My Soul to Take (11 page)

“I’m sorry for your loss, Jared,” remembering politeness despite his frenzied thoughts. “Did she live in the village?”

“No, she’s from Tanzania. She’d been a part-time English teacher out there for a year. We think …” Jared swallowed his tears away with great effort. “We think it spread quickly at the school. Issa hasn’t heard from me in months, and I have to tell her this.” His voice was almost unrecognizable with pain.

“Not now,” Dawit said, softening his sharp tone with another pat. “We have work first.”

Jared gave him a baleful look over his shoulder and produced a plastic key card at the hotel door at the end of the hall. “We’ve already been working, Uncle Dawit.”

Beside the door, a hotel sign promised twenty-four-hour electricity and water because of storage tanks and backup generators. Inside, the room was filled with bland fluorescent lighting. After the pure light under ground in Lalibela, fluorescent bulbs were an affront to Dawit’s eyes.

The large room’s hum of activity stopped when the door opened. Dawit was dismayed to find a mortal he didn’t know in the hotel room. The young man had features from Southern Africa, wearing gloves and a lab coat. Jared’s father, Lucas, was hunched over a too-small desk crowded with three laptops; his wife, Alex, was making a
graph with a black marker on one of the large sheets of paper taped to the walls. At the top was a photograph of a lovely young woman, beneath neat red letters:
PATIENT ZERO
?

Alex walked to David, squeezing his hand. “Hey, Dawit, we’re—”

“Who’s the boy?” Dawit said.

“That’s Dr. Dilebo. Moses! You don’t remember him? He used to come play with Fana in Washington. Jess and I knew him before then, in Botswana. He hung out at our clinic, and now Clarion hired him as a researcher. Dawit, we told you we’re grooming people.”

Alex should know better! The Lalibela Council had strict vetting procedures before mortals could have such close contact. It was bad enough that Alex maintained ties with a South African nurse whose brother and sister had died at the clinic that Alex and Jessica had run in Botswana, where mercenaries hunted them down for their blood. Alex had witnessed the shooting, and had nearly died. Jessica and her sister were painfully slow to learn.

“Are you studying this disease, or trying to spread it?” Dawit said. Privately, he added,
New mortals? Are you mad?

The young man flashed Dawit a tired smile before resuming his work. Alexis pulled Dawit around the corner of the suite, her voice quiet.

“Only Jared and I went with Lucas,” Alex said. “We got sent back after an hour, so don’t worry. And we’re taking injections. So we’re feeling fine—maybe
too
fine. How do ya’ll walk around with this stuff in your veins all day?”

Dawit’s teeth tightened. How crude it sounded to hear Alex speak of the Blood aloud, even at a hush. And jokes besides! Blood sharing with mortals had been forbidden, and now Alex and Jared were treating the Blood like aspirin. But he couldn’t stop Alex’s husband, Lucas, from giving his Blood to her. Lucas Shepherd had been a stranger when Dawit passed him the Blood—only because Alex had begged him to save the dying man’s life. Dawit hadn’t been able to deny a woman whose eyes so closely mirrored his wife’s.

Many of Dawit’s Brothers in Lalibela still refused to speak to him or make eye contact because he had shared Blood with Jessica and Lucas. Most blamed him for the turmoil with the new sect of
immortals that had overwhelmed him in Washington State last year. His role as peacemaker between his family and the Lalibela Council was a daily challenge.

“He’s no risk to us, Dawit,” Alex said. “He’s an epidemiologist, and he was Fana’s best friend in Botswana. This has nothing to do with ya’ll.”
Ya’ll
was Alex’s code word for his Life Brothers, or anyone with the Living Blood.

She was three years old, Alex!
In his anger, Dawit tilted his head close to her forehead.
The
goats
were her friends!

Alex jumped, startled by the amplitude of his mental stream. She rubbed her temple. “Dawit, chill out with that. I don’t need a headache. Fana wants him in our inner circle, so he’s here. ’Kay?” Alex patted his shoulder to end the conversation. Jessica and Alex often dressed up their own words or desires as Fana’s to get their way. “How did Fana’s concert go? Was Phoenix good? Her music is stone genius.”

Dawit still couldn’t fathom that Fana had staged a concert to promote sharing the Blood at Michel’s doorstep, all because the singer didn’t like airplanes. Madness! But that was a worry for another night.

“Suppose we talk about the outbreak?” Dawit said tightly.

A spark left Alex’s eyes. She nodded.

Lucas Shepherd stuck his head around the corner with a hollow-eyed stare, tall above them at six foot six. His Georgia accent never hurried. “We knew you’d be pissed off six ways to Sunday, Dawit, but come on back to the living room. We’ve got a full report.”

Alex doused her throat with a sip of stale, warm Coke Zero, which had kept her awake for two days straight. They needed fresh eyes—even if those eyes were two weeks late. Maybe two weeks
too
late. And he had the nerve to scold her for bringing in outside help? Waiting for the next reports of infection kept them all awake at night.

Where the hell have you been, Dawit?
She hoped he knew what she was thinking.

“It’s bad,” Alex told Dawit, the point she’d been trying to make in her email reports and sat-phone calls since the first reports from
North Korea. The cold brick that had lodged at the rim of Alex’s lower belly since her first visit to North Korea had resurfaced in Puerto Rico and bloated her stomach in Nigeria. She wasn’t a hypochondriac, but it was hard not to wonder if she’d caught the bug. Alex injected herself with Lucas’s blood once a day, to be sure.

“The mortality rate was nearly a hundred percent after contact,” Alex said. “The only survivors were out of the village during the forty-eight-hour outbreak period, or had no contact with the infected. Two hundred dead, but no new reports of the infection in three days.”

Alex checked Dawit’s face for signs. Anything. He was only nodding as if she’d been reciting ingredients from a recipe book. Yes, yes, go on. Alex knew in her heart that Dawit loved Jessica and Fana—he might think he loved her, too—but he was still The Brother from Another Planet. Dawit’s eyes were only mirror panes. How hadn’t Jessica seen it before she married him?

Moses walked forward, pointing out the photograph of the pretty young woman who was barely more than a child. “We think the teacher was patient zero in this outbreak,” Moses said.

“Gabrielle,” Jared corrected, hoarse. There hadn’t been any time to console Jared in his private nightmare.

“Yes, Gabrielle,” Moses said, apologetic. “She knew the man who ran the school. He was in Jos visiting family the day she arrived, but they spoke by phone. She said she’d had a terrible stomachache for an entire day and would try to make it to the school. She lived alone, and none of her neighbors have tested for the infection. Or reported significant illness.”

“Were there reports of illness at the village before her arrival?” Dawit asked.

“Coughs and sniffles, not the stomachaches—as far as we know,” Alex said. “But there were only sixty-three survivors. Most of the stories died in that village.”

She checked Dawit’s face again. Another impassive nod. Death didn’t bother him.

Moses went on. “Gabrielle was only at the school for an hour—she called her boss and said she was going to a student’s house to
rest. That night, the host family also complained of sudden stomachaches. A teenage victim sent an email to a relative in Lagos at eight-thirty. Another student, a neighbor, also complained of stomach pain in a telephone call by midnight. By morning, apparently, dozens in their families were ill. And neighbors. There were emails the next day about a ‘stomach flu.’ By the next morning, the entire village was dead.”

“Might as well have been a bomb,” Alex said.

“So here’s the part we really don’t like …” Lucas said. “Seventy-five people died in North Korea, isolated to a village. But only
six
people died in Puerto Rico a month later—even though there were two carriers, not one. And there’s no Asian link to Gabrielle. It just …”

“Appears out of the sky,” Moses finished matter-of-factly.

“Like brushfires,” Alex said. “We don’t know what’s starting the flares. And we don’t know what’s putting them out.”

“But it’s the deadliest SOB on record,” Lucas said. “It spreads faster than anything we can compare it to. Much more virulent than Ebola. SARS. Dengue fever. Lassa fever.”

Finally—a hint of alarm on Dawit’s face.

“The bug that wipes us out will look a lot like this one, Dawit,” Alex said.

Dawit blinked, seeming to agree. “How has it stayed so quiet?”

“Politics,” Alex said. “Just like in Puerto Rico—fear of panic or some other reaction. Here, the new government’s scared it’ll look like an ethnic clash. It’s a Muslim village, past skirmishes with Christian neighbors. At first the police thought it was poison, maybe a chemical agent. Bioterrorist attack, just like the theory in the U.S. An entire village of Muslims getting killed doesn’t look good on Al Jazeera. A lot less could set off a killing spree nobody wants. The government is pretending it never happened, so we have to meet our source there at dawn.”

“The whole bloody world needs to see it,” Jared said, his voice trembling.

The United States had done an even better job of covering up the outbreak in Puerto Rico—if not for a single blog posted for only
twelve hours, they might never have heard about it. Rumors of the outbreak in Nigeria were much more widespread.

“Glow had no impact on the outbreak?” Dawit said.

Nigeria had been one of the first nations to make Glow available at dedicated government clinics, which were always swamped with seekers. Glow centers kept the police and army busy. Too often, desperation turned ugly.

Alex sighed. “It’s illegal to keep a personal supply, but usually there’s somebody …”

“Missionaries and witch doctors,” Moses said. “Claiming Glow is their magic.”

“My guess is, nobody had any,” Alex said. “It swept through so fast, nobody had time.”

“Then how is it possible to have only six dead in Puerto Rico?”

“Go on and tell him,” Lucas urged her.

Alex’s stomach ached, spraying a bad taste into her mouth. She had stumbled on the strange significance of Puerto Rico only hours before Dawit arrived, and she still had gooseflesh on her arms. Alex’s legs ached to rest, so she pulled up a tall stool and sat with a sigh.

“In Puerto Rico, all of the dead were staying at a little hotel in a tourist town, Maricao. But
no one else got sick
—including dozens of people who had contact with them over the incubation period.”

“Fortunate,” Dawit said. “But very odd.”

“It gets weirder,” Alex said. “The dead woman from San Juan was named Rosa Castillo. She had a son named Carlos Harris. His wife—”

“Phoenix Harris,” Dawit said, breathless. “I just met them both. Are you sure?” Was Dawit’s face growing a shade paler? Alex was almost certain of it. Finally! Dawit got it.

“Damn right I’m sure,” Alex said. “Phoenix’s mother-in-law died of the same virus we saw in North Korea. Carlos Harris blogged about it! We smuggled out her blood work, and I did the analysis myself. We haven’t been able to get tissue samples here yet—we were run off from the village pretty quick—but I’m betting it’s the same strain.”

Alex pointed out the translucent sheets posted to a lighted panel on the wall beside her, enlarged images from an electron microscope. Dawit leaned close, studying the images. The photos of the new virus reminded Alex of linguini-shaped Ebola, but with coats of spikes.

Alex went on. “It hijacks the immune system, like Ebola. Disables tetherin and turns our immune responses against us to create new virions.
Lots
of them—a flood. That’s why the mortality rate is so high. So that’s the medical side. But on the personal side …”

“Phoenix’s mother-in-law
and
a girl Jared knew?” Dawit said. “Statistically …”

Lucas nodded. “Right. Impossible. That was our way of thinking, too. Why’d you think we’ve been so frantic?”

Dawit squeezed Alex’s shoulder fondly, a rare affectionate gesture that startled her. A glimmer in Dawit’s eyes made her heart race. What did he know that he wasn’t telling them?

“Dawit, we’ve been saying for
two weeks
how grim this outbreak looked!” Alex said. “Where’s the support from home?”
Home
was their code for the Lalibela Colony.

WE NEED TO TALK ALONE
, Dawit told her privately.
WITHOUT THE BOY
.

The tickling sensation, a whispered breath, always made Alex swipe at imaginary gnats. “Maybe we should talk alone,” Alex said to Lucas, as if it were her own inspiration, not Dawit’s.

“Looks like we better,” Lucas said. He couldn’t read minds yet, but he wasn’t fooled.

The young man shrugged, standing. “I’ll walk to the lobby,” Moses said. “Mr. Wolde, please tell your daughter hello from her friend Moses. She was an amazing child. So amazing!”

Dawit didn’t answer, staring straight through Moses as if he weren’t there. Sometimes Dawit seemed not to see people at all, his eyes bypassing everyone like they had at her mother’s Sunday dinners. Everyone except Jessica; you had to work to pry his eyes away from his wife.

The door closed behind Moses.

I’VE SEEN THIS VIRUS
, Dawit said silently.
ONE LIKE IT
.

Air seeped from her lungs. Another surprise! The world reinvented itself daily.

“When was the outbreak?” Lucas said. “Where are the records—”

Sometimes her husband’s naïveté drove Alex crazy. He reminded her of the way Jessica had been, once upon a time. “What’s the rest of the story, Dawit?”

“It may be ours,” Dawit said quietly.

“Lord Jesus,” Alex whispered, eyes wide. She’d known what he was going to say, but it still hurt her ears.

“Define … ‘ours’?” Lucas said, still not wanting to face it.