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They answered the emails, as best they could—there wasn’t a lot to say, and they were still in shock from the fight at the airport, and the fires. Hawkins said, “Do you think…never mind.”
“No, what?”
“Never mind, stupid thought.”
Letty started reading newspapers and spent time staring at headlines without seeing them. Hawkins went out to a series of photo blogs—he was a photo enthusiast and found he couldn’t focus on the latest Leica Q camera, which he lusted after. Letty went out to a comics site and read comic strips:The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Big Nate, Non Sequitur, Pearls Before Swine, Luann, Doonesbury.An hour later, she couldn’t remember them, and read them again.
The parish priest came by, dressed in jeans, Nikes, and a Molly Tuttle tee-shirt. He tried to reassure them about the disease, and though he seemed like a good man, neither Letty nor Hawkins were interested in what God’s hands might do for them.
That was how it went; hours dragging. Lucas had warned of the Black Hole of Calcutta, but it wasn’t that.
There was a high stress level, but even so, it was all boring.
“Do you find it odd that we can’t even amuse ourselves for a half-day, without going stir-crazy?” Hawkins asked.
“I’m too stir-crazy to respond to that,” Letty said. “What I’d like to do is lie down.”
Hawkins shrugged: “There’s room. Lots of people are lying down in their pews. So lie down.”
“I would sorta like you to be lying on top of me.”
“We may have to wait a few hours for that,” Hawkins said. “If Underwood comes through with his promise of a suite in the school…”
—
At six o’clocka man in an isolation suit came through the door with a bullhorn and said, “David Underwood here, folks. We’re ready to start moving people over to the school. We don’t have enough individual rooms for everybody, so some people will have to share rooms. Plenty of food, every room has a television, and there’ll be a big screen in the cafeteria…”
—
Letty and Hawkinswalked across the parking lot with the rest of the crowd, looked out to what amounted to prison fencing surrounding the parking lot. Two dozen prison-style lights stood on metal posts outside the fence, illuminating the parking lot so harshly they couldn’t look at each other’s faces without squinting.
At the school, they visited the cafeteria, ate again, and found their teacher’s prep room. They had it better than most of the others, whohad to share two communal bathrooms, while they had their own small bathroom with a toilet and a generous sink. They also had two thick and comfortable foam mattresses, and blankets. They pushed the mattresses together, made love twice, and eventually went to sleep.
At five o’clock in the morning they heard a fuss in the hallways and got up to see what had happened. Outside, they found several people in isolation suits, talking to a man and a woman. A child, they found, had begun running a fever and had developed a headache.
One of the confined men, standing next to Letty and Hawkins, said, “It’s begun. God help us, it’s begun.”
—
And it had.The toddler was still upright, but, said another observer, she was getting sicker, and quickly. They watched for a while, then went back to bed, but neither of them could sleep.
At nine o’clock, Letty called Lucas and Greet and told them about the sick child. Neither had much to say. Lucas seemed almost unable to speak; like he didn’t want to hear about it.
During the day, a half-dozen more people began getting sick. They were moved to classrooms that had been transformed into medical wards. Letty and Hawkins felt fine; they got jobs moving equipment and furniture that might puncture isolation suits.
One of the docs told them that they hadn’t yet seen measles outbreaks—the disease specialists thought that might take another week. But the Marburg loads were beginning to express themselves.
Letty and Hawkins worked through the first five days, doing what they could as more and more people fell ill, until the church and school—they were free to move between them, and the church wasattracting people who needed to pray—began to feel almost empty. There was much weeping, and some shouted arguments, a near fistfight between two women broken up by Hawkins and another man.
The school began to feel and smell fetid, as the inside atmosphere had thickened with intestinal gas: the victims were experiencing runaway diarrhea, and the medical people were torn between recommending high-energy food for people not yet affected, or abstention from foods to reduce the effects of the gastric upsets.
On the sixth day, Letty began to feel weak, and the weakness came on quickly. Hawkins began to go down an hour later; they were the last two, except for a medical worker who’d accidentally stuck herself with a contaminated needle while drawing blood from one of the victims. Before Hawkins started down, he helped push Letty, on a gurney, to one of the four classrooms now being used as hospital wards, three for women, one for men, because most of the churchgoers had been female.
The ward smelled so putrid that Hawkins began retching, and after containing the impulse, saw Letty settled into a bed. The medics directed him back out, so they could put her in a diaper. He kissed her before he went, put his hand on her heart and said, “I’ll see you on the other side of this…”
Outside, he began vomiting into a trash container’s burn bag, and a few hours later, when he could no longer stand, was taken to the men’s ward.
—
