with the antiretrovirals, and educate the detainees. They certainly hadn’t packed for a long trip. There was a small pantry with cereal and a desiccated croissant. He glanced in the garbage, which had a number of discarded bottles of tetracycline. The doctors must have had the same thought, that it was cholera.
In a laptop on a bench behind him he found a folder of case histories by Dr. Françoise Champey, presumably the young woman lying dead before him. Henry saw that she kept scrupulous patient records. There was also a lengthy unsent email, addressed to Luc Barré, chief of MSF in Paris. Henry’s French was good enough to make it out. “Luc, Luc, we need your help!” she began.
We are in a hot zone like you’ve never seen before! Already in one week we have dozens of infections in this pesthole. I sent you samples through the locals. Did you receive them? What are we dealing with here, we have no idea!
The lethality is extreme. We need equipment! We need pathologists! We cannot fight this, just three of us. Luc, I am frightened.
Below that, she wrote:
SHIT! Why can’t this send? There is no internet, no phone, and I think they have made us prisoners.
After that, she must have kept the email open as an ongoing testament, ready to send at the first opportunity. Henry scrolled down to the last entry:
19 March, entering our third week. Pablo died yesterday. My heart is breaking for his family, and when will they know that they lost him? Dear man. Antoine and I are both ill. We lie here beside our dead comrade. I feel so close to them. I have never loved anyone so much as these dead and dying men. I am thankful for this feeling, this intimacy. But I am also angry. We have been defeated by this monster, as I think of her. Yes, a monster. A creature we cannot see because we don’t have the tools to peer into the cells, so she hides from us, laughing at us, and now killing us. Why did
The email ended there, its question unfinished, unsent, and unanswered.
3
Fernbank
Each spring, when she taught her unit on dinosaurs, Jill took her kindergarten class on a field trip to Fernbank, Atlanta’s natural history museum. The children were always wound up when they got off the bus, but the sight of an Argentinosaurus, the largest dinosaur ever classified, quickly subdued them. The five-year-olds looked like mice in comparison.
“He weighed over a hundred tons and measures more than a hundred and twenty feet long,” Jill explained. “Can anybody guess how many school buses long that would be?”
“A hundred!” one of the boys shouted.
“Seventy-six!” another said.
“Three,” K’Neisha guessed, in little more than a whisper.
Jill cast an amused glance at K’Neisha’s mother, Vicky, who was helping out on the field trip, one of the few parents she could count on when she needed extra hands. “How did you know that?”
“I just figured that a bus is about forty feet long,” K’Neisha said.
K’Neisha wore a blue skirt, penny loafers, and a Frozen T-shirt. All of Jill’s students were on free or reduced-price lunch, but it was easy to tell which ones, like K’Neisha, had family support. Jill tried not to have special pets, but she loved K’Neisha’s smile and her shy intelligence. She was one of those children Jill wanted to know for the rest of her life, to see how she turned out.
“Look at T. rex!” a boy named Roberto said, pointing to the dinosaur skeleton just behind the Argentinosaurus. “He’s gonna eat the other one!”
“Actually, that’s a Giganotosaurus,” Jill said. “He’s even bigger than a tyrannosaur.”
“Giganotosaurus!” the children exclaimed, loving the name. Some of them hopped in excitement as they stared up at the mysterious, fleshless creature. The empty eye sockets were both menacing and amusing, like jack-o’-lanterns.
“Everybody thinks it was just the dinosaurs, but five times in the history of the earth most of its living creatures were made extinct,” Jill said. “Darren, keep your hands to yourself.”
Jill had conducted this trip many times, but she still loved seeing the enchantment of the children, the wonder in their eyes. When they got back to class they would make clay dinosaur models and bake them in the oven. Dinosaurs were her favorite fail-safe unit.
They entered another room with a visiting exhibition titled “Mammoths—Giants of the Ice Age.” A model of the great beast stood in the center of the room, its tusks stretching out four feet in front of