No Immunity

inaudible.
    She shook out her mask, a plastic apparatus akin to a tent covering face and neck, pulled it and the gloves on, opened the fridge door, and hauled out the gurney. The dead woman lay ashen and half draped on the cold metal.
    Unwillingly, Kiernan stepped back against the support of the wall. She wapped her arms around her ribs as if that could ward off the chill she felt. Ashes to ashes. Cold ashes when the fire is dead.
    She clasped her arms tighter, but the shaking wouldn’t stop. The cold. She pushed the gurney back in the (ridge, stepped into the hall, and ripped off her gear. She hadn’t felt like this in five years.
    The dead woman was nothing like Hope Mkema. The dead woman looked Hispanic; Hope had been African. Here the winter air seemed to float in currents of its own will, circling legs, icing neck, licking her spine. When she had stood over Hope’s body five years ago, in the brick-and-tin hospital in Takema, the West African focal point of the Lassa fever epidemic, her shirt had stuck clammily to her back and sweat rolled so relentlessly down her forehead, she’d given up attempts to wipe it away. Hope Mkema’s skin had been a vibrant brown. She had had huge elfin eyes, high cheekbones in a heart-shaped face, and a wide smile so engaging people smiled back before words were spoken.
    The first time Kiernan saw her was at the clearing that served as an airport for the brave. Hope was laughing then. “I understand you are here in spite of the Church. Perhaps I will take your place in Catholic heaven.”
    “Not too soon, I hope,” Kiernan had said.
    “I’d better not. My country can’t afford to lose one of its women doctors. We’re a rare, if not delicate commodity.” Her cadence suggested schooling in England . It was only later that Kiernan learned how much the village, her family, and Hope herself had mortgaged for her to become a doctor.
    Still smiling, Hope had led her to a vehicle that had been rebuilt so often, it was no longer recognizable as a specific make of car. “I won’t ask how many hours you’ve been in transit from India . When you wake up, we’ll talk about that.” She hadn’t asked and Kiernan hadn’t told her why an American doctor who had been fired from the coroner’s office in northern California had gone to India nearly two years earlier, or what she had done before she volunteered at a clinic run by nuns in Maharashta. Or why, when word came of the need for doctors in the Lassa fever epidemic, she had volunteered to fly to West Africa . That day she had been too tired to formulate any answers, and later was thankful not to have to corral her muddled emotions into a manageable line of thought. And even now, years later, she couldn’t have said exactly what drove her toward a project on which three of the ten workers had died. Perhaps after two years of wandering in a strange country trying to banish memories of a life that was no longer possible, the idea of doing something vital, all-encompassing, was worth the chance 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