The Hot Zone

by Richard Preston

  More team members came into the building. Jerry assembled them in the hallway and said to them: “STOP EVERY FIVE OR TEN MINUTES AND CHECK YOUR NEIGHBOR’S SUIT FOR RIPS. BE VERY CAREFUL. MAKE SURE YOU TAKE REST BREAKS. I WANT YOU TO REST FOR TEN MINUTES EVERY HOUR. WHEN YOU GET TIRED, YOU GET CARELESS.” Every time he looked into a monkey room, he saw a room full of eyes looking back at him. Some of the monkeys rattled their cages, and the wave of noise swept up and down the room.

  Jerry decided to set up a bleed area in a small room near the front of the building, right next to the offices. In the bleed area there was a shower with a drain hole in the floor. They would need to use the drain hole for washing down blood and for rinsing objects with bleach. Every time blood went down the drain, they would pour bleach after it—they didn’t want Ebola getting into the Reston sewage system. They found a metal examination table on wheels and rolled it into the bleed area. Jerry divided his people into subteams: a bleed team (to work at the bleed table), a euthanasia team (to put monkeys to death), and a necropsy team (to open up the monkeys and take samples and bag the carcasses in biohazard bags).

  They got an assembly line going. Every five minutes or so, Jerry Jaax would carry an unconscious monkey out of a room and down the corridors to the bleed area, holding the animal with its arms pinned behind its back. He would lay it down on the bleed table, and then Captain Haines, the Green Beret, would insert a needle into the animal’s thigh and draw off a lot of blood into various tubes. Then he’d hand the unconscious animal to Major Nate Powell, and he would give it an injection of T-61, the euthanasia agent. He’d put the needle right into the heart. When the animal was clearly dead, he would hand it to Captain Steve Denny, who did the necropsy. Captain Denny opened the animal with scissors and snipped out parts of the liver and spleen. The livers of these animals were gray, eroded, nasty looking.

  Private Charlotte Godwin stood beside Captain Denny and handed him tools. She thought he looked nervous, jumpy, inside his space suit. He pulled a spleen out of a monkey. It was speckled with white spots, as hard as a rock, a biological bomb ticking with hot agent. After a while, he handed the scissors to her and gave her a chance to open up a monkey. It frightened her and gave her a big rush. She was doing a hot necropsy in Level 4, perhaps the most dangerous work in a space suit. This was a rocket ride, and it thrilled her. Her hands worked within a membrane’s thickness of a death worse than any death in combat. She found herself racing to finish the job. She noticed that the monkey’s eyes were open. It was as if the monkey was looking at her while she worked. She wanted to reach out and close the monkey’s eyes. She thought, Is my face the last thing they see?

  INSIDE

  EARLY EVENING, TUESDAY

  The day wore on, and people began using up their batteries. They could see that the daylight was starting to go, because some windows at the ends of the hallways were getting dark. Jerry Jaax made people rest every now and then. They sat on the floor with blank looks on their faces, exhausted, or they loaded syringes with drugs. Meanwhile, Jerry went from person to person, trying to gauge the level of exhaustion. “HOW ARE YOU DOING? ARE YOU TIRED? DO YOU WANT TO GO OUT?”

  Nobody wanted to go out.

  The team inside the building maintained radio contact with Gene Johnson outside the building. He had supplied them with hand-held short-wave radios that operated on a military band. He hadn’t given them ordinary walkie-talkies because he didn’t want anybody listening to the talk, especially the news media, who might make a tape recording of the chatter. It seemed less likely that anyone would listen to these radios.

  Something went wrong with one of the soldiers’ suits. She was a specialist named Rhonda Williams. Her blower cut off, and her suit began to go limp until it stuck to her sweaty scrub suit, and she felt contaminated air creeping around her. “MY AIR’S GOING OFF,” she shouted. She kept working. She couldn’t leave her post. Her battery was failing. She discovered that she did not have a spare battery on her belt. All the others had used their spare batteries.

  When Rhonda announced that her air was shutting down, it caused a commotion. Jerry wanted to evacuate her from the building. He ran down the hall to the air-lock door, where a soldier was stationed with a short-wave radio. Jerry grabbed the radio and called Gene Johnson, shouting through his helmet, “WE’VE GOT A LADY WHO’S LOSING HER BATTERY.”

  Gene answered, “We need to get a battery and send it in with someone. Can you wait?”

  “NO. SHE’S COMING OUT. SHE’S LOSING HER AIR,” Jerry said.

  Abruptly, the soldier by the door told Jerry that he had an extra battery. Jerry said over the radio: “WAIT—WE HAVE AN EXTRA ONE.”

  The soldier ran down the hallway to Rhonda, grinned at her, and said, “YOUR BATTERY IS HERE.”

  People started laughing. He clipped it to Rhonda’s belt.

  She thought, Oh, my God, they’re going to unlock my old battery, it’s going to stop my blowers. She said, “WAIT A MINUTE! MY AIR’S GOING TO GO OFF!”

  “DON’T WORRY. IT’S JUST FOR A SECOND WHILE WE SWITCH YOU OVER,” he said. Rhonda was rattled and was ready to leave. She was wondering if she had caught the virus during the moments when her air pressure had been lost. Jerry decided to send her out with Charlotte Godwin, who seemed to be getting tired. On the radio, he said to Gene, “I HAVE TWO COMING OUT.”

  On Gene’s side, a near panic was occurring. A television van had just showed up. Gene was appalled. He didn’t want the cameras to start rolling just as two women in space suits were extracted from the building. He said to Jerry, “We’re jammed. We can’t move them out. We’ve got TV cameras out here.”

  “I’M SENDING THEM OUT,” Jerry said.

  “All right. Send them out,” Gene said. “We’ll give the cameras a show.”

  Jerry pounded on the door of the gray area, and the decon man opened it. He was a sergeant. He wore a space suit. He held a pump sprayer filled with bleach, and a flashlight. Rhonda and Charlotte walked into the gray area, and the sergeant told them to hold their arms straight out at their sides. He played the flashlight over their space suits, checking for damage or leaks.

  Rhonda noticed that he had a strange look on his face.

  “YOU HAVE A HOLE IN YOUR SUIT,” he said.

  I knew this was going to happen, she thought.

  “WHERE DID YOU GET IT?” he asked.

  “I DON’T KNOW!”

  He slapped a piece of tape over the hole. Then he washed the two soldiers down with bleach, spraying it all over them, and pounded on the door that led to the staging room. Someone opened it, and they went out. Immediately the support team opened their head bubbles and peeled off their suits. Their scrub suits, underneath, were soaked with sweat. They began to shiver.

  “There’s a television-news van out front,” Gene said.

  “I had a hole in my suit,” Rhonda said to him. “Did I get the virus?”

  “No. You had enough pressure in your suit to protect you the whole time.” He hurried them outdoors. “Get into the van and lie down,” he said. “If anybody asks you any questions, keep your mouths shut.”

  They couldn’t find their clothes in the van. They rolled themselves up in some overcoats to keep warm and lay down on the seats, out of sight.

  The television crew parked their van near the front door of the monkey house, and the reporter began to poke around, followed by a cameraman. The reporter knocked on the front door and rang the buzzer—no answer. He peered in the front windows—the curtains were drawn, and he couldn’t see anything. Well, nothing was happening in there. This place was deserted. He and the cameraman didn’t notice the white vehicles parked behind the building, or if they noticed them, it didn’t seem interesting. There was nothing going on here.

  The television men returned to their van and sat in it for a while, hoping that something would happen or that someone would show up so that they could get some sound bites for the evening news, but this was getting to be boring, it was an awful
ly cold day, and the light was fading. It did not occur to them to go around to the side of the building and point their video camera toward a window. If they had done that, they would have gotten enough footage to fill the entire evening news, with something left over for CBS’s 60 Minutes. They would have gotten footage of soldiers in space suits smeared with Ebola blood, engaged in the first major biohazard mission the world ever knew, and they would have gotten shots of biohazard buddies coming out into the staging area in pairs and being stripped of their suits by the support teams. But the news crew didn’t walk around the building, and so as far as I know, there is no video footage of the Reston action.

  Meanwhile, the two women lay on their backs in the van for many minutes. Suddenly the television crew left. Gene Johnson, poking his head around the corner of the building, reported that the coast was clear. The women got dressed and then hurried off to relieve themselves in the wooded area behind the building. That was where they found the needles—two used hypodermic syringes with needles attached to them. The needles were uncapped and bare, obviously used. It was impossible to tell how long they had been lying in the grass. Some of the safety people put on gloves and picked up the needles, and as they searched the area, they found more needles in the grass.

  The last person to come out was Jerry Jaax. He emerged around six in the evening, having lost between five and ten pounds of weight. It was fluid loss from sweating, and his face was ashen. His hair, instead of looking silver, looked white.

  There was no food for the soldiers, and they were hungry and thirsty. The soldiers took a vote on where to eat, and it came out in favor of Taco Bell. Gene Johnson said to them, “Don’t tell anybody why you are here. Don’t answer any questions.”

  The caravan started up, engines roaring in the cold, and headed for Taco Bell. The soldiers ordered soft tacos with many jumbo Cokes to replace the sweat they’d lost inside their space suits. They also ordered a vast number of cinnamon twists—everything to go—yeah, put it in boxes, and hurry, please. The employees were staring at them. The soldiers looked like soldiers, even in jeans and sweat shirts—the men were bulked up and hard-looking, with crew cuts and metal-framed military eyeglasses and a few zits from too much Army food, and the women looked as if they could do fifty push-ups and break down a weapon. A man came up to Sergeant Klages while he was waiting for his food and said, “What were you doing over there? I saw all those vans.” Sergeant Klages turned his back on the man without saying a word.

  After midnight on the water bed in the master bedroom of the Jaax house on the slopes of Catoctin Mountain, Nancy and Jerry Jaax caught up on the news while their daughter, Jaime, slept beside them. Jerry told her that the day’s operation had gone reasonably well and that no one had stuck himself or herself with a needle. He told her he hadn’t realized how lonely it is inside a biohazard suit.

  Nancy wrapped herself around him and rested her head against his neck in the way they had held each other since college. She thought he looked shrunken and thin. He was physically more exhausted than she had seen him in years. She picked up Jaime and carried her to bed, then returned and folded herself around her husband. They fell asleep holding each other.

  A BAD DAY

  DECEMBER 6, WEDNESDAY

  For the past several days and nights, an Army scientist named Thomas Ksiazek had been working in his space suit in a Level 4 lab trying to develop a rapid test for Ebola virus in blood and tissue. He got the test to work. It was called a rapid Elisa test, and it was sensitive and easy to perform. He tested urine and blood samples from Milton Frantig, the man who had vomited on the lawn and who was now in an isolation room at Fairfax Hospital. Frantig came up clean. His urine and blood did not react to the Ebola test. It looked as if he had the flu. This was a mystery. Why weren’t these guys breaking with Ebola?

  The weather warmed up and turned sunny, and the wind shifted around until it blew from the south. On the second day of the massive nuking—Wednesday—the Army caravan flowed with commuter traffic to Reston and deployed behind the monkey house. Things went more smoothly. By eight o’clock in the morning, the teams had begun their insertions. Gene Johnson brought a floodlight, and they set it up in the gray corridor.

  Jerry Jaax went in first and fed the monkeys. He made his rounds with Sergeant Amen, checking each room, and here and there they found monkeys dead or in terminal shock. In a lounge, they found some chairs, and dragged them into a hallway and arranged them in a semicircle so that the soldiers could sit on them while they took their rest breaks and filled up syringes. As the day wore on, you could see exhausted soldiers and civilians in orange space suits, men and women, their head bubbles clouded with condensation, sitting on the chairs in the hallway, loading syringes with T-61 and sorting boxes full of blood tubes. Some talked with each other by shouting, and others just stared at the walls.

  At midmorning, Jerry Jaax was working in Room C. He decided to take a break to rest and check up on his people. He left the room in charge of Sergeants Amen and Klages while he went out into the hallway. Suddenly there was a commotion in Room C, and the monkeys in that room burst out in wild screeches. Jerry ran back to the room, where he found the sergeants outside the door, looking in, in a state of alarm.

  “WHAT HAPPENED?”

  “A MONKEY ESCAPED, SIR.”

  “AW, SHIT!” Jaax roared.

  The animal had bolted past Sergeant Amen as he opened the cage, and the sergeants had immediately run out of the room and shut the door behind them.

  A loose monkey—this was what Jerry had feared the most. They can leap long distances. He had been bitten by monkeys himself, and he knew what that felt like. Those teeth went in deep.

  They looked into the room through the window in the door. The whole room had exploded in activity, monkeys whirling in their cages and shaking them violently, giving off high, excited whoops. There were about a hundred screaming monkeys in that room. But where was the loose monkey? They couldn’t see it.

  They found a catching net, a pole with a baglike net at the end. They opened the door and edged into the room.

  The events that followed have a dreamlike quality in people’s memories, and the memories are contradictory. Specialist Rhonda Williams has a memory that the monkey escaped from the room. She says she was sitting on a chair when it happened, that she heard a lot of shouting and suddenly the animal appeared and ran under her feet. She froze in terror, and then burst out laughing—nervous, near-hysterical laughter. The animal was a small, determined male, and he was not going to let these humans get near him with a net.

  Jerry Jaax insists that the monkey never got out of the room. It is possible that the monkey ran under Specialist Williams’s feet and then was chased back into the room again.

  The loose monkey was very frightened and the soldiers were very frightened. He stayed in the room for a while, running back and forth across the cages. The other monkeys apparently grew angry at this and bit at the monkey’s toes. The monkey’s feet began to bleed, and pretty soon it had tracked blood all over the room. Jerry got on the radio and reported that a monkey was loose and bleeding. Gene Johnson told him to do whatever had to be done. How about shooting the monkey? Bring in a handgun, like an Army .45. Jerry didn’t like that idea. Looking into the room, he noticed that the loose monkey was spending most of its time hiding behind the cages. If you tried to shoot the monkey, you’d be firing into the cages, and the bullet could hit a cage or a wall and might ricochet inside the room. Getting a gunshot wound was bad enough under any circumstances, but even a mild wound in this building might be fatal. He decided that the safest procedure would be to go into the room and capture the monkey with the net. He took Sergeant Amen with him.

  As they entered the room, they could not see the monkey. Jerry proceeded forward slowly, holding the net up, ready to swipe it at the monkey. But where was it? He could not see very well. His faceplate was covered with sweat, and the light was dim in the room. He might as well have been swimming u
nderwater. He edged slowly forward, keeping his body away from the cages on either side, which were filled with hysterical, screaming, leaping, bar-rattling monkeys. The sound of monkeys raising hell was deafening. He was afraid of being bitten by a monkey if he came too close to a cage. So he stayed in the middle of the room as he went forward, while Sergeant Amen followed him, holding a syringe full of drugs on a pole.

  “BE CAREFUL, SERGEANT,” he said. “DON’T GET BITTEN. STAY BACK FROM THE CAGES.”

  He edged his way from cage to cage, looking into each one, trying to see through it toward the shadowy wall behind. Suddenly he saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, and he turned with the net, and the monkey went soaring through the air over him, making a twelve-foot jump from one side of the room to the other.

  “GET HIM! HE’S OVER HERE!” he said. He waved the net, slammed it around over the cages, but the monkey was gone.

  He walked through the room again, slowly. The monkey flung itself across the room, a huge, tail-swinging leap. This animal was airborne whenever it moved. Jerry waved his net and missed. “SON OF A BITCH!” he shouted. The monkey was too fast for him. He would spend ten or fifteen minutes searching the room, squinting past the cages. If he found the monkey, the monkey would leap to the other side of the room. It was a small monkey, built for life in the trees. He thought, This environment favors the monkey over us. We don’t have the tools to handle this situation. We are not in control here—we are along for the ride.