Millen tried to imagine what the request was like for them. They had seen their family and friends die in a matter of days, and were left all alone. Now they were being asked to travel to a foreign land, where they’d be subjects in medical experiments—guinea pigs to find a cure. It must be terrifying, he thought.

Halima turned to Millen. “You are sure you’ll find a cure?”

“No. I’m not sure. But there’s a chance. I can’t promise you anything, but you three may be the key to saving a lot of people’s lives.”

“We will be free to come back here—you will return us when you are done?”

“You have my word.”

“We will come with you, Doctor.”

“Call me Millen.”

It was midday when Millen and the villagers arrived in Mandera. The Japanese SUV creaked on the red dusty road, and the four of them stared at the deserted town in silence. Mandera was a chilling shell of the place Millen had seen just days before.

When the team had first arrived, kids had interrupted their soccer games as the convoy passed, or rushed to the streets to get a glimpse of the visitors. Villagers carting produce and herding livestock had clogged the thoroughfare. Now there was not a soul in sight. The buildings, both new and ramshackle, lay empty. To Millen, it felt like a ghost town from America’s West—an African version of Dodge City. A boom town gone bust. But a different kind of boom had gone off in Mandera: a biological bomb, perhaps more deadly than any the world had ever witnessed before.

Millen expected the city’s, and possibly the region’s, last survivors to be concentrated at the hospital. But he found the tent complex empty and disheveled. Someone had raided every thing of use. The food, and every last medical supply box, was gone. Some water remained, likely because it was too heavy to carry.

“We’ll run out of food before the transport gets here,” Millen said. “The soldiers only left me a little.”

“We’ll search the town,” Halima said. “We’ve become good at scavenging.”

Millen got the PPE out of the back of the truck and began donning it.

Halima pointed at the hospital. “You’re going in there?”

“Yeah. It’s my job.”

The halls of the hospital were lined with empty buckets, bottles, and boxes that had once held medical supplies. The debris was stacked in tumbling heaps, with only a narrow walkway between them, like a mountain pass had been carved in the piles of used medical waste. Millen stepped carefully through the halls, mindful not to snag the suit or step on a needle. A mistake could be deadly.