by James Abel
Ranjay backed from the bed slightly, not because he feared the corpse. He feared the idea.
“But you never get four people with it, never, that has never happened,” he said. “I’ve seen this, yes, in India. Many cases. But you never get a group!”
“You’re right,” I repeated. “Quite right. So far.”
NINE
“It cannot be possible,” Ranjay said.
The twenty-five million dollar U.S. Arctic Research Center was a concrete tower sitting on the tundra, a half mile from the base and satellite farms, jutting up like those old forts forming the French Marginot Line before World War Two. Inside were labs assigned to scientists. The amenities were first class but security stank. When it came to the Arctic, Congress didn’t take the Arctic seriously.
I remember meeting a Senate aide on a fact-finding mission up here once. He’d asked me if the Eskimos spoke English and shops accepted U.S. dollars.
“This is the U.S.,” I’d responded, and watched the man’s cheeks color. “That was a joke,” he replied.
Now, in our lab, I said, “Here goes. We test for rabies.”
George Carling lay naked, under a sheet, in a bright light that would have driven him crazy before he died. I smelled formaldehyde and a more corrupt whiff from the man on the table, who had been alive hours ago.
Eddie, Ranjay, and I wore aprons, gloves, plastic visors. Sengupta shook his head, but looked distraught. “We considered this possibility, and discarded it.”
“But we didn’t test for it, Ranjay.”
“Because you never get cases together, never a cluster. Never!”
The Harmon bodies waited in a walk-in freezer, down a long, lab-lined hall.
“Rabies, one hundred percent fatal,” said Eddie morosely, watching me unwrap an enormous hypodermic, World War One size, more wicked-looking sword than needle. “Ebola deaths, ninety percent. Plague can be treated. Rabies? Hydrophobia? Once the symptoms hit, good-bye.”
I bent over the body. I probed with my gloved index finger at the base of George’s powerful neck. His feet hung upside down over the end of the table. The flesh was yellowish in death, even paler under the light.
Rabies, I knew, was a Lassa virus, a zoonotic brain infection named after Lyssa, Greek goddess of mad dogs. The Greeks understood rage enough to give it a god. By the twenty-first century, rabies had been shut down as a major killer in developed countries, but still killed fifty thousand around the world each year, usually in poor nations, jungle countries, where bite victims could not reach or afford the painful series of shots that could—only if administered before symptoms appear—halt the disease.
“Rabies kills one by one,” Ranjay argued. “If it spread the other way, my God”—he shuddered—“you’d have millions of fatalities.”
I found the spot where spine flowed into brain, a nerve highway or, if I was right, the road by which the virus had migrated to George’s skull, taken root, and spread back to set fire to his thinking, burn along his nerve endings, shut down speech, and, in the end, with a swiftness defying the usual timetable, stop his heart.
“The symptoms were there,” I said. “Come on, Ranjay, a laundry list of what we heard on Kelley’s recordings.”
Rabies is one of the most hideous diseases in the human imagination; the basis of vampire and werewolf legends. The virus infects through an animal bite, although, on rare occasions, it has sickened lab workers who got it in their eyes or mouth. Rabies transforms a pet into a salivating killer. It lives in superstition. I think we were all fairly terrified now.
“I grant this. Yes, Joe, water becomes disgusting. I had a case, a farmer, peaceful man, screaming as they brought him in because it was raining, that water hurt. But for five people to have it . . . no, impossible.”
Eddie said, “Plus, he died too fast.”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t mosquito-borne encephalitis. Or West Nile. Negative on herpes variations. The guttural noises. He thought he was speaking English.”
I inserted the needle into the mass of muscle and flesh, the brain stem. I drew back on the plunger, watching the hypo fill with a dark gray mix of blood and brain tissue. “Of course, none of our dipsticks were positive. Rabies doesn’t hide in blood. We came here to look for mutations. Then maybe we found one but refused to see it.”
“Too bad Clay Qaqulik blew his brains out,” said Eddie. “Can’t test it.”
“Even if George tests negative, we’ll do the others.”
Just weeks ago the research center had been packed with scientists from around the world; its hallways a mélange of languages: Swiss German from the glacier people, Norwegian or English from the ocean currents people, German-German from the Max Planck Institute’s climate people.
The locks on the doors were old-fashioned number punchers, there were no eye scans or fingerprint panels. The walk-in labs had key locks, and inside freezers, areas were assigned by rack and shelf space. Preserved samples ranged from algae to whale livers, the only security a few yellow-and-black BIOHAZARD stickers on crates, vials, shelves.
“Good thing the bodies were refrigerated,” Dr. Sengupta mused. “Because we are at the tail end of the period when the virus can be detected after death.”
Eddie shook his head. “You’re imagining things, One. That cabin’s been the site of research for decades. Who knows what the hell someone dumped there. Occam’s razor. The most likely explanation is probable.”
I slid out the needle and injected most of the extracted fluid into a five-ounce sample bottle, which Eddie sealed. This would remain our primary sample, which Eddie walked into the freezer down the hall. The place was so deserted that I heard his footsteps receding. George’s tissue would be stored beside our collection taken over the summer; toxoplasma from a four-year-old we treated for anemia in Point Hope—victim of a parasite normally found in cats farther south, but recently beluga whales have tested positive for it. So have people eating their dried meat. Stored rabies from Arctic foxes. And the prize, a disgusting foot-long tapeworm, diphyllobothriasis, normally found in Pacific Ocean salmon, but they’ve been moving north as oceans warm.
“This is all we need, another 1348,” Eddie said. He’d returned.
I moved to the microscope table and dripped a single drop of George’s fluid onto a glass slide.
Thirteen forty-eight, I knew—using a tongue depressor to thin the sample, so light could pass through it—was the red-letter date for plague researchers. It was a year when the smartest physicians on Earth did not even dream that microbes existed, and when infected fleas somewhere in central Europe boarded a sailing ship in the fur of a few black rats. By the time they scurried ashore in Marseille, the crew was dying of a new disease. And the fleas kept biting: a baby in a market, a husband and wife as they made love in a hut, a swineherd, a nobleman. Rank and money made no difference. They all began to die.
“Now we air dry the slide. Ten more minutes,” I said.
Bubonic Plague was what those terrified Europeans called the dark buboes that erupted in those medieval groins and armpits, that had victims coughing black blood and dying by the thousands. And then the disease got worse. Something changed in its DNA. It went from being transmittable through flea bites, into a killer that floated in air, lived in human breath, murdered if you kissed a girl, if a stranger coughed on you, if you took a steam with a friend, if you shook a hand and picked a food particle off your teeth. Bubonic Plague exploded into the catastrophic Pneumonic Plague, the Black Death, which rampaged across a continent and slaughtered one out of four people. Graveyards were overwhelmed. Societies collapsed. Armies of flagellants marched across Europe, through villages of the dead and dying; parades of half-naked, half-starved supplicants, praying, whipping themselves, crying for God, blaming the suffering on human sins.
“Now we stain our slide,” I said.
“I am very
fearful. I am thinking . . . about Constantine’s experiments,” Dr. Sengupta said.
Constantine was a Texas researcher who worked on rabies in the 1960s and his conclusions scared the shit out of me. That’s because Constantine worked in a huge cave, Frio Cave. And on the massive vaulted ceiling of that damp place lived a colony of three million silver-haired bats. Bats that fled their home each dusk in clouds of winged movement, spread through a thousand square miles of landscape, and were susceptible to rabies. The strain they transmitted was particularly virulent.
Thirty seconds and the slide will be dry.
Constantine was curious, I knew, why there had been a few isolated incidents where hikers in remote areas—people who insisted they’d never been bitten by animals—came down with rabies.
They’d been in bat caves, he found.
Constantine’s theory was that under the right circumstances, rabies could travel in air.
To test this, he placed caged coyotes in that cave, beneath the squirming bats on the ceiling, so the coyotes ate and slept in that air saturated with bat guano and effluence. Half of the cages were built with iron bars, enabling bats to enter the gaps. For the rest, steel mesh covered the bars, stopping bats, but the mesh would admit airborne virus.
Constantine’s question was: Would the mesh stop rabies?
“All the animals died,” Sengupta said.
Eddie shook his head. He did not want to believe. “That was closed space, Ranjay, the air thick with bat shit. There’s no connection between transmission in the Arctic and coyotes trapped with three million bats. Yeah, Constantine proved aerosolization possible, but not here.”
I gingerly moved our slide to the microscope, careful not to cut myself. Rabies virus is big enough to show up on a high school lab student’s microscope. No extra-special equipment required.
“Maybe I should have my sons and wife leave town, go back to her mother’s, in Mumbai,” mused Sengupta.
I heard my heart beating. I envisioned the Harmons in their camp. I inserted the slide beneath the eyepiece. At that moment we all sensed ourselves standing at a border between a world we knew and a different, frightening one that might exist a moment from now.
“Bird flu,” I said, adjusting focus.
Same story. Mutation. Bird flu originated in winged vertebrates. They passed the disease on to pigs—dropped a seed into their food maybe, who knows—and the pigs sickened and transmitted the flu to humans.
But then, again, something changed, we knew. The middle stage disappeared. I envisioned it. Somewhere on a Chinese farm, in a fetid sty a thousand miles from Beijing, air filled with alterations, maybe a local factory dumped chemicals in the water, maybe the temperature rose just a little bit, or nature stepped in, but for whatever reason suddenly DNA mutated and that flu bypassed pigs as hosts and went directly from birds into humans.
You no longer needed a pig to get it. You could catch it from a heron on a rooftop in Paris. You could catch it from pigeons you feed bread crumbs to in Central Park.
“Host shift,” said Eddie.
“Mutation,” said Sengupta. “Evolution at its finest.”
I considered Barrow, the homes, and church sing-alongs, the value center, the high school—any town, every town, with a thousand places for a virus to move between hosts.
I took a seat on the stool. I watched bright light shine up through the slide. I peered down.
“Oh, shit,” I said, uttering the most eloquent exclamation of inadequacy on the planet.
My head was an anvil. What I saw in the eyepiece matched the photo on my screen. The bullet shapes were unmistakable. I was staring at a quivering mass of microbes, thick as bees in a hive, bumping and shifting as if trying to get out; the spiked coatings like defensive antenna on a mine in the ocean, or an armored dinosaur; and beneath that, I saw the shadow of the virus’s protective envelope or shield; and inside that, like explosive powder that Merlin had poured into his whale bomb, the killer: looping spiral DNA.
“Rabies,” I said.
Eddie gasped. “How the hell did George get it? He was nowhere near the Harmons.”
I turned away, heading down the hall for the freezers and the three Harmon bodies. Eddie and Ranjay trailed along. “George doesn’t even live in Barrow. He flew in a few days ago. The Harmons were in the field then.”
Sengupta said, “Then the starting place is in town?”
“Let’s wait and see what we find with the Harmons. Maybe they’ll be negative.”
An hour later we stood amid the three bodies, now all laid out on tables, a little party of the dead.
Stunned, despite the fact that I’d anticipated this, I said, “And not a single bite mark. Anywhere.”
I heard a droning sound over the quiet whoosh of our air-circulation system. Looking out the window, I saw the contrail of the afternoon Alaska Air Flight to Anchorage, and, from there, many passengers would board other planes, to New York, L.A., Paris, Hamburg, Moscow . . .
The contrail disappeared into the gray.
Sengupta said, “We must call the CDC in Atlanta. I have only two doses of rabies vaccine at the hospital. We will need more.”
I tried to think. I shut my eyes. I flashed to flu season in New York. People crowding subways and buses, coughing. Workers and kids coming home at night and going straight to bed. Patients flooding ER rooms, lining up in local pharmacies. Whole offices of workers short of help.
I looked out the window, southward, toward the lights of Barrow. Almost five thousand people there.
What we’ve got here—if it’s contagious—is much worse than a flu. It makes you angry. It makes you crazy. It kills you ranting and screaming, stark raving mad.
Sengupta laughed softly. “Just think. I wanted to come to the Arctic.”
“So the possibilities are . . .” said Eddie.
“One. Worst case. It’s evolved. It’s traveling in a new way. Mutation. Evolution. Aerosolization.”
“Two?”
“The starting point is in town, in a single location they all visited. Point source, not contagious.”
“Is there a three?”
“Intentional. Someone gave it to them. Kelley said Tilda Swann was tampering with their water supply. It was out in the open, in the airport supply area.”
Ranjay said, “Where would someone get a sample?”
“Like we did. Sick dog. Dead fox. Hell, anyone could walk into the freezer where our samples are kept,” I said.
Sengupta recoiled. He was not a soldier, trained to look for enemies. “That is crazy,” he said. “Why would someone do that? If you wanted to hurt someone, there are other ways, easier ways to do it. You are talking about a very, very insane individual.”
Eddie said, “You don’t think it’s a weapon, One!”
I knew from our unit files that in those old Soviet labs, across the Bering Sea, as recently as thirty years ago, scientists had tried to weaponize rabies.
“We treat it like its contagious,” I said, reaching for the phone. “Your wife isn’t going anywhere, Ranjay. No one in town is. We need to quarantine this place, now.”
TEN
“Oh, pshaw! It won’t be rabies,” the distinguished-looking doctor on my computer screen said.
It was ninety minutes after we’d made our discovery, the amount of time it had taken General Wayne Homza to gather up the five faces looking back from the split screen. I’d alerted D.C. from the Quonset hut, not the lab, because of the crappy security. Just over the past few days Eddie and I had overheard detectives interviewing people in other labs through the vent system, a veritable highway for talk.
Bruce Friday telling Merlin, “Where was I on August second, when the Harmons had the lab fire? Hmm! Oh! Anchorage. At the Cook Hotel conference on polar bears. Here’s the photo.”
Anthropologist Candida McDouga
l, Alan’s wife, saying, “Leon Kavik was yelling at Ted about Kelley, just furious that he couldn’t see her more.”
I’d been quite rational in my step-by-step presentation. I’d told the men and women on-screen that something terrible and inexplicable had infected five so far, but we must anticipate more. I’d listed possibilities, that the rabies might be man-made or a natural mutation. I’d suggested the investigation split into two paths: tracking the infection backward, and considering that the Harmons had been targets from the first. That’s when Homza, incredulous, had sneered, “Targets? The algae people?”
The CDC, in the U.S., has the authority to call a national medical emergency. And its chief, Dr. Rudolph Gaines, looked like one of those M.D.s on old 1970s medical TV programs, when doctors were godlike, a status to which he seemed to feel he belonged. Silver hair. Pale blue eyes. Smooth movements. White coat. He radiated soothing.
“Rabies simply does not present this way,” he lectured. “We’ll send up a couple of epidemiologists. They’ll repeat the test. False positives! It happens all the time. You’re a warrior, Colonel. You believe intent exists where there’s merely understandable error. You’re simply not a rabies expert, sir. No shame in that, my friend.”
“How long will this confirmation take?”
“Hmm. Our plane is in Haiti, on the cholera now, so our people will use commercial flights . . . back and forth to Barrow . . . we’ll want the bodies back here. Retest, all total, electron microscopy, antibody tests, antigen, amplicon tests, oh, I’d say six or seven days at the most.”
“Six days? The whole town could be sick by then.”
“I very much doubt that.”
He gave me—and the four other faces on screen—a sincere, sympathetic doctor look.
“Colonel, please understand. Two years ago we had a similar panic in Braxton, Missouri. False positive! One hundred people vaccinated and then we find out that the preliminary was wrong!”
“We tested four people, sir. Four tests!”