No Immunity

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 got back with the vital cargo. She had mouthed the words carefully, sure then that she didn’t have a fever, was merely suffering from the extreme heat. “The old woman is sick all right. But we can’t use our only dose of ribavirin for me when we don’t know—”
    “Kiernan, we have no choice.” Jeff was already filling the hypodermic. “We don’t use this, you may die. We wait, you may die.”
    “There are people in these wards we know have Lassa—”
    “Look, this isn’t a political issue, it’s a practical one. If we let our outside volunteer doctors die, we’re not going to get more doctors. Then plenty of local people are going to die because there are no doctors to care for them, no epidemiologists to trace their viruses, no hope of stopping the next epidemic before it spreads all along the trade route.”
    “But—”
    “It’s not your decision, Kiernan. It’s mine.”
    She remembered Jeff Tremaine’s face, neither sympathetic nor angry, merely exhausted. It was Hope Mkema, beside him, who had offered her wide smile, a hand on Kiernan’s arm that reminded her she was still part of the team. Hope administered the shot. Kiernan let her eyes close and relaxed her vigil against the repugnant thought she had kept at bay for forty-eight hours: Even if there was only one dose of ribavirin, she wanted it. She had thought she was willing to die. But death had wrapped itself closer than her skin for two days and now it was all she could do to keep her terror at bay. The next day she lay too feverish to speak, her throat so raw each breath rasped flesh against flesh. And a week later, when her fever broke and she recovered enough to recognize people, she learned she had had an extreme fever that could have killed her, but it had not been Lassa. What saved her she never knew, but it had not been the ribavirin.
    She realized they had exhausted the entire supply of ribavirin for her when she saw Hope