Pestilence

65

Ngo Chon stood in the glass corridor at the CDC in Atlanta, observing the parking lot as he sipped tea out of a mug that had a saying on the side: Epidemiologists do it disease free.

The CDC. When he was younger, he had dreamed about working there. After medical school, he completed a doctorate and then realized he didn’t want to go into the world yet, so he completed another. By the time he got out of school at age thirty-nine, he thought he would be the most educated person at the CDC. He was shocked to find that at least half a dozen people had more degrees than he did, some of them from more prestigious schools.

But he’d outlasted them all. They transferred around, always vying for that position that would bolster their resumes. No matter how much they protested that they had purer motives, it was always about the resume with career academics and scientists. The CV determined the quality of the person.

Chon knew the opposite was probably true. The more crap on the CV, the more likely the person had never done anything new or interesting. Anyone who came up with some interesting theory or project devoted all their time to that one thing. Only when people aimlessly drifted did the CV commence building to the sky, like a nerdy Tower of Babel.

He finished his tea and then headed up to the level four biosafety labs. They were in the most secure facility in the United States, at least that the public knew about-and with good reason. Over a hundred unknown, absolutely lethal hot viruses were frozen in a refrigerated walk-in room on that level. Every so often, a man or woman working for some unknown military unit or spy agency would be flown in to USAMRIID in Maryland. They were typically dead at that point, but he knew of a few live ones. But once they passed, their blood and tissues were analyzed, and if an unknown hot virus was discovered, it went to a freezer on BS4 in Atlanta-even though most CDC employees didn’t realize it. USAMRIID also kept the unknown pathogens in BS4 freezers. A room of nightmares was right under their noses, and only a handful of doctors knew about it.

He scrubbed down and checked his suit before negatively pressurizing it and heading into the labs. The room was a cacophony of monkey howls from the twenty or so primates stacked in cages against the wall. Four were lying motionless in pools of blood. They had been injected with black pox-Agent X-less than forty-eight hours ago as a vaccine. The weakened virus husks had flooded their bodies, initiating an immune response that had apparently gone nowhere.

Chon stood frozen, staring at the corpses. Clever little bastard.

Samantha thought about staying in her office and finishing up a few of her other cases, but that seemed so pointless as to almost be laughable. A sample of the new strand of Agent X had been flown in and its identity had been confirmed: black pox with a slight mutation that was likely responsible for its hyper-incubation period.

Instead of working in the office, she went to the BS4 labs, stripped and showered, and then put on her suit. She spent a good five minutes searching for tears in the suit before filling it with negative pressure from an air hose connected to the wall. She entered the lab through the decontamination chamber.

Ngo Chon stood there, watching over about twenty specimens of primates, everything from small squirrel monkeys to hundred-and-fifty-pound chimps. Chon didn’t notice her and was standing as still as glass, watching the primates.

“No luck?” she asked.

He shook his head in his suit. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s not smallpox. With SP, we could vaccinate within a few days and still have positive effects. This thing takes hold in a day. It shuts down the immune system first, uses it to replicate itself. Then it begins attacking healthy cells.” He turned to her. “It knows where our defenses are and uses them against us. It’s really quite… beautiful in how ferocious it is.”

“What progress have we made on a vaccine?”

“Almost none. The virus destroys itself if it’s weakened or damaged in any way. Like a self-destruct button, I guess.”

She approached one of the cages and stared at a spider monkey that was lying on its side, its breathing heavy as its hands trembled.

It reminded her of the last case of smallpox she had ever seen. Officially, the last known case had occurred in Africa in 1977, but the World Health Organization and the CDC knew that wasn’t true. Several cases had been reported in western Africa and parts of South America. But the virus had died out so quickly, the organizations didn’t want to raise public alarm.

Sam had gone to Congo during the last outbreak in 2002. A twelve-year-old boy had infected and killed his entire family. She remembered the boy lying much like the monkey was, on his side, a blank expression over his still face as his hands trembled. His skin was coated with pustules that resembled oatmeal.

Smallpox.

“Ngo, how genetically similar is Agent X and its progeny to small pox? Would you say around ninety-nine percent?”

“Yeah, somewhere around there. Why?”

She took a step back. “Because I think I know how to make a vaccine.”