ph.D. Dumb to come here, huh? But piracy off Somalia ended research here for twenty years, until now. Climate projects. Ocean. Super important work.”

“What's so important about it?” I asked, looking into the throat.
Oh God. Maggots in there.

“Sediment samples help date early man.”

He was as calm as he was going to get. I said, “Well, I'm here to help. Lionel, what's going on?”

Eddie was lining the others up at the mess tent picnic table, our makeshift exam room. Wilderness Medicine 101. Triage them into groups: the doomed, savable, and healthy. Do it whether you're working an avalanche, cyclone, or cholera outbreak. Do it and you'll save the most lives.

“Lionel, can you tell me how this thing started?”

The twisted figure broke out coughing. He raised his left hand to cover his mouth. My horror intensified. The little finger was half gone. The stump of his index finger oozed blood.

But his brain was working, and the words he squeezed out came from an observant scientist who was fighting to maintain self-control, and save his own life. “Two weeks ago everyone was
fine
. Then Miriam—a grad student—said her fingers tingled. And then Dr. Ross cut his leg with an ax, but he felt nothing. Our faces. My toe. I woke up three days ago and it was half gone.”

I shone light in his eyes, used a tongue depressor on the rotting pink thing in the cave of his mouth. Heartbeat normal. I maneuvered a thermometer in his mouth, but his lips were eaten away so I had to hold it in place.

“Very helpful, Lionel. Miriam was the first to get sick, you say?”

“I think so. But everyone seemed to get it at the same time.
Mike Dellman died.” The watery eyes shifted to the body draped over the thorn bushes. “They shot him. He tried to run. I don't know where he thought he could go.”

“Tingling, you said? Miriam felt tingling. Tingling was the first symptom? What happened next?”

The eaten-away face before me seemed to consider, but it lacked animation. The nerve endings were probably shot. Flies landed on lumps and open sores.

“Next? The patches, skin patches, like cancer my uncle Fred had in Arizona . . . My nose got thick. I can hardly see.” His panic suddenly crested. “Hard to walk!”

“Very observant, Lionel. Keep it up,” I said, talking to him as if he were still a nineteen-year-old Marine, not an accomplished professor of geology. “Tell me about that rash a bit, will you? Where exactly did that start? Fingers and toes? Or in the central part of your body?”

“It's hard to think! My face! Yes! My lips.” His voice sped up. “And then the rashes came and my feet lost feeling!”

“Turn over. Good. Any fever? Chills?”

“It gets cold at night. But I stopped eating so I don't know if I'm cold because I'm sick, or not eating.”

In my earpiece I tried to ignore the sound of clan fighters arguing behind us, the babble of enraged voices back there, in the circle of guns. I said, trying to find possible sources of infection, “Where do you get your water?”

“It's bottled. Donated. Separate bottles for each person. We thought of that already.”

“Any odd smells? Or tastes when you ate?”

“No.”

“The sediments you work with. Is everyone here exposed to them? Did everyone go to these Roman ruins?”

“No. Some people stayed in camp, and never got near the work. They're helpers. But they got sick, too.”

I was finished with the prelim exam. But not the questions. Lionel was giving me baseline information. I'd need to ask every patient the same things. “Anybody you're aware of with hostility to this group?”

He let out a croaking laugh. “Hostility? That's good! We're in a war zone!”

“Almost done, Lionel. It's important to eliminate possible causes. Are you aware of any chemicals used here, by one of the warring groups? Have you been in any areas where you saw dead animals? Dead vegetation?”

“Only us. Can I help you now, to help the others?”

I gazed into the ravaged face and my chest swelled with pride for my former soldier. “Your answers are already helping, Lionel. The trouble you're having speaking—is that because you're experiencing difficulty thinking of words? Or is it physically hard for you to produce the words?”

“Produce . . . the . . . words . . .”

“Headache?”

“No.”

“Chest pain? Shortness of breath?”