Jameson shrugged. “I gave her a bag of fluid since she was dehydrated, then pumped her up with doxy and pentamidine. I covered all the bases that I could. I tried to get her father to leave her, but he refused. I heard later that the man sought out his own village’s shaman.”
She heard the disdain in her colleague’s voice. She reached a consoling hand to Jameson. “Her father was just covering all of his bases, too.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
Charlotte could not malign the tribesman for this choice. Many village shamans knew herbal treatments and cures for local ailments, regimens that medical science had not yet discovered or substantiated. She had studied several herself. Locals had been treating urinary infections with grapefruit long before the benefits of citrus were confirmed by Western medicine. Shamans also used Ocimum gratissimum—African basil—to treat diarrhea, which, if the camp ran out of supplies, their team might have to resort to.
“I don’t think this boy suffers from sleeping sickness,” Charlotte concluded. “Initially, from the minimal pupillary response or menace reflex, I thought it might be onchocerciasis, or river blindness. But I couldn’t detect any of the parasitic worms in his eyes that cause it.”
“Then what’re you thinking?” Jameson pressed her.
“His mother says he was fine two days ago. If she’s right, then the onset of symptoms was too fast for any parasitic disease. Protozoan or verminous. The rapidity makes me think of a viral infection.”
“There are certainly enough of those out here. Yellow fever, HIV, chikungunya, dengue, Rift Valley, West Nile. Not to mention—from the pebbling rashes on the boy and the girl yesterday—all manner of pox viruses. Monkeypox, smallpox.”
“I don’t know. The symptoms don’t match any of those. We could be dealing with something novel. Most new viruses arise from disturbances of a natural landscape. Digging new roads, deforestation, hunting exotic bush meats.” She glanced back to the pediatrician. “Also from heavy rains, especially in viruses transmitted by mosquitoes or other insects.”
As if summoned by this statement, a large driver ant climbed over the boy’s shoulder and latched onto the child’s neck. Blood dribbled as its mandibles gnashed the tender flesh. She remembered those painful bites from earlier this morning, but the boy didn’t move. He never lowered the thumb from his mouth to cry out. He didn’t even blink in pained startlement. He simply sat stiffly, his eyes dull.
Wincing in sympathy, she reached a gloved hand and removed the ant. She pinched it hard and tossed it away.
Jameson watched her, his brows bunched with concern. “Pray you’re wrong about it being a new virus. With the overcrowding here, the displacement, the shift in population . . .”
It could be a disaster in the making.
“Until we know more, maybe we should heighten our safety protocols,” Charlotte suggested. “In the meantime, I’ll collect blood and urine samples.”
Jameson’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know if it’ll do any good. With the chaos out here, it’ll take weeks until we can get any samples to a proper lab.”
She understood. It might be too late by then.
“But I know a researcher, a friend, over in Gabon,” Jameson said. “A wildlife veterinarian who works for the Smithsonian’s Global Health Program, specifically the new Global Virome Project. He’s collecting samples, helping the group create a surveillance network for still-unidentified viruses. More important, he has his own mobile lab for testing samples. If we can radio him, convince him to come out here . . .”
He looked to Charlotte for support in such an endeavor.
Before she could respond, raised voices, full of panic, sounded from the entrance of the medical tent. They both stepped clear of the privacy curtain. Two men rushed into the tent, carrying a stretcher between them. Another of the team’s doctors, a forty-year-old ob-gyn from Melbourne, hurried forward—only to fall back in shock.
Jameson headed over, drawing Charlotte with him.
The two men who carried the stretcher were a FARDC Congolese soldier and a Swiss triage nurse who had been canvassing the outer ramble of the camp. The latter was a tall blonde, who seemed incapable of tanning. Only now his face had drained even whiter.
The nurse panted as he lowered the stretcher to the floor. “I . . . I found him at the camp’s edge. There were four others. All dead. Place was overrun. He’s the only one still living.”
Charlotte cleared around Jameson’s back to note the ravaged state of the victim on the stretcher. An elderly local man lay there, struggling weakly to sit up. Blood soaked the scraps of his clothes and ran through the shreds of his skin. Half of his face was just red muscle and peeks of white bone. He looked as if he had been mauled by a lion, but the true predators involved in this attack were far smaller.
Ants still coursed through the gore or burrowed into the raw flesh.
“We found his body weakly stirring under a mountain of ants,” the nurse explained. “They were eating him alive. We used pails of water to wash off the worst of them.”
“Why didn’t the man simply run from the ants?” Jameson asked. “Was he passed out? Drunk, maybe?”
The pediatrician knelt closer to examine the bloody patient. The tribesman had finally managed to sit up. He opened his mouth, as if to explain what had happened to him—only a black swarm of ants boiled forth from his throat and flowed down his chin and chest. His body sagged and fell slack to the stretcher.
Jameson scooted away with a gasp.
Charlotte remembered the biologist’s earlier warning: Expect more bite cases. She also pictured what the researcher had described, how driver’s ants could strip the flesh off a tethered horse. She glanced back to the privacy curtain. The mother stood there, holding her stiff son, a child too dulled to respond to an ant’s bite.
She suddenly found it harder to breathe, as if the air had grown heavier. A fearful certainty welled inside her. It’s all connected somehow. She turned and grabbed Jameson’s shoulder. “Radio your friend, the virus hunter. Now.”
The pediatrician frowned at her for a breath, horror dulling his understanding. Then he blinked back his shock and nodded. He gained his feet and ran out, heading for the communication tent and its array of tiny satellite dishes.
Charlotte still had her arm raised. Movement drew her eye to her wrist. Three black ants wiggled there, latched onto the gap of skin above her glove. Their pincers were dug deep. Terror grew inside her at the sight of them—not at the violation, but at a sudden realization.
She hadn’t felt a single sting from those bites.
2
April 23, 5:38 P.M. WAT
Ogooué-Maritime Province, Gabon
Deep underground, Frank Whitaker confronted the pair of red eyes reflecting the beam of his helmet’s lamp. The eyes glowed down the tunnel, just above the mirror of the black stream he had been wading along. His heart clenched with a primal fear. He had been warned of the predators that lurked in this half-flooded cavern system.
Crocodiles . . .
He had spotted a few smaller ones earlier, no longer than his arm, but they had scurried away with whips of their tails. Not this one. He noted the armored drape beyond those glowing eyes. Easily six feet long. He also noted the orange hue to its scales, which was typical for the crocodiles trapped in this cavern system. They were members of Osteolaemus tetraspis, the African dwarf crocodile. Though from the length of this particular example, “dwarf” was a questionable descriptor.
The colony—or float as a group of swimming crocs were called—had been trapped and isolated in the Abanda caves near the coast of Gabon for three thousand years, getting caught here after the water table had dropped millennia ago. In such a harsh, sunless environment, these orange specimens were slowly diverging from their fellow brethren above, evolving in real time.