SANDRA OKU CUT HER engine and stared numbly through the windshield of her truck at what lay on the north side of the road. Many of them were still breathing, making deep wheezing sounds in the bright, breezeless afternoon. An eerie, out-of-tune chorus. Soybean and cassava farmers. Field workers. Families. Children clinging to parents. Elderly men and women lying beside one another. Dozens of them. No, hundreds. On her long journey to the edge of the village, Dr. Oku had stopped frequently to tend to victims who lay in the fields and alongside the road. Most of their eyes were closed, but some watched as she neared and called to her in weak, raspy voices. “Help me, please.” All along the road, the same muted request: “Help me, please.” Too weak to sound urgent. Just a simple plea. It was no good, though, and Sandra Oku had finally stopped trying. She had stopped even looking at them because she knew there was nothing she could do.
So was this it? she wondered again. The “ill wind?”
Staring into the distance beyond the village huts and chicken pens, she noticed an occasional glimmer, which she began to recognize as sunlight reflecting off handlebars. A figure on a bicycle was riding toward her in the late-afternoon light. A boy.
“Miss Sandra, Miss Sandra!” the shirtless boy shouted as he reached the road, letting his bicycle go.
It was Marcus Bkobe, whose family lived alone, far off in the farm fields, and whose uncle was the village’s only minister. He must have recognized her truck.
“Help! Back there!” he said. “You have to help!”
“Yes, okay,” she said, mechanically now, watching his face, which was streaked with tears and sweat. A large wet spot had dried on the front of his shorts. As if I could, she thought.
“My father. He won’t wake up. My uncle—” The boy saw the bodies in the field across the road and his eyes widened, before going to hers. “They can’t— They— They can’t make him get up, they can’t make him get up!”
“It’s okay,” she said, touching his head and turning him so he couldn’t see. She felt the moisture of his face on her belly.
“He told me to tell you.” He looked quickly at the field of bodies, then back at her. “It happened last night.”
“What did?”
“He heard it. My uncle. He heard the engines.”
“The engines.”
“Yes.”
Sandra Oku looked toward the sky, then at the gentle slopes of the western mountains where green forestland was being cleared by controlled fires. “What are you saying? What did your uncle mean?”
But the boy was too frightened, his eyes darting among the bodies, his face sweating. Instead of answering, he began to cry.
Dr. Oku reached into the back seat of her truck for a mask and the bottle of medicine. “Come on, let’s go see. Take this,” she said, giving him a pill. “Then I’m going to drive to the hospital and see what’s going on.”
The boy climbed in. She started the truck and shifted into gear. As they came to another group of farmer men crumpled beside the road, the boy, sitting on his knees to look, became hysterical. “No, no! They can’t! No, please, don’t! Help us!” he shouted, hitting his fists on the dashboard.
Sandra Oku drove faster along the two-lane road. Then slowed, seeing something in front of them. Accelerated, and slowed again. Ahead, what she had thought were optical illusions—late sunlight on the soil—were not tricks of the eye, after all. They were more people—farmers who had collapsed beside the road, trying to reach someone who could help. A winding ribbon of bodies.
“Shh,” she said, as the boy sobbed. “They’re just sleeping. Put your head down and don’t look. It’s going to be okay.”
But it wasn’t. This was like nothing she had ever seen. Too quick, too efficient, to outrun. Dr. Oku drove two-tenths of a kilometer farther and braked again, and she thought of the dream she had gone to sleep with the night before. Michael, the man she had planned to visit. What will he think when he hears of this?
Five people—a family—lay across the road in front of them, blocking the way. Two of the children were curled in fetal positions, another had been clinging to her mother, who was the only one still breathing. It was the Ndukas, a family of sorghum farmers who came to the clinic every few weeks for check-ups and antibiotics. She parked and stepped out of the truck. Looked back in the direction they had come, listening to the eerie sound of people struggling for breath, a sound that reminded her of crickets—a ragged chorus of death rasps across the sprawl of farm fields.
What was this? Superficially, at least, she knew: The symptoms resembled acute pulmonary edema—airborne viral particles had entered the victims’ bodies through their respiratory tracts, lodged in the lungs, and multiplied rapidly in the moist tissues there, filling their lungs with fluid until the victims literally drowned. The only frame of reference she had for it was the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, which spread mysteriously around the world for a year and a half, killing some forty million people, probably more, most of them within four or five days of catching the virus.
But this was different. These people had gone to bed with no symptoms. Could a much deadlier mutation have somehow occurred? It was possible, she knew, though hardly likely—most viruses were well-adapted to their environments and didn’t suddenly change milieus like this.
Sandra Oku walked back to her truck, where the boy was sleeping now, his head against the passenger door. She climbed into the driver’s seat and sat there, listening to the strange chorus of death rattles, stroking the boy’s moist head and looking toward the verdant western mountains, wondering, How far? How far has this gone?
And then, watching the sky, she began to think something else, as if her thoughts had turned away from all of this to a different reality: her cousin, Paul Bahdru, and the message he had left for her. She was starting at last to recognize what he meant. Paul had come to visit her six days earlier, on a pleasant, rain-cooled afternoon. They had sat on the deck behind her clinic, talking, drinking rooibos tea. He was traveling under an assumed name, he said. Driving a twelve-year-old car that he had just bought in the capital. En route to the airport and a meeting in another city. His story sounded a little fantastic to her, although many things about her cousin had seemed that way, particularly since his wife’s murder. He was investigating a network of business and investment interests in Sundiata, he said, in particular a well-funded, government-sanctioned medical research project. He was going to meet with a man called Frederick Collins. He didn’t say much about that, but as they drank their tea on the porch, watching giant black birds perched in the trees, he had told her other things. Things that he seemed to want her to remember—and which she did, now, with a sudden clarity: “There is a deadly force trying to push this way, and then north, like an ill wind. If it happens, it will happen very quickly. I hope that it doesn’t, but I will warn you when I know the details. If it does, you should be prepared to leave this village.”
“But how could I?” she had said and smiled at him, thinking of her patients and of Michael and their plans for after the rainy season. “These people depend on me.”
There was a reason he couldn’t tell her more just then. But he had said he would contact her again and send her a message. Three days ago, it had happened. She had received his instructions and the box of medicine. She stared now through the wiper-streaked windshield and stroked the boy’s head again. Is this what Paul meant? How could he have known?
Dr. Oku closed her eyes. Death could be very peaceful, she realized, listening to the ragged rasp of human breaths, the sound of death on a cool late afternoon in West Africa.