Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller: Book 2 (6 page)

“You’re dehydrated,” the doctor said.

Salim looked at the doctor while a nurse injected something into a clear plastic tube. He followed the line of the tube, which terminated under two bands of white tape at the crook in his elbow.

“You have a fever,” the doctor continued, “one hundred and three. Do you have any other symptoms?”

Salim fought through the fuzziness in his mind. “My stomach—”

“Nausea?” The doctor asked.

“I haven’t thrown up yet. I feel queasy.”

“Diarrhea?” asked the doctor.

He nodded. “For a couple of days. It’s getting worse.”

“I’ll prescribe a suppository.”

Salim grimaced.

“It’s best, considering the nausea,” said the doctor. “Don’t want you to regurgitate the medicine.”

Salim nodded his consent.

The doctor said something to the nurse, using quick words and too much medical jargon for Salim to follow. He looked down at Salim and said, “I’ll be back to check on you in a bit.”

Trying to sit up, but failing in the attempt, Salim asked, “Am I going to be all right?”

The doctor stopped and looked back down at Salim. “You’ve probably got the flu. Where were you flying from?”

“Chicago.” It wasn’t a lie, but it was far from the whole truth.

Nodding, the doctor said, “Lots of cases of the flu up there right now.”

“I’ll be fine, then?” Hope was back in Salim’s voice. “It’s just the flu?”

“People don’t understand how serious influenza can be,” the doctor told Salim in a mildly scolding tone. “They don’t think they need to stay home and rest until they recover, and they end up like you.” The doctor pointed at the hospital bed, then waved a hand at the rest of the emergency room. “You’re here now. You’re young and healthy. I’ve prescribed some medications. We’d like to keep you here for a few days. You did pass out in an airport, after all. When we’re sure you’re okay, you can go home. You’ll probably be fine.”

Relieved, Salim sighed as the doctor walked out through an opening in the curtain that surrounded two sides of the bed.

A large, dark-skinned woman pushed her way through the curtain as the doctor was leaving. She looked down at a clipboard stacked thick with papers. “Hello, Salim. I’m Cynthia Hinojosa. How are you feeling?”

He wasn’t sure how to answer. He felt terrible. At least he was in an emergency room and finally starting to feel a
little
better. “I’m okay.”

“Good,” said Cynthia. “I need to review your insurance and payment information. You weren’t conscious when they brought you in, so we need to take care of it now.”

Salim nodded.

“Do you have any medical insurance?”

He shook his head.

“You understand you’ll be fully responsible for payment.” Cynthia wrote something on a sheet of paper on her clipboard, and without looking back at him, asked, “You’re not on your parents’ policy?”

“No,” answered Salim.

“Do you have a credit card or debit card you can use for payment?”

“In my billfold,” he replied, “but I don’t think—”

“You don’t have to pay it all now. You’ll be billed. Was the address on your driver’s license correct? You live in Denver?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have someone to stay with locally?”

Salim balked as he thought about whether to tell the lie about visiting his cousin. “The doctor said I’ll be here for a few days.”

Cynthia cast an angry glance back to where the doctor had passed between the curtains. “You may be well enough to go home this evening.”

Much of the emergency room visit was a blur. Salim slept a lot and woke to prodding and poking from nurses. Cynthia Hinojosa came several times to his partitioned area and pressed him for more information. The credit card in his wallet, the one he’d been given by his jihadist handlers, had been cancelled. His debit card on an account he’d had since he was sixteen, which was still in both his name and his father’s, had been closed, probably by his father. Cynthia Hinojosa had no valid card number to write on her forms, and that caused her immense consternation.

Through the weight of her persistence and continual disappointment in his responses, Salim resorted to the story about his cousin. He had to expand on the lie with a fabrication about his missing telephone that held all of his phone numbers. He had them all stored by name and had memorized nobody’s actual phone number. His cousin was supposed to meet him at the airport, and Salim now had no way to reach him. Neither did Salim know the address. His life was in his phone, he explained. When the phone disappeared, he became disconnected from everyone he knew, and he had no way to get reconnected short of buying another phone and restoring it from the data saved in his computer, which was back in Denver. Salim was pretty proud of the new layer of lies, especially given the circumstances of his current state of health and persistent fever. He wanted to stay in the hospital. The fever had the doctor very concerned. It didn’t respond to anything prescribed.

Cynthia Hinojosa had her own thoughts on that subject. She thought Salim was a deadbeat.

So after eleven hours of taking up a bed in the emergency room, Salim was wheeled out of the hospital and helped into a waiting taxi. One of the nurses made him a reservation at a nearby hotel. From there, Salim could recover for a few days and take the samples of prescription drugs he’d been given. Some time before they ran out, he’d have to walk to the drugstore across the street and get the prescriptions refilled: something for the fever, another for the nausea, the happy little suppositories, and some kind of antiviral medication for the flu. The doctor told him it was no cure, and that viruses generally had to run their course, but the antiviral could help.

It was late in the evening when the taxi driver left Salim standing in front of the hotel, the kind that looked like it might be full of aggressive rodents and hourly renters.

The night air had still not shed the day’s heat, and Salim felt sweat run down his face, though he was expending no effort except that of keeping himself upright. He watched the taxi drive away.

A blue and red neon sign flashed “OPEN” at irritating intervals. The asphalt radiated heat up through Salim’s tennis shoes. His backpack seemed to have gained weight on its inexplicable journey from the airport, to the hospital, into the taxi, and now back onto his shoulder.

When the taxi’s tail lights disappeared into the stream of red pairs of lights flowing down the road, Salim turned toward the hotel lobby’s door, but the weight of that backpack pulled him around in a circle that Salim had difficulty stopping. He spun fully around once, almost twice. The dizziness returned. Fuzzy darkness and panic overwhelmed him, and he fell.

Late in the morning, Austin lay on his back in the remains of Kapchorwa’s burned-out hospital, watching some monkeys play on the rafters where the sheet metal had fallen away in the fire. One of the monkeys stopped, rose up on his back legs, and made a show of pissing onto the floor a dozen feet below.

It was when Austin heard the urine splatter on the concrete that he sat up straight, looking around at the charred interior, expecting to be among the hundreds of bodies burned because of Najid’s unexpected brutality. The bodies were gone, as was the fire debris. Only the stains on the floor remained.

To Austin’s left lay a row—he presumed—of the newly sick. Eleven men in military fatigues, and one mzungu, an older man. Austin had seen enough people sick with Ebola to know that each of them had it.

A noise from the back of the ward announced the entrance of a woman in gloves, goggles, surgical mask, and apron; insufficient protection, as Austin had learned. She spotted him sitting up and hurried over. Swaying in each of her hands were familiar buckets, soiled and splattered; some of the same buckets of waste Austin had the responsibility for emptying before—

The memories of Kapchorwa’s fire and death flashed through his mind, carrying with them a deluge of fierce sorrow and fear, as palpable as they were when the village was burning, and Austin had no strength to run. He gasped and struggled for control of his runaway emotions.

The plastic buckets echoed as the woman set them on the concrete near the other end of the bedridden row. Startled by the sound of the plastic, the monkeys scampered off. The woman said, “You’re up.”

Austin looked over at her as he drew in a few more deep breaths, and all he saw of her through the plastic she wore were brown eyes and dark hair.

The woman stepped closer. “How are you feeling?”

Austin answered, “Better.”

“Better?” She removed an infrared thermometer from a pocket, knelt down beside him, and scanned his forehead.

“Could I have some water, please?” Austin croaked through a dry throat.

He saw a smile in the woman’s eyes as she nodded. She jumped to her feet and hurried across the room to where a covered metal bucket sat—a clean bucket. With one of a dozen cups that had been sitting on the floor by the bucket, she came back across the room. She offered it to Austin.

Austin accepted the cup with a nod and started to drink, then gulp.

“Slow down, okay?”

Nodding as he drank, Austin slowed. When he finished, he reached the cup back toward the woman, “May I have another?”

Another smile hidden behind the mask. The woman took the cup and went back to refill it.

When she returned, Austin asked, “How’s my temperature?”

“Nearly normal,” she said.

He looked down at himself. He flexed his hands. He wiggled his toes and slowly shook his head as he realized what this moment meant. Choking on the words, he asked, “Did I—” But that was all he could get out.

She said, “I think you beat it.”

After a moment of looking at the woman’s hidden, happy face, he asked, “I’m going to live?”

She nodded.

“Are you a doctor?” Austin asked, looking for a reason to find falsehood in his hope.

“Yes. I’m Kristin Mills.”

“Doctor Mills,” he said weakly. “I’m Austin Cooper.”

Dr. Mills looked around at the charred ward. “I think under the circumstances, Kristin is fine.”

“Kristin,” he confirmed.

He took another drink of water. “Things have changed a bit.”

Kristin nodded. “The soldiers who stayed helped clean up the hospital.”

“The ones that stayed?” Austin asked.

“You’ve missed a lot.”

“How long have I been out of it?”

She pointed out through the back of the hospital. “We found you out by the burned bodies four days ago. Do you remember that?”

Austin rubbed a hand over his head, “Barely.”

“You told us what happened. At least you tried.”

“Tried?” he asked.

“You were mostly delirious, and it was hard to make sense of a lot of what you said, but enough of it came across.”

Austin set his cup on the floor and scooted himself back so he could lean against the wall. He looked over at the white guy sleeping on the floor. “There was a man with you.”

Kristin looked at the man on the floor. “That’s not the one you talked to.”

Austin raised his eyebrows with a question.

“The man who talked to you was Mitch Peterson. He works for the embassy in Kampala.”

“So the government knows?”

“He and his men—” Kristin seemed oddly stuck looking for the right words. “They rushed back to Kampala as soon as I was able to collect some samples for him. I haven’t seen nor heard from him since.”

“And the guy over there?” Austin pointed at the white man on the floor.

“He’s Dr. Simmons. He came with me.” Kristin sat down on the floor in front of Austin, crossed her legs, and told the story of what had happened while Austin was unconscious.

Once word got around among the soldiers that the burned bodies were infected with Ebola, it didn’t take more than a few hours for all the officers and most of the men to mount up in their vehicles and leave. Kristin hadn’t been given a chance to protest. She’d been counting bodies and collecting samples when she heard the trucks driving away.

The fleeing soldiers had left one sergeant and nearly twenty conscripts behind. That night, most of Kristin’s supplies and equipment disappeared along with the last vehicle and half the conscripts. She was stranded. With the help of the remaining soldiers, she started putting the hospital into a usable state. Some of the soldiers had set out to walk to nearby villages to find transportation or some form of communication. All of those who’d returned came back neither with a vehicle nor word from anywhere further than they could walk. The one thing they did return with was news that the Ebola virus was blazing its way across the countryside, from hamlet to hamlet, village to village. Kristin’s fear was for the cities. She made guesses about Mbale and Kampala, but hoped the government roadblocks had contained it.

In a surprise that left Austin’s mouth hanging open, Dr. Littlefield walked in through the hospital’s open front door followed by a haggard soldier. Austin said, “Dr. Littlefield, you’re alive.”