by Mark Kelly
24
Making Spores
“Whatcha doing, Professor Simmons?”
“We’re a little busy, Emma,” he said without bothering to turn around. “Why don’t you come back later?”
“Sure, but is there anything I can do right now? Mei said you guys were working on something important. I want to help.”
I knew it, Simmons thought.
Beth and Bennett stood on the other side of the lab bench. They glanced at him and he winked back. Then he looked over his shoulder at Emma.
“Are you sure you want to help?” he asked, knowing she wouldn’t last more than a few minutes.
She nodded but didn’t move from her safe position near the lab door.
“All right,” he said with a drawn-out sigh. “If you really want to help, why don’t you give Beth a hand. I’m sure she’d be more than happy to take a break.”
Emma took a single hesitant step into the lab. She stopped and peered suspiciously at the workbench.
“What are you working on, Beth?”
Beth held up a glass beaker full of vile-looking brown sludge with a stir rod sticking out and pointed to a mesh screen lying across the top of a second beaker.
“I’m filtering this to remove any fibre and coarse particulates. It’s pretty easy. You just have to remember to pour slowly so the mesh doesn’t plug-up, otherwise you’ll spill this stuff all over the table.”
“Is that what I think it is?” Emma asked, wrinkling her nose and pointing at the beaker.
Simmons could hear the smile in Beth’s voice as she spoke through the surgical mask covering her face. “I don’t know, Emma. What do you think it is?”
“Umm…Saanvi’s poop?”
“Nope.”
Emma’s eyes widened. “Really? What is it then?” She took another step closer. Beth lifted the beaker and waved it in front of her face.
“This fine specimen belongs to Professor Simmons.”
“Yuck!”
Emma backpedalled out of the lab as fast as her feet would take her. “I’m really sorry you guys, but I just remembered I’m supposed to help Belinda at the school this afternoon.”
She spun around and disappeared down the corridor. Simmons glanced at his watch. It hadn’t taken more than thirty seconds to get rid of her. Annoying as she was, he didn’t blame her. Given the choice, he’d rather be somewhere else too. He glanced at Beth and Bennett. Of them all, Beth had the worst job by far.
“I was serious. Do you want to take a break?” he asked her.
“No thanks,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m good. I soaked my mask in perfume and as long as I don’t think about what’s in the beaker, it doesn’t bother me.”
Bennett glanced at the beaker and snorted. “You’re lucky. When it was my turn to mix it that’s pretty much all I thought about. I never imagined any job could be worse than the Shit Burning Detail.”
“What’s the Shit Burning Detail?”
“Pretty much exactly what it sounds like. When I was on base, Sergeant Dines made me and a couple of the guys do it every week. We’d take the barrels from below the latrines and pour gasoline or diesel into them, then we’d light them up. The smell is like nothing you've ever imagined.”
“Why in earth did she make you do that?”
Bennett shrugged. “It’s the only way to get rid of the waste on base.”
“Sounds like fun,” Beth said sarcastically. “I’m glad we solved that problem here.”
Simmons didn’t bother telling her the problem hadn’t been solved—only deferred. With fuel and a generator, they could pump running water to flush the lab’s toilets, but the waste still went into a septic tank that would have to be emptied at some point. But if his experiment worked out, they wouldn’t be flushing anything down the toilet—not any time soon.
He pointed at the beaker on the table in front of her and asked, “How much do you have?”
Beth lifted the beaker full of evil-looking brown liquid and eyed the graduated markings on the glass. “About five hundred millilitres.”
“That will do,” Simmons replied. He patted the top of the machine on the table next to him. “This baby only has a maximum capacity of four hundred mils per run.”
The machine he had patted was a centrifuge. It, along with the large ultra-low temperature fridge it was sitting next to, were nearly left at the university in Ottawa during the scavenging trip he and Abrams had taken weeks earlier. Combined, the two pieces of equipment weighed close to nine hundred pounds and he had almost relented when Abrams complained bitterly about their size. Simmons was thankful he hadn’t given in. Without the equipment, what he was trying to do would have been impossible.
He popped open the machine’s lid and retrieved one of the four test-tubes from the rack inside. Holding the small test-tube gingerly between his thumb and forefinger, he held out his hand and motioned at Beth to pour. As the murky brown liquid oozed into the test-tube, he cringed. Collecting his own feces was bad enough, but even with the gloves he was wearing, the thought of liquefied poop on his hands was even worse.
When all four test-tubes were full, he corked them with small rubber stoppers, placed them in the rack and closed the centrifuge’s lid. He set the timer for thirty minutes and the speed for fifteen hundred revolutions per second.
“Do you really think this will work?” Beth asked.
“I know it will,” Simmons replied. “Using a centrifuge for fractionation is a tried-and-true method of extracting spores.”
He glanced down at the LCD display to check the machine’s settings one last time, then pressed a small green button. The machine started with a whir.
Bennett walked around the workbench to join them. “What’s fractionation? I still don’t understand what you’re trying to do.”
“Fractionation is just a fancy word that means separate,” Simmons replied. “It’s basic physics. As the rack inside the centrifuge spins, the contents of the test tubes will separate into layers with the heaviest material ending up at the bottom of the test-tube in a solid pellet. The spores and bacterial cells are lighter, so they’ll be in the liquid above the pellet.”
When the blank look on Bennett’s face didn’t change, Simmons asked, “Do you remember what we talked about during lunch yesterday?”
Bennett shrugged sheepishly. “No, not really.”
“We’re going to test your theory.”
“My theory?”
“Sure, I think it’s only fair we call it your theory. After all, you’re the one who suggested the immunity bacteria might need to be concentrated to be effective as a treatment. Since we have no way of concentrating the bacteria, we’re going to do the next best thing and concentrate its spores.”
“The one thing I don’t understand,” Beth said, “is how you’re going to isolate the immunity bacteria spores. Won’t the extract also contain pandemic C. diff spores too?”
Simmons nodded. “Not just pandemic C. diff, there will be spores from virtually every endospore-producing bacteria in my intestinal tract, possibly hundreds of strains. I was thinking about it last night, and there might actually be secondary benefits from having spores from multiple species in the pill.”
“Why?”
“No one really understands why FMT treatments—like what we’ve been doing with material from Saanvi—work, but one theory is they restock the patient’s gut with a diverse mixture of different types of beneficial bacteria. My hope is we’ll be doing the same thing, except using spores. When the spores are ingested, they’ll germinate, creating bacterial cells. Some of those cells will be pandemic C. diff but as long as the quantity is small, it shouldn’t matter.”
Bennett nodded to himself as he stared at the centrifuge. “I get what you’re saying now, sir, but how are you going to make a pill with the spores?”
“We’ll take the left-over liquid with the endospores in it, mix it with ethanol to kill off any active pathogens, then we’ll run it through the cen
trifuge again, add glycerol to thicken the mixture and fill the capsules with concentrated spores.”
“Is that all?” Beth said, laughing.
Bennett scratched his head. “What capsules?”
“These ones,” Simmons said, opening the bench drawer and grabbing a plastic jar of multivitamins. He tossed the jar to Bennett. “That’s your next job. I need twenty or thirty empty capsules. But take them apart carefully so we can reuse them.”
Bennett unscrewed the lid and peered into the jar. “What do I do with the powder inside the pills? Throw it out?”
“Jesus, no. Don’t do that for God’s sakes. Mei will kill you—right after she kills me. We’re going to need all the vitamins we can get during the winter. Find another clean container to put the powder in.”
Simmons clapped his hands together, stirring his two helpers into action. “Let’s get cracking. There’s lots to get done before 8:00 a.m. tomorrow morning.”
“What if this doesn’t work?” Bennett asked.
Simmons swallowed hard. He put on a brave front and said, “Look, people are counting on us. Failure isn’t an option. If the spore pills don’t work, we’ll continue working on the bioreactor. Mei has a clinic tomorrow, and I’m going with her. I’ll take the pills and whatever biotherapeutic we have with me, and we’ll test them both.” He took a deep breath and added, “Something has to work.”
25
Orphans
“For fuck sakes!”
The shouted curse jolted Simmons awake. Exhausted and bleary-eyed from spending the previous night in the lab, he glanced out the jeep’s window to get his bearings.
“What’s going on?”
“Herd of assholes,” Dines grunted.
He wasn’t sure about the asshole-part, but herd was an apt description, although the group of refugees blocking their passage were more like zombies as they shuffled down the middle of the road oblivious to the vehicle behind them.
Tired of waiting, Dines leaned on the horn and shouted out the window, “Would you get the hell out of the way?”
The crowd scattered, leaving a woman with sunken eyes staring blankly at the jeep from the side of the road. Dressed in layers of mismatched clothing that made her appear much larger than she actually was, the woman had the all too familiar look of malnutrition.
Simmons tried to guess her age, but it was impossible. She could have been thirty, or forty, or even sixty for all he could tell.
She stepped towards them and held out a filthy hand. “Anything to eat?”
Muttering under her breath, Dines reached into her coat pocket, pulled out an energy bar and offered it through the open window. The woman lunged towards the jeep with surprising speed and snatched the bar from Dines’s hand.
Startled, Dines yanked her arm back into the jeep and yelled, “Jesus, lady. What are you, part-snapping turtle?”
Frightened, the woman scurried away from Dines towards the front of the jeep and Dines pounded the horn again, scaring the woman even more.
“Was that really necessary?” Mei asked disapprovingly.
“Don’t know about you Doc, but I haven’t got all day. I’ve got things to do and people to see.”
“Like what, Sarge?” the male soldier sitting beside Simmons asked. “You got a date?” He laughed as if the mere thought of Dines on a date was hilarious.
Dines glared at him in the rear-view mirror. “Shut up, Chenney. At least I know what a date is, and I’m not talking about the numbers on a calendar.”
“Huh?”
Simmons felt sorry for the soldier sitting next to him. The entire trip had been like this, and the poor grunt was no match for Dines’s caustic wit. While the two of them traded increasingly vulgar insults about mothers and fathers, and brothers and sisters in various sexual acts, Simmons stared out the window at the people they passed.
Most of the refugees carried their belongings in packs on their back as they trudged through the wet snow left over from the storm two days earlier, but some were more inventive. He saw a man and woman who’d made a harness of rope and leather and attached themselves to the shaft of a small trailer. The trailer was filled with their belongings and partially covered by a tarp. Stooped over from the effort of pulling their load, the couple ignored the jeep and plodded along the side of the road like a pair of pack animals pulling a covered wagon. Neither looked up as the jeep passed.
Mei stared at the refugees. She turned in her seat to speak to him. “It’s like I told you, Tony. Every time we go to the clinic, there are more of them on the road. They aren’t all infected, but a lot are. I don’t know how we will manage.”
“We’ll manage,” he said with more confidence than he felt. He reached into his pocket, subconsciously checking that the plastic jar filled with spore pills was still there. He rested his head against the window and closed his eyes, wondering if the pills would be the miracle cure he hoped they were.
It wouldn’t be much longer until he had the answer to that question.
An army jeep parked on the side of the road was the first sign they were close to their destination. Twenty feet past the jeep, the entrance to a collection of tents in a large flat field was marked by a Canadian flag hanging from a telephone pole.
“Is this the clinic?” Simmons asked.
“No, it’s the refugee camp,” Mei said. “The clinic is a few minutes further down the road.” She tapped Dines on the arm, motioning her to slow down so they could show him the camp from the road as they drove past.
“The flag was General Leduc’s idea,” Mei said, pointing to it. “He thought it would be good to start using it as a symbol to identify locations where people could get official help.”
Simmons bit his tongue at the word official. It reminded him of the joke Ronald Reagan had made during a news conference back in the 80s. Regan, the U.S. president, had said the nine most terrifying words in the English language were: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.
But help was help, and Simmons understood what Leduc was trying to do. After months of lawlessness, the general was attempting to bring order back to the small part of the country he controlled. And for the most part, it looked like he was successful. The camp teemed with activity. It was also surprisingly clean and orderly; nothing like the camps they’d seen at the start of the pandemic. Those places had been wild and lawless, rife with looting and disease.
“What are those?” Simmons asked, pointing to three large white tents in the middle of the field, each of which was guarded by a soldier standing at the entrance.
“Sleeping quarters,” Mei said, “General Leduc insisted on setting up separate ones for men, women, and families. The soldiers are there to ensure people are only allowed into the tent they’re assigned to.”
Two boys, probably ten or eleven years old, came out of the closest tent. One of them dropped the soccer ball he was carrying on the slush-covered ground and then said something to the soldier standing next to the entrance. The man motioned at the boys to run for a pass. Then he took two steps towards the ball and gave it a mighty wallop with a black-booted foot. The ball soared high into the air. Simmons watched, mesmerized, as the ball followed a high arc over the boy’s heads.
THUD.
The ball hit the jeep’s hood and bounced twice before rolling into the ditch.
“What the fuck?” Dines shouted and slammed the brakes on. When she realized what had happened, she rolled the window down and bellowed at the soldier who had kicked the ball. “Hey, asshole. You could have killed someone.”
“Relax, Dines. It’s a ball, not a grenade.”
While Dines fumed, the boys waved furiously at the jeep. They raced across the field and climbed over the rusted wire fence that ran alongside the road.
“Dr. Mei…Dr. Mei,” they shouted together. “Are you going to the clinic? Did you bring us anything?”
Mei laughed and leaned half-way into Dines’s lap as she waved back at them through the open window.
> “Yes, I’m going to the clinic, and of course I brought you something. Do you want to get your ball and meet us there?”
Grinning like banshees, the boys jumped over the ditch and stepped onto the road. When they were right in front of the jeep, Dines honked the horn.
If the olympics were still being held, Simmons would have put his money on the two kids taking gold and silver in the high jump. When they landed, they each gave Dines the middle finger before grabbing their ball and running away.
“Jasmine, that was mean.” Mei said, swatting Dines.
“Yeah, Jasmine.”
Mei might have had a magic get-out-of-jail card that allowed her to escape Dines’s wrath, but the soldier next to Simmons didn’t. Without speaking a word, Dines turned around and glared at him. He shrank a little, sinking back in his seat and probably knowing he had just signed up for a long-term assignment to the shit burning detail.
“Sam and Tyler were patients number one and two when we opened the clinic,” Mei said to Simmons.
Simmons watched the boys run down the road, kicking the soccer ball back and forth. “Are they brothers?”
“No, just friends. I don’t think they even knew each other before they were cured. Now, they’re inseparable.”
“Where are their parents?”
“Dead, I suppose,” she said and sighed. “We’re trying to find someone in the community to adopt them, but for now they stay at the camp and the soldiers keep an eye on them.”
As the boys disappeared around a curve in the road, Dines slipped the jeep into gear and Mei glared at her.
“Stay behind them…far behind them.”
26
The Clinic
The clinic, like the refugee camp, was marked by a Canadian flag hanging from a pole. It was also guarded by a single green five-ton truck and a squad of soldiers, most of whom stood in small groups by the side of the truck smoking cigarettes while they kept a watch on the line of refugees waiting to be admitted.