Read No Immunity for Free Online

in that needle prick is Lassa,” Kiernan had insisted when he got back with the vital cargo. She had mouthed the words carefully, sure then that she didn’t have a fever, was merely suffering from the extreme heat. “The old woman is sick all right. But we can’t use our only dose of ribavirin for me when we don’t know—”
    “Kiernan, we have no choice.” Jeff was already filling the hypodermic. “We don’t use this, you may die. We wait, you may die.”
    “There are people in these wards we know have Lassa—”
    “Look, this isn’t a political issue, it’s a practical one. If we let our outside volunteer doctors die, we’re not going to get more doctors. Then plenty of local people are going to die because there are no doctors to care for them, no epidemiologists to trace their viruses, no hope of stopping the next epidemic before it spreads all along the trade route.”
    “But—”
    “It’s not your decision, Kiernan. It’s mine.”
    She remembered Jeff Tremaine’s face, neither sympathetic nor angry, merely exhausted. It was Hope Mkema, beside him, who had offered her wide smile, a hand on Kiernan’s arm that reminded her she was still part of the team. Hope administered the shot. Kiernan let her eyes close and relaxed her vigil against the repugnant thought she had kept at bay for forty-eight hours: Even if there was only one dose of ribavirin, she wanted it. She had thought she was willing to die. But death had wrapped itself closer than her skin for two days and now it was all she could do to keep her terror at bay. The next day she lay too feverish to speak, her throat so raw each breath rasped flesh against flesh. And a week later, when her fever broke and she recovered enough to recognize people, she learned she had had an extreme fever that could have killed her, but it had not been Lassa. What saved her she never knew, but it had not been the ribavirin.
    She realized they had exhausted the entire supply of ribavirin for her when she saw Hope Mkema. Hope was dying in the next room.
    A nurse helped her to the foot of Hope’s bed. She stood staring in disbelief at the fever sweat that glistened on Hope’s skin, the blood that oozed so thickly, it turned her eyes to red patches. The pervasive moaning cut through the lines of educated and illiterate, doctors and patients, and reduced all sufferers to one. Hope’s wavering cry carried away the white coat of protection “Doctor” had promised. The sound flowed from her lips, and it took with it all that she was or had been.
    “It is not safe for you here,” the nurse had said, moving her away from Hope Mkema’s bed. “You are still weak.”
    No one told her when Hope died. But she heard outside in the town, a dull tapping on metal and wood, thudding from a thousand hands, wood against rough metal.
    Hope Mkema’s family, her neighbors and friends, hadn’t blamed Kiernan, nor had they objected when a plane arrived unscheduled, allowing her to be airlifted out. She was too weak to travel alone, and it was Jeff Tremaine who was assigned to accompany her, as it turned out not merely to the coast but on a connecting flight back to Bombay .
    And it was Jeff who told her that the dreams and fortune of the area had died with Hope Mkema when she was denied the ribavirin Kiernan hadn’t needed. Odd, she had thought when she woke from exhausted sleep at intervals during the days of travel, what a personal affront death is to Westerners. If Jeff Tremaine could have sued God, he would have. Instead he turned his own guilt on her, and she made no move to deflect it. By the time he left her in a bare-bones hotel in Bombay , she knew that it was time to leave India and go home.
    She would have answered this call of his out of gratitude, but she was sure he wouldn’t understand that. He had expected her to come out of repentance.
    But she had come out of dread.

CHAPTER 8

    Dr. Louisa Larson had made only one faux pas: Grady Hummacher’s hoys.
    She