Mutant (27 page)
She nodded eagerly, and again said something that didn’t transmit.
“It must be a frequency problem,” he said, finding that the lack of her voice made him feel most enclosed and alone of all. He eyed the number pad at the air lock, resisting the impulse to step up and immediately punch in the code to get back out again. Instead he signaled to her with a thumbs-up sign that he felt okay and concentrated on slowing his breathing to normal.
His nerves settled as best as he could manage, he walked over to the benches where the rows of cages were located, disconnecting one hose and snapping into another as he went. His approach produced no response from the animals. Even the one that had raised its head paid him no heed. As he got closer he saw that the containers were completely enclosed in clear plastic, each connected to small pipes and hoses. “I see a couple of dozen primates of various kinds, and just about as many empty cages,” he reported to Sullivan. “Every one of the animals seems to have an enclosed environment with its own air supply.” He bent down to get a closer look at one of the monkeys. He didn’t know anything about the normal simian breathing rate, but he could tell from the way its small chest heaved each time it attempted to take in air that the creature was in severe respiratory distress. When it blinked at him, its eyes dry and sunken, the sight reminded him of the hollow look a child gets from dehydration. He noted the food and water dispensers at the side of the cage seemed untouched.
The animal in the neighboring cage, a small dark-furred creature with a white face, appeared to be in equally bad shape, except from out of its black nostrils and parched lips issued a fine bloody froth. The animals beside it, on the other hand, seemed fine. In the first dozen cages Steele found this pattern to repeat itself— roughly half the creatures gravely ill, the other half apparently normal, the bloody froth at the nose and mouth common to most of the sick ones. Could this be bird flu? he wondered, his throat going dry as his imagination freewheeled in a spiraling rush to judgment. But the doctor in him urged caution. Any number of severe respiratory infections could result in a leaky lung with blood-filled foam flowing from an airway. The phenomenon even had an acronym—ARDS, short for adult respiratory distress syndrome. So slow down, Steele, he admonished himself. This may not be an H5N1 infection at all.
But it sure as hell looked like it.
He leaned in for another peek at an apparently healthy spider monkey when suddenly a spray the color of milk discharged from the nozzle in its cage. Like a mist, it floated down onto the animal’s face and body, causing it to rub its eyes, lick its lips, and wipe it into its fur. The substance seemed greasy, matting the hair and leaving the strands shiny. Other than that it didn’t appear to bother the creature any. Twenty seconds later came a small click, the vapor vanished, and the monkey continued to groom itself, apparently unconcerned.
Uneasy and more puzzled than ever, Steele moved onto the next group of cages, where he stopped in his tracks. All these animals were near death, but clearly from a different cause. Vomit the color of used coffee grounds spewed from their mouths, and diarrhea dark as tar spilled out their rectums. From their noses and gums streamed frank blood. They lay helpless in their own waste, the cage floors coated black with excrement and streaked in red.
Revulsion played at the pit of his stomach as he recoiled from the sight, while his mind reflexively tried to reason what could possibly be happening to them. The pitch-black of the diarrhea told him that at least some of the hemorrhage involved the stomach, the hydrochloric acid of its gastric juices characteristically turning the iron of hemoglobin black. Fresh blood from the nose and gums, on the other hand, suggested a coagulation problem as well. But these were probably all secondary signs. The profuse vomiting and diarrhea would indicate that the primary site of the illness would be a GI source, but what? He again noted that, not surprisingly, none of these animals had touched their food either, but in this case the feed corn lay scattered about in the mess. One of the poor creatures started to urinate where it lay. The stream arched weakly into the air, its color red, indicating the kidneys or bladder also were hemorrhaging. More diagnostic possibilities raced through his head, some of them among the worst nightmares known to medicine.
He found himself creeping backward, wanting to look away, yet his gaze stayed riveted on the dying animals. He felt as if he were looking into a vacuum where logic and reason had been sucked away, and there descended on him a terrible premonition that he stood in the presence of science turned evil. Because unless Agrenomics had suddenly entered the field of medical research and sought a cure for whatever hideous diseases they’d unleashed in these cages, no sane person would do this. Despite his protective wear, he grew colder, as if in that gray crypt of no sound or color, heat, too, like morality, could not exist.
His thoughts swirling, he set off for the pile of documents and stacks of videotapes, still wanting answers, yet dreading what he’d find there. On the way he caught sight of a stainless steel table about three feet long with buckled straps at its four corners. It stood directly under a ventilation hood, had a shallow depression, and in its center he saw a drain with a bucket placed beneath it.
They’re doing autopsies on the monkeys, he thought, coming to an abrupt halt. Here might be his best chance to find out what had gone on. Just as the ancients had examined entrails to find great truths, modern medicine still has no better way to provide a definitive diagnosis than by opening up a cadaver and scrutinizing its organs, albeit with modern equipment. The principle should apply equally well to sick monkeys.
He quickly began searching for the usual fruits of the postmortem—containers of pickled hearts, lungs, livers, and the like, along with slices of the tissues mounted and stained on glass slides. But among the racks of specimen bottles, preservatives, and test reagents lining the nearby cupboards he found nothing. Nor did the shelves under the gleaming counters yield anything but baskets of blood tubes, swabs, and culture media. He pulled open a few more drawers, only to find an array of scalpels, tissue spreaders, and bone cutters—the tools of the dissecting trade—arranged like a fan of playing cards and ready for the next case. Okay, he thought, looking around him, after all the slicing and dicing, where did they put the results?
Three counters away stood a row of microscopes. He walked over and impatiently continued to pull out drawers, until he finally spotted part of what he wanted— an assortment of familiar-looking flat containers, the slotted trays used worldwide to store microscope slides.
Someone had labeled the containers MIST TRIALS: RNA VECTOR 2, and subdivided everything as SUBJECT 1, SUBJECT 2, SUBJECT 3, all the way to SUBJECT 200.
“Oh, my God,” he said aloud, all at once realizing what might be in the spray he’d witnessed. Then he remembered that Kathleen could hear him. In his frazzled state of mind, he’d forgotten to keep talking to her. “Sorry!” he said, spinning around and looking to the windows. She still stood there watching him, but was already dressed in full protective gear and wrapping tape around her wrists. She obviously intended to join him. “Wait a minute! This place is a house of horrors, and you need to be sealed up tight. Do you need help with your suit or the tape?”
She shook her head.
“You’re sure? They’re playing with at least two organisms in here, both of them deadly. One may be the bird flu hybrid, and I think they’re conveying it with a genetic vector.”
Her hands went still, frozen in the act of fixing a length of tape between one of her latex gloves and the suit. Not even the distance between them or the barrier of the window and her Plexiglas visor could keep him from seeing the look of horror that sprang to her eyes.
He watched her for a few seconds, giving her time to digest what he’d said, then added, “You’ll be able to tell better when you see for yourself. Are you coming?”
She slowly nodded and moved toward the air lock.
He turned back to the counter, put the first slide of SUBJECT 1 into the nearest microscope, and, switching on the viewing screen, brought the image into focus.
What he saw took his breath away. He instantly recognized the pink lacy fabric of lung tissue without difficulty, there being little difference between man and primates. Except in this case the cells of the air sacs where oxygenation takes place, the alveoli, lay in tatters, awash in red blood corpuscles and ripped open as if exploded from within. More important, the carnage resembled exactly what he’d seen on the slides of Tommy Arness’s lung at the conference in Honolulu. He started to quickly run through the other preparations, and saw virtually the same image in more than half the specimens.
“Can you hear me now, Richard?” interrupted Kathleen, her voice through the speaker sounding an inch from his ear and so startling him that he nearly slid off his stool. “I think I dialed in the right channels this time.”
He spun around and saw that she was already through the air lock and attaching herself to an air hose.
Five minutes later they stood before the documents they’d come to see in the first place. Steele stole an uneasy glance in her direction, concerned about how pale she’d become since he’d shown her the horrors in the cages. A sheen of perspiration covered her face, and the underlying muscles had grown so taut that her skin looked stretched and bloodless over her cheekbones.
“Where do we start?” she asked, her voice as shaken as she looked.
He spotted a pile of beige folders bearing the label CORN TRIALS: RNA VECTOR 1. “I’ll take these,” he said, and started to flip through them.
She took a brief glance at a similar pile marked MIST TRIALS: VECTOR 2, but after a few seconds discarded them, saying, “These are more your turf.” She started sorting through the videos instead.
He quickly realized that what he had were the clinical records of the monkeys with the hemorrhagic intestinal disorder. Organized exactly like a patient’s chart, they held progress notes, vital signs, and laboratory reports. Skimming through each section dossier after dossier, he learned that the disease started with one or two days of vomiting and diarrhea accompanied by a low-grade fever. By days five and six, massive upper and lower GI hemorrhages were prevalent, along with bleeding from the gums and teeth, high fevers, and low blood pressure. Biochemistry results at that stage revealed massive liver failure, coagulation abnormalities, immunosuppression with falling white cells, and the beginning of renal failure. Death invariably occurred by seven to fourteen days, and mortality ran around ninety percent. Each grim fact narrowed down the diagnoses for him, until he arrived at the one organism on earth that could cause such destruction.
Ebola virus.
His throat so dry he didn’t think he could speak and his head swamped with more questions than he had answers, he looked over at Kathleen to see that she’d settled on a solitary cassette. The others lay scattered in front of her, sporting computer-generated labels of either CORN TRIALS or MIST TRIALS, but the one she held in her hand looked more used than the rest and had a faded handwritten sticker on it.
When she saw him watching her, she turned the box so he could read it for himself.
Human Trials: Vector 1:
Afghanistan.
Without a word, she inserted it into the VCR and pressed PLAY.
Chapter 20
At first he thought the harsh grainy pictures had been filmed in black-and-white, until he saw the red blood. Otherwise the dark bruises, vomitus, and excrement against naked skin had no color.
The camera panned along a row of cells, peering in at emaciated, unclothed men who were shivering, from cold or fear he couldn’t tell. Some retreated from the glare of the light, others sat blinking dumbly at the lens. Others still were doubled over, vomiting blood or crouched in the dirt, diarrhea flowing from them like water, sometimes black, sometimes crimson. In the background were male voices speaking what sounded like some form of Arabic.
“It’s Farsi,” she said in a tremulous whisper.
The camera zoomed up close, and the narrator pointed out in accented English the clinical features of each man—the chills, the dehydration, the hemorrhages from every orifice. Sometimes he’d bark out a string of guttural orders to the victims until they stood and adopted the position best suited to display a particular aspect of their grotesque condition to the camera. On other occasions he held up a chart documenting the victim’s high-spiraling fever. But in every case he’d focus his camera on the patient’s food supply, to make a point of identifying it as an uncooked mash made from corn.
Steele clutched the table to steady himself when the next cells came into view. The victims here were children, all in similar condition to the adults. They submissively cowered and whimpered as the camera probed their various clinical features. Some started to cry outright and tremble when ordered to stand and show themselves. When those who were too weak didn’t respond, their tormentors released a fury of brutal screams until, wailing and shaking with terror, even these little ones struggled to comply, often unable to do little more than raise their upper bodies on quivering thin arms.
“These are the orphans of those already dead,” said the narrator. “Next we look at the effect of the organism on entire families—”
Steele shut off the machine, unable to take any more.
“Mother of God,” said Kathleen, starting to cry.
Steele slipped an arm around her shoulders, feeling her sobbing even through the bulky suits. She began to rock, the way children do to comfort themselves, while he had to keep swallowing hard in order not to vomit. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, bringing himself to the verge of retching just by opening his mouth to speak.
“But I haven’t checked what’s in those vats—”
“Fuck the vats, Kathleen! They’re making genetic weapons here. That’s Ebola they gave those poor people. Somehow they’ve figured a way to transmit it through corn. There’s nothing more to know. We leave now, then bring down every cop, state trooper, and FBI agent within a hundred miles on these creeps. Let’s move.”
“Right,” she said, “just give me a second,” and made a beeline for the large containers. “You know why it’s corn they used?”
Her voice had a strained falsetto to it that jangled like a warning bell. Patients in ER who sounded that way were often about to snap.
“Kathleen, we’ve got to get out of here—”
“Because it’s the whorehouse of genetics. Takes all comers of genes, replicates them, expresses them, and passes them on to its progeny. Ebola, bird flu, it could handle them all.”
He caught up with her, took her by the elbow, and steered her back toward the air lock.
“Now, if people boiled the corn,” she continued, her pitch rising further still, “that might denature the Ebola, but bake it like a cornmeal—hell, genetic vectors are put together at those temperatures—both RNA and DNA would survive just fine. Of course, even more effective would be if it got eaten uncooked, like feed corn.”
He found her sudden chattiness to be another bad sign. She also looked paler than before, though he wouldn’t have figured that possible. “Right,” he said, and sped up the pace. They were halfway to the exit.
“Richard, what’s the usual vector for Ebola?”
“Nobody knows.” Ten more strides.
“Maybe they wanted the vector to get it, and pass it on to humans that way.”
“Could be,” said Steele, stepping up to the number plate and entering the code to open the door.
Nothing happened.
“What the hell?” He entered it again.
Still nothing.
The pupils of Kathleen’s eyes dilated in alarm. “You’re sure you’ve got the code right?”
“Yes.” He tried it a third time.
Nothing again.
“Oh, God!” moaned Kathleen.
Steele stayed silent, but felt himself break out in a sweat from head to toe.
“So what now, Richard?” She sounded very frightened.
“I don’t know. See any sign of an override switch or control panel anywhere?”
They scanned the walls, but to no avail.
“There’s got to be another way out, some kind of emergency exit, in case of fire, no?” Her voice betrayed desperation more than hope.
“I don’t think these people are the kind to worry about building codes. Where’s your cellular?”
“In the antechamber, along with everything else God didn’t give me, remember?”
He spotted a metal lab stool against one of the counters and started to walk over to it. “Maybe we can smash these windows with something like this, get to your phone, and call for help—”
Her scream interrupted him.
He spun around, and through the windows saw the door of the main entrance already open. Six swarthy men dressed in security uniforms stepped inside, one after the other. Two of them carried guns with silencers. Over the speakers in his helmet came orders the guards uttered to each other in the same tongue he’d heard on the video.
“A goddamn trap!” Kathleen muttered, her words strained through clenched teeth.
The heavy stool already in his hands, Steele immediately hefted it over his shoulder and heaved it at the window. “Help me break the glass before they get in their suits. It might scare them off!”
The projectile hit the clear surface and bounced off as though he’d thrown it against brick. Plexiglas, he remembered, and knew he’d never smash through. The men on the other side, initially startled by the sound, finished changing into OR clothing, then walked over to the moon suits and began to put them on.
Kathleen picked up another stool and climbed up on one of the counters with it, as if she intended to clobber anyone who came near her. Steele thought of another weapon. He ran over to the autopsy table, pulled open one of the drawers filled with dissecting tools, and grabbed some scalpels. Racing back to the area in front of the air lock, he handed some up to Kathleen. “Hold them like this,” he said, gripping a pair in his fist so the blades stuck out each end, then did the same in his other hand. “I’ll greet them at the door. If I can cut the suit of the first one into the lab, it ought to make the others think twice about coming through.”
She gave him a wan smile of encouragement, but looked terrified.
One of the guards noticed what he was doing. The man smirked and walked over to the control panel where all the pressure gauges were. Steele watched him reach up and turn something, then felt his air supply shut down.
“Bastards!” he heard Kathleen mutter.
His mask immediately started to fog over from his breath again, and he saw a similar opaque film appear inside hers. Soon they wouldn’t be able to see at all. “Get back to back!” he ordered.
As she jumped down from the counter and moved into position behind him, the same man strode over to the radio console and turned off their speakers.
Alone with the sounds of his breathing again, Steele fought to keep from panicking. Though his visor continued to steam up, he could still make out his and Sullivan’s reflection in the window, the two of them weaving and flashing their blades. It made him think of an eightlimbed creature in Chet’s video games, one that always brandishes its stingers before an enemy the way a scorpion does its tail. The man who’d rendered them virtually mute, deaf, and nearly blind stood watching, his smirk fading into a look of concern as the steel glinted under the overhead lights.
At least we’ll go down fighting, Richard thought.
In minutes he could see only white shapes through a blurry haze. It took so much yelling to communicate that he stayed silent, conserving air, but he felt her back pressed to his as they waited. It already had gotten difficult to breathe, the closed-in heat of his own body suffocating him as much as the lack of oxygen or the mounting carbon dioxide levels.
More seconds ticked by. He began to feel light-headed and knew neither of them would last much longer. He tried listening for any sounds that might signal the suited men were on their way in, but could hear only the maddening noise of his increasingly jagged respirations. When he tried holding his breath in brief intervals, hoping that way he’d pick up some sound of their approach, the absolute silence so overwhelmed him it filled his ears like dirt and made him feel they’d buried him alive.
Another minute passed and his head began to swim. As he sank to his knees, a black figure lunged at him from the right without warning. “They’re here!” he screamed, swiping at the form with a sideways swing of his blade. He felt solid contact and instinctively pressed the point of the scalpel in, completing a sweeping crosscut the way a surgeon opens an abdomen with a single stroke. Not even the suits could mask the shrieks of pain that followed.
He lurched to his feet and lashed out at a second attacker on his left. But a savage pull on his air hose from behind and a forward kick to the calves of his legs slammed him backward onto the floor knocking the wind out of him. Immediately someone stomped on his wrists, forcing him to drop his weapons. Before he could even breathe again, they yanked off his helmet and slammed his head against the floor. A starburst of light exploded behind his eyes, but he didn’t lose consciousness. He could still see the white points dancing in his head when he felt the muscles in his chest give a reflex heave and fill his lungs with whatever the air in that room contained.
“You bastards,” he heard Kathleen scream from nearby and knew that they’d taken her helmet off as well.
Two men dragged him over to the vats where they tied him up with masking tape below a big overhead nozzle that he hadn’t noticed before. Seconds later they dumped her beside him, hands and feet also bound despite her valiant writhing and kicking.
“Ya’ cowardly creeps,” she bellowed. “Gutless is what ya’ are! Gutless . . .”
As she raved at them, they ignored her and turned to their wounded comrade. Blood flowed from a diagonal cut across the chest of the man’s protective suit. Two of the men attending him struggled to tape it up, their gloves quickly turning red as they worked. The remaining three went over to the dangling hoses and gestured into the antechamber that they wanted the pressure turned back on. A shadowy form on the other side of the window moved to comply.
Watching all this, Richard desperately cast around for a way he and Kathleen might still survive, and only vaguely realized that a seventh person must have joined their attackers. But his thinking disintegrated into little more than a flurry of partial thoughts from which he could barely stitch together anything coherent. Ebola’s not airborne, he told himself. Only bird flu is. And the infected monkeys themselves are isolated.
The air lock hissed as the latest arrival, having donned a moon suit, stepped into the lab.
Richard again ignored the newcomer, continuing to concentrate on whether the air he and Kathleen were breathing would necessarily kill them. Only the technicians working with the animals might spread the vectors into the lab itself, he thought. But no one’s been here all weekend. So if we’re breathing bird flu right now, maybe it’s a limited exposure and won’t be fatal, especially if we can get our helmets back on. Maybe if I promise these creeps we won’t struggle . . .
But before he could beg for their lives, a white spray cascaded down onto their heads from the nozzle above them, covering their faces and hair.
Caught by surprise, he tried to squeeze his eyes shut and clamp his mouth closed in time to keep the mist away from his mucous membranes, but he reacted too late. He could already feel its slipperiness on the inside of his lips, and though it had no taste, the oily texture of the liquid on his tongue made him want to gag. Neither could he detect an odor while breathing through his nose, but could tell that he’d begun to inhale the greasy droplets by the slimy sensation accumulating at the back of his throat whenever he swallowed.
Kathleen had once described what now permeated their eyes, lips, and skin as genetic worms. Yet the bland liquid basically felt no more noxious than if they were deluging him with soapy bathwater. Somehow that innocuousness made its invasion of their bodies seem all the more insidious.
Her screams were suddenly cut off with a sickening thud. His eyes sprang open. “No!” he roared, instantly twisting around and straining toward where she lay. But he found himself looking from behind at the man who’d just smashed her head into the floor. Crouched over her, he lifted it again by its short auburn-gold hair. The way it lolled lifeless under his hand must have convinced him that a second blow would be redundant. He simply let go, and it fell with a soft
klunk
. Then he turned, bringing his face into view.
Steele felt his stomach pitch forward until he thought it would turn inside out. “My God!” he said, barely above a whisper.
The sight before him made no sense. The spray must have scrambled his vision. He shook his head to try and clear away what had to be a hallucination. But when he looked again, his mind still felt as if it had catapulted into a blender. Because from behind the visor, an owl-like stare continued to blink back at him. Then Steve Patton reached over, lifted his head by the hair, and smashed it backward. Richard saw a flash more brilliant than the first, followed by blackness. Like dark blood it spilled through his brain.