Amazonia (45 page)

"I help." He struck a fist on his chest. "I strong." He nudged her aside and took her end of the stretcher.

She was too weak to object, too winded to mumble a thanks.

As Kelly stepped aside, the two men now continued upward, moving faster. Kelly kept pace beside the stretcher. Frank was so pale, his breathing shallow. Relieved of the burden, Kelly's full attention focused back on her brother. She pulled out her stethoscope and listened to his chest. His heartbeat thudded dully, his lungs crackled with rales. His body was rapidly giving out, heading into hypovolemic shock. The hemorrhaging had to be stopped.

Focused on her brother's condition, she failed to notice that they'd reached the tunnel's end. The spiraling passage terminated abruptly at an opening that looked identical to the archway at the base of the giant tree. But instead of leading back into the morning sunshine, this archway led into a cavernous structure with a saucer-shaped floor.

Kelly gaped at the interior, again lit by rough-hewn
slits high up the curved walls. The space, spherical in shape, had to be thirty yards across, a titanic bubble in the wood, half protruding out of the main trunk.

"It's like a massive gall," Kouwe said, referring to the woody protuberances sometimes found on oaks or other trees, created by insects or other parasitic conditions.

Kelly appreciated the comparison. But it wasn't insects that inhabited this gall. Around the curved walls, woven hammocks hung from pegs, a dozen at least. In a few, naked tribesmen lay sprawled. Others of the Ban-ali worked around them. The handful of prone men and women were showing various signs of illness: a bandaged foot, a splinted arm, a fevered brow. She watched a tribesman with a long gash across his chest wince as a thick pasty substance was applied to his wound by another of his tribe.

Kelly understood immediately what she was seeing.

A hospital ward
.

The tiny-framed tribesman who had ordered them here stood a few paces away. His look was sour with impatience. He pointed to one of the hammocks and spoke rapidly in a foreign tongue.

Their guide answered with a nod and led them to the proper hammock.

Professor Kouwe mumbled as they walked. "If I'm not mistaken, that's a dialect of Yanomamo."

Kelly glanced over to him, hearing the shock in the professor's voice.

He explained the significance. "The Yanomamo language has no known counterparts. Their speech patterns and tonal structures are unique unto themselves. A true lingual isolate. It's one of the reasons the Yanomamo are considered one of the oldest Amazonian bloodlines." His eyes were wide upon the men and women in the woody chamber. "The Ban-ali must be an offshoot, a lost tribe of the Yanomamo."

Kelly merely nodded, too full of worry to appreciate the professor's observation. Her attention remained focused on her brother.

Overseen by the tiny Indian, the stretcher was lowered, and Frank was transferred onto the hammock. Kelly hovered nervously at his side. Jarred by the movement, Frank moaned slightly, eyes fluttering. His sedatives must be wearing off.

Kelly reached down to her med pack atop the abandoned stretcher. Before she could gather up her syringe and bottles of morphine, the tiny healer barked orders to his staff. Their guide and another tribesman began to loosen the bandages over Frank's stumps with small bone knives.

"Don't!" Kelly said, straightening.

She was ignored. They continued to work upon the soaked strips. Blood began to flow more thickly.

She moved to the hammock, grabbing the taller man's elbow. "No! You don't know what you're doing. Wait until I have the pressure wraps ready! An IV in place! He'll bleed to death!"

The stronger man broke out of her grasp and scowled at her.

Kouwe intervened. He pointed at Kelly. "She's our
healer
."

The tribesman seemed baffled by this statement and glanced to his own shaman.

The smaller Indian was crouched by the curved wall at the head of the hammock. He had a bowl in his hand, gathering a flow of thick sap from a trough gouged in the wall. "I am healer here," the small man said. "This is Ban-ali medicine. To stop the bleeding. Strong medicine from the
yagga
."

Kelly glanced to Kouwe.

He deciphered. "
Yagga
...it's similar to
yakka
...a Yanomamo word for mother."

Kouwe stared around at the chamber. "
Yagga
must be their name for this tree. A deity."

The Indian shaman straightened with his bowl, now half full of the reddish sap. Reaching up, he stoppered the thick flow by jamming a wooden peg into a hole at the top of the trough. "Strong medicines," he repeated, lifting the bowl and striding to the hammock. "The blood of the Yagga will stop the blood of the man." It sounded like a rote maxim, a translation of an old adage.

He motioned for the tribesman to cut away one of the two bandages.

Kelly opened her mouth again to object, but Kouwe interrupted her with a squeeze on her arm. "Gather your bandage material and LRS bag," he whispered to her. "Be ready, but for the moment, let's see what this medicine can do."

She bit back her protest, remembering the small Indian girl at the hospital of Sao Gabriel and how Western medicine had failed her. For the moment, she would yield to the Ban-ali, trusting not the strange little shaman, but rather Professor Kouwe himself. She dropped to her medical pack and burrowed into it, reaching with deft fingers for her wraps and saline bag.

As Kelly retrieved what she needed, her eyes flicked over to the nearby sap channel.
The blood of the Yagga
. The tapped vein could be seen as a dark ribbon in the hon-eyed wood, extending up from the top of the trough and arching across the roof. Kelly spotted other such veins, each dark vessel leading to one of the other hammocks.

With her bandages in hand, she stood as her brother's bloodied wrap was ripped away. Unprepared, still a sister, not a doctor, Kelly grew faint at the sight: the sharp shard of white bone, the rip of shredded muscle, the gelatinous bruise of ruined flesh. A thick flow of dark blood and clots washed from the raw wound and dribbled through the hammock's webbing.

Kelly suddenly found it difficult to breathe. Sounds grew muted and more acute at the same time. Her vision narrowed upon the limp figure in the bed.
It wasn't Frank,
her mind kept trying to convince her. But another part of her knew the truth. Her brother was doomed. Tears filled her eyes, and a moan rose in her throat, choking her.

Kouwe put his arm around her shoulders, reacting to her distress, pulling her to him.

"Oh, God...please..." Kelly sobbed.

Oblivious to her outburst, the Ban-ali shaman examined the amputated limb with a determined frown. Then he scooped up a handful of the thick red sap, the color of port wine, and slathered it over the stump.

The reaction was immediate--and violent. Frank's leg jerked up and away as if struck by an electric current. He cried out, even through his stupor, an animal sound.

Kelly stumbled toward him, out of the professor's arms. "Frank!"

The shaman glanced toward her. He mumbled something in his native language and backed away, allowing her to come forward.

She reached her brother, grabbing for his arm. But Frank's outburst had been as short as it was sudden. He relaxed back into the hammock. Kelly was sure he was dead. She leaned over him, sobbing openly.

But his lungs heaved up and down, in deep, shuddering breaths.

She fell to her knees in relief. His limb, exposed, stood stark and raw before her. She eyed the wound, expecting the worst, ready with the bandages.

But they proved unnecessary.

Where the sap had touched the macerated flesh, it had formed a thick seal. Wide-eyed, she reached and touched the strange substance. It was no longer sticky, but leathery
and tough, like some type of natural bandage. She glanced to the shaman with awe. The bleeding had stopped, sealed tight.

"The Yagga has found him worthy," the shaman said. "He will heal."

Stunned, Kelly stood as the shaman carried his bowl toward the other limb and began to repeat the miracle. "I can't believe it," she finally said, her voice as small as a mouse.

Kouwe took her under his arm again. "I know fifteen different plant species with hemostatic properties, but nothing of this caliber."

Frank's body jerked again as the second leg was treated.

Afterward, the shaman studied his handiwork for a few moments, then turned to them. "The Yagga will protect him from here," he said solemnly.

"Thank you," Kelly said.

The small tribesman glanced back to her brother. "He is now Ban-ali. One of the Chosen."

Kelly frowned.

The shaman continued, "He must now serve the Yagga in all ways, for all times." With these words, he turned away--but not before adding something in his native tongue, something spoken in a dire, threatening tone.

As he left, Kelly turned to Kouwe, her eyes questioning.

The professor shook his head. "I recognized only one word--
ban-yi
."

"What does that mean?"

Kouwe glanced over to Frank. "Slave."

And how many more in the coming days?
Lauren recalled the epidemiologist's computer model and its stain of red spreading over the United States. She had heard cases were already being reported in Canada, too. Even two children in Germany, who had been vacationing in Florida.

Now she was realizing that Dr. Alvisio's grim model may have been too conservative in its predictions. Just this morning, Lauren had heard rumors about new cases in Brazil, cases now appearing in healthy adults. These patients were not presenting fevers, like the children, but
were instead showing outbreaks of ravaging malignancies and cancers, like those seen in Gerald Clark's body. Lauren already had researchers checking into it.

But right now, she had other concerns.

She sat in a chair beside Jessie's bed. Her grandchild was watching some children's program piped into the video monitor in the room. But no smile ever moved her lips, no laugh. The girl watched it like an automaton, her eyes glassy, her hair plastered to her head from fevered sweat.

There was so little comfort Lauren could offer. The touch of the plastic containment suit was cold and impersonal. All she could do was maintain her post beside the girl, let her know she wasn't alone, let her see a familiar face. But she was not Jessie's mother. Every time the door to the ward swished open, Jessie would turn to see who it was, her eyes momentarily hopeful, then fading to disappointment. Just another nurse or a doctor. Never her mother.

Even Lauren found herself frequently glancing to the door, praying for Marshall to return with some word on Kelly and Frank. Down in the Amazon, the Brazilian evacuation helicopter had left from the Wauwai field base hours ago. Surely the rescuers would've reached the stranded team by now. Surely Kelly was already flying back here.

But so far, no word.

The waiting was growing interminable.

In the bed, Jessie scratched at the tape securing her catheter.

"Hon, leave it be," Lauren said, moving the girl's hand away.

Jessie sighed, sinking back into her pillows. "Where's Mommy?" she asked for the thousandth time that day. "I want Mommy."

"She's coming, hon. But South America is a long way away. Why don't you try to take a nap?"

Jessie frowned. "My mouth hurts."

Lauren reached to the table and lifted a cup with a straw toward the girl, juice with an analgesic in it. "Sip this. It'll make the ouchie go away." Already the girl's mouth had begun to erupt with fever blisters, raw ulcerations along the mucocutaneous margins of her lips. Their appearance was one of the distinct symptoms of the disease. There could now be no denying that Jessie had the plague.

The girl sipped at the cup, her face scrunching sourly, then sat back. "It tastes funny. It's not like Mommy makes."

"I know, honey, but it'll make you feel better."

"Tastes funny..." Jessie mumbled again, eyes drifting back to the video screen.

The two sat quietly. Somewhere down the row of beds, one of the children began to sob. In the background, the repetitious jingle of the dancing bear sounded tinny through her suit.

How many more?
Lauren wondered.
How many more would grow sick? How many more would die?

The sigh of a broken pressure seal sounded behind her. Lauren turned as the ward door swished open. A bulky figure in a quarantine suit bowed into the room, carrying his oxygen line. He turned, and through the plastic face shield, Lauren recognized her husband.

She was instantly on her feet. "Marshall..."

He waved her down and crossed to the wall to snap in his oxygen line to one of the air bibs. Once done, he strode to the girl's bedside.