The ultimate fate of the other two victims was unknown. They were in the early stages and it was still too soon to tell. Both were strong and in their twenties, but that didn’t seem to make any difference to YARS. It was an equal opportunity killer that took healthy adults at about the same rate it did children and the elderly.
The boy started to cough again, but this time she didn’t go to him, instead staring down at his blood on her gloves. She’d leave his mother where he could see her and take comfort from her presence. The heat in the building was suffocating, but it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t last long enough for her to start to decompose.
• • •
“Vick—”
The satellite phone cut out and Schaefer shook it violently. Not the most high-tech solution, but it seemed to work. She was able to make out the last few words of her boss’s sentence, but ignored them. Ken Dinh was the president of Doctors Without Borders, a good man and a personal friend. But he was sitting behind a desk in Toronto and she was on the ground in the middle-of-nowhere Yemen.
“Are you listening to what I’m saying, Vicky?”
No one was watching, so she allowed herself a guilty frown. At forty-two, she’d already been through a number of husbands, all of whom had roughly the same complaints. The top of the list was that she was obsessed with her job. Second was that she was—to use her last husband’s words—always camped out in some war-torn, disease-ridden, third-world hellhole. The last one was something about never listening and instead just waiting to talk. She wasn’t sure, though, because she hadn’t really been listening.
“I heard you but I don’t know what you want me to say. No worries? Hey, maybe it’s not as bad as it looks? And what do you want me to tell the people in this village? Take two aspirin and call me in the morning?”
“This sarcasm isn’t like you, Vicky.”
“Seriously?”
“No. Obviously that was a joke.”
“So now we’re going to sit around telling jokes?”
Even from half a world away she could hear his deep sigh. “But it’s isolated, right? You haven’t seen or heard anything that points to an outbreak outside that village.”
She’d walked about a third of a mile to make the call, stopping partway up a slope containing boulders big enough to provide shade. It was the place she came when she needed to be alone. When she needed to find a little perspective in a world that didn’t offer much anymore.
The village below wasn’t much to look at, a few buildings constructed of the same reddish stone and dirt that extended to the horizon in every direction. She surveyed it for a few moments instead of answering. Dinh was technically right. The disease she’d discovered appeared to be isolated to this forgotten place and its forty-three remaining inhabitants.
And because of that, no one cared. It had no strategic relevance to the Houthi rebels or government forces fighting for control of the country. The ISIS and al Qaeda forces operating in the area didn’t consider it a sufficient prize to send the two or three armed men necessary to take it. And the Saudis had no reason to waste fuel and ordnance blowing it up.
The disease devastating the village had probably come from one of the bat populations living in caves set into the slope she was now calling from. But the specialists she’d consulted assured her that their range was nowhere near sufficient to make it to the closest population center—a similarly tiny village over forty hard miles to the east.
“It’s isolated,” she admitted finally. “But I don’t know for how much longer. I’m containing it by giving these people food and health care so none of them have any reason to leave. And I’m counting on the fact that no one from outside has any reason to come. Is that what you want to hang your hat on?”
“You also told me that you thought the whole thing was a fluke, right? The war cut off the village’s food supply and they started eating bats for the first time?”
“That’s just a guess,” she responded through clenched teeth. “We can’t get anyone with the right expertise to come here to do the testing. Look, Ken, I’m here with one nurse and a microbiologist who’s only interested in getting his name in the science journals. Twenty-five people in this village are dead. That’s a third of the population.”
“But you’ve stopped the spread, right? You’ve got it under control.”
“We’ve got the last few identified victims quarantined and for now we’ve convinced the villagers to steer clear of the local bat population,” she admitted. “But it’s incredibly contagious, Ken. Not like anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. Even casual contact with someone who’s sick comes with over a fifty percent infection rate. But the worst thing is how long the virus seems to be able to survive on surfaces. We have credible evidence of people getting sick after touching things handled by a victim seventy-two hours before. What if someone infected with this went through an airport? They could push a button on an elevator or touch the check-in counter and have people carry it all over the world. How could we stop it?”
“We stopped it last time,” he said in an obvious reference to the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s.
“It’s not the same thing and you know it! SARS is an order of magnitude less contagious and it broke out in Asia. We had time to mount a worldwide response in countries with modern medical systems. This is Yemen. They don’t have the resources to do anything but stand back and pray. We could be talking about a pandemic that could kill a hundred million people. Are you a doctor or a politician, Ken? We—”
“Shut up, Vicky! Just shut your mouth for one minute if that’s possible.”
She fell silent at the man’s uncharacteristic outburst.
“Do you have any idea what’s happening in the rest of Yemen? Outside your little world? We’re dealing with a cholera outbreak that’s now officially the worst in modern history. NGOs are backing out because of the bombing and growing violence. Local medical personnel are either sick themselves or haven’t been paid in months and are moving on to figure out how to feed themselves.”
“Ken—”
“I’m not done! About a third of the country is slowly starving. We’re seeing infections that none of our antibiotics work on. And there are rumors that there’s going to be a major attack on Al Hudaydah. If that port closes, most of the imports into the country are going to dry up. No more humanitarian aid. No more food or medicine. No more fuel. On top of everything else, the country’s going to slip into famine.”
“But—” she tried to interject.
“Shut it!” he said and then continued. “All this and I can barely get governments or private donors to take my calls. Why? Because no one gives a crap about Yemen. They can’t find it on a map and they’re bone tired of pouring money into Middle East projects that get blown up before they’re even finished. And that’s leaving aside the U.S. presidential election that’s already consuming every media outlet in the world. If an alien spaceship landed in Yemen tomorrow, it’d be lucky to make page nine in the Times.”
“Ken—”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” he said. “Now, where was I? Oh, yeah. So, after all that’s said, you want me to divert my almost nonexistent resources from the thousands of people dying in the cities to a little village of fifty people surrounded by an impassable sea of desert?”