No Immunity Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the small loss of herself.
    When she woke, Hope Mkema had been working. The hospital, a pale brick rectangle filled with moaning patients on pallets on the floor with their families settled around them for the duration, reminded Kiernan of the railway stations in India in which families had lived for generations. The doctors had had to fight to keep even a curtain as a cordon sanitaire between the regular sick and those bleeding to death from Lassa fever. Inside the curtain of death, as the patients called it, the scene was different. No comforting relatives offering food and chatter. Here patients’ throats were too sore for water, spiking fevers banished thought, words were replaced with uncontrollable moans. Faces swelled to grotesque masks. Blood oozed everywhere, from gums, noses, eyes.
    That was where Kiernan had come across Jeff Tremaine. She hadn’t realized he was on the project, hadn’t heard of him since she finished medical school. It took her a minute to place him, not just because he was here on the other side of the world but because he looked different, older, and strangely alive in a way he had never been in San Francisco.
    “As soon as we get the shipment of ribavirin, we’ll be in good shape,” he’d said in lieu of greeting.
    Kiernan had looked down at the patient moaning on the bed and known that that shipment would be too late.
    Two weeks later the shipment was still behind the lines of guerrillas fighting a hundred miles away.
    Two weeks later she had taken blood from hundreds of patients, readying the samples to see which of the feverish, pain-racked sufferers showed antibodies to Lassa and which fortunate ones had similar but nonlethal viruses. The heat was so intense that the fans scalded, and the water, boiled of necessity, never cooled below lukewarm. At dusk the regular twelve-hour day would end, and only emergencies would be treated in the precious light of the generator. Staff members would retreat behind thick mosquito netting, and revive themselves on dinners of barbecued goat and beer, if the refrigerator was working, or a local wine as potent as it was foul. No amount of additives masked the taste. It was destined to survive when all else died out, and they anointed it Cockroach Vineyards Last Squeeze.
    At the end of her third week there, dusk had settled as Kiernan finished the frustrating process of taking a complete history of a patient through an interpreter with spotty English, checking for headache, muscle pain, sore throat, bloodshot eyes, bleeding gums, then taking urine and blood samples. The heat was like a leaden robe, making every movement a struggle. She deposited the samples and washed up. The hospital was already in night mode. Her mind was suspended between the case she’d just finished and the cold beer behind the mosquito netting.
    “Doctor!” One of the nurses led her past the moaning patients to an elderly, frail woman lying deadly still just inside the main door. There were no frightened, ministering relatives as with most patients. There was no chance of taking a history; that would come later, if the woman survived. In the meantime fluid samples would have to do. Kiernan found a vein on the bone-thin arm, pulled up the blood. Just then the woman went into spasm, flailing arms and legs. The blood-filled needle flew into Kiernan’s arm.
    Kiernan yanked it out and flung it to the floor, but of course that made no difference. They all knew what needle pricks meant. They had all seen the progress of Lassa fever—it took no longer than a week and a half to kill its victims. It was Jeff Tremaine who sprang into action. He had raised every hospital in the country on the phone lines. He had gotten the missionary phone-radio circuit humming, and finally tracked down the one batch of ribavirin inside the rebel lines, then spent nearly two days driving to get it.
    “We don’t know that the blood I got in that needle prick is Lassa,” Kiernan had insisted when he