The Hot Zone

by Richard Preston

  Back at the monkey house, the situation had become unbearable for the remaining workers. They had seen people in space suits, they had seen their colleague puking in the grass, they had seen Channel 4 chasing the ambulance. They left the building in a real hurry, locking it after themselves.

  There were four hundred and fifty monkeys alive in the building, and their hoots and cries sounded in the empty hallways. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. A snow flurry came and went. The weather was turning colder. In the monkey house, the air-handling equipment had failed for good. The air temperature in the building had soared beyond ninety degrees, and the place had turned steamy, odorous, alive with monkey calls. The animals were hungry now, because they had not been fed their morning biscuits. Here and there, in rooms all over the building, some of the animals stared from glazed eyes in masklike faces, and some of them had blood running from their orifices. It landed on metal trays under their cages … ping, ping, ping.

  91-TANGOS

  1030 HOURS. MONDAY

  Dan Dalgard felt he was losing control of everything. He set up a conference call with all the senior managers in his company and informed them of the situation—two employees were down, and the second man could be breaking with Ebola—and he told the managers that he had offered to turn the monkey house over to the Army. They approved his action, but they said they wanted the oral agreement with the Army to be put in writing. Furthermore, they wanted the Army to agree to take legal responsibility for the building.

  Dalgard then called C. J. Peters and asked that the Army assume responsibility for any liability that would arise after the Army took over. C. J. flatly rejected that proposal. He saw a need for clarity, speed, and no lawyers. He felt that the outbreak had ballooned to the point where a decision had to be made. Dalgard agreed to fax him a simple letter turning the monkey house over to the Army. They worked up some language, and C. J. carried the letter by hand to the office of General Philip Russell. He and the general pored over the letter, but they did not choose to show it to any Army lawyers. Russell said, “We have to convince the lawyers of the path of righteousness.” They signed the letter, faxed it back to Dalgard, and the monkey house fell into the hands of the Army.

  Jerry Jaax would have to lead a much larger biohazard team back into the monkey house. The number of animals that needed to be dealt with was staggering. His troops were untested, and he himself had never been in combat. He didn’t know, couldn’t know, how he or his people would perform in a chaotic situation involving intense fear of an unpleasant death.

  Jerry was the commanding officer of the 91-Tangos at the Institute. The Army’s animal-care technicians are classified 91-T, which in Army jargon becomes 91-Tango. The younger 91-Tangos are eighteen years old and are privates. While the ambulance was taking Milton Frantig to the hospital, Jerry called a meeting of his 91-Tangos and civilian staff in a conference room in the Institute. Although most of the soldiers were young and had very little or no experience in space suits, the civilians were older men, and some were Level 4 specialists who had worn Chemturions on a daily basis. The room was jammed, and people sat on the floor.

  “The virus is Ebola or an Ebola-like agent,” he said to them. “We are going to be handling large amounts of blood. And we will be handling sharp instruments. We are going to use the disposable biocontainment suits.”

  The room was silent while he spoke. He didn’t mention that a man was down, because he didn’t know about it—C. J. Peters hadn’t told him about that. For the time being, Peters was staying quiet about that development.

  Jerry said to his people, “We are looking for volunteers. Is there anyone in this room who does not want to go? We can’t make you go.”

  When no one backed out, Jerry looked around the room and picked his people: “Yep, he’s going. She’s going, and, yep, you’re going.” In the crowd, there was a sergeant named Swiderski, and Jerry decided that she could not go because she was pregnant. Ebola has particularly nasty effects on pregnant women.

  No combat unit in the Army could handle this work. There would be no hazard pay, as there is in a war zone. The Army has a theory regarding biological space suits. The theory is that work inside a space suit is not hazardous, because you are wearing a space suit. Hell, if you handled hot agents without a space suit, that would be hazardous work. The privates would get their usual pay: seven dollars an hour. Jerry told them that they were not to discuss the operation with anyone, not even members of their families. “If you have any tendency to claustrophobia, consider it now,” he said. He told them to wear civilian clothes and to show up at the Institute’s loading dock at 0500 hours the next morning.

  DECEMBER 4–5, MONDAY–TUESDAY

  The soldiers didn’t sleep much that night, and neither did Gene Johnson. He was terrified for the “kids,” as he called them. He had had his fair share of scares with hot agents. Once in Zaire, he had stuck himself with a bloody needle while taking blood from a mouse. There was reason to believe the mouse was hot with Lassa (a Level 4 agent), and so they had airlifted him to the Institute and put him in the Slammer for thirty days. “That was not a fun trip,” as he put it. “They treated me as if I would die. They wouldn’t give me scissors to cut my beard because they thought I would be suicidal. And they locked me in at night.” At Kitum Cave, while wearing a space suit and dissecting animals, he had been nicked three times with bloody tools. Three times his space suit had been punctured and his skin broken and the cut smeared with animal blood. He regarded himself as lucky not to have picked up Marburg or something else at Kitum Cave. Having had some close calls, he was deeply afraid of what had invaded the monkey house.

  Johnson lived in a rambling house on the side of Catoctin Mountain. He sat in his study most of the night, thinking about procedures. Every movement of the body in a hot area has to be controlled and planned. He said to himself, Where’s this virus going to get you? It’s going to get you through the hands. The hands are the weak point. Above all, the hands must be under control.

  He sat in an easy chair and held up one hand and studied it. Four fingers and an apposed thumb. Exactly like a monkey’s hand. Except that it was wired to a human brain. And it could be enclosed and shielded by technology. The thing that separated the human hand from Nature was the space suit.

  He stood up and went through motions in the air with his hands. Now he was giving a monkey an injection. Now he was carrying the monkey to a table. He was putting the monkey on the table. He was in a hot zone. He was opening the monkey up, and now he was putting his hands into a bloody lake of amplified hot agent. His hands were covered with three layers of rubber and then smeared with blood and hot agent.

  He paused and jotted notes on paper. Then he turned back to his imaginary hot zone. He inserted a pair of scissors into the monkey and clipped out part of the spleen. He handed it to someone. Where would that person be standing? Behind him? Now he imagined himself holding a needle in his hand. Okay, I have a needle in my hand. It’s a lethal object. I’m holding it in my right hand if I’m right-handed. Therefore, my buddy should stand to my left, away from the needle. Now my buddy’s hands. What will my buddy’s hands be doing? What will everyone’s hands be doing? By early in the morning, he had written many pages of notes. It was a script for a biohazard operation.

  • • •

  Jerry Jaax left home at four o’clock in the morning, while Nancy was still asleep. He met Gene Johnson at the loading dock, where they went over Gene’s script. Jerry studied it, and meanwhile the team members began to show up, soldiers in Jerry’s unit. Many of them arrived on foot, having walked over from their barracks. They stood around, waiting for their orders. It was pitch-dark, and only the floodlights illuminated the scene. Jerry had decided to use a buddy system inside the building, and he began deciding who would be paired with whom. On a piece of paper, he drew up a roster of buddies, and he wrote down the order of entry, the sequence in which they would be inserted into the building. He stood before the
m and read the roster, and they got, into their vehicles—a white refrigerator truck, a couple of unmarked passenger vans, an unmarked pickup truck, the white ambulance containing the bubble stretcher, and a number of civilian cars—and headed for Reston. They became trapped in rush-hour traffic again, surrounded by half-asleep yuppies in suits who were sucking coffee from foam cups and listening to traffic reports and easy rock and roll.

  When all the vehicles had arrived at the back of the monkey house, the teams assembled on the lawn, and Gene Johnson asked for their attention. His eyes were sunken and dark, suggesting he had not slept in days. “We are not playing games here,” he said. “This is the real thing. A biological Level 4 outbreak is not a training session. There’s been a development I want you all to know about. There is a possibility that transmission of this virus to humans has taken place. There are two people who are ill and are hospitalized. Both of them are animal caretakers who worked in this building. There is one guy we are especially worried about. Yesterday morning, he became sick. He vomited and spiked a fever. He is now in the hospital. We don’t know if he is breaking with Ebola. The thing I want you to understand is that he was not bitten by an animal and he did not cut himself or stick himself with a needle. So if he has Ebola, there is a possibility he got it through airborne transmission.”

  Jerry Jaax listened to the speech with a rising sense of horror. He hadn’t known about this man getting sick! Nobody had told him about this! Now he had a feeling that there were going to be casualties.

  It was an icy, gray day. The trees behind the monkey house had lost their leaves, and dead leaves rustled across the lawn. At the day-care center down the hill, parents had been dropping off their children, and the children were playing on swings. Gene Johnson continued his speech. “Everyone is to proceed on the assumption that Ebola virus is potentially airborne,” he said. “You know the risks, and you are experienced”—and his eyes rested on a private first class named Nicole Berke. She was quite beautiful, long blond hair, eighteen years old—and he thought, Who is she? I’ve never seen her before. Must be one of Jerry’s people. They’re just kids, they don’t know what they’re up against. “You must follow the procedures exactly,” he went on. “If you have any questions, you must ask.”

  Jerry got up and said to them, “No question is too stupid. If you have a question, ask.”

  Private Nicole Berke was wondering if she would get a chance to go into the building. “How long are we going to be doing this, sir?” she asked him.

  “Until the monkeys are dead,” he replied. “There are four hundred and fifty monkeys in there.”

  Oh, God, she thought, four hundred fifty monkeys—this is going to take forever.

  The questions were few. People were tense, silent, turned inward. Jerry Jaax entered the staging room, and the support team helped him put on his Racal suit. They fitted the bubble over his head, and his blowers started to roar. He told the teams he’d see them inside, and he and his buddy, Sergeant Thomas Amen, entered the air lock. The door closed behind them, and they stood in darkness. They felt their way down the dark air-lock corridor, opened the far door, and crossed over to the hot side.

  The area was trashed. It had not been cleaned in many days. The workers had left in a big hurry. There were monkey biscuits scattered all over the floor, and papers were scattered everywhere, and there were overturned chairs in the offices. It looked as if the humans had fled from here. Jerry and the sergeant began exploring the building. They moved slowly and carefully in their suits, as if they were wreck divers operating in deep water. Jerry found himself in a small corridor that opened into more monkey rooms. He saw a room full of monkeys, and every one of the animals was looking out at him. Seventy, pairs of monkey eyes fixed on a pair of human eyes in a space suit—and the animals went nuts. They were hungry and were hoping to be fed. They had trashed their room. Even locked inside cages, monkeys could really do a job on a room. They had been throwing their biscuits all over the place, and they had been finger-painting the walls with dung. The walls were scribbled all the way up to the ceiling with monkey writing. It was a cryptic message to the human race that came out of the primate soul.

  Jerry and the sergeant found some bags of monkey biscuits, and went into each room in the building, and fed the monkeys. The animals were going to die soon, but Jerry didn’t want them to suffer more than they had to. While he fed them, he inspected them for signs of Ebola. In many of the rooms, he found animals that seemed dull-eyed and listless. Some of them had runny noses, or there was a kind of blood-spattered green crust caked around the nostrils. He saw puddles of blood in some of the pans under their cages. These sights disturbed him deeply because they told him that the agent had gone all through the building. He could see some of the animals coughing and sneezing, as if they had the flu. He wondered if he was seeing a mutant form of Ebola—a kind of airborne Ebola flu. He shrank from the idea and tried to turn his mind away from it, for it was too awful to contemplate. You could no more imagine a season of Ebola flu than you could imagine a nuclear war. A layer of sweat built up inside his plastic head bubble, making it difficult for him to see the monkeys clearly. But he could hear them, shrieking and calling distantly beyond the sound of his blowers. So far, he had not felt any claustrophobia or panic. He wasn’t going to lose it in here.

  Several members of the team spent the next half hour in the staging room. They were shucking syringes, removing them from a sterile envelope, and fitting each syringe with a needle. Now the syringes were ready to be filled with drugs.

  A few feet from the soldiers, Captain Mark Haines began to suit up. While the support team got him dressed, he gave a speech. He wanted the soldiers to keep certain things in mind as they followed him in. He said, “You are going to euthanize a whole building full of animals. This is not a fun operation. Don’t get attached to the animals. They were going to die of Ebola anyway. They’re all going to have to go, every last one of them. Don’t think of it as killing something. Think of it as stopping the virus here without letting it get anywhere else. Don’t play with the monkeys. I don’t want to hear laughing and joking around the animals. I can be hard. Remember the veterinarian’s creed: you have a responsibility to animals, and you have a responsibility to science. These animals gave their lives to science. They were caught up in this thing, and it’s not their fault. They had nothing to do with it. Keep an eye on your buddy. Never hand a used needle to another person. If a needle comes out of its cap, it goes straight into an animal. And then put the used syringe immediately into a sharps container. If you get tired, tell your supervisor, and we’ll decon you out.” He turned away from them and went in with his buddy.

  “Who’s next?” Gene Johnson said, reading the roster. “Godwin! You’re next.”

  A private first class named Charlotte Godwin hurried outdoors to the van and climbed inside, and took off all her clothes, and put on a surgical scrub suit, socks, sneakers, and a hair cap. It was brutally cold in the van. She felt embarrassed and vulnerable.

  In the staging room, they began to suit her up. Someone said to her, “You’re kind of small. We’ve got a special suit for you.” It wasn’t special. It was a large suit, sized for a big man, and she was five feet tall. It hung around her like a bag. The support team was taping her now, running brown sticky tape around her ankles and wrists, and her blowers came on.

  An Army photographer took some photographs for the action file, and as the flash went off she thought, God, I would be wearing a hair cap. It’s a clown cap. It’s a Bozo hat. You won’t see my hair in the picture, and my space suit is too large for me. Makes me look fat. Just my luck to be the one looking like a dork in the action photographs.

  She staggered into the gray zone, carrying boxes of supplies, and felt a sweeping adrenal rush, and thought, I’m too young to be going through this. She was eighteen. Then she noticed the smell. A really bad smell was creeping through her filters. Her buddy pounded on the far door, and they entered. Ripples
in the faceplate of her head bubble distorted the view, as if she was in a house of mirrors. The smell of monkey was overpowering inside her space suit. It was also too quiet, and monkey houses are not quiet places. The quiet bothered her even more than the smell or the heat.

  A door swung open, and Colonel Jaax appeared. He said, “START LOADING SYRINGES. DOUBLE DOSES OF KETAMINE.”

  “YES, SIR,” she replied.

  “THE SERGEANT AND I WILL BE KNOCKING DOWN MONKEYS IN HERE,” he said.

  Charlotte started filling syringes with ketamine, the anesthetic. Jerry Jaax carried a loaded syringe into the monkey room and fitted it to the socket of a pole syringe. The sergeant fished his mop handle into a cage and pinned a monkey. Then Jerry opened the door of the cage. Watching the monkey carefully to make sure it didn’t try to rush at him, he slid the pole syringe through the open door and gave the monkey an injection of anesthetic, and then pulled out the syringe, and slammed the door shut. It was the most dangerous job because of the open door. The animal could attack or try to escape. Jerry and the sergeant went from cage to cage, and the monkeys began to go to sleep under the anesthesia.

  The rooms contained double banks of monkey cages. The lower bank was near the floor and was dark. Jerry had to get down on his knees to peer inside. He could hardly see anything through his head bubble. His knees were killing him. He would open a cage door, and the sergeant would slide the mop handle into the cage. The monkey would scrabble around, trying to escape, and the sergeant would say, “OKAY, I GOT HIM. HE’S PINNED.” Jerry would slide the pole syringe toward the monkey, aiming the needle for the thigh. There would be screeches and a wild commotion, the monkey shrieking “Kra! Kra!” and the needle would sink in. This was turning out to be one of the hardest things he’d ever done in his career as a veterinarian.