Outbreak

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A small village in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, not far from the Rwandan border. Just before midnight.

They would be dead by morning. When you've seen it happen enough times, you get used to the signs.

Naked apart from an old pair of underpants, he lay listlessly on the elderly, stained mattress, its springs broken and its stuffing now home to a thousand invisible bugs. By the dim, smoky light of a candle, she watched his chest rise and fall in time with his heavy, laboured breathing. It seemed somehow too big for the rest of his emaciated body. He had not eaten for eight days, not since he fell ill. And he hadn't eaten much even before that: he was a poor man.

Beside him on the mattress lay his wife. Her body, heavier than her husband's, was covered with a piece of material that had once been colourful but was now ragged and dirty. Her breathing was forced too. Rasping. Occasionally her eyes would open and roll around, unseeing, in their sockets, before closing again. Now and then she would shout out, but it was impossible to understand what she was saying.

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