The Hot Zone (33 page)

“GET HIM! HE’S OVER HERE!” he said. He waved the net, slammed it around over the cages, but the monkey was gone.

He walked through the room again, slowly. The monkey flung itself across the room, a huge, tail-swinging leap. This animal was airborne whenever it moved. Jerry waved his net and missed. “SON OF A BITCH!” he shouted. The monkey was too fast for him. He would spend ten or fifteen minutes searching the room, squinting past the cages. If he found the monkey, the monkey would leap to the other side of the room. It was a small monkey, built for life in the trees. He thought, This environment favors the monkey over us. We don’t have the tools to handle this situation. We are not in control here—we are along for the ride.

•  •  •

Outside the building, Colonel C. J. Peters stopped by to observe the operation. He was dressed in Levi’s and a sweater, along with sandals and socks, even though it was a cold day. With his sandals and mustache, he appeared to be a sixties type or some sort of a low-grade employee, maybe a janitor. He noticed a stranger hanging around the front of the building. Who was this? Then the man started to come around the side of the building. He was obviously after something, and he was getting too close to the action. C. J. hurried forward and stopped the man and asked him what he was doing.

He said he was a reporter from
The Washington Post
. “What’s happening around here?” he asked C. J.

“Well—aw—nothing much is happening,” C. J. replied. He was suddenly very glad he had not worn his colonel’s uniform today—for once, his bad habits had paid off. He did not encourage the reporter to come around to the side of the building and have a look in through the window. The reporter left shortly afterward, having seen and heard nothing of interest.
The Washington Post
suspected that something funny was happening at the monkey house, but the reporters and editors who worked on the story couldn’t quite get to the bottom of it.

•  •  •

“This monkey knows nets,” Jerry shouted to the sergeant. The monkey was not going to let himself be caught by some fool of a human wearing a plastic bag. They decided to leave him in the room overnight.

Meanwhile, the surviving monkeys were becoming increasingly agitated. The teams killed most of the monkeys this day, working straight through until after dark. Some of the soldiers began to complain that they were not being given enough responsibility, and so Jerry let them take over more of the hazardous work from the officers. He assigned Specialist Rhonda Williams to duty at the euthanasia table with Major Nate Powell. The major laid a drugged monkey on the table, holding its arms behind its back in case it woke up, while Rhonda uncapped a syringe and gave the monkey a heart stick—plunged the needle into the chest between the ribs, aiming for the heart. She pushed the plunger, sending a load of drugs into the heart, which killed the monkey instantly. She pulled the needle out, and a lot of blood squirted out of the puncture wound. That was a good sign; it meant she had punctured the heart. If she got blood on her gloves, she rinsed them in a pan of bleach, and if she got blood on her space suit, she wiped it down with a sponge soaked in bleach.

It was awful when she missed the heart. She pushed the plunger, the poison flooded the animal’s chest around the heart, and the monkey jumped. It doubled up, its eyes moved, and it
seemed to struggle. This was only a death reflex, but she gasped, and her own heart jumped.

Then Colonel Jaax put her to work at the bleed table with Captain Haines, and presently she began drawing blood from unconscious monkeys. She inserted a needle into the animals’ leg vein and drew the blood. Their eyes were open. She didn’t like that. She felt they were staring at her.

She was bleeding a monkey when suddenly she thought its eyes moved, and it seemed to be trying to sit up. It was awake. It looked at her in a daze and reached out and grabbed her by the hand, the one that was holding the syringe. The monkey was very strong. The needle came out of its thigh, and blood spurted out. Then the animal started pulling her hand toward its mouth! It was trying to bite her hand! She screamed: “GRAB HIM, SOMEBODY, PLEASE! HE’S GETTING UP!” Captain Haines caught the monkey’s arms and pinned it to the table, shouting, “WE HAVE ONE THAT’S AWAKE! NEED KETAMINE!”

The needle, in coming out of the monkey, had cut the monkey’s leg vein. Immediately a ball of blood the size of a baseball formed in the monkey’s leg. It just got bigger and bigger, the blood pouring under the skin, and Rhonda almost burst into tears. She pressed her hands on the blood ball to stop the internal bleeding. Through her gloves, she could feel the blood swelling. A ball of Ebola blood.

A soldier hurried over and hit the monkey with
a double load of ketamine, and the monkey went limp.

During the crisis, Peter Jahrling spent every day wearing a space suit in his lab, running tests on monkey samples, trying to determine where and how the virus was spreading, and trying to get a pure sample of the virus isolated. Meanwhile, Tom Geisbert pulled all-nighters, staring at the cellscapes through his microscope.

Occasionally they met each other in an office, and closed the door.

“How are you feeling?”

“Tired, but otherwise I’m okay.”

“No headaches?”

“Nope. How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

They were the discoverers of the strain, and it seemed that they would have the chance to give it a name, provided they could isolate it, and provided it didn’t isolate them first.

Jahrling went home for dinner with his family, but after he had read his children their stories and put them to bed, he returned to the Institute and worked until late. The whole Institute was lit up with activity, all the hot labs full of people and operating around the clock. Soon he had stripped nude in the locker room, and he was putting on his scrubs, and then he was wearing his space suit, feeling sleepy, warm, and full of dinner, as he faced the steel door blazed with the red flower,
reluctant to take another step forward. He opened the door and went through to the hot side.

He had been testing his and Geisbert’s blood all along, and he wondered if the virus would suddenly show up in it. He didn’t think it was likely. I didn’t stick the flask close to my nose, I kind of just waved my hand over it. They used to do that all the time in hospital labs with bacteria. It used to be standard procedure to sniff cultures in a lab—that was how you learned what bacteria smelled like, how you learned that some kinds smell like Welch’s grape juice.

The question of whether he, Peter Jahrling, was infected with Ebola had become somewhat more pressing since the animal caretaker had puked on the lawn. That guy had not cut himself or stuck himself with a needle. Therefore, if that guy was breaking with Ebola, he might have caught it by breathing it in the air.

Jahrling carried some slides containing spots of his own blood serum into his closet, shut the door, turned out the light. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness, and had the usual struggle to see anything in the microscope through his faceplate. Then the panorama swam into view. It was the ocean of his blood, stretching in all directions, grainy and mysterious, faintly glowing with green. This was a normal glow, nothing to get excited about, that faint green. If the green brightened into a hotter glow, that would signify that his blood was inhabited by Ebola. And what if his blood glowed? How would he judge if it was really
glowing? How green is green? How much do I trust my tools and my perceptions? And if I’m convinced my blood is glowing, how am I going to report the results? I’ll need to tell C. J. Maybe I won’t have to go into the Slammer. I could be biocontained right here in my own lab. I’m in Biosafety Level 4 right now. I’m already in isolation. Who can I infect here in my lab? Nobody. I could live and work in here if I go positive for Ebola.

Nothing glowed. Nothing reacted to his blood. His blood was normal. Same with Tom Geisbert’s blood. As to whether their blood would glow tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, only time would tell, but he and Geisbert were climbing out of the incubation period.

At eleven o’clock at night, he decided it was time to go home, and he entered the air lock and pulled the chain to start the decon cycle. He was standing in gray light in the gray zone, alone with his thoughts. He couldn’t see much of anything in here, in the chemical mist. He had to wait seven minutes for the cycle to complete itself. His legs were killing him. He was so tired he couldn’t stand up. He reached up with his hands and grabbed the pipes that fed chemicals into the shower, to hold himself up. The warm liquid ran over his space suit. He felt comfortable and safe in here, surrounded by the sloshing noises of virus-killing liquids and the hiss of air and the ruffling sensation across his back as the chemicals played over his suit. He fell asleep.

He jerked awake when the final blast of water jets hit him, and he found himself slumped against the wall of the air lock, his hands still gripped around the pipes. If it hadn’t been for that last jet of water, he would not have woken up. He would have slid down the wall and curled up in the corner of the air lock, and probably would have stayed there all night, sound asleep, while the cool, sterile air flowed through his suit and bathed his body, nude inside its cocoon, at the heart of the Institute.

Specialist Rhonda Williams was standing in the main corridor of the monkey house, afraid she would end up in the Slammer. There was no sound except the roar of air in her helmet. The corridor stretched in both directions to infinity, strewn with cardboard boxes and trash and monkey biscuits. Where were the officers? Where was Colonel Jaax? Where was everybody? She saw the doors leading to the monkey rooms. Maybe the officers were in there.

Something was coming down the corridor. It was the loose monkey. He was running toward her. His eyes were staring at her. Something glittered in his hand—he was holding a syringe. He waved it at her with a gesture that conveyed passionate revenge. He wanted to give her an injection. The syringe was hot with an unknown agent. She started to run. Her space suit slowed her down. She kept running, but the hallway stretched
on forever, and she couldn’t reach the end. Where was the door out of here? There was no door! There was no way out! The monkey bounded toward her, its terrible eyes fixed on her—and the needle flashed and went into her suit.… She woke up in her barracks room.

Nancy Jaax awoke at four o’clock in the morning to the sound of the telephone ringing. It was her brother, calling from a pay telephone at the hospital in Wichita. He said that their father was dying. “He’s very, very bad, and he’s not going to make it,” he said. Their father was in cardiac failure, and the doctor had been asking if the family wanted him to undertake extreme lifesaving measures. Nancy thought only briefly about this and told her brother not to do it. Her father was down to ninety pounds, just skin and bones, and he was in pain and miserable.

She woke up Jerry and told him that her father would probably die today. She knew she would have to go home, but should she try to fly home today? She could arrive in Wichita by afternoon, and he might still be alive. She might be able to have a last farewell with him. She decided not to fly home. She felt that she couldn’t leave her job in the middle of the Reston crisis, that it would be a dereliction of her post.

The telephone rang again. It was Nancy’s father calling from his hospital room. “Are you coming home, Nancy?” he asked. He sounded wheezy and faint.

“I just can’t get away right now, Dad. It’s my work. I’m in the middle of a serious outbreak of disease.”

“I understand,” he said.

“I’ll see you at Christmas, Dad.”

“I don’t think I’ll make it that long, but, well, you never know.”

“I’m sure you will make it.”

“I love you, Nancy.”

“I love you, too.”

In the blackness before dawn, she and Jerry got dressed, she in her uniform, he in civilian clothes, and he headed off for the monkey house. Nancy stayed at home until after the children had woken up, and she fixed them some cereal. She sent the children off on the school bus and drove to work. She went to Colonel C. J. Peters and told him that her father was probably going to die today.

“Go home, Nancy,” he said.

“I’m not going to do that,” she replied.

The dead monkeys began coming in after lunch. A truck would bring them twice a day from Reston, and the first shipment would end up in Nancy’s air lock while she was suiting up. Usually there would be ten or twelve monkeys in hatboxes.

The rest of the monkeys that came out of the monkey house—the vast majority of them, two or
three tons’ worth—were placed in triple biohazard bags, and the bags were decontaminated, taken out of the building, and placed in steel garbage cans. Hazleton employees then drove them to an incinerator owned by the company, where the monkeys were burned at a high temperature, high enough to guarantee the destruction of Ebola organisms.

Some of the monkeys had to be examined, however, to see if and where the virus was spreading inside the building. Nancy would carry the hatboxes into suite AA-5 and work on the monkeys until after midnight with her partner and a civilian assistant. They hardly spoke to one another, except to point to a tool or to a sign of disease in a monkey.

Thoughts about her father and her childhood came to Nancy that day. Years earlier, as a girl, she had helped him during plowing season, driving his tractor from afternoon until late at night. Moving at a pace not much faster than a mule, it plowed furrows along a strip of land a half a mile long. She wore cutoff shorts and sandals. It was loud and hot on the tractor, and in the emptiness of Kansas she thought about nothing, drowned in the roar of the engine as the sun edged down to the horizon and the land grew dark and the moon appeared and climbed high. At ten o’clock her father would take over and plow for the rest of the night, and she would go to bed. At sunrise, he would wake her up, and she would get back on the tractor and keep on plowing.

“SPONGE,” she mouthed to her buddy.