Blood Virus

PROLOGUE

The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a dead man.

—Revelation 16:3

The infant clung to his mother, his tiny body riddled with insect bites. The two lay in a swampy area near the shoreline of Lake Nokoué. The sweltering West African sun belted its rays onto their unsheltered forms. The woman had tried to protect her son by covering him with her body. Her once-beautiful ebony skin was dry and caked with blisters. Blood, now congealed, had erupted from her nose, mouth, ears, and eyes. Dark bruises covered her body where massive bleeding had taken place under the skin. Rivers of black diarrhea pooled on her bright yellow skirt, saturating the ever-thirsty, dry soil. Adding further insult to her person, engorged flies indulged on the meal of blood and feces.

The distressed cry of the infant rang through the still air, shrill with anxiety and pain, yet he could not wake his mother—she had been dead since dawn. The still-nursing baby was now encased in a tomb of decaying flesh, defenseless and helpless. The child continued to cry out in sharp, piercing tones as the morning progressed. The chilling sounds didn’t disturb the black-and-white vultures who were feeding on his father nearby. He’d never made it out of their wooden boat when they’d left their stilt village on the lake two days before. One of the birds had just plucked out an eye; another began picking at the man’s bloated belly. Its pointed talons and beak ripped into the body with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. Several more of the scavengers landed and tore into a mass of blood and bone that was now almost unrecognizable as a human. They squabbled and fought for dominance to determine who would feast first.

The baby was now whimpering. He was hungry and sick with the disease that had claimed both of his parents. His township was close by, but no one could come to his aid, for he was the only one left out of thirty thousand residents. All of them were dead or dying.

Death was imminent for the infant too, and just before the sun set, the baby’s breath became labored; terrible gasping sounds emanated from his tiny chest until he breathed his last. In the morning, he too would become a meal for the scavengers.