Born of the jungle—or made in the shadows? Only love and truth stand between humanity and extinction. Below is an excerpt from the new novel LD100: Kill Them All by John E. Espy.

Chapter 1

Walking in blood can’t help but reach down into the burrows of your soul and pull up thoughts of ghoul. Memories of that which frightened us as children are brought to bear in our moment-to-moment lives. Blood, if warm and fresh, is slick like ice, crimson ice. Walking through this kind of blood is always, one way or another, because someone has bled out right about the time the sole of your boot touches the ground. With each passing minute the blood begins to cool. Then each step is like walking through cold scarlet molasses.

She had never seen so much blood. Neither had anyone else unless they had been in war of course. Bodies, random bodies, splayed out in filthy beds, soaked in blood, piss and shit. Hospitals, if there were any, weren’t the same as in the States. Here they were in the best of circumstances only a tent or two. The stakes pounded deep in the thick muck to keep the tent erect when the monsoonal winds come. Sometimes, the rain is so loud that it blessedly drowns out the screams of the dying. Unanswerable “Help me’s” make the once firmed now forever infirmed.

But, now with the blood came the trembling, then the bones would sound like dried sticks. Snapping with a crack as those who were held in its intractable spell, muttered incomprehensibly. One couldn’t even be sure if they felt their bones breaking. And the rash, the horrible rash that eventually became so prolific that it completely took over the person’s skin.

Terror arose when they caught you with their increasingly keratinized eyes, frightened that you too would soon become possessed like them as they gazed pleadingly at you. The slack in the rope of hope rapidly becoming increasingly taut.

Their insides liquefying. If there wasn’t an orifice for the blood to find its way out of, it would create one of its own, with the skin itself beginning to leach blood. “Jesus Christ,” Isabella thought, “…what in the fuck is this?”

The tents were filling up with bodies. When she arrived, the sick were all in one tent. She had them separated. A staging. From one just showing symptoms to those hours from being taken outside and burned.

No one had ever seen anything like this before. There were long histories of diseases decimating African villages deep in the jungle. Some were given names by scientists, and others just came and went so fast that only the stories of the villagers cast any light on what the culprit of the decimation could be. Usually, a disease takes time to mutate. But with this it was as though it had begun making replicas of itself as it jumped from one host to another.

The villagers were bringing in their sick and dying, screaming kindoki, kindoki. Trying to get their sick to anywhere beyond their villages, to pass them off and try to run away. The unwell, who had become not themselves, now were believingly being poisoned by witchcraft. Guérisseurs had tried with their prayer and potions to cure the sick, but they could not. The jungle was hungry, devouring, relentless. Those infected by the dark magic of the bush devil must be cast out of the village before what had befallen one would
befall them all.

As Isabella thought back, she remembered stories of the notary, de Mussis, describing how the Mongol army hurled plague-infected cadavers over the walls of the Crimean city of Caffa to create terror and hoping this would stop the ‘mire of manifold weakness…’ As the populace believed that the plague was the result of the limitless capacity for evil… the entire human race was being punished for no longer fearing the judgment of God. The doctors of the time wearing masks with long bird-like beaks, filled with perfumes and fragrant herbs, trying to purify the air. Clearly neither tossing the evil ridden corpses over the walls of Caffa or scenting the stench of the liquified rotted bodies made any difference. That plague killed around 200 million people.

But it never made sense. When Isabella was in medical school and residency she was taught that the plague was caused by Yersinia Pestis and that fleas riding on the backs of rats were the culprit of the spread. Never, in the history of medicine, had there been any bacterium that had been able to gain a foothold and spread with that kind of ferocity and with that kind of killing power. If you got the plague—you died. From all the accounts of the Black Plague, the symptoms and how people died, it behaved more like a virus would. And now with this outbreak…

The question was not only what was causing this devastation but was there a way to contain it to these villages and could it be treated. One way that outbreaks of viruses in the past had been treated was by quarantining the villages with the military and letting those who were infected die off, treating their horrendous symptoms as best they could, but not allowing them outside of the perimeters of the village to spread whatever the hell it was. But this thing had spread beyond whatever village it had come from. As far as anyone knew no cases had shown up in any large population centers.

When the infected were brought into the hospital compound, those who brought them in were ordered to chain the infected’s feet. They knew the infected, now only called that, were going to die. Even the Priest praying for the souls of the dying had lost all faith that Jesus would touch at least one of the suffering, perhaps a child, and spare them. But no such miracle was to be. Isabella thought that maybe God Himself was afraid of touching the infected ones.

Once the infected’s feet were bound, the other end of the chain was hooked around hitching rails, cobbled together from old, galvanized pipes. Then when they died, men wearing masks and rubber gloves unhitched the chain of the dead, dragged them from their cot and pulled them into a pit with the other villagers that had died that day. They were then doused in petrol and set ablaze. Good Christ, the stench was retching.

What those who carried the dying in from the villages did not know was that they too were now infected and could not be allowed to leave what may be called a hospital, but really was no more than a camouflaged morgue. Those who brought the sick in on their backs, put them on a cot, and thinking they would go back to their villages, were told at gun point to go to the next tent, until they too inescapably began to show signs that death’s scythe had come for them. If they refused, the government ordered they were to be shot. Isabella thought if she were one of the villagers, she would run just to get shot.

As she watched the horror, Isabella thought back to growing up in Paintsville. What she saw in her parents’ clinic growing up had helped steel her for what she had to endure here. But even with the horrors of the black lung and the other queer calamities she’d witnessed, the outbreak that had exploded here was like some ungodly apparition that had come straight up from hell.

Isabella was sent here to try and discover what this thing was and where it had come from. She was not here as a physician to treat anyone as there was nothing to do except watch. In the past when an outbreak of hemorrhagic fevers had happened there had been one or two villages within close proximity, so it was easier to isolate where the origin of the infection had come from. But with this new outbreak, villagers were bringing in their infected from far and wide.

Fruit bats, rodents, fleas and ticks or macaques were the usual suspects, dank caves, trees, or the depth of the rainforests, harboring the deadliest viruses known to man. This too could be spread by bat guano, but it had to get to the bat as a vector and… how did it do that? But clearly first, it had to be discovered what the it was. The villagers kill and dry bats under breadfruit trees and then either eat it, after it has lost its moisture from baking in the sun or use it in making bat soup.

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