Pestilence

66

Six days later, the weakened poxvirus sat in a syringe on her desk as Samantha stared out the window. Requests for aid were coming in from all over the country, but the Centers for Disease Control could provide almost none. The impact was so large that the best they could do was send teams of specialists out with military personnel to assess the damage. But the military wasn’t there to heal; they were there to prevent.

In almost every major American city, an order had gone out for isolation. No one was to have contact with anyone else. No school, no work, no church, and no recreational activities. The only way to prevent infection was to avoid exposure to the virus. The hope was that, eventually, the infected would die off.

But humans were social animals, and Sam was even aware of studies in which psychosis ensued after prolonged periods of isolation. She had once spent three weeks by herself in the Sahara after her guide had caught malaria and died. She remembered the madness encroaching like a dark cloud that she could see but couldn’t walk away from. It drifted toward her slowly at first, and within two weeks, she was mumbling aloud to herself. The first time she became aware of it, she stopped. But by the second time, she didn’t have the strength to fight it anymore. In fact, in some odd way, speaking to herself was comforting.

By the time another guided party happened by and found her, she was having conversations with herself, and learning to stop took several weeks.

Taking up the syringe, she examined the semi-golden fluid within. She tapped it twice to push the bubbles to the top and then placed some pressure on the bottom of the syringe to pop them. Unlike the vast majority of the world’s population, she had once been vaccinated for smallpox-before going out into the field. Thinking back, she wondered if that was why she hadn’t become infected with Agent X and her old boss, Dr. Ralph Wilson, had. He was a lab worker, not a field worker, and there wouldn’t have been a need to vaccinate him.

The chimpanzee she had immunized with smallpox a week ago had grown ill, but he’d survived and was strong. She then injected it with Agent X, and it had survived. The poxvirus wasn’t genetically dissimilar enough to prevent a powerful immune response to Agent X. The vaccine had worked once… and it needed a human subject.

She blotted alcohol on her left bicep and then lifted the syringe. It touched the tip of her skin, but before she could push it in, a hand violently jerked it away. Chon stood there, gawking at her. He took the syringe and capped it.

“Come with me.”

Samantha followed him up to the BS4 labs, where they suited up. Mongo, the chimp she had injected with smallpox, lay on his side, twitching. Blood pooled around him and was leaking from every orifice in his body. As was also displayed in the human victims, his organs had liquefied and were coming out in thick strands with his feces. Unable to control his bowel movements, he was coated in bloody flesh.

“He didn’t display any symptoms,” she said.

“Not at first. I took a sample of his blood.”

“And?”

“The poxvirus mutated again. I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. But it sensed the vaccine, and it mutated.”

Samantha knew of only one other virus that could have had such an ability: influenza. The common flu virus was the most adaptable life form on the planet and could almost sense its own destruction. That was why vaccines had to be given every year instead of once in a lifetime: it simply mutated too quickly. But even the flu couldn’t mutate within a host after injection of a vaccine.

“Damn,” she muttered. She began pacing. “This is the key, Ngo. There has to be some way to slow the mutation.”

“How?”

She thought of graduate school. She remembered an experiment in which they slowed ants with liquid nitrogen. When they thawed, they would pick up exactly where they had left off. If they were heading for a piece of food, they would continue there. If they were retreating, that’s what they would continue doing.

“What if we could slow the mutation with liquid nitrogen? After immunization with poxvirus, we could slow Agent X before injection. Maybe that would give the body enough time to come up with antibodies before the next mutation?”

Ngo thought it over. “I love it. I’ll get the LN. We have some in Lab Two.”

Samantha bent down in front of Mongo. She placed her thickly gloved hand over his head, and he didn’t have the strength to respond. Instead, he whimpered and closed his eyes.