My Soul to Take by Tananarive Due

sip of stale, warm Coke Zero, which had kept her awake for two days straight. They needed fresh eyes—even if those eyes were two weeks late. Maybe two weeks
too
late. And he had the nerve to scold her for bringing in outside help? Waiting for the next reports of infection kept them all awake at night.
    Where the hell have you been, Dawit?
She hoped he knew what she was thinking.
    “It’s bad,” Alex told Dawit, the point she’d been trying to make in her email reports and sat-phone calls since the first reports fromNorth Korea. The cold brick that had lodged at the rim of Alex’s lower belly since her first visit to North Korea had resurfaced in Puerto Rico and bloated her stomach in Nigeria. She wasn’t a hypochondriac, but it was hard not to wonder if she’d caught the bug. Alex injected herself with Lucas’s blood once a day, to be sure.
    “The mortality rate was nearly a hundred percent after contact,” Alex said. “The only survivors were out of the village during the forty-eight-hour outbreak period, or had no contact with the infected. Two hundred dead, but no new reports of the infection in three days.”
    Alex checked Dawit’s face for signs. Anything. He was only nodding as if she’d been reciting ingredients from a recipe book. Yes, yes, go on. Alex knew in her heart that Dawit loved Jessica and Fana—he might think he loved her, too—but he was still The Brother from Another Planet. Dawit’s eyes were only mirror panes. How hadn’t Jessica seen it before she married him?
    Moses walked forward, pointing out the photograph of the pretty young woman who was barely more than a child. “We think the teacher was patient zero in this outbreak,” Moses said.
    “Gabrielle,” Jared corrected, hoarse. There hadn’t been any time to console Jared in his private nightmare.
    “Yes, Gabrielle,” Moses said, apologetic. “She knew the man who ran the school. He was in Jos visiting family the day she arrived, but they spoke by phone. She said she’d had a terrible stomachache for an entire day and would try to make it to the school. She lived alone, and none of her neighbors have tested for the infection. Or reported significant illness.”
    “Were there reports of illness at the village before her arrival?” Dawit asked.
    “Coughs and sniffles, not the stomachaches—as far as we know,” Alex said. “But there were only sixty-three survivors. Most of the stories died in that village.”
    She checked Dawit’s face again. Another impassive nod. Death didn’t bother him.
    Moses went on. “Gabrielle was only at the school for an hour—she called her boss and said she was going to a student’s house torest. That night, the host family also complained of sudden stomachaches. A teenage victim sent an email to a relative in Lagos at eight-thirty. Another student, a neighbor, also complained of stomach pain in a telephone call by midnight. By morning, apparently, dozens in their families were ill. And neighbors. There were emails the next day about a ‘stomach flu.’ By the next morning, the entire village was dead.”
    “Might as well have been a bomb,” Alex said.
    “So here’s the part we really don’t like …” Lucas said. “Seventy-five people died in North Korea, isolated to a village. But only
six
people died in Puerto Rico a month later—even though there were two carriers, not one. And there’s no Asian link to Gabrielle. It just …”
    “Appears out of the sky,” Moses finished matter-of-factly.
    “Like brushfires,” Alex said. “We don’t know what’s starting the flares. And we don’t know what’s putting them out.”
    “But it’s the deadliest SOB on record,” Lucas said. “It spreads faster than anything we can compare it to. Much more virulent than Ebola. SARS. Dengue fever. Lassa fever.”
    Finally—a hint of alarm on Dawit’s face.
    “The bug that wipes us out will look a lot like this one, Dawit,” Alex said.
    Dawit blinked, seeming to agree. “How has