Upon A Pale Horse

Epilogue

Two figures moved out of the level four biosafety laboratory towards the showers and UV light room, their baby-blue ILC Dover Chemturion positive pressure suits rustling as they moved, looking more like astronauts in a science fiction film than research scientists working in one of the only privately owned level four laboratories in the country. The multiple airlocks were electronically controlled, designed to prevent accidental contamination from the lab into the outer world, and the safety procedures to enter and leave were redundant and stringent.

Part of a larger complex in Virginia on the grounds of a major military contractor’s facility, the series of reinforced concrete chambers had been built two decades earlier, and were constantly updated with state-of-the-art technology. No expense had been spared in outfitting the secret laboratory, whose personnel were all assigned top security clearances and employed by the Department of Defense, paid out of a dark pool of deniable funds that were administered in conjunction with the CIA.

It was the end of another long day, and the pair had put in seven hours working with pathogens that were being synthetically modified to be resistant to existing antiviral agents. That their work was illegal under international law didn’t bother them a bit — they were both old hands, and had long ago lost any moral qualms about doing their jobs.

The lights in the laboratory extinguished once they were in the first containment chambers, where the tedious routine of multiple showers and airlocks were familiar precautions. As they stood in their respective rooms, the glow of dim LED lighting emanated from behind a locked steel door at the far end of the lab, past the row of Class III biological safety cabinets, where the most dangerous of the pathogens were kept — technology that had been perfected in the seventies after furious development activity in the sixties.

Inside the temperature- and humidity-controlled chamber, which had its own airlock entry, sat a row of vials in lab trays, the small canisters surprisingly innocuous, offering no hint of the destructive capacity of the agent stored inside — an agent that had been refined and modified to ravage the immune system in a matter of days, its infective capacity at the extreme end of the spectrum, a virus that had already proved devastating in its first-generation form and was now far more deadly and contagious in its latest iteration.

A tag labeled the tray as well as the tubes, laser-printed in black on a stark white plastic background. Row after row of deadly cargo, waiting, the modifications finally complete, the clandestine testing in the Congo at an end, the corpses burned, the data accumulated and tallied, the limited outbreaks carefully orchestrated and contained before they could go full-blown. And of course, a limited quantity of antidote that would be distributed to the ruling elite safely stored in another facility, ensuring the best minds were spared the ravaging that would destroy civilization, enabling them to create a new, improved order, having learned the lessons of uncontrolled population growth and unrestricted freedom.

In the artificial glow, the script looked like an ancient Roman curse, the innocent combination of letters barely hinting at the nightmare that rested inside, indestructible: a real-life portal to the underworld, the biological equivalent of an eternity in hell. One of the two scientists had just finished painstakingly affixing the decals after creating two dozen with the same name embossed in tiny letters, the name of the pathogen clearly legible through the double-paned glass window in the cool greenish light: EBOV.