“So what did these guys develop, then? This Virophage thing, right?” Tom asked.
“These guys fuck each other majorly.” The doctor continued angrily, but then course-corrected. “Sorry, forgive me, but there is no other way to put it.”
“You mean they fucked themselves?” Tom fought hard to hold back a snigger.
“Well, whichever way you say that…you know, they did a very bad thing.” She replied, slightly irritated.
“I guess you never heard of Sputnik?” Her follow-up came from left field.
“What, the Russian satellite?” Tom wasn’t joking. It was the only association he had with the name.
“Not quite.” The doctor felt a sense of superiority returning. “Sputnik is the original Virophage. A parasite, if you will, that infects other viruses.” She sat up. “Believe it or not, it was first discovered in a Paris water-cooling tower in 2008. Originally it was only able to affect members of the Mimivirus family. You know, the type that can cause pneumonia, or so they say. The research is a little hazy on that one.” She relished the look on Tom’s face as he tried to follow.
“So what does that have to do with this place and Ebola, moreover?” Emile chimed in.
“According to what the files say, they worked on a Virophage small enough to infect the Ebola virus. They tried to develop a disease that would kill a disease without killing the disease’s host at the same time.”
“Kind of like fighting fire with fire?” Tom concluded, half to himself.
“In a way, yes. It was to infect the Ebola virus with an engineered type of DNA that would render it useless and unable to do what it normally does. Like, the original virus gets a virus.” The doctor gestured, placing palm over palm to demonstrate one virus infecting the other.
“But this Virophage, that’s what the artificial virus is called, not only changed the Ebola DNA based on its own, it also then used it to replicate itself. All Ok normally, because the Virophage is generally harmless. Only, in this case, it looks like they obtained DNA fragments from certain plants or micro-organisms here in the Congo, which they thought had additional healing properties. Healing properties?!” At this, she laughed hysterically. “There is something in the journal notes that I managed to download. I only glanced over it, but one of the last entries contained something I don’t quite understand. But if it is true, then they created something far more dangerous than Ebola.”
“What did it say?” Tom was growing impatient.
“It said that the new virus activated after the host’s death. You know, after someone had succumbed to the original illness?”
Her word struck him like a fist. His face drained of colour, as did Emile’s.
“You mean, after death? You mean, like the villagers out there?” Tom needed a clear answer.
“Exactly like the villagers out there,” the doctor replied. “Walking corpses with a level of aggression that is only matched by their…appetite.”
“The guys on Level 3, the test subjects they kept there…They died and then just got up and walked out of here?!” Tom felt queasy. Their visit to the lab replayed in his mind.
“Pretty much. Except it looks like they ate their way out of here.” She pointed in the direction of the foyer.
The doctor looked pale now, sickly almost. Her forehead glistened with shiny beads of sweat. She thought she was going to vomit.
“I don’t feel so good.”
“You are saying this place wasn’t broken into, but it was broken out of?” Emile tried to follow.
“What do you think will happen?” It was a rhetorical question as Tom contemplated their discovery.
“Ebola is highly contagious. These things will continue to eat their way through the area and infect anything and everything they can get their teeth into with this new strain.” The doctor replied. She felt exhausted.
“They get up and kill. The people they kill get up and kill.”
“And when they reach the border, they will go beyond!” Emile looked terrified. “To Uganda, to South Sudan, to Nigeria, Chad, Tanzania, Angola. What’s to stop them?”
‘And to Kenya.’ Tom didn’t dare speak the words. ‘They are going to munch their way all the way to Kenya!’ Fear dug into him with icy talons. He shuddered.
‘Julie and Anna!’
He needed to warn them. Screw the organization. He had to warn them. And get them out. Yes, get them out. Get them away before it reached them like it had reached these villagers.
“We need to go. We need to go now.” He grabbed the sat phone.
CHAPTER 9
The bunker-like control room was virtually dark. Hunched over the day’s copy of the Washington Post, a slightly overweight analyst brushed sandwich crumbs of his white shirt in the green glow of the monitor in front of him. In the background, the scratchy noise of a printer obediently spitting out rows of data onto an endless roll of continuous paper. He looked up and blinked, taking a second look.
For sure, a single red light, mounted on the wall across from his desk had just started to flash. He straightened up, and the cheap plastic office chair creaked under the weight. He clicked on an onscreen link.
‘EUPHARM – Be Well.’ He smirked and entered an access code, just as the phone on the desk next to him began to ring.
“Yes, Sir. I just saw it.” He rolled his eyes.
He knew what he was doing, but as always, they were impatient. “No, Sir. Just logging in.”
The voice at the other end sounded more than a little excited. He listened for a moment and nodded, watching the computer go through the log-on protocol until a map appeared onscreen.
“Locating now, Sir.” Wedging the receiver between his shoulder and neck, he clicked on the map and began jotting down numbers, before reading them out loud.
The voice at the other end was frantic now.
He loathed late-night shifts. He hated alarms.
“Correct, Sir. Congo. C-O-N-G-O. Coordinates 2.415652, 30. 367268… Gono. G-O-N-O. That’s correct, Sir.” He again rolled his eyes, sarcastically mouthing the ramblings of the voice at the other end.
“Oh?” He suddenly stopped. “It is 4 am, Sir. Are you sure you want me to wake him?”
He sat up and straightened his hair.
“Not one of ours? Yes, Sir. Of course, Sir. Right away, Sir.” A click in the line terminated the call.
The analyst pulled open a drawer and retrieved a folder. The first page contained nothing but a telephone number in large print.
“Hello?” A sleepy voice answered within seconds.
The analyst cleared his throat.
“We have a data alert in Gono. Gono, Congo, Sir.” He sounded nervous now. For a moment, the line went silent.
“Gono is offline. Pull the file. VP304.” The voice at the other end stated matter-of-factly.
The analyst punched in the code. He was sweating. The room seemed hotter than minutes before. He hated sweating. The screen flickered and came to life. An overlay of several pages popped up onscreen. Corporate cables. He clicked through the files.
‘There, VP304. Incident report. Eupharm. Confidential.’
“I’ve got it, Sir.” He skimmed over the document.
“Location suspended following Biohazard containment breach. Remaining personnel evacuated as of 2100 HRS, September 2nd. Recommend initiate CLEANSWEEP.”
“What is the next entry?” The voice pressed on.
The analyst shrugged. Large sweat stains now concentrically expanded from his armpits.
“Nothing, Sir. I mean, that is the last entry.” His mouth felt dry.
“Are you sure?” The voice sounded irritated.
The analyst frantically clicked through the files and folders.
“Yes, Sir. Nothing further.”
Like the sleepy eye of a Cyclops, the red light on the wall flashed lazily, competing with the green glow of the monitor.
“What about the alarm then?” The voice at the other end probed. “What does it
mean?”
“RFID tracker, Sir. It means a protected information source has been removed from its designated area without safe removal authorization.” The analyst replied, not without pride.
He knew Eupharm’s standard operating procedures by heart. With zero distractions in the small control room, there had been little else to do but read them over and over again for weeks on end.
“Son, it’s 4.15 am. Plain English, if you will?” The voice replied wearily.
“Someone has removed a device from BSL-4. Sorry, from Biosafety Level Four.” The analyst spoke deliberately slow.
‘Why do executives, with their 6-digit paychecks, their beach houses and chauffeurs not know their own corporation’s language?’ He frowned.
“How long can we track it?”
“Provided we have eyes on…no limit, Sir.”
The analyst had heard about Eupharm’s DOD partnership program and had no doubt drone surveillance had long been part of its field research and security protocols. The line crackled with static but stayed silent for what seemed like an eternity.
“Sir? Are you there?” The analyst asked nervously.
Rustling papers at the other end of the line. A cough.
“Listen up, son. I need you to open a secure session.” The voice came back, this time barking its orders.
The analyst complied and entered a sequence of alphanumerics into a plain log-on window. The screen went blank. The computer rebooted.
“What does it say now?” The voice asked impatiently.
Another log-on screen appeared.
“EUPHARM STEM Project. RPAS Request Portal.” The analyst had to read it twice before responding.
‘RPAS: Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems Services.’
The voice instructed him to enter another set of letters, followed by the Gono coordinates. The analyst pressed enter.
“It’s done, Sir.”
Then the line went dead.
CHAPTER 11
There was something sticky under his hand, and his head felt like scrambled eggs. Lightning bolts through his head like a migraine on steroids. His eyelids weighed a ton, and his body had all the sensitivity of a lump of clay. Motionless, he lay there for what seemed like hours.
The air was dense with humidity and a wetness that crept through and blanketed everything with the stale stench of an old urinal. If this was death, he had been thoroughly misinformed about the afterlife.
He willed his limbs to follow his command, but they refused, responding only with more pain. Wiggling his fingers and then his hand, progress was slow until finally, his right hand obeyed.
Tom ran it over the rest of his body. His clothes were soaked. He smelled his fingers.
‘No blood. Good’.
There didn’t seem to be any open injuries or wounds. He sighed and tried to relax, and eyes still locked tight, used his nose and ears to explore the immediate surrounds. The rank smell of effluence and mould assaulted him. The few noises he could hear seemed suppressed by thick walls around him. Muscle-control slowly returning, Tom turned his head to the left and right, the unbridled hurt pulsing through his skull reminding him that he was far from out of the woods.
Needles of light through corroded sheet metal pierced the darkened interior of the holding cell. Broken tiles. Bare concrete. A few rotten wood beams holding up what could barely pass for a roof. Tom felt his swollen tongue stick to the top of his mouth. His throat was dry, barely allowing him to swallow. Pain-fighting endorphins coursed through his mind, painting rainbows. Stars winked before his eyes as he struggled to open them. After some minutes, summoning all his strength, Tom turned onto his side and pushed himself against a wall. Agonizingly slow, he continued until his upper back rested against its cool moss. Tom exhaled and felt his ribs. He cringed. ‘Damn it.’ At least one rib, if not more, was broken. He lifted his other hand and ran it through his hair. He winced. A lump about the size of a baby’s fist protruded from his upper forehead, its distinct shape making it feel more like a horn than a bruise.
‘They got me good, the bastards’, Tom cussed under his breath, clenching his jaws through another bolt of agony. He pressed the side of his head against the cool moss to sooth the throbbing pain.
Across the claustrophobic room, in the damp gloom beyond the dust dancing in the beams from the roof above, something lay on the floor. Tom gasped as his eyes regained focus. What had looked like a pile of discarded clothes was, in fact, the outline of a body covered with a dirty tarp.
Tom was still trying to corral the stampede of thoughts rushing through his head when the wooden cell door flew open.
Eclipsed by the silhouette of a man, a deluge of bright light flooded the tiny space. A man whom Tom recognized instantly as the one who had collected the scalps from the dead near the facility, the very same man he had been horrified by as much as intrigued when he watched him go through his ritual of stabbing, howling and slicing. Seeing him towering above him now, Tom felt weak and useless. The indignation of capture nibbled at his pride and tag-teamed with something far more lethal. Cold fear.
“Where am I?” Tom groaned, taking the initiative. “And what have you done with my friend?”
He suspected the doctor would probably not have fared much better than himself. Staring straight down at Tom, the man just stood there for a few seconds, relishing his victory.
“Your friend?” He finally spoke in almost perfect Oxford English. “Are you sure that’s what she is…was?”
He tapped the tarp-covered shape with the tip of his boot. Tom felt burning, uncontrollable rage combust with an intensity he had felt only once before.
The flashback of an Afghan village burst into his mind. A local trying to stone his own wife to death. Back then, Tom’s rage had known no bounds, and the man surviving had been nothing short of a miracle. Here in the confines of a cell and barely conscious himself, there was no way he could start, let alone finish any kind of fight. Not as long as this tower of muscle and authority was looming over him. Tom fought back tears of wrath.
“She was more of a human being than you will ever be.” He seethed. The man just laughed.
“I think that is very much up for debate, my friend.”
He leaned forward, took a knee, and fixed Tom with a menacing stare. The necklace of human scalps dangled from his neck, mere inches away from Tom’s face.
“If she really was your friend, then you had better follow her, hadn’t you?”
His voice turning into a perverse snarl, he unsheathed his large knife with the well-rehearsed movements of a predator and ran it across from left to right, millimeters away from Tom’s throat.
“Get it over with already. You have no respect for life anyway. So do what you have to.” Tom didn’t flinch.
‘I am not going to give you the satisfaction.’
The man sat on his haunches. He flicked his tongue and watched Tom with the curiosity of a hungry constrictor.
“Now, now. No need for animosity. I see that you are different from that one.” He nodded in the direction of the dead form beneath the tarp. “But that doesn’t mean you’re not of the same kind.”
His unflinching stare hot as needles, he cocked his head, moving it from side to side. Tom could feel the man’s breath on his forehead and smelled the stench of the rotting scalps.
“What do you mean by the same kind?” He asked, confused by the turn of phrase.
“She may not have been a lot of fun. But, as they say, she had a certain…spunk about her.” A beam of light from above made the man’s gold teeth glow as he sneered back towards what Tom now knew for certain was the doctor’s body. “That, and some rather interesting credentials.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.” Tom’s mind was racing. “She works for the same bunch I do. Just look at our IDs.”
He immediately felt stupid at having made the remark, knowing full well IDs could be sold and bought as easily as the copier paper they were printed on.
The blade sang like a razor across Tom’s unshaven face.
“Is that what yours says as well?” He winked as he twisted and turned the tip of the knife a hair’s breadth away from Tom’s eye.
Tom tried to steady his nerves. None of this made sense. And yet, oddly, it did. The doctor had been added to the team last minute, introduced as an outside expert, and replacing a local in the process; nothing unusual in the humanitarian realm, where local staff would draw the short straw without fail when it came to competing for assignments with internationals. She had been friendly, but guarded; again, nothing unusual in a male-dominated context where many organizations still struggled to achieve any sort of gender balance. Even her accent and nationality seemed to make sense, given the frequent staff exchanges between regions, especially in a small organization that constantly struggled with technical capacity in its various responses across the globe. Suddenly all this somehow seemed suspicious. The man nodded as if having read Tom’s thoughts.
“Yes, Mon Ami, she was working for the US of A. The military. The spooks. Whatever. She was here on a different kind of mission.” The man again cocked his head, studying Tom’s bruised features, and a hint of sadness flitted across his face. “But her mission, I am beginning to think, wasn’t yours…”
Abruptly he rose to his feet and sheathed his knife, leaving Tom to look up at him as if viewing a giant statue.
The Virophage Chronicles (Book 1): Dead Hemisphere Page 10