“We will come with you, Doctor.”
“Call me Millen.”
It was midday when Millen and the villagers arrived in Mandera. The Japanese SUV creaked on the red dusty road, and the four of them stared at the deserted town in silence. Mandera was a chilling shell of the place Millen had seen just days before.
When the team had first arrived, kids had interrupted their soccer games as the convoy passed, or rushed to the streets to get a glimpse of the visitors. Villagers carting produce and herding livestock had clogged the thoroughfare. Now there was not a soul in sight. The buildings, both new and ramshackle, lay empty. To Millen, it felt like a ghost town from America’s West—an African version of Dodge City. A boom town gone bust. But a different kind of boom had gone off in Mandera: a biological bomb, perhaps more deadly than any the world had ever witnessed before.
Millen expected the city’s, and possibly the region’s, last survivors to be concentrated at the hospital. But he found the tent complex empty and disheveled. Someone had raided every thing of use. The food, and every last medical supply box, was gone. Some water remained, likely because it was too heavy to carry.
“We’ll run out of food before the transport gets here,” Millen said. “The soldiers only left me a little.”
“We’ll search the town,” Halima said. “We’ve become good at scavenging.”
Millen got the PPE out of the back of the truck and began donning it.
Halima pointed at the hospital. “You’re going in there?”
“Yeah. It’s my job.”
The halls of the hospital were lined with empty buckets, bottles, and boxes that had once held medical supplies. The debris was stacked in tumbling heaps, with only a narrow walkway between them, like a mountain pass had been carved in the piles of used medical waste. Millen stepped carefully through the halls, mindful not to snag the suit or step on a needle. A mistake could be deadly.
In the large open room where Hannah had taken the samples, he found rows of dead bodies. Some held wooden crosses at their chests, their eyes closed. Others stared upward, glassy-eyed, at ceilings fans that sat idle. At the back of the room, body bags were stacked against the wall, a black plastic staircase of human death that led nowhere. Flies swarmed.
There were no unopened or unused medical supplies. No uneaten MREs. The room told the story of a medical mission slowly losing its battle against disease. They had bagged and burned the bodies for as long as they could, then had focused on the ones they hoped would survive. And then they had pulled out.
Millen was certain he would find no survivors here. Or food.
He wandered the halls after that, peering into the patient rooms, being thorough, looking for any clues or observations he could take back to Atlanta. He found only dead bodies, all with the same hemorrhaging, jaundiced eyes, and signs of severe dehydration.
Suddenly, he heard a rustling. Just down the hall from him, boxes fell to the floor. He raced toward the noise, moving as fast as he could in the bulky suit. At an open doorway, he peered in.
Empty.
Something darted from beneath a rolling cart. It dashed toward him, between his legs, and out into the hall.
Millen stepped back and turned quickly. A bat-eared fox. The sight of the animal filled him with excitement. He’d read about them before the deployment, but had never seen one. He would have loved to have seen it up close. The small fox fed mostly on termites and other insects—spiders, ants, and millipedes in particular—but also occasionally ate fungi or small animals. They hunted not by sight or smell, but sound, their large ears helping them locate even the smallest insects on the sprawling savannas of Africa. They were mostly monogamous, and the male, not the female, took the lead with caring for their young.
Another bat-eared fox emerged from the room, followed by another. That made sense; they were highly social animals that typically hunted in packs.
Behind him, Millen heard a door creak open. To his shock, an African man stood there, leaning against the door frame. He was weak, barely alive. But for the first time since Millen had entered the hospital, a living set of human eyes stared back at him.
The survivor tried to take a step, but his legs were unsteady. Millen was at his side in seconds, offering his hand to steady the man.
“I’m Millen Thomas. With the CDC.”
The middle-aged African surveyed Millen’s face through the suit’s helmet. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Elim Kibet.”
Millen knew the name. “You’re the physician in charge here.”
Elim smiled weakly. “Was the physician in charge here. I’m just a patient now.”
“I think you might be the last one.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Let’s get you back to bed,” Millen said.
“No. Thank you, but I need to walk. My fever broke this morning. And I’ve been in that room too long. In bed too long. I need to use my muscles before I lose them.”
For the next thirty minutes, Millen helped Elim pace around the hospital. The older physician looked into the patient rooms as they passed. At the large open room, he paused for a long time, his bloodshot eyes filling with water.