Free Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller by Bobby Adair

goggles,
gloves, rubber boots, and a plastic apron.
    “I’m Dr. Dante Giovanni. I sent the girl to
wake you.”
    “Thank you for coming, Doctor.”
    “You’re an imbecile.” Dr. Giovanni sounded
like a father who’d lost all his patience with a child who didn’t
want to learn. “You are going to kill everyone in this town.”
    Dr. Littlefield’s immediate impulse was to
lash back, but he didn’t have the energy for it. Too many
twenty-hour days had worn all the fight out of him.
    “I’ve only been here a half hour, and I can
already see this is Ebola—or maybe Marburg—if you’re lucky. And
what have you done? Your nurses wear plastic aprons they’ve been
reusing for days. They clean the aprons in a common bucket instead
of burning them. They are not protected from this outbreak. You’re
going to kill them and yourself. You don’t have a
containment area. You let people walk out of the hospital and into
the street, carrying the virus with them. You’ve made this whole
town a hot zone. How can you be a doctor in this country and not
have the good sense to take the proper steps to contain this?”
    Dr. Giovanni was on the edge of the porch by
then, Littlefield having backed down a few steps in the face of the
scolding.
    But Giovanni’s rebuke found a quick end.
“Have you nothing to say for yourself?”
    “Yes. Are you ready to listen?” Littlefield
replied.
    “Of course.” It sounded like a platitude.
    “I’ll skip right over the part where I tell
you I’ve been on the radio, and you’re the first person to show
up.” Littlefield retreated down the last few steps and put himself
on level ground. The Italian could come down and talk to him
face-to-face.
    Dr. Giovanni proceeded down the steps and
took up a position on the dirt road in front of Littlefield,
towering over him anyway. “I came to investigate as fast as I
could.”
    “When were you told to come?” Littlefield was
not impressed, and his tone made that very clear.
    “Yesterday morning?”
    “Why so long?”
    “West Africa.” That was the simple answer,
and both Littlefield and Giovanni knew that. West Africa was
experiencing the largest Ebola outbreak in history, and it was
accelerating. “Whoever is not there is running around the rest of
Africa chasing rumors of more outbreaks. Most of them are just
fear.”
    Littlefield nodded to the hospital. “But this
one isn’t, is it?”
    “No. But if you know it’s Ebola, why haven’t
you taken the steps to contain the disease?”
    Dr. Littlefield laughed harshly. “It’s so
easy to judge, isn’t it?”
    Dr. Giovanni took a moment to pull himself
back from the edge of losing his temper. “Tell me, then. What
happened here?”
    “As far as containment goes, well, you can
see the outbreak is bad. It’s already everywhere in the town.”
    “When did it start?”
    Littlefield did some mental math. “People
started showing up with symptoms a week ago.”
    Dr. Giovanni asked, “How many?”
    “A lot more than there should have been for a
normal outbreak. Nearly two dozen that first day.” The fog of
missed sleep clouded his memory.
    “Twenty-four?”
    “Yes.” Littlefield looked down, nodding for
emphasis. “Twice that number, the next. On the third day, when I
started pleading for help, we had around a hundred. That is a lot
for a town this size.”
    “And you’re the only doctor?”
    Littlefield gestured down the street. “This
is not a large town. Even so, maybe a hundred thousand live in the
district. There are two other small clinics in the area, but this
is the only one that passes for a hospital. There were two
of us, but Dr. Ruhindi is inside. He fainted last night. He has the
virus, and can’t even stand now. Two of our nurses went to Sierra
Leone two months ago to help. Some of the college students teaching
at the free school volunteered to help. All but one is sick. We
have Nurse Mary-Margaret and a couple of girls from the town who
help us.”
    “When did