The drive to the first cave took less than two hours, and the four men in the SUV mostly rode in silence. Millen and Kito discussed the map and the caves a little, but the two Kenyan army officers in the front seats merely gazed out the windows, scanning for any signs of trouble.
Millen was excited. To some degree, he had been training for this day his entire life. He was the son of Indian immigrants to America, and they had encouraged him to explore all his affinities as a child. He had gone through a number of phases, everything from music to dance. But he had always come back to his first love: animals. He was awestruck with the diversity and complexity of the creatures that shared the world with humans. He loved how unpredictable they were, how each species seemed to have a special ability. Seeing a new animal, interacting with it, never got old.
He was especially interested in exotic animals and their habitats. He read everything he could about them and watched animal documentaries repeatedly. He considered a career at a zoo, but decided he wanted to work with animals in their natural environments. He also wanted to do something that made a big impact, not just on animals, but on humans as well.
When he graduated from veterinary school, his parents strongly urged him to become a practicing veterinarian—a career with a reliable income, a return on the considerable investment they had made in his education. But their strong-willed son won out. Instead of opening his own practice, he joined EIS, committing to a career in applied epidemiology. It was the perfect path for Millen. He would have the opportunity to travel the country and world, investigating outbreaks, seeking out animal hosts for infections that jumped to humans. He assured his parents that he could always go into veterinary practice if things didn’t work out.
They had relented, and as he donned the PPE and looked into the mouth of the cave, he had never been more glad that they had. He was about to perform what might be one of the most important investigations of his career.
Kito wished Millen luck, and he began his march inside, a sample kit at his side. The dried, yellowing snake skins lying just beyond the mouth of the cave unnerved him, but he pushed on. The suit would provide good protection.
With each step, the dark cave swallowed him up. When the darkness was complete, he switched on his night vision goggles, bathing the scene before him in an eerie green glow. Kito pinged him with a comm check every minute, and Millen responded each time.
At the ten-minute mark, the transmission began breaking up. Millen had been dropping green chemlights each minute, but at the radio blackout point he sealed the bag of green sticks and began dropping orange markers. The tubes glowed in the dark cave, green and orange breadcrumbs tracing his path. They were military-grade, with a twelve-hour duration. He planned on collecting them on his way out, long before they went dark.
As he moved deeper into the cave, the ground became more rocky and damp. Ten seconds after dropping his twentieth orange marker, he spotted what he had come for: bat droppings.
He bent and took several samples, marking them with their depth within the cave, and placed a numbered blue marker and flag by the sample spot.
Excited to have collected his first sample, he stepped deeper into the cave, leaving the sample kit behind. He held a tranquilizer pistol in his right hand and a large net in his left. He felt his boots slipping on the wet rock, but he pushed forward. The bats had to be close by. If they were the carrier for the mysterious disease, it would be a huge breakthrough, possibly the key to finding the index patient, or even a cure. It would blow the entire investigation wide open, saving thousands, maybe millions of lives. He walked even faster.
As he turned a corner, his left foot slipped on a wet rock, sending him tumbling. The gun and net flew from his hands as he slammed into the rocky floor. The fall frightened him, but he was unharmed. He rose and searched for the gun.
Bat screeches—a sound somewhere between the call of a crow and the yelping of a rodent—sounded from not far away, followed by flapping noises.
He turned in time to see a swarm of bats barreling toward him.
The creatures enveloped him. He threw his arms up, covering his faceplate, and stepped to the side, trying to move out of their flight path. He felt claws ripping at the PPE, the bony wings brushing past his arms and legs. He turned and ran, his head down. Rock crumbled beneath his feet. He slipped and fell, but there was no ground beneath him.
Chapter 32
A yellow spot burned through the white tent fabric above Peyton, like a heat lamp boring into her. She squinted, wondering what it could be. Then she realized: the midday sun, high in the sky. She sat up quickly, reached for her phone, and gasped when she saw the time. Eleven thirty.
Jonas’s cot was empty. She raced to the main tent.
Jonas and Hannah sat at a table, a large map pinned up on a board behind them. There was a lot more red on the map than there had been yesterday.
“Report,” she said, trying to catch her breath.
“Want some breakfast?” Jonas asked, ignoring her order.
“I want to know what’s happening.”
Jonas glanced at Hannah, who stood and left. “I think you’d better sit down, Peyton.”
“That bad?”
“Pretty bad.”
Jonas brought Peyton up to speed on the reports from the teams in the field. Fifteen more villages were infected. Including the fatalities from the Dadaab refugee camps, the death toll had climbed to over six thousand.
Peyton shook her head. “It’s impossible.”
“What?”
“Let’s assume Dr. Kibet was infected around the time the two Americans walked into his clinic.”
“Okay.”
“He broke with the disease within seventy-two hours.”
“Right.”
“But he never had the respiratory symptoms. His progression to the hemorrhagic stage of the disease was too fast—much faster than this village.”
“True,” Jonas said.
“Why?”