“Many. No one buries them anymore. Everyone is too frightened.”
One of the young men whispered something urgent to Bambang.
“He says they have prayed for you, boss. They sees you at the gate and they pray to Allah that you are a doctor who come to save them. They says you answer their prayer.”
Henry knew how little he could do for them now. They were inside a hot zone and everyone was contaminated. He noticed a small backhoe in the back of the camp, apparently the only concession the authorities had made to the epidemic—a way to swiftly dig trenches for mass graves. Henry wondered where the gravedigger was.
The machete man led him through the muddy pathways, Henry using his cane to steady his footing. Bambang walked behind, holding the umbrella to little effect. The squalid camp had been thrown together whimsically, using cardboard and plastic bags and strips of canvas as building materials. Some of the roofs were tiled with crushed soda cans. A duck on a leash floated in a puddle beside a hut. Set apart from the hovels was a blue Médecins Sans Frontières tent, with the MSF symbol emblazoned on the side.
Henry cautiously pulled back the rain flap. The stench of death was nauseating.
“You go now,” Henry said.
Bambang’s eyes were filled with horror by what he had seen, but he gamely stammered, “I protect you.”
“No. I’m fine. But listen to me. Don’t touch anything. Wash yourself, you understand? It will take some time for me to do my work. Wait for me outside.” He asked again, “Do you understand? Don’t touch anything!”
Bambang froze for a moment. Henry could see how frightened he was, and yet he offered the umbrella to Henry. “You take it,” Henry ordered. “Now go.”
Henry looked sternly at the men surrounding the tent, and they respectfully backed away, disappearing in the veil of rain.
Henry had long since grown accustomed to the perfume of decay. Most of the dozen beds in the infirmary were occupied by corpses. One patient tracked Henry with his eyes, too weak to do more. Henry glanced at the chart at the foot of his bed, and then put a fresh bag of glucose in the IV drip, the only useful thing he could do. The death rattle in his throat indicated that the patient would soon be quiet.
Three dead doctors lay in oddly contorted positions in the small clinic. They were like so many of the MSF people Henry had met around the world—young, not long out of residency. Henry understood the courage it took to face an invisible enemy. Brave men and women who rushed into battle would flee from the onset of disease. Disease was more powerful than armies. Disease was more arbitrary than terrorism. Disease was crueler than human imagination. And yet young people like these doctors were willing to stand in the way of the most fatal force that nature has to offer.
But now they, too, were dead.
Henry lit a kerosene lantern, illuminating the face of a female doctor whose head was resting in a pool of dried blood on the examining table. Henry surmised that she was African or Haitian; many black doctors were enlisting in the medical corps. But then he realized that her face wasn’t black. It was blue.
Henry had seen cyanosis before. It was normally caused by low oxygenation of the blood. Usually it manifested either in the lips and tongue or the fingers and toes. He had never seen anyone so completely blue. Cholera, he thought, the blue death. It made sense. Poor sanitation in the camp, God knows where the water came from. But anyone in the field knew how to treat cholera, and surely the doctors had been vaccinated. He glanced into a field cabinet, which contained a handful of elementary diagnostic equipment: a stethoscope, digital thermometers, bandages, a blood pressure cuff, a speculum, an otoscope set—the ready-to-go setup for a small nonsurgical team treating a localized infection for a week or so. The medicines were locked in a heavy box with a thick plexiglass door. Insulin, heparin, Lasix, albuterol, Cipro, Z-Paks, but mainly what Henry saw were antiretrovirals.
They were doctors, obviously, not laboratorians. They had nothing to work with in the way of analytic equipment. Instead, there were posters and brochures about safe sexual practices. Apparently the team had intended to do a quick survey of the outbreak, treat as many HIV patients as possible