by M. D. Massey
Chibueze was asleep in her hospital bed, curled up in a fetal position, clutching her knees. I grabbed my metal water cup and banged it gently against the bars separating us. I tried not to attract the attention of the guards.
Waking up, Chibueze stared at me with her usually magnificent eyes: light brown with flecks of gold. But they were different now, speckled with hemorrhaged blood and lit with fear.
I asked her a simple question: “Chibueze, do you remember being let out of your cell last night?”
She sat up, swinging her feet to the side of her bed, and turned to face me. A brilliant intern, her face appeared blank. She struggled to remember. Staring at me with a penetrating look, she answered slowly, “I think I do remember that. Wait…Wasn’t there moonlight over there…?” She pointed at a glass wall directly across from our cells. “It came flooding through. And then…” She turned to look at the other cells down the row from our own. Her gaze landed somewhere. “Over there…” She pointed. “Akachi, that sweet little boy we treated for Ebola, and his mother. I remember them changing from normal human beings into walking corpses…bony with their skin falling off in sheets. Maybe I was drugged. The images were like horrifying hallucinations. A bad trip...” She pivoted back toward me, her face awash in confusion. “Wait…Akachi…Someone told me he had been pronounced dead after bleeding out from Ebola.”
I shook my head yes. “That’s right. He was. Dr. Angela Steele pronounced his Time of Death. I heard her. But a couple of hours later, she completely denied doing it. She blamed the male nurse who had recorded Date and Time of Death for making a mistake. She claimed that Akachi had never died, but had recovered from Ebola on his own.” I paused. I didn’t know how much new information Chibueze was capable of absorbing before passing her threshold for cognitive dissonance. I decided to continue. “Chibueze, I saw Akachi after he was pronounced dead. I touched him with a gloved hand. He wasn’t breathing. He had bled out. There was blood all over his bed and pillow; there was tarry diarrhea on his sheets. He was clearly dead. I have no doubt about that. But Dr. Steele came back into his room, along with a few CDC workers. They administered some kind of vaccine to him. They talked about moving him over to a research facility and giving him two more doses of the vaccine. They said he’d need a total of three doses to complete his experimental trial. I saw him moved into an ambulance. And then…later…I saw him and his mother here in this prison.”
Chibueze’s eyes reflected a sudden stroke of insight. She asked me, “Were you also given a vaccine?”
It was my turn to freeze with panic. I plumbed the depths of my memory. “I remember being stung or bit by something as I searched through Akachi’s medical records. Shortly afterwards, I became violently ill. At the camp clinic, I was checked by a CDC doctor and a WHO doctor supervised by a soldier carrying an assault weapon. I thought it was strange to be checked by more than one doctor and to have the CDC and WHO involved before I had even been diagnosed with anything. And having a soldier with an assault weapon present during my examination was downright unnerving and bizarre. In the days that followed, Dr. Tovar told me that I had Ebola and that I had been approved for an experimental serum. Then late one night, he came into my quarantined hospital room with a group of doctors wearing white coats and, once again, soldiers with guns. He told them to give me something called Mutation Z. I received it via hypodermic needle. Next thing I knew, I woke up in this prison cell.”
Chibueze became animated and jumped off her bed. In a voice filled with desperation, she asked me, “Do you have those papers I gave you?”
My memory cleared a bit. I dashed across my cell. I kneeled down, crawled under my bed and removed a loose brick from the wall. I pulled out a couple of sheets of paper, wrinkled and stained with coffee and blood: the summary of a scientific research report on Mutation Z.
Skimming through the pages, I remembered Chibueze shoving them into my hands the day she had first been imprisoned. I grabbed my diary. I had written the following about the report:
According to the report, Mutation Z, also called Z Serum, is an experimental drug developed by a clandestine pharmaceutical company for a top-secret U. S. military program. Mutation Z changes Ebola victims into Zombies. It was developed as a biological weapon for the U. S. military. Certain characteristics of Ebola made it the easiest way for scientists to create the Zombie disease, something they’d been trying to do for the past decade. Zombie hordes can be sent into enemy territory as weaponized soldiers in order to terrorize the local population. Zombie disease is also contagious, so it will spread as a biological weapon. Genetic code can be written into the disease, so that those infected will die after a certain amount of time, thereby halting the spread of the disease once the enemy has been conquered.
The current form of Mutation Z being tested in our camp has genetic code spliced into it that only activates the Zombie state at the time of a full moon. That can be changed. Future codes will arrange for different activation triggers. The genetic coding for making a human being more susceptible to the full moon was developed by splicing in rat genes that cause rat physiology to be affected by the lunar cycle, specifically their taste sensitivity and the ultrastructure of their pineal gland cells. The full moon trigger was used in our camp because each outbreak of the Zombie disease would be short-lived and would also give the research scientists another month to analyze the data and tweak the code if necessary.
And Mutation Z has a second planned use. If Ebola becomes pandemic in Africa, according to the report handed to me, the U. S. military could use Zombies as vulture-like creatures to pick the human carcasses clean and restore Africa to pre-Ebola status. The research scientists have already tested Mutation Z on chimpanzees which had been known to engage in cannibalism to see if they would clean Ebola carcasses, and they did it.
The report states that the pharmaceutical company has developed medicines capable of completely curing the Zombie disease, should that become necessary. The report mentioned that, like Ebola, Mutation Z is contagious by infected bodily fluids entering broken skin or mucous membranes.
I don’t believe for a minute that the effects of Mutation Z can be contained.
Chibueze and I grasped each other’s hands through the bars, a substitute for the hugs we so deeply needed. We cried, tears soaking our faces. We knew in our hearts that we, along with Akachi and his mother and others we didn’t yet know about, were the military’s first experimental Zombie subjects.
Chapter 2
Journalist Hunter Morgan: New York City
Something didn’t smell right. The White House Press Secretary had just made an announcement on all the major news channels. The U.S. government had signed an exclusive deal with Chen-Zamora Pharmaceuticals. They would now make all the experimental Ebola vaccines and serums that would be used by the U.S. military to treat Ebola patients in West Africa. No other company would be allowed to supply them. No other company would receive government grants to develop them.
It smelled like rotten fish because there were at least three other companies much farther along in their success rate for experimental Ebola drugs. Chen-Zamora had only recently announced they were getting into the Ebola game.
I spent the day at my desk at the New York City branch of The Magnifying Glass, the Internet news site where I work, poring over background research on Chen-Zamora. Hours into it, I uncovered information linking the nutcase politician, Texas Congressman Mason Fuller, to the pharmaceutical company. He had married May Chen, the daughter of James Chen who was the co-founder and co-owner of Chen-Zamora. James Chen was a second-generation member of an immigrant family from China.
The Zamora side of the equation came from Daniel Zamora, second generation from Mexico.
James Chen and Daniel Zamora had worked hard to distance themselves from their parents’ countries of origin. They both had graduate degrees from top U.S. universities: James Chen, an MBA from Harvard Business School; Daniel Zamora, an MBA from The Graduate School of Bu
siness at Stanford University. Both spoke impeccable English without a hint of their family’s native accent. Both were rumored to be incredible pricks, hard on their workers, spouses and children, and having nothing but disdain for their family’s country of origin.
Congressman Mason Fuller and his wife lived in the border state of Texas. The Congressman was in his third term of office, winning the election through the support of extremists who wanted all U.S. borders closed and citizens armed with assault weapons to defend those borders. He paid for political ads that featured inaccurate fear-mongering about how immigrants are bringing diseases—including Ebola—across the border. That was patently untrue. Most of the immigrants crossing the border into the United States from Mexico were fleeing poverty and violence in Central America and were simply passing through Mexico to get to the U.S. Many were children. Most had been vaccinated for normal childhood diseases because their countries had excellent vaccination programs. Ebola didn’t exist in their countries. There were no cases of Ebola in Mexico either, for that matter.
Looking up financial contributors to Congressman Fuller’s campaign, I discovered that not only did the Chen family contribute, as one might expect; but so did Daniel Zamora and so did the company of Chen-Zamora Pharmaceuticals. Congressman Fuller was about as deeply in bed with the pharmaceutical company as one could be without fucking it. Oh wait, he was married to a Chen heir, so actually there was some fucking going on.
Looking up the Congressional committees upon which Mason Fuller served, I discovered that he was very active on the U.S. House Science Committee. That committee had recently advocated ramping up distribution of Ebola vaccines and serums in West Africa. And—bingo!—they had also recommended using Chen-Zamora Pharmaceuticals for that purpose.
Congressman Fuller also currently served on the Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee. In the past year, that committee had approved funding for some kind of DARPA-run combination of Ebola treatment and biological warfare prevention program called The Ebola Mutations Research Project. Scientists receiving funding worked in several locations, including a place called The Liberia Treatment and Research Camp in West Africa, run by the CDC and the World Health Organization and guarded by the U.S. military. Other than a brief description of the program and the rather generous amount of funding it received, all other information about The Ebola Mutations Research Project was top-secret.
I gathered up the information I had found and walked into my boss’s office. Alice Gibson waved her arm at the TV set hanging on the wall across from her massive wooden desk that was covered with so many stacks of books and folders, she had had to make a path through the middle of them to see people standing right in front of her. Her blue eyes appeared lit with lightning. “Hey, Hunter, what do you make of this? The President’s giving funding to only one pharmaceutical company for vaccines and serums to fight Ebola…and that funding’s going to Chen-Zamora, a company far behind in the development of Ebola drugs. What the fuck?”
Alice cursed like a drunken sailor once she got riled up about stuff.
I plunked myself down in the chair in front of her desk. I shoved my research through the passageway in her mountains of books. “I’m on it. Check out my notes. I’ll need some travel expenses. This story stinks like a rotting corpse.”
When she finished reading through the material, Alice stared at me for a moment without saying anything. She had a haunted look in her eyes, like she had seen the ghost of something not yet fully materialized. I felt the same way. I had glimpsed a shadow of something much bigger than the entire thing, I was sure of it.
Brushing a few strands of fiery red hair from her eyes, Alice said to me, “OK. Funding’s not a problem. I don’t know where you were thinking of starting your investigation, but I want you to head on down to Texas and start with that extremist, Congressman Mason Fuller. The guy’s been in a rage insisting that anyone coming into our country from West Africa be placed in quarantine for an entire month. I always assumed he was suffering from anti-science paranoia. Considering that he’s involved in a military Ebola drug treatment program with a questionable pharmaceutical company, I’m now thinking: Does he know something that I don’t know?”
Alice didn’t scare easily, but she looked a bit rattled.
I booked a flight to Texas for the next evening; then headed home to tell my wife and little girl about the assignment. Claire was used to me traveling, but our three-year-old daughter Sophie was too young to ever accept my going away.
Dinner was comfort food, spaghetti with meatballs, which Sophie ate sitting on my lap, her attempt to keep me from leaving. Dressed in her favorite astronaut costume, her early interest in adventure clearly at odds with her three-year-old fears, she chattered on and on about her day at preschool and how maybe I could visit her there. She kept turning around to study me with her large inquisitive green eyes, wispy blond hair floating around her head like a halo from all her quick movements.
Claire watched us, glowing with happiness over our family time and from her early stage of pregnancy with our second child.
The next night, I read Sophie an early bedtime story before heading out to the airport.
As we taxied down the runway, I noted how beautiful the airport looked—sun setting, full moon hanging like a ghost between day and night.
Chapter 3
Emma Johnson: The Liberia Treatment and Research Camp, West Africa
A couple of weeks after Chibueze and I shared memories of being released from prison for a night, Dr. Tovar and a team of doctors all dressed in white coats visited Chibueze and me in our cells. They spoke with each of us separately.
Dr. Tovar looked at me with a kind of frightening intensity, as though studying a germ under a microscope. He offered me the following explanation for my imprisonment: “I’m sorry we haven’t spoken sooner. I’ve stopped by several times since you’ve been here, but you were asleep each time. With the rate at which the Ebola pandemic’s been spreading in Liberia, our treatment camp ran out of quarantine units by the time you got sick. We had to use the prison for that purpose. I hope you’re finding your hospital bed comfortable. If you ever need more warm blankets or more water or anything, just press the buzzer on your bed. It will alert the prison staff, the same way a call button in a hospital alerts the nursing staff, and they’ll assist you. I’m proud to say we got up to speed pretty quickly training the prison guards about Ebola. And we send medical staff over here every day as well.”
Blood pumped so furiously through my ears, I had trouble hearing anything else.
Sweating with fear, I asked, “What exactly is Mutation Z? I know I’ve been given it. Has it worked?”
Dr. Tovar’s left eyelid twitched. His upper lip twitched as well, which made him look like he was snarling, even though I was pretty sure he was trying to comfort me, to keep me under control. He reached out and touched my arm. I could feel his hand shaking through my sleeve. He said in a voice that cracked before he had completed the statement, “You have Ebola, Emma.” He tried to look at me warmly, but it came off as dissonant with something else in his body language. He continued, “We gave you three doses of Mutation Z. The virus count in your body has gone way down. We’re not even sure you’re contagious anymore. We’re going to monitor you to see if your body will eventually kill the virus off completely. Until then, we need to keep you under quarantine. If your body doesn’t fight off the Ebola in the next month or so, we’re going to try other experimental serums.” Before I could respond, he asked me, “How do you feel?”
I wanted to ask Tovar about Akachi’s apparent rise from the dead and Chibueze’s condition and why we remembered having been released from our prison cells—or quarantine units or hospital rooms behind bars or whatever the hell kind of locked units we were in—on the night of the full moon; but my intuition told me not to do it, not to inquire too deeply or press for too much information. I felt it safest to play the
dual role of naïve patient and thankful medical worker. I simply answered, “Well, I’m tired; but, other than that, I feel OK.” I laughed, trying to ingratiate myself with humor, and added, “I’m also going a bit stir-crazy. There isn’t exactly a lot to do in here.”
Dr. Tovar smiled especially wide, flashing his pearly white teeth. In a voice that made him sound like a game show host, he asked, “Do you like video games?”
I’m sure I looked surprised at the question. I played along. My answer was a no-brainer: “Yeeeessss.”
Tovar’s smile expanded, looking a bit eerie in the low light of my prison cell. “And do you like books?”
I cocked my head to the side, taking a chance with teasing, as if to say, You’ve got to be kidding me. I answered, “Well, of course I do. I’m a nurse. I read.”
Dr. Tovar laughed. It was probably my imagination, but I swore his cackle had a hint of evil in it, like all the laughs of the mad scientists in the old movies. He swept his arm in a wide circle, gesturing around my cell, saying rather magnanimously to one of the medical workers wearing a white coat, one of his minions, “OK, then. See to it that Emma here gets a widescreen TV, a couple of game systems, lots of games, and an electronic reading device loaded up with books—her choice as to which games and which books. We want to keep our patients happy.”
Then the team headed on over to Chibueze’s cell. She got everything I got plus an automatic coffeemaker and a box of donuts. Damn.
The next day, we received our gifts, everything we had asked for. We were also injected with what a prison guard wearing turquoise gloves called “a booster serum for Mutation Z.”