Chuck Hogan Read online

  We declined their offer of breakfast, and four other bright-eyed conservationists helped with the gear transfer into a waiting Pinzgauer Turbo. They argued with one another over the directions, eventually producing a hand drawn map of cross-outs and jagged arrows. "Good time to be here," said Todd, his unlaced boot resting on the towing loop of the all-terrain Pinzgauer. "Neat little window on the rainy season right around Christmas time, these next two weeks. Roads should hold.

  This is Pygmy territory. You two okay with that?"

  Peter, tying a white cotton headwrap around his shining white hair, nodded. "You'll run into them if you're lucky," said Todd.

  "This is their backyard. And they take francs."

  Peter said, "I like your hat." Todd's eyebrows rose in response.

  He pulled the hat off his head and inspected it. "Imitation snakeskin," he said, touching the band, as though accused of something.

  Todd looked a decade older without the hat, strings of brown hair drawn across his sweat-soaked pate. He seemed to consider making a gift of the hat, then instead replaced it firmly on his head and squinted into the risen sun. "We got some teams camping out there, entomologists, botanists. Should I be calling them in?"

  "No need," I said. I pulled down an Emory University ball cap snugly over my brow and climbed into the green Pinzgauer. "We should be back to you in a day or so."

  Peter drove us out. The road deteriorated immediately from hard dirt and sandy shoulders to soft gray dirt and no shoulders to encroaching jungle walls and emerald vines sweeping like pennants over the windshield. A light, wavy mist became a driving rain that pattered the massive, thickly veined tree leaves, sloughing rivulets of water into the softening road, and our speed dropped to five kilometers per hour.

  The road faded and reappeared but the map read true.

  I marveled. The vegetation spilled over us as though from a perpetual green fountain, reducing the Pinzgauer to little more than a sturdy beetle scuttling over the ground. We drove like that for hours, and my thoughts returned, as always, to work back home, to PeaMar4.

  Peter stopped for the first Pygmy we saw. He was an elderly man with rich brown skin and a short, dusty beard, wearing only a battered navy blue suit jacket and a sheath that covered his groin, holding a whittled staff by the side of the road. Peter got out and approached and exchanged It's salutations with the diminutive man, whereupon the rest of the tribe emerged from the vegetation behind him, as one. I had remained a few yards back, near the car.

  The old man, standing not much taller than one meter, next to Peter who stood just under two, cast a dark eye upon Peter's gloved hands.

  "Mgdecins Sans Frontibres?" he said.

  Peter shook his head. He spelled out "C-D-C." Some among the tribe nodded. They were used to intrusions by doctors and scientists.

  As a race Pygmies possessed extraordinary natural immunities, including a seeming resistance to certain clades, or distinguishing strains, of the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV. Although they had lived for millennia in the remote rain forest region that was the epicenter of the virus that caused AIDS, in the three active decades of the disease no infections had yet been reported among their tribes. This revelation in the early part of this century had led to a resurgence of interest from immunologists hoping to penetrate the mystery of the coevolution of virus and man.

  The old gentleman reassured Peter that we were nearing "the settlement," as he called it. Then at once he grasped Peter's oversized hands and regarded them through their latex shields. "As young as your hands," he said in French, "or as wise as your hair?"

  The question seemed to amuse Peter. He glanced back, then looked out at the tribe. "Le chapeau," he said. One of the tribesmen was wearing a bush hat similar to Todd's, fixed atop a traditional African toque for balance and fit. The snakeskin band appeared authentic.

  Peter relieved him of the hat with four hundred of the five thousand francs he had withdrawn on account from the CDC currency office-somehow he had known where to locate the keys-and presented the old man with an appropriate tribute of four blue pouches of Drum rolling tobacco, procured at de Gaulle airport for just such an occasion.

  Peter fitted the hat onto his wrapped head as the old man raised his tobacco pouches in appreciation. His tribesmen followed, all raising their hands and whatever tools they held in them. It was something to see, this race of immunologically advanced people saluting Peter Maryk, who was in fact immunologically nearly a race of people unto himself.

  I remained behind. In the jungle our roles were reversed, and for one of the few times in my life, I smiled the empty smile of the outsider.

  The pitted, sunken road was a courtesy the jungle soon withdrew.

  The twists and turns of the RECI map led us out beyond the eastern border of the conservation lands, the Pinzgauer surfing a collapsing tsunami of mighty vegetation. The land rose and fell and we rose and fell with it. Roadside bursts of beauty-waterfalls, lagoons-became routine, a whispering palette of emerald and black and olive. In time the rains returned to crash against the steel grille and overmatch the windshield wipers of the Pinzgauer, a fresh sheen of mud slicking the jagged road. The path before us flickered but never quite went out.

  The rain pecked at the immense leaves, giving them fitting life as we rolled past. The jungle now seemed antagonistic; my earlier wonder was eclipsed by a mix of respect and fear. In no other place on earth does man feel more like the intruder that he is. Tamed or chased out of the megacities of the world, here resided the fugitive Nature, the artist in exile, stripped of her canvases and finer oils, now hurling paint.

  The rain tapered off again and the swirl of the windshield cleared, wipers slowing in relief, the roar of the storm subsiding to a thumping on the steel hood of the Pinzgauer like small rubber mallets pressing out tin. I eased off the grab handle before me and settled back into my seat, and Peter popped his hat back onto his wrapped head.

  I rolled down my window and the vehicle filled with the dank sweat of the troposphere.

  Another thirty minutes and the path began to widen again. Dirt shoulders appeared and the road surface ran smooth. We passed a fallen tree neatly quartered beside the road, and it was a relief to see something touched by the hand of man.

  Misty sunlight streamed through gashes in the high canopy ahead, and suddenly the jungle opened on a plot of wet dirt cleared around a large, one-story plantation style house.

  The house was constructed of whitewashed stone. Its clay tile roof glistened from the sunny rain, as did twin pairs of shuttered French windows in front. A fat path of crushed rock led like a white mat to the door. Another muddy car, a Japanese 4X4, was parked near the walk.

  Above the door hung a sopping flag fashioned waist-to-hem from a tattered, yolk-yellow skirt. It was a homemade flag of quarantine.

  We stepped out into light rain and swung out the spare tire hinge to open the rear door. Peter removed his hat and broke the tape seal on a CDC-stamped carton, and we stripped off our gloves, dropping them into a cubic repository emblazoned with the international biohazard symbol.

  We pulled on two fresh pairs each, first standard latex surgical, then dull green contact issue extending beyond the wrist, sealing them against our skin with adhesive tape. Neither of us had much hair left on his forearms. Peter pulled blue cotton surgical scrubs on over his clothes and I did the same, forsaking the thicker, safer contact suits, selecting for mobility and comfort in the seething clime. It occurred to me at the time that it was always nice to have one higher level of protection to fall back to.

  Respirators went on last. I swept my hair in under a surgical cap, then pulled the flexible harness down over the back of my head, adjusting the belt so that the customized black rubber face piece set flush across my brow, behind my ears, and below my chin-again creating a seal. The stubby inhalation valves, extending like insect mandibles forty-five degrees off each side of the chin piece, decontaminated incoming air by exposure to ultraviolet light. UV light
destroyed viruses by shattering their genetic material, and was radiation-safe to three hundred and fifty nanometers. A smaller black exhalation valve was set in between.

  Raindrops picked at my Plexiglas view. We powered up our respirators, hearing the dull whine emitted by the light source, and lifted the emergency aid kits out of the cargo hold, starting for the house.

  The door beneath the dripping flag of quarantine was garnished with a childlike weaving of vines, stems, and berries. An African man answered my knock. He was in his sixties, wearing an agricultural mouth and nose shield tied around his head, his eyes baggy and blinking above it. His open shirt collar exposed pearls of sweat. His gloved hands, one hanging at his side and the other holding the door, were streaked with blood. "Dr. Kaunda," Peter said through his mask.

  The doctor looked from respirator to respirator, then focused on our scrub shirts and the letters stenciled there, CDC. He looked out at the Pinzgauer in the rain beyond us, a dazed expression in his eyes.

  "Parlez-vousfrqnais?" he said. I nodded, feeling the muzzle like awkwardness of my respirator. "Le vaccin?" said Kaunda.

  Peter held up a small plastic box. "Par ici." This way. We entered.

  A woven mat ran the length of the hallway inside. Dr. Kaunda shut the door behind us and at once the trapped heat of the shuttered house raised pops of sweat on my exposed upper arms. The respirator and twin layers of gloves dulled most of the senses. Taste was lost and touch and smell were well cloaked, though sight remained strong-I could see a light flickering through an opening at the end of the hall-and sounds were muffled but audible over the ultraviolet whine. I discerned a faint cough somewhere within.

  Kaunda led us slowly down the hall. The windows were shut in accordance with the rules of quarantine, protecting against the possible introduction of a vector-an insect or rodent or some other conduit of microbial transmission-even though smallpox was passed directly from person to person. A pall of sweat shaded the back of Dr. Kaunda's pink cotton shirt. He felt his way along the wall, moving more like a parent than a doctor.

  We turned into a small, flickering bedroom. A fat candle hung unswinging in a ceiling lantern over a stripped bed upon which a nine-year-old girl lay twisted upon a patchwork of towels. She was nude, her arms out at her sides, the swell of her stomach sinking and filling as breath huffed out of her small, blistered mouth. Bulbous pox sores speckled her inflamed flesh, most prominently on her neck and arms, although common also to her torso, upper legs, and groin. The largest ulcerations were swollen to more than a centimeter. "Elle the peut pas supporter etre touchge, " Dr. Kaunda said. She cannot bear to be touched. He stood with the underside of his left forearm pressed against his brow.

  Some of the sores were broken and discharging pus, the sand-colored towels under the girl's back showing mixed stains of yellow and red. A rash imbued the unblemished patches of her dark skin with a ruddy glow.

  Her right eye was swollen shut, the bloated lid pored and crusting over. Her left eye remained open, and was bursting with veins. "En feu, " she hissed. Burning.

  Shed hair lay in wiry, doll-like strands atop her undressed pillow.

  The bed was soiled with waste and flakes of dead skin.

  Peter moved quickly around the foot of the bed. There were trinkets and carved gourds on a wooden night stand, cleared back from a basin of reddened water. He slid his case onto the table and swiped the gourds and trinkets noisily to the unmatted floor.

  Dr. Kaunda said behind us, "Elie the peut pas supporter mime la pression d'un drop." She cannot bear even the pressure of a bed sheet.

  I said sharply, "She can hear you."

  "Maman, " said the girl with a cluck of her blistered tongue, shivering, straining up off the bed.

  I knelt and set the aid kit down on the floor and fumbled open the clasps. I admit that I did not know what to reach for first. "Her name," I said behind me.

  Kaunda had found a child's wooden rocking chair in the far corner.

  He was squeezing himself into it. "Her name," I said again.

  "Jacqueline, " he answered.

  I rose empty-handed and moved to her. The new rubber smell of my respirator had been replaced by the stench of human decay, seeping like a gas down my throat. I fought the odor as I stood over the writhing body of the girl. Peter was preparing an injection across the bed.

  "Jacqueline, " I said in French. "My name is Dr. Pearse. We have come for you."

  Her open eye flickered and fixed overhead. "La bougie, " she insisted.

  The candle.

  Peter straightened with the syringe. "Delirious," he said. "Get clear."

  Peter popped off the plastic tip protector and readied the needle above the blistered pocket of her left elbow.

  He located the median cephalic vein and entered it.

  She arched and thrust out a low-pitched groan of pain. I kept talking to her in French, partly in order to calm myself. "It is all right," I said many times.

  Her venous left eye bulged as though straining to see through the ceiling. Peter remained over the syringe and the girl's tensed arm. I realized then that he was not vaccinating her, but was instead drawing out blood. "Peter!"

  He straightened, holding a full red barrel. "We need a clean sample for PCR,- he said, never stopping his work, chucking off the needle hub and discarding it, setting aside the full barrel and reaching for a proper hypodermic. He braced her arm at the biceps and stuck her a second time, easing down on the plunger, voiding the barrel and shooting the inoculant into her system. She arched again and cried out shrilly, a cry without human precedent.

  He discarded the hypodermic, and we met at the foot of the small bed.

  "Abscesses match," I said, mumbling. "The rash, the languor.

  Odor."

  Peter was excited. I suppose we both were. "I don't recall hypotoxicity," he said-the inability to absorb inhaled oxygen, likely the cause of her hyper-sensitized nerve endings. He listed the classic diagnoses, recalled from text. "If the sores do not touch: recovery probable. If sores cluster: fifty-fifty. If bleeding erupts beneath the skin: death likely."

  The girl's sores were clustered. I nodded just to nod. She lay trembling on the stained towels beside us. "I'll run the blood sample," Peter said. A PCR assay would provide us with a genetic fingerprint of the virus and demonstrate conclusively whether or not it was indeed variola. Before he left, something in the room darkened Peter's expression, and he turned to Kaunda.

  The aged doctor was slumped in the girl's rocking chair, his bloodied gloves dangling to the floor. Peter asked him where the parents were.

  "Dead," Kaunda said in French, making no effort to lower his voice.

  "Two days ago. I buried them next to the house." Peter exited the room without the blood sample. I heard him in the hallway, and he was throwing open doors.

  I returned to the girl's side. Her half-open eye was again focused on the candle above the bed. I reached for her small hand and took it in my own, lightly, aware of the rubbery strangeness of her fingers even through my thick gloves, monitoring her eye for distress.

  "Jacqueline, " I said. "Jacqueline." Her head rolled slightly and the dark pupil inside her raw red eye settled on me. I warmed my eyes and put forward the smile of a confident doctor. I nodded. Her unwavering stare was one of apparent amazement. "Je flotte, " she whispered. I am floating.

  It would be a minimum of six hours before she could be safely evacuated. Six hours before the Pasteur Institute could assemble and fly in a biohazard team with an isolation stretcher-assuming no reluctance on the part of the French government in granting a visa to an African national racked with an unidentified contagion that was perhaps smallpox, a single case of which would, by definition, represent an epidemic. At that point I hoped that it was just that, mere smallpox, the reemergence of the worst scourge in human history, but an entity known and imminently curable."was staring at the girl, waiting for her to tell me what to do, as Peter reappeared at my side.

  "A ma
n's study in the front room," he said. "Mural of a lion hunt on the wall. A rolltop desk full of French pens and empty file hangers.

  A laser printer. Two unused business ledgers in a drawer, tablet chargers, and a rotary file on the desk stripped to the brackets, even the alphabet dividers. The stove in the kitchen is full of burned paper."

  He turned from me to face Kaunda and spoke bitingly, in French.

  "Where does the back road lead?"

  Kaunda appeared quite aged as he looked up at Peter from the small chair in the corner of the room. He did not immediately answer. "You are a camp doctor," Peter said.

  Kaunda's eyes above his blood-dappled mask showed a prisoner's expression of weary defiance, as that of a man so broken and exhausted that he existed beyond fear. I was still very much in the dark as to what Peter was getting at. "That is why you requested vaccine only, and not support," Peter said. "You didn't want us here at all." Anger burned brightly in his gray eyes, glowing with each flicker of the candle. "What are you bringing out of the jungle? It can't be ivory.

  Diamonds?"

  Kaunda's latex hands rotated slightly at the ends of his arms in a truncated shrug, and his sad eyes pleaded. "Monsieur Moutouari ordered that help be called only if his daughter became ill," he said in French.

  Peter said flatly, "How many more cases like this one?"

  "None," Kaunda said. He blinked profoundly, many times. "The others are much, much worse."

  The girl's hand slipped from my grip. Peter told him, "You bring the girl," then picked up my emergency kit and moved out of the room.

  I remained, awaiting an explanation from Dr. Kaunda, but the old doctor just sat looking at the dark floor, his head shaking weakly.

  The girl was trying to speak. Her tiny, blistered throat was working, but not well. I leaned close and lowered my masked head to her lips as she managed a hoarse whisper. "C'est la mort, " she said fiercely. It is death.

  I wondered at the extent of the girl's agony as we crawled along behind Kaunda's muddied 4X4. I chided myself for being too accustomed to life in comfortable, metropolitan Atlanta, having overlooked the significance of the improved jungle road, and failing to question the logistics of constructing such a house in the depths of the African rain forest. And then there was the original EPI-AID alert, broadcast by a general practitioner in the middle of the jungle with a state-of-the-art digital uplink. Peter had suspected treachery from the beginning.