It was hardly the bucolic natural world she had envisioned back in Paris.
As a further reminder, thunder rumbled ominously in the distance. Over the past two months, storm after storm had swept the area, flooding lands that were already swamps, even during the dry season. It had been the worst recorded rainfall in over a century—and more storms were forecast. Floodwaters threatened the breadth of the central Congo, and between corruption and bureaucratic red tape, relief aid was slow to keep up. She prayed for another drop-shipment of U.N. medical supplies before the situation became even more dire out here.
As she crossed toward the medical tent, she watched a young child squat and loose a wet stream of diarrhea. Ants climbed over the little girl’s bare feet and mounted her legs. She cried out from their bites, until a woman, likely her mother, scooped her up by the arm and brushed at her legs and feet.
Charlotte hurried over and helped pick off the last of the ants. She pointed to the clinic tent. Her Swahili was poor at best. “Dawa,” she said, guiding the woman and child. “Your daughter needs medicine.”
Dehydration—whether from cholera or a thousand other etiologies—could kill a child in less than a day.
“Kuza, kuza,” Charlotte urged the woman and led the way.
All around, locals scurried about. Many wielded brooms of palm leaves and fought the invading ant horde. She skirted behind a Luba native who swept a path toward the medical tent. Following in his wake, she safely reached the tarp above the clinic entrance. The smell of disinfectant and iodine wafted out, momentarily holding back the stench of the encampment.
Another of the doctors—Cort Jameson, a gray-haired pediatrician from New York—noted her arrival. “What d’ya got, Dr. Girard?” he asked in English, the de facto language among the clinicians.
“Another case of diarrhea,” she answered and started to follow the woman and child inside.
“I’ll handle it.” He passed her a steaming tin cup of coffee instead. “Fuel up first. Looks like you barely got your eyes open. We can hold down the fort for a few minutes.”
She smiled her gratitude and took the cup in both hands. She inhaled the aroma. The smell alone set her heart to beating faster. The coffee here was as thick as syrup, far from the delicate petit café at her favorite Parisian restaurant. The team had all grown dependent on the brew and only half-jokingly debated taking it in intravenously.
She stepped to the side to savor both this brief interlude and the dark, bitter elixir.
Her gaze fell upon the stocky figure of Benjamin Frey, a twenty-three-year-old biology post-grad from Cambridge, who was working on his doctoral thesis. The auburn-haired student wore khaki safari gear and a slouch hat. He also had on a pair of white trainers, which he inexplicably kept spotless. She suspected from his abrupt manners, along with a few tics, that he might be on the autistic spectrum, but if so, he was clearly high-functioning. The young man could also dive deep into an esoteric subject, oblivious of his audience’s interest—or lack thereof.
She headed closer as he crouched near a thick trail of ants and held one up in a pair of tweezers. She was curious at this invasion, this newest plague to strike the camp.
Frey glanced over a shoulder as she joined him. “Dorylus wilverthi,” he explained, lifting the captured specimen higher. “The African driver ant. Also called siafu. One of the largest genus of army ants. Soldiers, like this one, can grow to be a half-inch long, with their queen up to two inches. They have mandibles so strong that the indigenous tribes here use their bites to suture lacerations closed.”
She felt the man ramping up into one of his lengthy discourses and cut him off. “But where did they all come from?”
“Ah, they’re refugees, like everyone else here.” He lowered the ant to the trail, then stood. He pointed his tweezers toward the rolling flow of the Tshopo River. “Looks to me like they were flooded out of their regular nesting grounds.”
It took her an extra moment to realize that the black islands floating in the current were not piles of debris, but massive rafts of dark-red ants all latched together.
“Why aren’t they all drowned?” she asked.
“From a little dunk in the river? No problem for them. They can survive an entire day underwater. Ants are hardy little soldiers. They’ve been around since the time of dinosaurs and have colonized every continent. Except Antarctica, of course.”
She felt sickened, especially as she watched one of those rafts break apart against the shore and disperse outward. The invaders all acted in unison, as if they had strategized this assault in advance.
“Smart buggers, too,” Frey added, as if noting the same. “Two hundred and fifty thousand brain cells each. Makes them the smartest insects on the planet. And that’s just one of ’em. Put forty thousand together, and they’re equal to our own intelligence. And mind you, some Dorylus supercolonies have clocked in at more than fifty million ants. Can you imagine? All led by a queen who can live to be thirty years old, longer than any other insect. So don’t underestimate them.”
Charlotte suddenly wished she had never approached the biologist.
“Until this army moves on,” Frey warned as she began to leave, “expect a lot of bite injuries. Besides being smart, driver ants have nasty tempers, along with the armament to go with it. Those jaws are as tough as steel and sharp as razors. When on the march, they’ve been known to consume everything in their path, even killing and stripping the flesh off of tethered horses. Or dogs trapped in houses. Sometimes infants, too.”
She swallowed queasily. Like we need more problems here. “How long until they’re gone?”
Frey frowned, setting his fists on his hips. He watched the lines flowing from the river through the camp. “That’s the strange thing. Behavior like this is unusual. Typically, driver ants avoid areas of commotion like this camp, preferring to stick to the shadows of the jungle.” He shrugged. “But this flooding is certainly atypical. Maybe that’s what’s made them extra aggressive. Regardless, they should eventually calm down and move on.”
“I hope you’re right.”
He nodded, still watching the spreading mass with a worried pinch of his face. “Me, too.”
11:02 A.M.
Charlotte flashed her penlight across the eyes of the three-month-old baby. The boy rested in his concerned mother’s arms. He held a thumb in his mouth but didn’t suck on it. He sat quietly, his back unusually stiff and straight. He pupils were dilated and only responded minimally to the light. Except for his breathing, he looked like a waxen doll. His skin had a feverish sheen, but his temperature was normal.
“What do you think?” Charlotte asked without turning.
Cort Jameson stood at her shoulder. She had called the American pediatrician over for a consultation. They had gathered behind a thin privacy curtain, set off from the main ward and its crowded cots.
“I saw a similar case yesterday,” Jameson said. “A teenage girl. Her father said she had stopped speaking and would barely move unless prodded. She presented with swollen lymph nodes and a rash across her belly. Like this lad. I thought it might be late-stage trypanosomiasis.”
“Sleeping sickness,” she muttered, considering his potential diagnosis. The disease was caused by a protozoan parasite transmitted by the bite of the tsetse fly. Early signs of sickness included swollen glands, rashes, headaches, and muscle soreness. Later on, if untreated, the or ganism attacked the central nervous system and led to slurred speech and a sluggish difficulty in walking.
“What happened to the girl?” Charlotte asked.