Xibalba

CHAPTER 16

Maria stared at the opaque plastic wall, wondering if she should try to smash through it. She desperately needed to get past the obstacle, to get moving, even though she had no idea where she needed to go or why.

Except that wasn’t actually true. She did know why.

First, they wander.

She had known this was coming, even before realizing that the old woman she had met on the mountain road was infected. When she had gone into the house to assess the four critically ill patients, she had done so with the full knowledge that, no matter how careful she was, she might also contract the illness, but that was a risk she had willingly undertaken. She saw herself as a soldier, fighting microscopic enemies rather than human ones, but no less willing to sacrifice herself to save others.

And sacrifice herself, she had.

She felt chilled, a sure sign of the fever rising in her blood, but the tell-tale symptom was the perverse compulsion to move. Not aimless wandering as the villagers had suggested, but an overpowering urge to walk in a specific direction, like the homing instinct of a migrating bird.

But overpowering urge or no, three steps was as far as she got. That was where she encountered the sterile polycarbonate walls of her prison cell. Although she had never actually seen a room like it outside of the movies, she recognized the small enclosure for what it was: a Bio-Safety Level IV isolation room.

The soldiers — she assumed they were soldiers — had taken her along with the other visibly infected patients, about a dozen people including the three Maria had been monitoring. They had all been put in a makeshift isolation ward, nothing more than plastic sheeting held together with strong tape, aboard one of the helicopters. Maria guessed that about a full day had passed, but it was impossible to say with certainty. She had not seen the sun since taking off in the helicopter. After a short flight, they had disembarked in a closed hangar. She didn’t think they could have gone very far. No more than a few hundred kilometers, but aside from knowing that she was in a BSL–IV facility, she had no idea where she was now.

Yet somehow, she knew which direction she need to go.

And she knew how it would end.

A buzzing sound distracted her, breaking the strange spell, momentarily at least. She turned and saw the light above the sealed door blinking on and off. This, she knew, was the signal that someone was about to come through the door, and that she was to lay down on the bed in a non-threatening manner. Failure to comply, she had been told, would result in her being placed in five-point restraints.

She turned away from the wall and stretched out in a supine position, but almost immediately felt herself sitting up again, swinging her feet off the hospital-style bed, turning in the direction of the wall.

“No,” she whispered, gripping the side rails forcefully to hold herself back.

The door opened with a hiss and someone entered. She didn’t immediately see the person’s face, not until he finished connecting the air hose from his environment suit to the supply valve near the door. It was the young man who had come in earlier to draw blood and check her vitals. Then he had spoken only a few words to her in halting Spanish — probably not his native tongue — and refused to look her in the eye or answer her questions.

That had been several hours earlier, before the urge to walk had come over her.

“Are you American?” she asked in English.

The young man stiffened a little at the question. “You speak English?”

“Si. I mean, yes. My name is Maria.”

“Please stay on the bed. I need to check your vitals and take more blood.”

“I have it,” she blurted. “The sickness. I am showing first stage symptoms.”

The young man in the space-suit did not appear surprised by this news, but he kept his head tilted down, hiding his face as he began wrapping a blood pressure cuff around her right bicep.

“I can help you,” she went on.

He secured the cuff and activated the stand-mounted electronic sphygmomanometer. For a few seconds, the only noise in the room was the low hum of the device cycling. Maria did not move or speak, knowing that doing so might affect the accuracy of the readings. When the machine finished, she took note of the results.

Her systolic was slightly higher than normal. So was her heart rate.

The young man began loosening the cuff.

“Let me help you,” she said again. “I am a physician. I can tell you what’s happening to me. I know it’s too late for me, but I can still help you find a cure. Please let me help you.”

The man still refused to look, but his subsequent movements were hesitant, as if he were fighting his own inner irresistible compulsion.

“It’s a fungal infection of some kind, isn’t it?” She kept talking, hoping that her display of cooperation might somehow reach through the barriers that separated them. “That fits most of the symptoms, but it’s unbelievably aggressive. It seems to be spread by skin-to-skin contact, but airborne transmission is also possible. I don’t think it’s contagious in the early stages. The first symptom… ”

She faltered here, knowing that she was diagnosing her own terminal condition.

“The first symptom is an urge to start walking. I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m fighting it right now. It’s like my brain is telling me that I really want to do it. I think the infection is interfering with dopamine receptors. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

The young man placed a thermometer in her mouth, silencing her, and once again she did not resist. After a few seconds, the device beeped, signaling that it had finished measuring her body temperature.

“I have a fever, don’t I?”

No response.

“It feels mild right now, maybe 37 degrees… About 100 degrees Fahrenheit,” she amended. If he was American, he probably wouldn’t know Celsius temperatures. “Are my eyes bloodshot? I think capillary leakage is an early symptom, too. In a few hours, I’ll develop petechiae. It spreads through contact with infected blood, and maybe other bodily fluids. Aerosolized blood from coughing. After a while, I won’t be lucid anymore.”

The young man put away the diagnostic machine and turned to leave.

“Please,” she said again. “Let me help.”

The man disconnected his air supply and reached for the door, but before he hit the button to open it, he turned and faced her. His lips moved but she heard no sounds at first. Then he took a breath, and spoke again more forcefully. “Doug. My name is Doug. I’m so sorry, Maria.”

Then, he turned away quickly, opened the door and left without looking back.

Doug Simpson lingered under the disinfectant shower, as if the harsh chemicals might somehow burn away the guilt he felt. The suit kept the solution from making contact with his skin, just as it kept the microbes in the patient rooms at bay, but it offered scant protection from the pain of watching another person die.

The shower was part of the multi-layered Bio-Safety protocol designed to keep infectious agents from escaping the lab and spreading to the outside world, yet despite such precautions, on more than one occasion, deadly pathogens had made it out of even the most capable BSL IV facilities. Because this was a privately operated lab, operating without oversight from any government, additional layers of protection had been put in place, including a fail-safe that would sanitize the entire facility in the event of a containment breach — something as simple as attempting to leave the airlock before the disinfectant shower finished its cycle.

After five minutes, the flow of chemicals switched to pure distilled water, which sluiced away all traces of the caustic disinfectants. The pressure of the shower pushed his clammy skin against the inside of the suit, chilling him.

What am I even doing here? he thought. I’m not going to be able to help Maria or any of them.

Several more patients had died, and those few from the village who had been exposed but were asymptomatic — like Maria — were now exhibiting the first signs of infection. Bloodshot eyes, fever, and that weird compulsion to move.

Maria had been partially right about that. Somehow, the disease hijacked the central nervous system, making infected victims start walking. It was probably some evolutionary adaptation to spread the pathogen. He knew of a similar example in nature—Ophiocordyceps unilateralis—the so-called “zombie fungus” which caused infected ants to immediately climb up the nearest tree and bite down on a leaf with a death-grip until actual death occurred, whereupon the fungus would reach maturity inside the ant’s carcass and scatter spores on the forest floor below.

The thought of what would soon happen to Maria made him want to throw up. She was in the control group, which meant that, even if, through some miracle, they found the right combination of therapies to cure the afflicted patients, Maria would not be spared. When — if — such a cure was found, she would be too far gone to save.

The patients belonged in a real hospital, USAMRIID in Reston, Virginia, or maybe a CDC facility, not here, in a privately operated facility owned by a biotech outfit. What Alex had him doing was insane. It was profoundly unethical.

Worse, it was probably criminal.

He knew his boss’s reputation for putting profits ahead of everything else, even basic humanity. Alex was impetuous, hot-tempered, vindictive, like his legendary father in many ways, and utterly without compassion. He had rushed into the hot zone and brought the infected patients here to this mobile BSL IV facility, not so that he could save their lives, but so that, when a treatment was finally discovered, he and he alone would control it. If the contagion ever got out into the open, the governments of the world would be forced to pay whatever exorbitant price he set for that cure.

Alex called it capitalism in action, and Simpson had tried to convince himself that he was right, but no amount of money would take away the shame he now felt.

He marched back to his office, wondering who to call first. The CDC? Or the FBI?

Who even has jurisdiction out here?

The light in the airlock went from red to ordinary white, signaling that it was safe to exit, but as he opened the door, a chill shot through him. Alex was there, sitting behind a disused desk across from the suit storage area, with his feet propped up on the desktop.

“Doug. Took your sweet time.”

Simpson gaped for a moment, then finally nodded. “I was just… with the patients. Er… subjects.”

“I figured as much. I took the liberty of reviewing the data you’ve collected so far. I have to say, I’m not altogether happy with the results. This should have been a cakewalk.”

Simpson sucked in a breath. “Mister… Alex… I think we’re going about this the wrong way.”

Alex’s eyes narrowed into cold reptilian slits. “Is that what you think?”

“I just mean… we… there are other agencies, with resources we don’t have. We should turn this over to someone else. I know what you’re going to say. That there’s no profit in doing things that way, but… ” Simpson shook his head miserably. “Some things are more important than money.”

Alex brought his feet off the desk, planting them on the ground with the suddenness of a gunshot. He pointed a finger at Simpson. “Exactly. I can see you’re a man after my own heart, Doug. Maybe it’s time I let you in on a little project I’ve been working on. I call it ‘Shadow and Light.’ And it’s going to change the world.”