Authors: Daniel Kalla
Pandemic (13 page)
Samira put her iron down. "So?"
"In eight years, I've never known Kabaal to take a vacation," Eleish said. "The man is a workaholic."
Samira eyed her husband for several seconds. "There's something else, isn't there, Achmed?"
"I make it my business to know whenever Kabaal leaves the country," he confessed sheepishly. "And I hadn't heard about him going anywhere."
Samira's lips broke into a smile that Eleish recognized as part admiration and part exasperation. "What do you intend to do, Achmed?"
Eleish shrugged. "Find out where he is."
She stared at him without comment.
Eleish folded the paper and put it down on the couch beside him. "Miri, I have been a detective my whole life. It's all I know. And it's the only thing I've ever been good at."
"Come, now." Samira's brown eyes twinkled. "You're a pretty good father, and not so bad a husband."
Eleish smiled, but when he spoke his tone was serious. "I have a feeling that Hazzir Kabaal is up to something. Something bad. I cannot tell you why, but you know my hunches are rarely wrong."
The smile left Samira's lips. She nodded. "Go find out where he is and what he's up to. But, Achmed..." Her voice trailed off.
"Yes?" Eleish said.
"Never forget what happened the first time you crossed his path. Our girls need their father. And I do not want to be a widow." Her face creased and her eyes bore into his. "Achmed Eleish, you be careful with this man."
HARGEYSA, SOMALIAThough she had to rise in a few more hours, Khalila Jahal was no closer to sleep than she had been the rest of the night Even more than her apprehension about her looming predawn viral inoculation, the continuous soft sobs of her neighbor kept sleep at bay for Jahal.
Unlike the men's section of the complex, which was an open dorm, curtains partitioned the women's side into rooms so small that the women had to sit on their beds to finish dressing. More than twenty women stayed at the complex. Khalila had been given the spot next to Sharifa Sha'rawi. In Cairo Jahal and Sha'rawi hardly spoke, but their friendship blossomed in the Somali wasteland. Khalila had naturally assumed the role of a protective big sister to her emotionally fragile neighbor with the round face and wild, black curly locks.
When Sharifa's weeping showed no sign of abating, Khalila slipped out of her bed and peeled back the curtain separating their rooms. She knelt down by her friend's bed. "Sharifa?" she asked gently.
"Oh, Khalila, I am sorry." Sha'rawi sniffed, but then broke into an even louder cry.
Khalila reached out and squeezed Sharifa's arm. "May I lie with you?" she asked.
Sharifa nodded her assent, and Khalila climbed onto the bed. Though neither woman was particularly large, the wooden cot was so narrow that they had to lie on their sides to both fit. Even snuggled against Sharifa's back, Jahal could feel the rough edge of wood digging into her buttock and shoulder. And she felt the dampness on her cheek from where Sharifa's tears had wet the sheets. "What is it?" Jahal asked.
"You are going, tomorrow," Sha'rawi sobbed.
"It is time."
"How come you are not more frightened?" Sha'rawi asked.
"I am." Jahal rubbed the other woman's shoulder, thankful for the human contact. "But what can I do? It is what God has chosen for me."
"But it is men who have chosen this for you," Sha'rawi said. Then she grabbed Jahal's hand on her shoulder. "I didn't mean that!" she said fearfully. "You know, it's just that sometimes--"
"I know, Sharifa." Jahal reassured Sha'rawi with a squeeze of her shoulder. "Sometimes men are fools." She paused, then added in a quieter voice, "And sometimes they are hateful and very dangerous."
Sha'rawi giggled nervously.
"But not Abu Lahab," Jahal continued. "Sheikh Hassan explained it to me. Abu Lahab is fighting the only way he can to preserve our faith."
"But you, Khalila." Sha'rawi sniffed again. "It is such a waste ..."
"It is our duty--our honor--to serve God." She paused. "Zamil would agree. I know it."
Sha'rawi looked over her shoulder. Though Jahal couldn't see the other woman's face in the near darkness, she could feel and smell her warm, garlicky breath. "I should go in your place, Khalila," she said earnestly.
Khalila stroked Sharifa's cheek, feeling the slight pocks of old acne scars. "I want to do this," Khalila said.
"But, Khalila, you are so beautiful and intelligent," Sha'rawi said and her voice cracked. "I am the slow orphan girl that no man would marry. I have no husband or children to live for."
"Hush, Sharifa. I don't like to hear you talk this way," Jahal removed her hand from the girl's cheek. "Women do not need to live for men or children. You are very special. You serve God here." Then she spoke in a near whisper. "Besides, my husband is dead."
"Please, Khalila, tell me more about Zamil," Sha'rawi said.
Jahal shook her head slowly.
"Is it too painful?" Sha'rawi asked.
Jahal shrugged, but pain had nothing to do with it. Every waking moment she carried the pain of his loss like a knife in her side, but she had decided not to discuss the memories of their perfect life together with anyone else. She had learned that protecting the privacy of those memories helped maintain their lingering sense of intimacy.
Sha'rawi groped for Jahal's hand and squeezed it tight. "I had no right to ask--"
"Zamil never wanted to go to Afghanistan, but he felt duty bound," Jahal said calmly. "He was a scholar not a fighter." She had a vivid mental picture of her scrawny, beautiful husband packing up his heavy books to drag to a dark cave in the middle of a war. "The night he crossed the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan, I found out I was pregnant"
Only when Jahal heard Sha'rawi's sobs did she realize that tears had begun to run down her own cheeks. "Ten days later, I miscarried," Jahal said slowly. "Everyone wondered why I mourned so hard for a baby I had only carried for weeks, but I knew."
"Knew what?"
"It was a sign." Khalila said. "A week later I heard Zamil had been killed by an American bomb that destroyed his cave on the same day I lost my baby." Her voice went hoarse. "The very same day"
Sha'rawi squeezed her hand even tighter but said nothing.
"I accepted the Fate God had chosen for me," Jahal said, feeling the resolve cement inside her. "I vowed to make myself useful. To commit the way Zamil had. Then Sheikh Hassan introduced me to Abu Lahab. And now here I am beside you."
Sha'rawi sniffed several times. "But you will leave in the morning. And without you ..."
"Listen to me, Sharifa." Jahal let go of her friend's hand and placed her hand on Sharifa's cheek again. "You will be fine without me. Abu Lahab will take care of you."
Sha'rawi swallowed. "I will miss you so much."
"As I will miss you." Jahal tapped the woman lightly on her cheek. "Sharifa, I want you to promise me something."
"What?"
"That you will stay away from the Major."
"Major Sabri? Why?"
"He is not like the rest of us." She paused. "He is no fool but ..."
"But?"
"Remember what I said about some men?" Jahal asked.
Sha'rawi nodded. "That they are full of hate?"
"And very dangerous," Jahal said wistfully. "Just like the Major."
CHAPTER 11
COMMUNIST PARTY HEADQUARTERS, JIAYUGUAN CITYLike everything else he had seen from the Cultural Revolution era, the box of a boardroom struck Noah Haldane as austere. He decided that if the bank of windows lining the wall behind him were even half the size of the dour black-and-white portraits of the Party functionaries hanging on the other walls, the room might have come across as a little less oppressive.
Noah sat between Duncan McLeod and Milly Yuen at the large, rectangular board table. Helmut Streicher sat on the other side of the table beside the city's chief health officer, Yung Se Choy. A blueprint-sized, detailed map of Jiayuguan City covered the tabletop in front of them. In his late forties and skinny to the point of swimming in his navy-blue suit, Yung Choy had a mop of thick hair and a wispy mustache that failed to hide the scar of a repaired cleft lip. Dr. Kai Huang, the regional hospital's young director, sat on the far side of Choy and fidgeted distractedly with his pen. Both Choy and Huang spoke passable English, but Milly Yuen filled in as translator where necessary.
Streicher ran a finger over the map. "Here," he barked in his crisp Germanic accent. "All known cases of viral transmission have occurred among people living in these zones in red." He pointed to the north corner of the city, where several blocks had been circled in red. "And the blue lines represent the buffer zone," he said of the single blue rectangle that enclosed all the red zones plus a buffer of several city blocks.
"Fucking great, Streicher!" McLeod hollered. "No doubt all those potential Typhoid Marys knew better than to walk past the little red and blue lines."
Streicher adjusted the Lennon-style round eyeglasses, which highlighted his striking blue-gray eyes. "You understand, Dr. McLeod, about sectorizing outbreaks, no?" he asked with a hint of condescension. He circled the red zones with a finger. "There have been no confirmed cases outside of these. Correct, Mr. Choy?"
Choy nodded vigorously.
Streicher pointed at the blue line. "As of yesterday, the local authorities have quarantined this entire zone within the blue."
"Quarantine, of course," McLeod said. "I remember the wonderful quarantine in Toronto during SARS. Suspected cases were told to stay at home and wear masks, but some of them went to work anyway."
The health officer shook his head. "No one leaves," Choy said emphatically. "Army guards against it."
"Lord love a repressive dictatorship during an epidemic!" McLeod said. "Makes our job so much easier."
Streicher nodded as if McLeod were serious. "The quarantine should contain the spread within the city. The incubation period is estimated at three to five days. We will know in seventy-two to ninety-six hours whether there has been spread beyond the blue."
"When was the first case seen in Jiayuguan City?" Haldane asked.
"Five days ago," Choy squeaked in a high-pitched voice.
"And how many cases so far?"
Dr. Huang spoke to Yuen in Mandarin. "Seventy confirmed, forty-five suspected, and twenty-six dead," she translated for him.
"Five days and less than two hundred cases," Haldane thought aloud. "With the short incubation period, I would have expected greater spread by now. It's a safe bet that this virus does not exhibit airborne spread."
Even after the translation, Choy stared blankly at Haldane. With Yuen acting as the go-between, Haldane explained. "For all infections, there are three routes of potential spread. First, direct contact. HIV or Hepatitis B are examples of viruses requiring intimate contact. Second is droplet spread like with the common cold or flu. When an infected person sneezes or coughs, large mucous droplets carry the virus from person to person. However, these droplets are relatively big and fall to the ground quickly so you need close and immediate contact. The final and most feared route of spread is airborne. Smallpox and measles are viral examples. By coughing or sneezing, people aerosolize tiny particles. These particles can linger in the air for hours or spread remotely via ventilation systems and so on. It means that people can be infected without direct contact to a contagious person."
"Ja,"
agreed Streicher. "Airborne spread is an epidemiological catastrophe. But this ARCS looks only to have droplet spread."
agreed Streicher. "Airborne spread is an epidemiological catastrophe. But this ARCS looks only to have droplet spread."
Eyes wide, Choy asked in English, "This is very good?"
"Bloody marvelous," McLeod said. "As it stands, we might not die for weeks."
Haldane glanced sidelong at his colleague. "Not helping, Duncan."
Milly Yuen held up a hand tentatively. "I have something to report."
"Please, Milly ..." Haldane held out his palm.
"I heard from the WHO Influenza Surveillance Lab in Hong Kong an hour ago," she said quietly. "They've isolated the virus in the serum samples."
Two hands on the table, McLeod pushed himself up out of his seat. "Don't keep us hanging, Milly!"
"As we assumed, this virus is closely related to influenza," Yuen said.
Haldane folded his arm across his chest. "But it's not influenza?"
Yuen shrugged so imperceptibly that her shoulders barely flickered. "It is a subtype, but it is not influenza A or B."
"What other kinds of influenza are there?" Streicher asked.
Kai Huang dropped the pen and looked up at the others. "The Spanish Flu," he said in English.
Haldane shook his head. "I wondered about that, too, but I don't think this is the Spanish Flu. At least, not the exact same virus that caused the 1918 pandemic."
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