The Flare

1. WHO Compound, Kinshasa

July, 2003

Oliver Allen checked on his cultures in the morning, before he packed up his bag. The compound was empty, so when he walked along the halls between the stations of his former colleagues he left dust prints on the tile floors. Inside the lab it was very dark, there were no windows and no sunlight sneaked in, but he held a candle between his fingers that he lit up as he walked in. The light was dim, but it was enough for him to see the two petri dishes he had set up in the shelves of what was once a state of the art facility. He checked each dish, and then very slowly proceeded to pour their contents into individual crystal vials. Two vials was all he had. He would've been able to make more, but it would have taken him far longer. Three months alone was long enough. One more day and he was sure he would've lost his mind.

Weeds had taken over the pathways and he found it hard to open the gate on his way out - roots had grown between the hinges. He swung his bag over his shoulder and pulled his hat over his face. He took a few steps forward, and then turned back. The WHO compound was a humble building, and after months of abandon it looked even humbler. The white-washed walls were yellowed, and the flowering bougainvilleas had taken over the roof and both neighbouring trees like a giant purple carpet. It looked pretty, in a lost civilisation sort of way. He turned again, and shook his head. He was leaving his previous life behind in that compound, and all that was left of his co-workers - he couldn't bring himself to call them friends. Most had died before he had managed to turn his cultures into a viable cure. The rest had left, and he didn't know what had become of them.

He kept walking forwards, past the gate and the parking area, and once he was out in the streets of Kinshasa, he did not look back again.

He had a good amount of supplies - he had medicine, rain gear, water filters, and enough food for a week, so the first thing he looted was a bicycle. It was old and its red paint was rusted, but both its tyres were inflated and when Allen picked it up from the dusty red ground it rolled without a squeak. It had a backpedal brake, a metal tray in the back and a basket screwed to the handle bars -- a delivery boy's bike. He sighed. He had expected that in a city of millions, as was Kinshasa, he could have the chance of finding something of more quality, but as he'd soon realised, he'd come very late for the looting, and though he knew that most of those looters were now deceased, the bikes were all gone, scattered across the country, since they were the only form of transport besides the use of livestock now available. This delivery bike would have to do. And if it broke down along the way, he figured it could not be that hard to find another. According to his most recent projections, the best-case scenario showed him a halved world population at the two-months marker. The worst-case scenario showed him four-fifths already dead. He reckoned there was probably an excess of, among other things, bikes.

It was hot, though it was supposed to be winter. He hadn't felt it so much before, in the cool shadow of the compound, but now he was out in the sun, and he felt it burning the back of his neck like a furnace. The air was damp, and he was soon sweating, but he still pedalled on, staring ahead at the great, great sun that had interfered in something it was supposed to have no influence in. It was the sun that had killed everyone, not the disease. He told himself that, over and over, at every in-breath. He would've been able to stop the disease, he could still stop it. But the sun, with all its mysteries, had had plans of its own. He rode now along a road of firm red earth, and there were abandoned fruit stalls along either side. He was in the outskirts of the city now, surrounded by slums, in one of the most populous parts of the country, and there was still not a soul to be seen. He had avoided breathing through his nose before, but now as he rode, he had to, and he felt for the first time the stink of rot and waste, of civilisation abandoned, unmistakable signs of a true pandemic.

When Allen first heard of the outbreak of a rare strain of a viral haemorrhagic fever in the Congo, he was excited. He'd spent twenty years studying Ebola and Marburg, and he thought this strain could make his career - they might even call it after him. When he arrived at Kinshasa and isolated the disease, he was overjoyed. He worked day and night in his compound, and he visited the field hospitals and recorded the new symptoms with an enthusiasm he had for nothing else. He felt like he'd been waiting for this his whole life, and he was not afraid. All epidemiologists caught in the middle of the spread were in terror, but Allen thought them either hypocrites or cowards. Because, how could they not enjoy it? This was their whole career in action, everything they had studied happening right in front of their eyes, all their projections, alive and working. It was fascinating, in every way. The disease was a living, breathing thing, huge, and getting larger, so beautifully complex and multi-layered and yet so simple. And to be able to understand it, to trace it to its start and put a stop to it? That was power.

Within months, he had put decades of effort to the test, and isolated a cure. In the state of emergency they were in, no one objected when he asked for volunteers to try it on humans. Three half-dead men from the field hospital had allowed him to treat them as guinea pigs, and they had recovered, and become immune to further infection. He had felt the Nobel prize within his grasp, the eyes of the scientific community already on him... But then the sky had lit up, burning white with a solar storm, and his strain, the one he'd discovered, the one he'd named the Kinshasa Haemorrhagic Fever but secretly toyed with the name Allen's Disease, suddenly became airborne. It defied logic. The sun had had no effects on humans or animals or even other viruses, not even on other strains of Ebolaviruses. It made no sense. His announcement had been lost to the world as within a week all those working in the complex with him were starting to show symptoms, and he wasn't able to synthesise more of the drug as fast as was necessary. The disease raged through Kinshasa, spreading like wildfire, and it soon had jumped into Uganda, the Central African Republic, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In two months, it was everywhere. The solar storm peaked, and with a final flare it fried every electric circuit and battery they had, darkening the whole city and for all he knew the world, and it crashed any hopes Allen had of announcing and mass producing his cure.

Fascination had turned very quickly into frustration then, and frustration into fear. He had done every test, and found nothing. His strain was unchanged. Though he tried hard to convince himself that the outbreak and the sun storm were unrelated, he knew in his heart that it could not be so. And he was afraid. Spanish Influenza had killed 10% of its victims, had infected almost the whole world, and had claimed over 50 million lives. His strain of fever killed almost 90%, over the course of roughly two weeks, with an even longer incubation period in which the patient was already contagious. How many had died by now? He had no way to know.

As he pedalled through another nameless town East of Kinshasa, he could only guess about the state of the rest of the world. He had no idea if the flare had truly affected people beyond Central Africa, but two months had passed since the third and last of the sun flares, and no one had come to help them. There had been no news.

When he thought about that, as he did now, his mind drifted to the faces of people he knew, from long ago. Not family, not exactly, but as close to that as he had. He tried to convince himself that the lack of contact didn't mean anything, because he was in the Congo. Who would think to worry about the Congo if the whole world was in darkness?