Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (13 page)

Get to the hospital, he thought.

Outside, it was night, and he swayed as he left the building, needed to grasp the handrail by the steel steps, barely aware of the frigid metal against his hand. Cars were passing, their headlights brighter than usual, painful, in his face, causing him to turn away. His throat hurt badly. He bent over and threw up in the snow. When the episode was over he realized that his saliva still ran freely from his mouth over his chin, dripping, Christ.

Finally, he was scared. This was no small cold. This was no flu. Cancer?

George walked into the middle of the street to hail a ride. A cab passed but did not stop. The driver already had a passenger. In Barrow, you didn’t flag cabs. They were on radio call or you found them outside the AV Value Center, where they picked up shoppers. But gasoline cost so much—as much as seven dollars a gallon—that no taxi driver would simply drive around, hoping for fares.

Another pair of headlights approached. Fearing that if he waited longer, he’d lose mobility again, George stumbled into the road and held up his arms. The Subaru began skidding. It loomed and swayed but stopped. The driver was a scientist he recognized; Bruce Friday, who regularly came to Wainright to research polar bears.

“What’s wrong, George?”

“I need to get to the hospital.”

Dr. Friday helped him in and he coughed on the man, sprayed his whole face, mumbled, “Sorry.” Dr. Friday said not to worry and wiped the spit off with his parka sleeve. Back at the wheel, he eased down on the accelerator to keep from skidding. The hospital, like any building in Barrow, was minutes away.

When they pulled up at the ER George’s hand refused to grasp the door handle. Dr. Friday came around to his side and helped him out. George, staring at Friday’s gloved hand, had an urge to bite it. He started laughing. Friday asked him if he was able to walk, and slipped an arm under his shoulders. Someone must have changed the lighting in the ER, because it was like floodlights in a theater, like one time when he’d walked on stage at the University of Alaska auditorium in Anchorage, to receive an award for mentoring the wrestling team. The light hurt.

At first they made him wait, but when he started throwing up they ushered him into a curtained-off cubicle. The nurses took his blood pressure and blood and a young doctor—she looked fifteen years old—asked about symptoms.

He tried to get it out. The curtain seemed to be billowing and voices in the big exam room, from other cubicles, seemed to echo and then the beating sound in his head was like the end of a
kivgiq
, the winter messenger feast, when all the dance groups in the borough crowd into the high school gym, when, at 2
A.M.
, after the five-day-long celebration, all the drummers from all the villages marched in, in groups, and stand in a solid line, in their traditional dance clothes, and hit those whale liver–lining and hide handheld drums at the same time. The dancers stamping. The stands filled and everyone—young and old—visitors from D.C., moms with infants on their backs, whalers, and hunters . . . all clapping . . . magnificent!

BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM!

Like a thousand years of drums mixing together under the basketball banners. He blinked. He was hallucinating. He thought he was in that gym, the stands filled, the dancers stomping. BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM!

Then his vision changed and there was a new doctor there, that Indian fellow, from Mumbai, positioning a mirror to look into George’s throat but the light spiked so harshly that George reached and swept the mirror into the corner, where it shattered.

“Turn down the lights!” he screamed.

Faces went out of focus. There were more faces there, the two Marine doctors who had flown into Wainright earlier in the season, with the Coast Guard. All three doctors bending over him, looking down at him, looking worried, asking questions that he struggled to answer.

Suddenly he was convulsing, thrashing, trying to hit the doctors, flailing, and when a nurse tried to put the plastic cuffs on him, restrain him against the bed rests, he lunged with his teeth, tried to bite her, felt the crazy heat spread through his synapses, like poison, like a sizzling electricity cauterizing thought, the sun was in his chest, a furnace, consuming tissue as fuel.

Nurses wheeling in medicines.

“George, look at me. George!”

“What’s happening to him, Ranjay?”

“Oh, my God! Look at the monitor!”

BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOOOOOOM! . . .

•   •   •

I STOOD WITH EDDIE AND RANJAY, BESIDE THE DEAD MAN. HIS AGITATION
had exploded in the final moments, and he’d been trying to speak, but no words had come out.

“It’s the same thing the Harmons had,” said Eddie.

“It’s in town,” said Ranjay.

“Did we bring it back with us, in the chopper?”

“If we brought it back, why did
he
get it? Why not us?”

“You think it started here?”

We heard voices from other ER cubicles, as doctors had normal conversations with patients. Where does it hurt? We’re going to do an X-ray. Take these pills when you get home. Illness, but something familiar. Disease, but something we understand.

“What the hell is this thing?” said Eddie.

All three of us doctors, in our imaginations, now filled in sights to go with the voice recordings that Kelley Harmon had made, out in a deserted research camp. And what I imagined was terrifying. Clay Qaqulik holding a shotgun . . . yes, we’d known that . . . but all four people convulsing, babbling, and feverish.

Dr. Ranjay Sengupta said, in a whisper, “Contagious?”

I left the cubicle and walked to the ER window. Outside it was night and I looked over the rooftops. I saw headlights moving. I saw lights in windows. In those homes people were watching television and making love and sleeping. I wondered if, in those houses, there was also something else, lurking, small enough to seem invisible. Or was it in the caskets awaiting flight out? I looked at the ER doors, portals for the sick and injured. At the moment they were still, as was the hallway. I did not want to think about what I saw in my mind’s eye, which was more people coming in, convulsing, screaming, like George.

Eddie said, “We go home tomorrow, One.”

“Oh, not now, Two.”

I went back into the cubicle. The man on the table looked yellow in the artificial light, and the pain he’d suffered at the end remained etched in agony lines of his mouth. My eyes swept the cubicle, the medicine vials, the tools of my job, all of which had failed us this evening.

I saw the mirror shards on the bright linoleum, in the corner, I recalled George sweeping the instrument from Ranjay’s hand, barking something about too-bright light.

Mirrors . . .

And then it hit me.

“Shit.”

The other two doctors stared at me, understanding that I’d made a connection. But it was a bad one, a very, very hideous connection, a connection that I wished would turn out to be wrong.

“We knew it. But we ignored it,” I said.

They both drew in closer.

“We ignored it because we said it was impossible,” I said. “Tell me, why did we come here this summer, Eddie?”

“To check if there have been changes, new things . . .”

“
Changes
, Eddie. Because the place is warming. Because the Slope’s been a dumping ground. Because new species are arriving. We
saw
it, but didn’t believe it.”

He knew what I meant, his eyes growing wider. I uttered a single word then. The word has terrified humans for two thousand years.

“It’s a one-hour test,” I said. “We can do it right now. At our lab. After we leave, disinfect this room.”

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
.”

“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?”