12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  “I don’t ever sleep,” an elderly man called out. “How will they know if I got it?”

  “Make sure to tell the doctors everything you can about your normal sleeping patterns,” the CDC officer told the man. “And anything else they should know.”

  “This place is festering,” a Latino woman carrying a baby said. “If we weren’t sick before, we’ll get sick here.”

  “Keep your eye shields fastened,” the CDC man told her, “and don’t touch your eyes or anything else, and you’ll be safe.”

  Eye shields were a crucial part of the containment effort. The CDC was encouraging people to wear masks as well. But Stanton believed eye shields and masks and education weren’t nearly enough. He’d sent a CDC-wide email recommending complete transparency with the public, as well as a home-isolation period of forty-eight hours, and making eye shields mandatory in L.A. schools until they could slow the spread.

  He made his way to the makeshift CDC command center in the rear of the hospital. Health-department regulations were taped to every wall, covering peeling paint. More than thirty Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, administrators, and CDC nurses were packed into the conference room, and everyone wore masks and eye shields. Stanton was the only one in a biohazard suit, and everyone eyed him, knowing what possibility it suggested.

  The highest-ranking doctors sat around a table in the middle of the room. Deputy CDC Director Cavanagh ran the meeting. Her long white hair was pulled back, and her blue eyes flashed brightly from behind her eye shield. Despite more than thirty years of service to CDC, the skin on her forehead was still smooth. Stanton sometimes imagined she’d simply ordered it not to wrinkle.

  “We’ve got two hundred thousand more eye shields coming by morning,” Cavanagh said. Stanton squeezed into the seat next to her, an almost comical challenge in his bulky suit. “Trucked and flown in from all over.”

  “And we can get another fifty thousand by the day after tomorrow,” someone behind them chimed in.

  “We need four million,” Stanton said into the small microphone inside his helmet, wasting no time.

  “Well, two hundred fifty thousand are available,” Cavanagh said. “That’s going to have to be enough. First priority will be to supply health-care workers, obviously. Next will be anyone with a connection to any of the infected, and the rest will go to the distribution centers and get doled out first-come-first-served. The last thing we need is to create a panic and cause people to leave en masse. Or this thing could burn across the country.”

  Stanton piped up again. “We have to consider a quarantine.”

  “What do you think we’re doing here?” Katherine Leeds from the viral division said. Leeds was a tiny woman, but she was tough. Over the years, she and Stanton had clashed many times. “We have a quarantine, and we’re coordinating them in other hospitals too.”

  “I’m not talking about the hospitals,” Stanton said. He looked at the group. “I’m talking about the entire city.”

  There was a low murmur throughout the room.

  “Do you have any idea what ten million people will do when they find out the government is telling them they can’t leave?” Leeds said. “There’s a reason it’s never been done before.”

  “There could be a thousand cases tomorrow,” Stanton said, unflinching. “And five thousand the day after. People’ll start to flee the city, and some will be sick. If we don’t stop the flow out of L.A., VFI will be in every city in the country by week’s end.”

  “Even if it were feasible,” Leeds said, “it’s probably not constitutional.”

  “We’re talking about a disease that spreads like a cold,” Stanton said, “but that’s as deadly as Ebola and that’s impossible to get rid of on fomites. It doesn’t die like a bacteria, and it can’t be destroyed like a virus.”

  Whereas most pathogens were no longer contagious after twenty-four hours or less on “fomites”—hard and soft surfaces—prion could stay infectious indefinitely, and there was no known way to disinfect the surfaces. Earlier in the day, the same ELISA test with which Stanton and Davies found no prion at Havermore Farms yielded a very different result from the planes at LAX, Volcy’s hospital room, and Gutierrez’s house. Doorknobs, furniture, cockpit switches, seat cushions, and seat-belt buckles on the planes Zarrow had flown in the last week were all covered with prion.

  “Every plane leaving L.A. could have passengers about to spread it around the world,” Stanton said.

  “What about the highways out of town?” one of the other doctors said. “You want to shut those down too?”

  Beneath the weight of Stanton’s suit, everyone in the room sounded far away. He had to imagine that his voice through the helmet didn’t exactly have a commanding effect. “We have to cut off the flow. We call in the California Guard and the army if we have to. I’m not saying it will be easy, but if we don’t act fast and decisively, we’ll pay the price.”

  “There’ll be riots and hoarding and all the rest,” Leeds said. “It’ll be like Port-au-Prince in a couple of days.”

  “We have to explain to people that it’s a precautionary measure and that they’ll be allowed to leave when we know how to stop the disease from spreading—”

  “We need to be extremely careful with what we tell people,” Cavanagh cut in, “or there will be mass panic. It’s got huge liabilities, but so does allowing clusters of cases to develop in every city in America.” She stood up. “Quarantine is a last option, but we certainly must consider it.”

  The entire command center was stunned to hear her agree with Stanton. He was as surprised as anyone—despite the fact that she’d long been his champion at CDC, Cavanagh wasn’t usually one to consider drastic measures so quickly. She clearly understood what they were up against.

  Once the meeting was adjourned, Stanton waited for her to finish giving division directors their assignments. He stood in front of a massive whiteboard depicting the spiderweb of connections between the patients showing symptoms, with Volcy in the middle. Volcy, Gutierrez, and Zarrow had red circles around their names, indicating they were deceased. The other hundred twenty-four names were arranged in four concentric rings.

  Cavanagh approached him, and Stanton resumed his plea. “We have to do it now, Emily. Or it’ll spread.”

  “I heard you, Gabe.”

  “Good,” he said. “Then if that’s settled, how are we going to pursue a treatment? Once we have the quarantine in place, that must be our priority.”

  They left the room and paused in the corridor outside the shuttered gift shop. Through the glass, Stanton could see boxes of candy bars, gum, and granola bars lining the counters and helium balloons losing gas.

  “You’ve been looking for a cure for prion disease for how long?” Cavanagh asked.

  “We’re making progress.”

  “And how many patients have you cured?”

  “People upstairs are dying, Emily.”

  “Gabe, you’re already trying to sell me on the idea of quarantining a whole damn city. Don’t get sanctimonious on me too.”

  “Containment’s essential,” he said. “But we need to explore possibilities for a cure, and we need the FDA to suspend its normal experimental protocols. We need to be able to test patients right away.”

  “Are you talking about quinacrine and pentosan? You know the problems with them better than anyone.”

  Quinacrine was an old treatment for prion disease that had now been shown to have little use. Pentosan was different: Derived from the wood of beech trees, it was once Stanton’s best hope. Unfortunately, the drug couldn’t pass the human blood–brain barrier, which protected neurons from dangerous chemicals. Stanton and his team had tried everything, from changing the drug’s physical structure to giving it through a shunt, but they had found no way to get pentosan into the brain without causing even more harm.

  “Quinacrine won’t work,” Stanton said. “And the old problems with pentosan still exist.”

  “So then
what are we even talking about?” Cavanagh asked.

  “We could start purifying antibodies.”

  “After your lawsuit, Director Kanuth won’t hear anything about antibodies. Besides, you have absolutely no idea if they work in vivo, and we’re not using VFI victims as stage-one guinea pigs.”

  “So that’s it for the people already sick?” Stanton asked. “That’s what we tell them and their families?”

  “Don’t lecture me,” Cavanagh said. “I was there at the beginning of HIV when we were trying to shut down the bathhouses. From the first moment, there were researchers screaming about diverting money and resources to explore a cure, which is how we ended up razor-thin on containment, and more were infected. And how long did it take before they found something that could treat HIV? Fifteen years.” Stanton was silent.

  “Our priority right now is containment,” Cavanagh continued. “Yours is educating the public about how to prevent the spread and figuring out how to destroy the prions once they’re outside the body. Once the number of cases stabilizes, we’ll talk more about a cure. Understand?”

  From the look on her face, Stanton sensed that for now there would be no convincing his boss otherwise. “I understand,” he said.

  When she spoke again, Cavanagh’s voice was calm. “Anything else on your mind I need to know, Gabe?”

  “We need to get a team down to Guatemala now. With Ebola and hantavirus, we had teams in Africa in days to cut it off. Even if we get a quarantine here, it’ll be no use if we don’t shut it down at the original source. It’ll keep spreading around the world from there.”

  “The Guatemalans don’t want any Americans who could have the disease entering their country. They won’t let us across the border. And I can hardly blame them, given that we still have no substantive proof it came from there.”

  “We don’t even know what this thing is, Emily. Think about Marburg. We didn’t have any idea how to stop the virus until we found the original source. What if we could pinpoint where Volcy came from? If we can find these ruins where he was camped out? Then would they allow a team in there?”

  “I have no idea.”

  A voice came from behind them. “Deputy Cavanagh?” They turned to find a baby-faced administrator holding a folder labeled CONFIDENTIAL.

  They were the results of the blood for the patients in the original contact group.

  Cavanagh grabbed the folder. “How many positives?” she asked.

  “Nearly two hundred,” the administrator said.

  Two hundred patients with VFI. More than had ever been diagnosed with mad cow, and they’d only known about VFI for forty-eight hours.

  Cavanagh glanced up at Stanton, and flipped quickly to the final pages, toward the end of the alphabet. He realized she was searching for his name.

  THIRTEEN

  AT THE NORTH END OF THE GETTY CAMPUS, CHEL AND HER ATTORNEY sat in the main administrative office. They were across the table from senior members of the board, the museum’s head curator, and an agent from ICE. Everyone wore eye shields, per the latest CDC recommendations, and everyone had a copy of Chel’s official statement in front of them.

  Dana McLean, head of one of the largest venture-capital funds in the country and chairman of the board of trustees, leaned back in her chair as she spoke. “Dr. Manu, we have to issue a formal suspension without pay pending further review. You’ll have to stop all museum-related activities until a final decision is made.”

  “What about my staff?”

  “They’ll be supervised by the curator, but if it’s found there was anyone else involved in the illegal activities, they’ll be put under review as well.”

  “Dr. Manu,” one board member chimed in. “You claim Dr. Chacon had no idea what you were doing, but then why was he here with you on the night of the eleventh?”

  Chel looked at her defense lawyer, Erin Billings. When Billings nodded for her to answer the question, Chel tried to maintain an even tone. “I never told Rolando what I was working on. I asked him to come in and answer some restoration questions for me. But he never saw the codex.”

  With everything she’d confessed to in her statement, the group had no reason not to believe her. This was the one lie she felt good about.

  “You should know that we’ll be looking back at all of your records for any other evidence of professional misconduct,” the ICE agent, Grayson Kisker, told her.

  “She understands,” her attorney said.

  “What will happen to the codex?” Chel asked.

  “It’ll be returned to the Guatemalans,” McLean told her.

  Kisker said, “But because the illegal transaction happened on American soil, we’ll be the ones filing criminal charges against you.”

  Even after the CDC called to inform her that she’d tested negative for any prion in her blood, Chel had felt numb. The last day had been the most overwhelming mix of guilt and confusion and shock in her life. She knew she’d eventually be fired outright and that she’d lose her teaching position at UCLA as well.

  But after everything she’d seen, she couldn’t bring herself to care.

  Chel and Billings stood from the table. Chel tried to prepare herself to gather her things from her lab for the last time.

  Then Kisker’s cell rang. He listened to someone on the other end of the line, a strange look creeping across his face.

  “Yes,” he said, glancing at Chel. “I’m here with her now.” Slowly, he held his cellphone in her direction. His voice was almost shy. “My boss wants to talk to you.”

  THE AFTERNOON SUN beat down on Chel as she descended the Getty garden walkway into the flowery jungle that sat at the lowest point of the museum grounds, below all the buildings, but still high above L.A. Visitors said the views from the museum-on-the-mountain were better than the art itself, but Chel loved the gardens here most of all. Finding herself alone among the pink and red bougainvillea, she reached out to one of the papery flowers, rubbing it between her fingers. She needed a touchstone now.

  She was listening to Dr. Stanton on her cellphone. “They haven’t found cases in Guatemala yet,” he said. “But if we can give them a more exact location for where Volcy came from, maybe we could send a team in.”

  After talking to the director of ICE, Chel was told to call Stanton for further instructions. She was relieved to learn that he hadn’t been infected either. The glasses they each wore probably had given them some small amount of protection, he’d told her quickly, as if it weren’t important, before launching in.

  “What do you know now about where it might be?”

  “It has to be somewhere in the southern highlands,” Chel said. She reached out, ripped one of the pink bougainvillea flowers off its stem, and tossed it into the stream. She surprised herself with how roughly she did it.

  “Which is how big an area?” Stanton asked.

  “Several thousand square miles. But if the disease is already here, why does it matter where it started?”

  “It’s like a cancer. Even if it’s metastasized, you remove the tumor at the original site so it doesn’t spread farther. We need to know what it is and how it started to have any chance of fighting it.”

  “Something in the codex could tell us more,” she said. “We could find a glyph specific to a smaller area, or some geographic description. But we can’t know until the reconstruction is finished.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “The early pages are in poor condition, and the later ones are worse. Plus there are linguistic obstacles. Difficult glyphs and strange combinations—we’ve been doing everything we can to decipher them.”

  “You better find a way to do it faster.”

  Chel dropped onto a metal bench. It was dripping with dew or water from the sprinklers and she could feel it soaking through her pants, but she didn’t care. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why do you trust me with the codex after I lied to you?”

  “I don’t,” Stanton said. “But ICE called in a
team of experts who told them the best shot at quickly figuring out where the book came from was you.”

  LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER, Chel was on the 405, headed for Culver City. It was the last place she wanted to go after everything that had happened, but she no longer had a choice. For now there’d be no criminal investigation, and the most important artifact in Maya history would stay in her lab. Whatever hesitations she’d had about involving Victor Granning, all that mattered now was doing whatever she could to help the doctors. She couldn’t let her personal issues get in the way.

  The Museum of Jurassic Technology on Venice Boulevard was one of the strangest institutions in L.A. Maybe in the world. Chel had been there once before, and after she’d oriented to the labyrinthine layout and its dark rooms, she was able to relax and let the museum work its wonders on her imagination. There were tiny sculptures that fit into the eye of a needle, a gallery of cosmonaut dogs sent into space by the Russians in the 1950s, an exhibit about cat’s cradles. Each one stranger than the last.

  Just past the In-N-Out Burger on Venice Boulevard, Chel spotted the nondescript taupe building and pulled into a spot in front of the deceptively small storefront façade. The other time she’d come here, she was with her ex. Patrick had been obsessed with an exhibit on letters written to Mount Wilson Observatory about the existence of extraterrestrial life. He said the letters reminded him that there were ways to see the skies other than through the eyepiece of a telescope. As they read them together in the darkened space, Patrick’s voice never far from her ear, one letter drew Chel in too. The exact words the woman wrote about her experiences in another world had always stayed with Chel: I have seen all sorts of moons and stars and openings.…

  At the door to the MJT, Chel pressed a buzzer above a sign that read: RING ONLY ONCE. The door swung open and before her stood an auburn-haired man in his forties, wearing a black cardigan and rumpled khakis. Chel had met Andrew Fisher, the museum’s eccentric manager, when she came here the first time. Even the plastic shield he wore over his face couldn’t disguise the gentle intelligence in his eyes.