“It is a filo or a thread virus. But it is unlike any virus we have ever seen. Its DNA appears a combination of smallpox, malaria, perhaps another genetically mutated virus—we are not certain. But whatever it is, it multiplies at an extreme rapid rate in a host. First symptoms of outbreak occur within two hours.”
“Is it airborne? Can you become infected by mere contact with a carrier?”
“For our purposes, I believe we would be better served if we could study this back in Yangon—”
“No one leaves here until I have answers. What about the refinery?”
“If you are asking if the refinery is contaminated, the answer is no. Viruses do not simply go away, they merely hide. A virus needs a live host.”
“Watch your tongue! I am not completely ignorant of the situation, Doctor. I sense you are holding something back. What is your expert opinion? How bad is it?”
“The virus, in my expert opinion, is a hybrid cross, created in a laboratory. It—”
Nuyaung gritted his teeth, waiting, the look in Angku’s eyes warning him he would not like the answer. “Speak!”
“I am afraid this particular virus, General, is one hundred percent fatal.”
NAHIRA MUHDU no longer prayed for deliverance from evil. God, she believed, knew the horror she was leaving behind, aware, too, of her needs. If she—and her only surviving family—were to survive the journey, reach safety inside the border of Kenya, then it was God’s will. She was too tired, so parched from thirst the tears had ceased flowing, too weak from hunger, even, to pray.
It had been…what? she wondered, feeling the blood squish in sandals worn down to ragged strands of leather, each yard earned over rock-stubbled broken ground shooting pain through every nerve ending. Three weeks? A month since she had set out on foot with the other villagers from Bhion and the vast surrounding southern plain?
They had been driven out by marauding rebel troops at war with the government of Addis Ababa, and the entire country appeared under assault by rebels and soldiers alike, men who were more like wild beasts than anything human. Killing. Burning. Looting. Raping. The horrors of a new war with Eritrea had spread from the north where Eritrean soldiers were invading the Tigray region. She had heard her country was losing the latest war with Eritrea, mauled Ethiopian troops falling back to the plains of the south, renegade soldiers taking what they wanted from defenseless villages so they could live to fight—or murder—another day.
Famine, drought and civil war were nothing new to Ethiopia, she knew, but the past six months had become a living hell, her country gone mad with violence and brutality, villages in flames from the Tigray to the Darod, reports of mass graves littering the countryside. Drought, then starvation and, finally, the invasion by Eritrea had unleashed anarchy, an evil, it seemed to her, that was much like an avalanche gathering momentum the longer it kept rolling.
And the evil of other men had found her. Remaining in her homeland was certain death. Small comfort, but she wasn’t alone in misery.
Her anger and grief had withered some the first week out of the village, exhaustion and hunger dampening raw emotion, but the memory of her husband, shot dead by the killers of the Free Ethiopian Order of Islam, was still fresh, as if it happened only minutes ago. What they hadn’t burned, they plundered, seizing every last grain of wheat, every handful of sorghum they could find. The horror of the past, the dreaded uncertainty of tomorrow, and she wondered if peace would simply come with her own death.
And they had been falling dead in greater numbers the past week.
Only yesterday had she buried in a shallow grave, dug by rock with the help of fellow refugees, two of her three sons, ages four and six. The weeping was over, only the ghosts from a life taken haunting her every step. So weary now, her fingers aching, the flesh raw and crusted with dried blood where she had clawed out the hard earth, there was nothing to do anymore but to keep moving, to keep hoping. There was a life to consider beyond her own, the tiny, emaciated frame of Izwhal, swathed in filthy rags, she determined, her final reason to live. She couldn’t recall the last time either of them had eaten.
Which was why the refugee camp of Barehda lit a flicker of hope inside her punished body, rubbery legs finding energy at the sight of the food lines near the massive transport plane. Her only thought that food might sustain life until God opened another door.
The net veil was some protection against the buzzing hordes of flies, but she gagged as the fumes from the initial wave of rotting and diseased flesh and bodily waste clawed her senses. She followed the others toward the plane, appalled and pained at the sight of their stick figures, bodies sheared of muscle by malnutrition, dark, sagging flesh like leather, aware she looked every bit a walking corpse herself.
They skirted the outer northern perimeter of the camp, weaving past camels, goats and mules, their hides likewise worn to the bone. She heard the faint sobs of children, saw mothers cradling tiny bodies in spindly arms, skeletal fingers pushing some sort of grainy oatmeal into their mouths. But the infants, and even the older children, appeared almost too weak to chew. God, she had heard, might create drought, but man made the famine. What had been created here as the result of man’s inhumanity, she thought, had to be an abomination in the eyes of God.
She looked at the smattering of plastic tents, spotted shells of dark figures stretched out inside the flimsy covering, but most of the refugees were forced to bake under the sun, the suffocating heat, she knew, only compounding their suffering. She fell farther behind the others, shrouded in dust, her heart sick at the sight of so much misery, aware she and her son would most likely die here.
The refugees were eating all around her, a hopeful sign, she thought, the older males—teenagers mostly—shoveling the gruel into their mouths, slurping some white liquid from small plastic containers. There were a number of men, even small children, with missing arms and legs, cruel and sudden amputations as the result of countless land mines buried across both Ethiopia and Somalia.
She scoured the sea of displaced and starving, head spinning from the stink and the sight of so many living dead. She felt the cry of anguish burn in her chest, the thought that this would soon be the open burial ground for so many too much to bear when she saw tin containers suddenly falling to the ground. Refugees began clutching their stomachs, men, women and children convulsing, vomit spewing from mouths like burst faucets, bodies slumping over. Paralyzed by horror, she watched, listened to the cries fade, infants spilling from the arms of mothers who tumbled, thrashing on the ground. It was no mystery, she knew, disease was a major killer throughout Somalia, but something else was happening across the camp. The ravages of whatever the affliction were too sudden, too violent, to be any illness she had ever seen.
She found herself alone, the others now falling into the food line far ahead, unaware of what was happening, caring only about whatever food was being dispensed. She watched those she had made the trek with, fear mounting, something warning her to flee this place. There were armed men, wearing filter masks and white gloves, she saw, some of them barking orders to the refugees to hurry, other gunmen handing out the tin containers from the ramp of the silver transport plane. Why were they protecting themselves from breathing the air? No Red Cross or United Nations relief workers she’d ever seen came to the camps, heavily armed, donning protection as if they feared close contact with the local populations. That was no UN plane, either. She strained to make out the emblem on the fuselage: a white star inside a black ring, a fist that looked armored inside the star. They were westerners, that much she could tell. Another group of white men, she could see, stood on a ridge where the plain gave way to a jagged escarpment,
