McKean 02 The Neah Virus

by Thomas Hopp

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  McKean explained. “IgM and IgG are different types of antibody molecules. The IgM-to-IgG shift is a measure of the maturity of the immune response. Failure to shift indicates that Leon’s antibody response against G1 is shutting off, while his anti-G2 response keeps getting stronger. All other things being equal, I would have expected both the anti-G1 and anti-G2 responses to increase with time.”

  “But his fever is down,” said Erwin. “That’s a sign of recovery.”

  “Yes,” McKean agreed. “Which suggests the anti-G2 response may be sufficient to rid the body of virus. And I see he’s no longer restrained. Is he still sedated?”

  “No,” Erwin replied. “But that’s not necessarily a good sign. The violence subsided with the fever but now when he’s awake he seems almost mindless. When we try to talk to him, he just stares.”

  McKean looked up from the chart and glanced into his friend’s open, unseeing eyes. An orderly in a yellow hazmat suit came to change the bottle on the iv drip line, and Curtis’s eyes shifted toward him while he worked. But there was no sign of recognition on his face.

  “He’s got all the basic reflexes,” Erwin said. “He follows movement like you just saw. He blinks, and closes his eyes when he’s truly sleeping. But we see no cognitive functions whatsoever. He just lies there as if there’s nobody home inside his head.”

  “A lost soul,” I commented.

  “What?” Erwin asked.

  “Gordon Steel’s legend of the Lost Souls.”

  McKean continued reading the chart but remarked as he read, “I wonder what Gordon Steel would do for him at this stage?”

  “I wonder what we’re going to do for him,” said Erwin. “Feed him iv fluids and wait. I guess that’s all we can do.”

  McKean watched the clear intravenous fluid drip from the plastic bag that led through a line into Curtis’s left arm. He remarked thoughtfully, “Without modern medical intervention, a victim would naturally die at this point, if the fever hadn’t already claimed him. That was the fate of Capitan Nuniez.”

  Erwin said, “You know, Peyton, another pair of cases were admitted late yesterday to the isolation facility we set up in Port Angeles.”

  “New cases?”

  “Yes. A husband and wife who were both bitten by a deranged neighbor when they tried to help him.”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “Farm country just outside Clallam Bay.”

  “Inside the quarantine area?”

  “We’ve got a team looking into that. They lived on a back road with several possible routes out. There are old logging roads all over the landscape in that area. And it’s all very remote and mountainous. It will take time to figure out whether it was within the containment blockade or not.”

  “That does not sound too encouraging.”

  “We’re doing our best, given the rough country.”

  “You said bitten by a neighbor,” said McKean. “Is that neighbor one of your other cases?”

  “No. And that’s quite troubling. The couple said they heard him moaning and thrashing around in the woods and they went out to help him. They found him lying on the ground, naked and bleeding and groggy from exposure, but when they tried to get him on his feet he managed to bite them both. The husband chased him off with a stick, but now the madman is missing and the man and woman are both patients. They hadn’t heard the President’s announcement that day, or they might have been more careful. They waited overnight but then called the police and were fetched to the hospital in an aid car.”

  “How rapidly is their disease progressing?”

  “Very rapidly, as we might expect for biting victims. They’ve gone through the same stages of the disease as Leon, but on a much faster timeline. Itching in twelve hours, scratching and disorientation in twenty-four, mania in thirty-six.”

  “Less than two days!” I said.

  “So, by now,” said McKean, “they must have reached this somnolent stage?” He pointed at Curtis.

  “No,” said Erwin. “They both died, pretty horribly.”

  “Fever?”

  “They were given ibuprofen for high fevers, and restrained against scratching themselves or biting. They were sedated with ketamine, but that wasn’t enough. They went into convulsions, quite lengthy, quite severe. Both finally died of cardiac arrest.”

  “Horrific,” said McKean. “At least Leon has been spared that fate.”

  “So far,” Erwin agreed. “What scares me most is the idea of this stuff spreading faster than it has until now, if biting becomes a trend.”

  “There are other reports of biting?”

  “Three more bite victims were admitted in Port Angeles this morning. Most telling similar stories of people running naked in the woods.”

  “Same localities, Neah Bay and Clallam Bay?”

  Erwin looked even more troubled. “Not all. One was from Neah Bay, one was from Clallam Bay, and one was a bit closer to Port Angeles. The little town of Pysht. That’s a good fifteen miles beyond the blockade, as the crow flies.”

  “Funny you should mention crows flying,” I said.

  “It’s just a very tough place to try to contain a viral outbreak,” Erwin went on. “I’m really beginning to doubt our ability to establish an effective perimeter. I have a hunch there are a lot more cases out there we haven’t heard about yet, given the trend of people coming out of backwoods areas in bad condition. I’ve asked the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office to shut down all roads in the west half of the county. They said they’d get back to me, but it’s been hours with no call. Same response from Atlanta. I feel like going and blockading the place myself.”

  “Any Makahs reporting sick yet?”

  “As impossible as it seems, not one Makah has shown up sick yet. Everyone so far has been Caucasian or Asian, or African American.”

  “Makahs must indeed have an inborn resistance,” McKean said. “It’s the opposite of history. Now they survive while the babalthuds die.”

  “And while you’re trying to figure that one out, Peyton, factor in one more thing. We’ve had two cases of young children admitted in Port Angeles, a boy and a girl from Clallam Bay. Both went by the fast progression route, even though neither was bitten.”

  McKean thought a long moment. “That suggests the disease hits young children harder, like many diseases. The last time Sean went down with the flu…” He stopped and remained silent for some time.

  Erwin could see, as I did, that McKean had been struck by a deeply personal concern. She said, “Keep a close eye on your boy, Peyton. I don’t like the fact that he was exposed to Leon Curtis in your office.”

  “Neither do I.” Concern deeply creased his high forehead.

  Across the hall, the outer airlock door to the isolation facility opened. A young man in turquoise surgical scrubs came out, having just gone through the sterility control shower and gotten out of his isolation suit. He went to where Leon’s chart was hung on the wall, took it, and made a few notes.

  Erwin introduced him as he wrote. “Peyton and Fin, you remember Dr. Zimmer, don’t you? He’s the one who admitted you with the jihad virus.”

  Zimmer turned to us and smiled. I recognized him as the blond, wary-eyed man who had checked us over first when we were infected with Sheik Abdul Ghazi’s super strain of smallpox. Something about him looked different, now.

  Kay Erwin noticed it too. “Hey,” she said, grasping him by one elbow and then consciously letting go again. “You’re eyes look a little puffy. Haven’t you been getting enough sleep?”

  “Sleep?” he said as if he hadn’t understood the question. Then he rubbed a knuckle into the swollen flesh under his right eye.

  Erwin, McKean, and I all took a step backward. Erwin raised her hands in a silent command for Zimmer to hold still. “John,” she said, thin-voiced. “I want you to go back into sterility control, put your pressure suit back on, go into the ward and wait there.”

&
nbsp; “But I’m off duty,” he protested, still acting like the issue was eluding him.

  “You’re on duty until I say you’re off,” Erwin blustered.

  He turned, rather robotically, and went back through the airlock door without another word.

  Kay shook her head. “I hope I’m just imagining things. But he was the one who admitted Leon. He spent quite a bit of time with him before he was sent to the isolation ward.”

  “Time without protection?” McKean asked.

  “Not even a respiratory mask,” Erwin acknowledged. “That was five days ago. We didn’t know what we were dealing with then.”

  “But if he has contracted the virus,” I said, “he could have exposed other people. His family, coworkers.”

  “Let’s hope he’s okay,” Erwin replied. She turned to go to the airlock door. “I’m going to suit up and get some blood from him to test for virus and antibodies.”

  We turned to go, but stopped short of the elevators when Erwin called, “Peyton!”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re all hoping for a vaccine, soon.”

  “I’m doing my best.”

  * * * * * * * * * *

  When McKean and I got off the elevator on ImCo’s third floor, Janet Emerson was waiting at the landing to go up. She stopped halfway aboard as we passed her, looking expectantly at McKean.

  “Yes?” he said, mystified by her quizzical look.

  “Aren’t you going to the staff meeting?”

  His expression clouded. “What staff meeting?”

  “Dave Curman just came through the lab and told everybody there’s an emergency meeting of all staff involved with the Neah virus project, right now, in the executive conference room upstairs. I assumed they had already cleared it with you.”

  “Not a word spoken.”

  She looked more surprised. “I have to hurry. Dr. Curman said Dr. Holloman wants to discuss my data first.” She patted a stack of computer printouts and data notebooks gathered in the crook of one arm. He flashed a look of concern at her, which she returned. He thought a moment and then said, “Go ahead, Janet. I’ll be right up.”

  She took the elevator and McKean hurried to his office, hung his coat on the rack, grabbed a pen and pad of paper from his desk and hurried out the door with me on his heels. “Come on,” he said grimly. “Time for some damage control.”

  A minute later we entered at the back of an executive boardroom on the sixth floor, finding it crowded with a mix of scientists in white lab coats and dark-suited corporate officers, a group of about thirty people in all. Most sat around the boardroom table but the overflow of attendees was accommodated in chairs arranged around the periphery of the room. A few of the junior staff leaned against the wall in the back. I joined them, trying to make myself inconspicuous. McKean took one of the last unfilled seats at the table, midway down its length from the presiding seat at the head of the table, which was occupied by stout-bodied Stuart Holloman. As McKean took his seat, the room’s hushed conversations fell silent. Holloman eyed McKean coolly for a moment before he spoke. Beads of perspiration shone on his bald cranium and the armpits of his pink dress shirt were once again soaked in sweat.

  “I see Dr. McKean has managed to find time to join us.” He glared at McKean as if the fact displeased him. Then he spoke to the group. “We have learned from a confidential source at Virogen that we are in a horserace with this vaccine. I have it from someone in their labs, who will remain nameless, that they have the virus in hand thanks to Peyton McKean’s friend, Kay Erwin. She sent them a package via overnight delivery. According to my source, Virogen has already isolated the G protein segment of the viral genome and is making it into a vaccine as we speak.”

  McKean said, “If they have isolated that gene fragment, then they know like we do, just how difficult it is to work with.”

  Holloman waved a hand to stop McKean. “And, apparently, they have found a way past that problem. From what my source tells me, they are well on the way to producing a vaccine that contains not one, but two viral surface antigens. Does that sound familiar, Dr. McKean?”

  “Of course, G1 and G2. But I have strong doubts they were able to obtain better sequence data than ours in this short a time span.”

  “And that,” said Holloman with the satisfaction of someone springing a trap, “is what we are here to make an executive decision about.”

  McKean held firm. “I suggest we assume they are stymied just like we are. Janet told me this morning the virus has some physical roadblock in its gene structure that has frustrated our efforts to read the code sequence past the start of the G1 gene.”

  “Roadblock?”

  “I suspect the gene has a secondary structure in that region, which effectively ties the DNA into a knot like a shoe lace, which is inhibiting the sequencing reaction. Although newer sequencing techniques usually overcome the effect, it seems we are faced with a particularly strong knot to unwind. Odds are it has caused the same problem at Virogen.”

  “Odds are!” Holloman repeated impatiently. “I’m not willing to take odds on this company’s future. I don’t care what the source of this problem is. I only want to know how we’re going to solve it.”

  “With caution. Proceeding without full knowledge of what we are working with could lead to catastrophe.”

  “What sort of catastrophe?”

  “I’m not certain.”

  “Well, I am certain it will be a catastrophe if Virogen beats us to market with this product.” He took a more conciliatory tone and glanced at faces around the room. “Certainly, we all would like to proceed cautiously and analyze every detail of the viral gene sequence. On that I think we all, as rational scientists, can agree.”

  There was a general nodding of heads around the room.

  “However,” he said emphatically, stopping the heads in mid-nod. “We are capitalists here as well as scientists - in case you need reminding, Peyton McKean. And as capitalists we cannot afford to come in second in this race. Virogen could dominate the marketplace and exclude us completely. And I would say some people in this room might lose their jobs if we come in second.” He suppressed a cruel smirk and looked at McKean meaningfully. Then he turned to Janet. “I want to see your sequence data, right here, right now. Put it on the projector screen.”

  David Curman was seated towards the rear of the board table and across from McKean. He switched on a projector sitting on the table top near him and it shined a blue rectangle on a screen mounted on one wall of the room. Janet used a portable computer in front of her to key in some commands. The projector showed a slide filled with long horizontal strings of the letters A, T, G, and C. The slide contained several hundred of these letters.

  “Right here,” she said, picking up a laser pointer and using its red dot to circle a segment of letters near the middle of the slide, “is the start of the G1 protein, with the three-letter amino acid codes translated from the DNA code letters.” She read the beginning of the sequence, “Met-Thr-Arg-Tyr…” and then paused. “Unfortunately,” she said, pointing to the lower left part of the slide, “the sequencing reaction terminated before it got very far beyond the beginning of the gene. It only reads 43 amino acids from one end of a protein molecule that according to our western blots should have about 600 amino acids in it. So most of the molecule is still unaccounted for.”

  Holloman nodded as if he had been prepared for this. “And the G2 gene? Tell us about that.”

  “We had better luck reading the DNA sequence in reverse from the other end, so we got more information on the second gene.” She typed a few more commands and the screen showed a second slide. “Reading backwards, we start at the tail of the protein and read toward the head.” Again, she pointed her red laser dot at a sequence of amino acid codes. “Ser-Lys-Phe-Glu…In this case the sequence reaction covered more than two hundred amino acids. According to G2’s molecular size of about 500 amino acids on our western blots, that’s nearly the entire second half of the prot
ein.”

  “Anything unexpected?” asked Holloman.

  “No, it’s quite normal for a fish virus G gene. It’s a previously unknown family member, but it’s similar enough for us to be sure it’s from a fish virus.”

  “How are your efforts coming at getting the rest of the sequence?”

  “Not so well. We’ve tried to cut the DNA with dozens of different restriction enzymes, but none seem able to break it in the middle and give us a new starting end. Meanwhile, nothing we do seems to get us a better sequence run on the front end of the G1 protein. Heating, cooling, denaturants, we’ve tried it all.”

  “That confirms what certain people have told me.” Holloman glanced at Curman, who smiled at him and then glared vindictively at McKean. “And that brings me to the second subject of this meeting. David, why don’t you explain what you have been doing?”

  With a smug smile, Curman said, “Janet, put on slide DC1, will you please?”

  A moment later a slide appeared, in which two rows of blue spots stretched from one side of the screen to the other.

  “My technicians have placed the entire two-gene segment into a yeast expression vector and, lo and behold, the yeast produce both G1 and G2 in huge quantities. Look at the slide. Going from left to right, the pairs of spots get darker, because both G proteins are being made in larger and larger quantities as time goes on. At the twenty-four hour time point on the right, we had produced incredible amounts of both products. We couldn’t ask for more.”

  McKean said to Curman without rancor, “Congratulations, Dave. Science sometimes gives us pleasant surprises.”

  Holloman said, “You see, Peyton? No need to analyze the sequences, no need to alter them to get the best result. Everything just worked the way I hoped.”

  “So far.”

  “And, that brings us to the final question of this meeting,” said Holloman. “If Virogen has also discovered how easy it is to produce these proteins, then they may be moving forward with all possible speed. Don’t you agree, Peyton?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “Therefore, we need to scale up for manufacturing without more delay. Does anyone here want to dispute that?”