Genesis Plague (13 page)

T
he ID key card I got from the CDC technician when I arrived
gave me access to every room in the building. It showed a terrible picture of
me and listed my name and abbreviated credentials. It was always depressing
when the titles with which I quantified the accomplishments of my life fit onto
a small plastic card.

I used the key to ride
the elevator up one level to the top floor. When the Center for Disease Control
forced us to transfer from our lab in San Francisco, there was a lot of huffing
and puffing about unfamiliar equipment and “Would there be enough space”, and
all that. Much to my surprise, the CDC lab place blew ours at SFU out of the water.
The bulk of the resistance had come from crotchety scientists who didn’t want
to set up shop so far from home.

Most of them were
already back in San Fran, anyway, now that a majority of the sequencing was
done. We damn near had the bug mapped out, and we were
that close
to
producing a working vaccine. Not bad for a few days’ work.

The long hallway
leading from the elevator was lit in a 1970s off-yellow, as opposed to the break
room’s sterile blue. You could get a variety of different hues in this building,
but the light always had to come from harsh fluorescent lamps. It was probably
one of the many CDC mandates you never heard about before you showed up for the
first time.

Take the no cell-phone
rule and the fact that I couldn’t leave the building until that morning, just
as examples. I supposed if I were given time to think about it before the
rushed transfer to this facility, I would have agreed with the CDC’s conclusion
that you couldn’t trust people with information that might spark a panic.

The crowd of protestors
outside the building proved my point. Somebody had made a phone call, perhaps
one of the old-timers who had retreated back to San Fran, and whoever answered
that phone ran to the local news station, who then, in their infinite wisdom,
announced to all of Seattle that we were working on a vaccine for an
unidentified strain of the flu. Naturally, elements of the public suspected we
already
had
the vaccine and were holding on to it until demand rose to
the point of maximum profit. Add fuel to the fire in the form of widespread online
misinformation, and you could just imagine how much froth was on the mouths of
those who couldn’t be bothered to dig deeper into the truth.

If it weren’t for the
two Military Policemen with M4 carbines guarding the entrance to the building,
I imagine the crowd outside would have already broken in. Some local boys in
blue were supposed to be keeping an eye on the place as well, but they wouldn’t
step in unless the business
really
hit the fan.

A third MP, the only
one inside the building, stood like a statue at the end of the long hallway
leading to the lab. Clean-cut kid, probably no older than twenty-five. Last
name of Nash, according to the patch on his vest. Looked more like a rookie
football player than a guy who should be in full tactical armor gripping a
semi-automatic assault rifle.

I held my badge up as I
approached, and his body remained rigid as his eyes flicked to the card.

“How’s it going this
afternoon?” I asked.

I had been trying to
get more out of him than his last name since we arrived four days ago.
Apparently, whoever gave his orders told him not to socialize.

“How many more days
till we can skip this routine?” I asked.

He stared at my ID a
moment longer, then looked at the stubble on my chin.

“Yeah, I could use a
shave,” I said, scratching at my throat.

He stepped aside and
opened the glass door to the lab, watching me as I walked past.

“Thanks, Nash,” I said,
and he snapped his head down in a quick nod.

I thought I was
starting to get through to him.

The door closed behind
me with a soft hiss of air as its rubber seal pneumatically compressed. I grabbed
my clichéd white lab coat from the hook on the wall and put it on. It didn’t
offer any protection against contamination in case the
Loasis
virus got
into the open, but I guess it made me feel a little better; a little more professional,
like I knew exactly what I was doing there in the first place.

The main laboratories led
off from the short hallway in front of me. I passed the first couple of doors
and took a right into a large, square room, which was empty except for two
chairs that faced a transparent wall. The wall was made from a single piece of
two-inch-thick clear acrylic. Beyond this observation window were two rooms,
separated from each other by a thick dividing wall.

I approached the
transparent wall slowly. The specs said it was bullet resistant, but I had
never seen it tested.

And it wasn’t like the
patients on the other side had guns.

F
rom the room on the left, Dan Grayson stared out at me with
bloodshot eyes, his mouth slightly open. His blue hospital gown was covered in
dark streaks. The lighting in the room was overly bright, illuminating every
gruesome detail of his infection. Red lesions covered his arms, legs, and neck,
cutting deep gashes in his skin. A thin stream of watery blood ran from each
nostril. A web of diaphanous black veins etched intricate lines across the
areas of his pale flesh not afflicted with lesions.

His room was spare,
nothing more than a bed and a nightstand bolted to the wall. Several weathered
paperbacks were on the nightstand, dried bloody fingerprints smeared across
their covers.

Each of the observation
rooms had a sealed door with no handle flush with the back wall. A
decontamination chamber was just on the other side of each door, which only
opened when one of us needed to collect another blood sample, or to deliver the
patients’ meals.

The only other
distinguishing characteristic in each room was a square plastic vent in the
upper corners nearest the dividing wall. Those vents were on an independent air
control system from the rest of the building. The air Dan and the other patient
were breathing was being pumped into a sealed container in the next room. If
the virus mutated and becomes airborne, we’d know within minutes.

A small sheet of paper
labeled ‘Patient A’ was taped to the acrylic wall just below the two-way
communication panel for the left observation room. I kept my pace steady and
slow as I approached. Dan’s eyes followed my hand as I reached out and pressed
the transmit button. He looked up at the speaker in the ceiling when I said,
“How are you, Dan?”

His eyes drifted slowly
back down to me, and he swallowed hard. Through the microphone embedded in the
wall of his room, I could hear a harsh liquid gurgle as his throat worked,
along with a clicking sound, like the snapping of chicken bones.

He opened his mouth
wider to speak, but only a constricted wheeze came out, as if he was struggling
to yell with a throat full of dust.

Dan lost his speech
yesterday, during the last few hours of the fifth day of his infection. I hated
to say it was a welcome development, but his speech had seemingly been limited
to nothing but long strings of loud expletives and shrill screams for the
previous two days. I couldn’t say I blamed him, but that didn’t mean a small
part of me wasn’t glad that aspect of his illness had passed.

I pressed the button
again. “We’re working on it, Dan. The CDC sent two of their top people.
Johann’s close to finding the vaccine and Conny hasn’t slept in two days. She’s
real close to figuring out how to stop this thing.”

Dan turned away. I
could only imagine what he would say to me if he could speak. When we first
discovered he was infected, none of us could believe it. We only ever expected
to
study
the
Polychaeta
Loasis
specimens we brought back
with us from the cave beneath the Mauna Loa volcano. We never expected to have
to find a vaccine when our own people were exposed to the virus.

Dan and his girlfriend
had been the first ones in the cave. They went in without protective gear, and
later, Dan admitted to touching one of the
Loasis
specimens with his
bare hands. He had a torn cuticle on that finger, and the virus entered his
bloodstream. His girlfriend was soon infected, and they had both been in the
SUV when it flipped while trying to outrun the volcanic eruption.

The scene flashed in my
mind – as it had every day since it happened – like a nightmare that never
faded. I remembered kneeling next to the SUV, seeing Dan’s girlfriend strapped
in tight, her neck twisted and broken, her eyes glazed over, reflecting the
nearby flames. I remembered Dan, kicking to get free, his face half-covered in
blood.

The other people in the
vehicle were no better off than Dan. During the crash, blood splattered against
their clothes, their skin – their eyes. And not all of it was theirs.

Dan continued to ignore
me. He stood in the corner of his room, looking up at the plastic vent. Until
that morning, his increasing agitation had made him impossible to approach. We
had to resort to drugging his food whenever we needed a blood sample.

But now, as if a switch
in his brain had suddenly flipped, he had become docile and serene. I found
myself wondering if he had made peace with his demons, and was no longer afraid
to die.

I walked along the
transparent wall, past the solid divider. Patient B’s room on the right wasn’t as
messy as Dan’s, because Patient B was infected twelve hours later, and his
infection wasn’t as severe.

Yet.

Roger Levino stood up
from the edge of his bed when I walked over. He approached the acrylic wall,
the soles of his pale, bony feet sticking to the linoleum floor with each step.
His hospital gown fit him loosely and his hair stuck out in all directions. His
lesions were less pronounced than Dan’s, but I had no doubt they would worsen
in the next twelve hours.

As he stood close to
the transparent wall, looking out at me, I noticed that one of his eyes was
bright red, like a cherry tomato. The other eye was only mildly bloodshot. I
needed to have Conny, the physiologist, check for signs of an aneurism. The
virus could be doing something to Levino’s brain.

I pressed the comm
button on the small panel in the wall.

“Heya, Doc.”

He cleared his throat
and swallowed with great effort. “Well?”

“Nothing yet. But we’re
close. Johann is sure this next batch will be the one.”

Levino huffed. “Johann
is working too fast. Fast work earns sloppy results.”

“We don’t really have a
choice here, Roger.” I lowered my voice when I said, “Dan’s fading fast, a lot
faster than you—”

I stopped and looked at
him, hesitant to continue.

“This is no time to be
shy, Paul,” he said. “I know I’m dying. I know it’s already too late for me,
and for Dan. But you better solve this thing, because if it gets out, who knows
how many it will kill before it’s contained?
If
it can be contained at
all.”

“It won’t get out. All
of the samples are accounted for. You and Dan were the only two infected.
Maria’s back in San Francisco working out how to use the
Loasis
’ natural
antiviral compounds to our advantage. She’s close.”

Levino waved a
dismissive, lesion-covered hand. “Puh. ‘Close’. You said you were close three
days ago.”

“What was I supposed to
tell you?”

“The truth. That it’s
been a long shot for Dan and myself from the beginning. Still, in a way, I
suppose we’re lucky. If Dan’s poor girlfriend hadn’t died in the crash, and if
Renfield hadn’t…well, you know…then we would have had four possible host
vectors instead of just two. We owe it to the world to be impartial, Paul.
Science demands it of us, and we must obey. If you can’t save me, at least tell
me the truth. You have to embrace the reality of the situation if you don’t
want this bug to beat you.”

He closed his eyes and
sighed. His throat rattled with each difficult breath.

“I suppose you want me
to describe how I’m feeling,” he said.

I nodded. “We need as
many pieces of the puzzle as we can get, Roger.”

He shuffled to his bed.
With a groan, he stretched out on his back and laced his fingers over his
chest.

“Alright,” he said,
closing his eyes. “Let’s start with the stabbing pain in my stomach.”

I heard a dull thump
from the other side of the divider.

“Hang on a second,
Roger,” I said, walking back to look inside Dan’s room.

The acrylic wall was soundproof,
but the divider wall was not. If one of the comm channels was open and the
other patient made enough noise, I’d hear it.

What I was hearing was
Dan Grayson, thrashing around on the floor in the grip of a major clonic
seizure, kicking at the divider wall as his body writhed and contorted. His
bloodshot eyes rolled up into his head and red spittle foamed from his mouth.

I ran from the room. Levino
shouted after me to know what was going on. I swiped my key card at a wall
panel in the hallway behind the observation room. The door swished open and I
hurried into a small decontamination chamber.

Four biosafety suits hung
from a rack in a sealed closet. White smoke hissed down from above when I opened
the closet and pulled out a suit, struggling to peel off my lab coat at the
same time.

Interminable seconds
passed as I worked to put the suit on, first stepping into each leg, then
carefully sealing it along the sides. The floppy helmet with plastic
face-shield went on last. I didn’t bother with the air pack since I wouldn’t be
inside the observation room for long.

There was a medicine
cabinet bolted to the wall, and I took a small syringe filled with clear
liquid: a house cocktail composed primarily of phenobarbital, to calm seizures,
and a lesser dosage of the anesthetic ketamine for sedation. I also took an
empty syringe to grab a fresh blood sample after I facilitated Dan’s early nap.

The lights in the
decontamination chamber changed to a deep purple as the door leading to the
observation room hissed open.