PATIENT ZERO -The lone survivor
He handed her a canteen of clean water.
"Where did you come from?" Baraka asked gently, his voice devoid of the commanding thunder he used in battle. "The military locked down the Northern Zone. How did two hundred of you bypass the checkpoints?"
"We didn't come from the North," the woman choked out, taking a desperate, trembling drink from the canteen. She looked up at Baraka, her eyes hollow and haunted. "We came from the coast. We came from Dar es Salaam."
Baraka felt a cold dread pool in his stomach. Dar es Salaam was five hundred kilometers away. To make that journey on foot, through a country tearing itself apart under martial law, was a near-impossible feat.