Invasive Procedures (3 page)

Galen, however, didn’t seem to mind the man’s appearance. He looked Byron up and down, as if measuring him for a suit, and said, “Get in. We’ll give you a lift.”

“Thank you.”

The door slid open, and Byron climbed in, taking a seat behind Dolores, next to Jonathan. As soon as Lichen had the door closed, Stone had the van in gear and on the road again.

Galen turned around in the seat. “I’m George Galen,” he said, then, pointing to the driver and the Healer behind him, “These are my companions, Stone and Lichen. My other guests are Hal, Dolores, Nick, and Jonathan there beside you.”

Byron gave a vague wave and smiled at everyone, not looking particularly comfortable with the crowd or the smell. “Nice to meet you,” he said. Then he addressed Galen. “My car broke down, and I couldn’t find a phone. Nothing’s open at this hour.”

“Your car?” Galen asked, as if he was surprised the man owned one.

“You probably passed it a mile or so back.” he said. “I would’ve used my cell phone, but it ran out of juice. How’s that for luck?”

“We have a phone back at the shelter,” Galen said. “You’re welcome to use that one.”

“That’s very kind. Thank you.”

Dolores caught Stone, the driver, eyeing Byron through the rearview mirror with a look of suspicion, like he suspected him to be trouble.

After a long silence Byron said, “You’re Healers, right?”

“That’s right,” said Galen.

“I’ve seen you around,” said Byron. “You do a lot for the community. That’s very commendable.”

“We heal what needs mending,” said Galen.

They passed two all-night gas stations, and Byron asked to be let out both times.

“Don’t be silly,” Galen said. “It’s warmer at the shelter. You’ll be much more comfortable there.” When they left the Pacific Coast Highway and started driving up into the mountains, Dolores got nervous.

“Must be a pretty secluded shelter,” Byron said. “I hope whoever I call can find it.”

Galen said nothing. Nor was he whistling anymore.

After a half a dozen turns up unlit roads, the van pulled onto a gravel drive.

Finally, Dolores thought. Finally we’re going to stop. This driveway can’t be long.

But it
was
long. They drove for another ten minutes, twisting and turning, the tires grinding the gravel. Dolores was beyond nervous now. She was the only woman in a van of six men, more than a day’s walk from the pier. She shouldn’t have agreed to go. She should have stayed in the cold. This was too far away, too strange.

She gripped the tennis racket tucked in her bag between her feet.

She wanted to make a break for it, push Hal and Lichen out of the way, slide open the door, and jump.

“I want to get out,” Nick said.

“No kidding,” murmured Byron.

Galen said nothing.

Then the gravel road widened and they pulled up to a building. The driver stopped the van and Galen turned around to face them.

“Here we are,” he said.

They all looked out the window. Dolores’s heart sank. This was no shelter. And no home either.

She turned back and saw that Lichen was holding a gun, or something that looked like a gun. “Everybody out,” he said.

Beside her, Nick began to cry.

Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hartman stepped into the decontamination room, wearing his biocontainment suit and feeling his heart rate quicken. Despite having crossed this threshold hundreds of times before, Frank still occasionally felt the sickening knot of dread in his stomach or the quickening of his pulse as he prepared to enter Biosafety Level 4. It was a natural reaction. Level 4 was possibly the most dangerous man-made environment in all the world and certainly the most dangerous here at the United States Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. It was here that the military housed and studied the world’s deadliest viruses, viruses like Ebola or Marburg, microscopic devils that had the tendency to turn one’s innards into black gooey messes and for which there was no known cure or treatment.

Frank checked the air valve on his suit and took a few deep breaths of fresh oxygen.

The breathing calmed him, and the sound of his breaths echoed in his helmet as the doors closed behind him.

The decon room, no larger than an elevator, was the last wall of defense between Level 4 and happy-go-lucky taxpaying Americans. As the lights went out, Frank became very still. Tight beams of ultraviolet light emitted from the walls and scanned him for contaminants. He thought it a silly exercise to be scanned
before
entering Level 4 as well as after, but
such was the military. Everything had its order and tradition, be it ass-backward or not.

The ultraviolet light dancing around him suddenly went out, and the bright fluorescent light above him illuminated.

A computerized female voice said, “Decontamination complete. Please enter your access code.”

A row of numbers composed of light appeared on the wall.

Frank extended a gloved finger and entered a complex series of digits.

His yellow biosuit, which covered every inch of him, was made of a thick, puncture-resistant rubber that weighed heavily on his shoulders and looked about three sizes too big. A utility belt at his hip held several pouches and a holster sporting a shiny injection gun. The helmet had a single pane of Plexiglas across its front with a comlink just below Frank’s mouth. The inside of the suit smelled strongly of baby powder.

“Welcome, Dr. Hartman,” the computerized voice said. “You are cleared for entry.”

Frank felt and heard the rush of air as the fans behind him turned on, blowing fiercely. The entry doors opened, and Frank stepped over the threshold and into Level 4. The fans were a precautionary measure, preventing airborne pathogens from escaping Level 4 during entry. Once the doors closed behind him, the fans slowed until all was silent.

Frank looked down the long empty corridor that stretched before him and felt the twinge of fear again, tickling at his spine. Two more breaths and all was well.

The floor, like the ceiling and walls, was a blinding spotless white, the one exception being the large red biohazard symbol painted on it at the entrance.

Frank waddled down the corridor. Moving in the suit, with its size and weight and rubberiness, was always awkward. Frank had made a joke once that researchers here looked like the offspring of an astronaut and a rubber duck.

He passed through another series of doors, each with its own security access, until he came to a room lined with glass holding cells.

The cells were four feet deep, four feet wide, and stretched floor to ceiling, like tall glass lockers. Inside each, suspended from the ceiling at eye level, was a cage. Inside each cage sat a small, bleary-eyed monkey.
Frank approached the first cell and tapped the glass. At the sight of Frank, the monkey sprang to its feet and shook the cage bars violently.

“Well, aren’t you a fireball this morning?” Frank said.

He turned to a computer terminal mounted on the wall and entered a command.

The monkey looked up as blue gas poured into the cell from an air vent in the ceiling.

The gas swirled and billowed into multiple tendrils of vapor as it slowly descended toward the cage.

The monkey, wide-eyed with terror, shook the bars again vigorously, screaming in a panicked frenzy.

Frank felt a pang of guilt. It wasn’t often that he used animals as test subjects, but sometimes the occasion required it. When it did, the cold detachment necessary for such work somehow eluded him. He found himself liking the animals, giving them names, even—the cardinal sin of science.

“It’s only a sedative,” he said, annoyed for feeling the need to explain himself. “It’s not going to kill you.”

The monkey continued screaming.

“I can’t have you biting me. If you’d keep your trap shut when I’m in there, we wouldn’t have to do it this way.”

The gas billowed into the animal’s face.

After a moment, the monkey staggered, then slumped lazily to the cage floor, fast asleep.

Frank entered another command into the computer, and the ventilation fan stopped and spun in the opposite direction, sucking the gas back up into the air shaft. A loud buzzer followed, sounding an all clear, then the holding-cell door hissed open. Frank waddled inside, opened the cage, and clipped a heart monitor on one of the monkey’s fingers. The monitor beeped, and a bead of light, bouncing up and down rhythmically, appeared on the LCD screen.

Good, he thought. Heart rate’s normal.

He set the monitor aside and lifted the monkey’s limp right arm. Then, being careful not to prick himself, he uncapped a needle, found a suitable vein, and took a small blood sample. When done, he dropped the used syringe into the biohazard chute at the back of the cell and slid the vial of blood into a pouch at his hip.

The monkey sighed quietly but didn’t move.

Almost done, girl.

Frank removed the injection gun from his holster and turned off the safety. A vial of red serum sloshed inside the injection tube. He placed the tip of the gun against the monkey’s thigh and squeezed the trigger. The serum shot into the monkey’s leg. When the needle retracted, Frank holstered the gun and gathered his things.

“This could be your last dose, girl. If you keep getting better, I’ll get you a really big banana.”

He exited the holding cell and went through a series of doors until he reached the main lab and heart of Level 4. It was an expansive room, filled with humming diagnostic machines centered around a twelve-foot-tall electron microscope in the middle of the room.

Frank put the vial of monkey’s blood into a glass containment box and vacuum-sealed the lid. Then he sat in front of the box and inserted his gloved hands into the gloves attached to the box. It was cumbersome working this way, gloves on top of gloves, but he couldn’t risk contaminating the sample.

Carefully he uncapped the vial and, using an eyedropper, placed a drop of blood onto a slide. A robotic arm whisked the slide away and slid it into the electron microscope.

Moments later, the electron micrograph appeared on the monitor.

It looked clean. There were no virions that Frank could see. The blood appeared completely virus free.

Frank knew better than to get too excited. The monkey was only a single subject. He couldn’t be certain that it had been the red countervirus he had been administering that was responsible for eradicating the virus.

Still, after all the success he had had in eradicating the virus in petri dishes using the same red countervirus, Frank felt optimistic.

There was a beep in his headset, and a woman’s voice sounded. “Dr. Hartman?”

Frank recognized the singsonginess of the voice at once and resisted the urge to sigh audibly. It was General Temin’s secretary, and her calling meant only one thing.

“This is Dr. Hartman,” he said.

“Your presence is requested in General Temin’s office immediately,” she said. The words came out of her so sweetly that it was almost as if she
considered the message the best of news, as if Frank did nothing more than sit around all day idly waiting for the good general to bless him with his presence.

Rather than explain to her how incredibly inconvenient it would be for him to leave Level 4 after just entering it, not to mention all the time he would lose in having to disrobe from his biosuit, Frank thanked her politely and ended the conversation.

Twenty minutes later, he arrived at General Temin’s office, showered and in full uniform. At thirty-nine, Frank was slim but toned, the result of adhering to the daily exercise regimen that had been drilled into him during officer’s training: get up, run, swim, run some more, throw up maybe, shower, go to work.

His black hair was cropped short, graying slightly at the temples. His jaw was square and clean shaven; his cheeks ruddy; his lips tight as if smiling were a pleasure they only rarely indulged in.

His khaki-brown uniform was well pressed and lightly adorned with a few colorful bars of achievement and rank over the pocket of his left breast. An officer’s hat was tucked under his right arm, and his black shoes were polished to an impressive shine.

The secretary, wearing a uniform a little tighter than regulation would permit, didn’t look up from her computer when he entered.

Frank drew closer and cleared his throat.

She stopped typing, lifted her eyes to him, and smiled warmly.

“Why, Dr. Hartman,” she said, batting her eyelids, as if his presence somehow embarrassed her and yet was an unexpected surprise.

A true Southern belle, he thought. “General Temin asked to see me?” he said.

“And see you I shall,” a gruff voice said behind him.

Frank felt a heavy hand on his shoulder and turned to look into the weathered and smiling face of Major General Ned Temin.

He was a round man, with the kind of gut that came from age and prolonged time behind a desk. His hair was white, heavily receded, and buzzed to a stubby shortness. His nose was wide and red, which, combined with the roundness and wrinkles of his face, made him look like W. C. Fields without the jaunty hat.

Despite the inconvenience of the visit, Frank couldn’t help but smile. Temin was the kind of man who brightened a room just by being in it,
laughing more perhaps than etiquette would allow, but never so much that anyone minded, since his laughter was so contagious and his demeanor always pleasant.

“You don’t eat enough, Frank,” he said, louder than Frank thought necessary. “Look at you. You’ve lost five pounds since I saw you last.”

“It’s the long trek to your office, sir,” Frank said. “I think it’s the farthest room from Level 4.”

Temin laughed. “Bet your butt it is. I stay as far away as possible. I’m not letting one of those viruses in here to shrivel
my
pod.”

Frank glanced surreptitiously at the secretary, who was typing again and didn’t look up, clearly accustomed to Temin’s choice vocabulary.

“You asked to see me, sir? It sounded urgent.”

Temin put an arm around Frank’s shoulders and led him toward the conference room. “You got company.” He opened the door and led Frank inside, not taking a moment to warn Frank who that company might be. “Gentlemen, I’d like you to meet our leading virologist, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hartman. He’s the man who’s got that virus of yours against the ropes, so to speak.”