Viral Read Free

pulled on a sleeveless night dress and unlatched the door, pointing her flashlight at the ground. The eyes of Mrs. Makere, a farmer’s wife who lived across the dirt fields to the southeast, met hers with pleading urgency. Dew still glistened on the ground and in the baobab trees in the moonlight.
    “What is it?”
    “He won’t wake up. Nothing will wake him.”
    “Your husband?”
    “Yes. Please.”
    “Okay. Let’s go see.”
    Dr. Oku grabbed her bag and walked barefoot into the cool morning to her pick-up truck. It turned over after a reluctant whir-whir-whir sound. They rode together in silence, nearly a kilometer across the open plain to a cluster of mud homes where the Makeres and other farm workers lived—the route Nancy Makere must have just walked.
    Like the others, theirs was a small, square-ish, mud-brick house, reinforced with sticks and cardboard and plastic bags. A pink light hung in the sky above the rusted tin roof as they arrived. The breeze smelled of wood smoke.
    Joseph Makere, a large, gray-bearded man known to work ten or eleven hours a day harvesting soybeans this time of year, was asleep on a mattress in a corner room, as his wife had said. An open window faced the lorry route and the small produce stand Nancy Makere ran.
    “There,” she said.
    The two women watched him, inhaling and exhaling beneath a white sheet, as if struggling for air, his eyes closed. It was an eerie sound, one Sandra Oku had heard once years before—the sound of a man about to drown in his own lung fluids.
    Dr. Oku pulled a surgical mask over her face. She knelt and touched his chest, and then felt his pulse, noticed a small, dried trickle of blood extending from each nostril. Hearing a cough, she turned; one of the Makeres’ four children was standing beside Nancy now, her face glistening with a thin film of sweat.
    “Where are the others?”
    Nancy Makere’s eyes pointed. “In there,” she said.
    Dr. Oku followed her into the other bedroom. She set down her bag. The three boys were sleeping, unclothed, on a thin mattress, two on their backs, the other on his right side, breathing with the same deep raspy sound as their father.
    She knelt beside them and gently shook the shoulders of one, and another. She opened the lids of the oldest boy and saw that his eyes were bright with fever.
    “Have they been ill?” Dr. Oku asked, taking the boy’s pulse. “What sort of symptoms have they had?”
    “None. Last night, when they went to sleep, they were fine. We’ve been trying to wake them for—” She looked at the battery clock on a shelf by her bed. “More than fifty minutes.”
    “Okay. Help me carry them to the truck. I’ll need to bring them into the clinic. They’re contagious and are going to need to be quarantined.”
    “Quarantined,” she repeated, a frightened look flickering in her eyes. Nancy Makere stood still, watching Dr. Oku. “And then what?”
    “Then we’ll see. I don’t know yet. We’ll give them oxygen and antibiotics and see what we can do. Help me now, please.”
    The two women bundled Joseph Makere in the sheet and dragged him to the back of the truck. One at a time, then, they carried the boys, laying them on the threadbare mattress that Dr. Oku kept in the truck-bed for transporting patients. As they rode silently across the field back to the clinic, the first crescent of sun appeared above the familiar distant mountains, silhouetting random trees on the plain.
    At the clinic, Sandra Oku lay the four patients on cots and began to administer oxygen to them one at a time, monitoring their vital signs. It quickly became clear that there was nothing she could do to wake them. At 7:22, Joseph Makere stopped breathing. The youngest boy died twenty-three minutes later.
    About an hour before the third boy stopped breathing, a station wagon arrived from the south village fields with seven passengers, four men and three women. Normally they would be in the maize and cassava fields by now.