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She stopped in the doorway. "I know," she said.
"God bless you for it," said Cole.
Two days later, Mingo's fever broke, and it seemed likely that Babe and Drew were also about to make it over the hump and start the slow recovery. They were still as weak as babies.
Meanwhile, Arty and Benny were now in the full crisis of fever, and so was Cole. So were most of the soldiers on the base, since they had been infected at nearly the same time.
Cecily couldn't believe that some of the caregivers complained about how many resources the soldiers were using up. "We came here for the Nigerians, not to take care of soldiers," one man said. "We're not camp followers."
Cecily didn't answer him as she wanted to. She merely waited for a few beats of silence, in which everyone else seemed a little embarrassed for him; or perhaps they were all expecting her response to be harsh.
Instead she merely said, "They're sick, they're children of God, and they're here," she said. "You aren't on the base rotation, are you?"
The man admitted he was not.
"Then it doesn't affect you," she said.
"There are thousands of people out there that we haven't gotten to yet," insisted the man, perhaps not realizing how every word stabbed her to the heart. "And they'll die without our reaching them because this base is taking up so many of our people."
"Those people out in the city," said Cecily, managing to keep her voice calm, "have families, most of them, and they're taking care of one another. We're all these men and women in uniform have. I hope you don't think that because they volunteered to serve their country in uniform, they are somehow undeserving of God's love and our help."
That was as close as she came to rebuking him, but he wasn't a complete fool—he understood what she was saying and he kept his thoughts to himself from then on, at least around her.
In the city, by necessity the dead were being taken to mass graves, and though the burial squads made some effort to keep a record of the names, many bodies were picked up from the street with no way of finding out the names. On the base, however, the soldiers were all known, all placed in body bags and carried to a tent at the edge of campus. The Navy sent choppers and soldiers in hazmat suits to carry them back to the ships for blood samples, then flew them back to the States to be sealed in coffins and returned to their families. That was where Cat's body went, along with the other American soldiers who died in the first wave.
By now they had enough soldiers who had passed the fever stage to have some idea of what kind of difference the care they were getting would make. Four were dead, and twenty-nine had passed through the fever and seemed likely to recover. If they did in fact get well, then it looked like there might be a twelve percent mortality rate. That was a vast improvement over the death rate when people didn't get this treatment. Even though it was only preliminary, Cecily wrote to the President that he could safely call the caregiving operation a success, and every effort should be made to get the word out, worldwide, about the treatments they were using. It could save lives in African countries where the nictovirus was just entering. And everywhere else, if the quarantine failed.
If this epidemic did spread beyond Africa, and most people were able to get decent care from their families and medications from their governments or health care systems, the treatment they had devised—based on Aunt Margaret's interpretation of Chinma's account of the disease—might well save a billion and a half lives, or more.
It was two days after Cat died that the talk radio host showed up in the military plane. Cecily had been warned that he was coming, but she assumed he would watch the offloading of supplies and the loading up of bodies, maybe talk to a couple of caregivers—the ones who had the time to talk to him, which meant the least effective or experienced ones—and then he'd go home.
But he didn't. Instead, he showed up with a microphone in his hand and a recorder in a shoulder bag and accosted her as she was leaving a house where she had helped a family deal with a child who had just started bleeding.
He started to introduce himself. "Hi, I'm Rusty Humphries from Talk Radio Network, and—"
His smile, his glibness, they made her angry, and she walked past him, saying, "I know who you are."
Doggedly he pursued her along the street.
"Everyone back at the University of Calabar said that you were in charge."
"They were wrong," she said.
He kept following. She walked faster. So did he. She couldn't go any faster without running, so apparently she was going to have to be rude. She stopped and faced him. "Look, Mr. Humphries."
He held the mike up to her mouth.
She pulled it out of his hand and dropped it on the ground.
"Hey," he said. "That's a fifteen-hundred-dollar microphone."
"What we're doing here isn't about ratings or selling airtime or whipping people up into a frenzy," she said.
"I know what you're really here for," said Humphries.
Oh, he was going to go speculating about her motive, was he? "And what is that?"
"You're here because you believe these are children of God and you have a responsibility to help them."
