Eclipsed

by Kathryn Hoff

  I hoped not—I’d rather take care of a chimp than ordinary babies.

  “So, how come you have babies here?” I asked. “If they don’t belong to anyone on the staff.”

  The iceberg got even frostier. “Ah. An inquisitive one.” She glanced at Paula before answering. “They ‘belong’ here because Dr. Mendez is their registered foster parent.”

  Chubb and Reyna exchanged looks. Maybe there was more to the story, but I’d have to wait to get it from them.

  Gabe got tired of dangling from my fingers and plopped to the floor. He crawled over to Chubb to be lifted onto Chubb’s hip.

  Paula smiled at Gabe and touched his cheek. “Hello, precious.”

  The baby grinned goofily and hid his face in Chubb’s shoulder. Paula gazed at Gabe’s miniature fingers and toes and then, when Gabe peeked back at her, she touched her own nose. Gabe mimicked her, bringing his grubby fist to his face.

  Paula smiled at Chubb. “He looks very healthy.”

  “Yeah, he’s a strong little dude.”

  Paula knelt next to the beanbag chair, where Reyna cradled Deedee. Deedee kicked her feet as Paula touched her toes.

  “You’re taking excellent care of her,” Paula said.

  “’Course I am,” Reyna sniffed.

  Paula never fussed over babies, not human ones, anyway. Why the sudden interest? Maybe she was thinking about fostering another kid—or even having one of her own.

  Somehow, I didn’t like that thought.

  “So,” I said, “where’s the chimp?”

  Dr. Westerly led me and Paula down to the ground floor and toward the rear of the building. All the doors we passed were closed, their window panels covered over. Machinery hummed, but otherwise the place was too damn quiet.

  Paula noticed too. “June, how many are on the research staff now?”

  “Leo, myself, Avery, and now you. Bert Rasmussen assists as lab tech.”

  Paula stopped short. “Impossible. When I was here three years ago, you had twenty scientists on staff!”

  “All the labs have suffered attrition. Eclipse mortality for strains five and six spiked at age thirty to sixty—more than half the experienced researchers in the country are gone. The ECA had to consolidate research facilities to maintain momentum.” Westerly started walking again. “This facility no longer investigates vaccines or antibiotics, we now concentrate solely on phage therapy. Due to the innovative nature of our research, we’ve kept our staff deliberately small and security tight.”

  I wondered if “phage therapy” was some kind of exercise program, or maybe a mental health group. Like that would help you survive Eclipse.

  Paula tightened her lips. “June, I have deep reservations about some of the procedures here.”

  Tell her, Paula. Chimps shouldn’t be treated like lab rats. For that matter, even rats shouldn’t be treated like lab rats.

  “Naturally,” Westerly said. “I wouldn’t expect otherwise. Only the most dire necessity and the high probability of success render those procedures acceptable. As you can see, we have limited our operations to the minimum number, and we have taken every reasonable step to ensure a high standard of care.”

  So they were only mistreating one chimp. Did that make it all right?

  We passed a wide doorway that still had Boys Locker Room painted over the top. The ordinary swinging doors had been replaced with a heavy steel door with a reinforced window and a badge reader for a lock. A red-lettered sign shouted out Danger! Isolation Lab. Infectious Agents in Use. Authorized Personnel Only. Through the window, I glimpsed empty white hazmat suits hanging on the wall, and another set of heavy doors beyond.

  White suits and double sets of doors. I knew what that meant: a red zone.

  “Uh, you got sick people here?” I asked nervously.

  Westerly shot an annoyed glance my way, like she’d forgotten I was there. “Not at present. However, we deal with the Eclipse bacterium. We are prepared.”

  We came to the doors to what had been the gymnasium, and now was labelled Phage Lab. Westerly ran her badge over the reader and the door clicked open.

  Dr. Quinn, looking even taller and darker in a long white lab coat, called, “Paula! Wonderful. I’m so glad you’re here.”

  Paula wrinkled her nose at him. “I’m not here by choice, Avery.”

  “By whatever means necessary. Perhaps two or three years from now, when the Nobel Prize committee makes its awards, you’ll be glad you were here.”

  Westerly blessed them with a smile and bustled away.

  The phage lab was filled with computers, microscopes, consoles, and a lot of other mysterious equipment. It made little clicks and beeps like an aviary full of twittering birds. A middle-aged man in a lab coat and glasses puttered around on the lab’s far side.

  Quinn spread his arms and smiled his toothpaste-ad grin. “Make yourself at home.” Not meaning me, obviously. “That bench and computer are yours. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able to work with you again.”

  The way he grinned at Paula, I figured he had more than work on his mind.

  I didn’t like Quinn any better now than when he’d come to our apartment. Everything had been fine until he’d showed up.

  On the other hand, if I wanted to get anywhere in the laboratory, it would pay to suck up a little.

  “What’s a phage, Dr. Quinn?” I asked.

  Quinn seemed to notice me for the first time. “Oh, yes. Our own Jacqueline Kennedy. Bacteriophages, phages for short, are a special kind of virus—a virus that feeds on bacteria. Can you guess what kind of bacteria we would like to find a phage to feed on?”

  “Eclipse.” Duh.

  “Correct.” He made tiny clapping motions, like I’d given the Nobel Prize-winning answer. “Eclipse began among African primates. In chimpanzees and gorillas, the original Eclipse bacterium was nothing more than a mild infection the host readily fought off, just like we shrug off a cold. But when the microbe mutated and spread to human hosts, it developed into forms that are deadly to us.”

  He swept his arm to take in the whole room. “In this lab, we’re investigating the natural defenses—the phage viruses—that other primates evolved to fight their version of Eclipse. We’re going to use them to develop a new super-phage, a bacteria-eating virus, that can protect humans from Eclipse. You want to help with that, don’t you, Jackie?”

  My teeth hurt with the effort to be nice. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

  His grin dialed down a notch. “Yes, that’s why you’re here—to take care of Molly.”

  Paula perked up. “Molly? The same Molly who was here before?”

  “That’s right. You’re old friends, aren’t you? Let’s introduce our own Jackie Kennedy to her new best friend.”

  Quinn walked us down the hall to the next set of doors, what had been the girls’ locker room. The sign on the door said Primate Lab.

  As soon as Quinn opened the door, the screaming began.

  CHAPTER 7

  New best friend

  The screams came from a chimp, a gray-chinned old female. Molly’s coarse black fur was patchy, either from age or from her plucking at it out of boredom. Her black face was blotched with pale age spots. She screeched and jumped up and down and shook the bars of her cage, stretching her lips back to show worn, yellow teeth and pink gums. The noise echoed off the high ceiling. The whole place smelled like pee.

  A dog, a black Labrador retriever, whined and fawned at Molly’s feet. Without taking her eyes off us, and still baring her teeth, Molly stroked him with long, black fingers.

  “That’s Barney,” Quinn said. “He’s company for Molly.”

  I knew better than to look directly at Molly—she’d think I was being aggressive. Instead, I stayed still and gazed around, waiting for Molly to calm down. Lockers and showers had been replaced with shelves of supplies. A desk held a computer and a steel table had been set up next to a deep sink. In a corner were tools for cleaning the cage: rubber
boots and gloves, brooms, buckets, and mops. A coiled hose. A big plastic cart labeled Medical Waste for hauling away Molly’s leavings. Barrels of disinfectant.

  Hanging from the wall was other equipment I knew from the zoo: a catchpole with a wide cable loop and a two-meter-long jab stick with a syringe at the end for sedating an animal.

  Paula said wistfully, “I don’t suppose Molly remembers me.”

  “Give her a chance. Here.” Quinn handed Paula some latex gloves and a handful of monkey biscuits, the kind we used at the zoo for treats. I’d tried one once—they tasted like cardboard to me, but they were nutritious and the apes loved them.

  Calmer now, Molly watched us carefully from under her protruding brow. She leaned on the knuckles of one hand, the fingers of her other hand curled through the heavy bars that formed the walls of her cage.

  Without staring, I looked over her digs. It wasn’t an enclosure like the zoo had, with glass walls and places to climb and swing and nest. Molly just had a bare steel cage with a cold metal bench to lie on—easy to keep clean but no more comfortable to live in than a shower stall. A closed hatch divided the main enclosure from a smaller shift cage. The whole thing was mounted on a half-meter-high platform, with a gutter and curb around it to make it easy to wash down. The cage floor was a grate with a wide drawer underneath to catch pee and scat like a giant birdcage. Molly’s long, finger-like toes grasped the grate—a poor substitute for grass or branches.

  Paula slowly stepped toward the cage, keeping her eyes down and her side toward Molly. “Hey, Molly,” she crooned. “Remember me?” She extended her gloved hand, palm up, toward Molly, and began to make short, quiet hooting puffs, hoo, hoo, hoo.

  Molly took up the call, hoo hoo hoo, at first quietly, then with loud excitement. She bounced up and down and slapped her hand against the bars. The dog barked and ran around Molly’s feet.

  Quinn grinned. “Excellent! She remembers you.” Paula put the back of her hand against the cage near Molly’s face, and Molly leaned over to mouth her glove. Paula laughed and fed Molly and Barney biscuits through the bars.

  Paula motioned for me to come closer. I put on some gloves and did as she had, sidling slowly forward, eyes down, saying hoo hoo hoo. When I was close enough, I stretched my hand forward, palm up.

  Molly screeched and jumped away.

  “It’ll take time,” Paula said. She handed me a biscuit. I held it to the cage until Molly ventured close enough to snatch it through the bars. I held my hand low, too, for Barney to smell.

  Quinn had been hanging back. “I’m quite impressed. Molly usually flings excrement at anyone who gets that close. If Jackie can clean the cage daily without upsetting Molly, it will be a vast improvement to all our lives. Especially Molly’s.”

  “What do you do to her?” I asked.

  Quinn frowned. “Nothing to harm her, silly girl. Molly is a key part of our research. Stool samples are easy to obtain, but she objects to blood samples. I’m sure you’ve seen Paula take blood at the zoo, haven’t you?”

  “At the zoo the animals don’t mind, because we give them treats.”

  “Well, Molly is more strong-minded, and we don’t have the luxury of waiting until she’s ready.”

  “What about enrichment? She needs toys. Don’t you have any puzzle feeders or a blanket or something for her to play with?”

  “Make a reasonable request, and we’ll see.”

  I asked the question I dreaded most. “Do you make her sick?”

  “Molly has already had all six strains of Eclipse,” Quinn said. “As you can see, she’s recovered quite well. I told you—for chimps, Eclipse is no worse than a case of bronchitis for us. Inconvenient and uncomfortable, but they get over it.”

  That sounded all right, until Paula cleared her throat and asked softly, “What about strain seven?”

  My head jerked up. “Strain seven? There’s already a strain seven?” Eclipse’s sixth wave was still sending households into quarantine, but the news hadn’t said anything about a seventh wave.

  Quinn straightened to his full height, the better to look down on us. “The ECA’s been trying to keep it quiet, to prevent panic. But yes, a seventh strain has been identified, and it’s circulating in Central and South America. Unfortunately, strain seven of the bacterium has evolved in significant ways. It’s resistant to the antibiotics that were effective against prior strains. In addition, exposure to prior strains appears to afford very little immunity.”

  No immunity? My stomach took a turn for the worse. Since people who’d already been through one of the earlier waves had at least partial immunity, strain six hadn’t been as deadly as waves three and four. But if the new strain was worse and the antibiotics didn’t work anymore? Yeah, that would cause a panic.

  In fact, I felt a little panicky already. “You’ve got strain seven here? You’re giving it to Molly?” She was watching us now, making little distress hoots. She knew her name, knew I was talking about her.

  “Not yet, but soon.” Quinn was way too calm about it.

  “But we’ll all get sick!” The peanut butter sandwich I’d had for lunch threatened to come up.

  Quinn tsked. “That’s what the isolation lab is for. I fully expect that when Molly’s exposed to strain seven she’ll shrug it off, just as she has the other strains. Molly’s quite the survivor. I doubt she’ll be in any danger.”

  I’m not witless. “But she might die.”

  “So might we all.” Even though Quinn was pretending to talk to me, it was Paula he kept his eyes on. “Eclipse is too big a problem to get sentimental about a chimp. The Eclipse bacterium is responsible for nearly a billion deaths worldwide, not just from the disease but from the economic collapse it’s caused. Even in this country, with everything we’ve done to care for the sick and stop the spread, millions have died.”

  Quinn nodded to Paula. “Even Bert and Tilly lost their only daughter a few months ago, along with her unborn child.”

  Paula drew a quick breath. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “I’ll do anything I can to stop Eclipse. Anything.” Quinn folded his arms, talking to Paula as if I was no more part of the conversation than Molly. “Frankly, I was not in favor of your bringing another minor into the facility. There have already been too many mistakes, delaying our research. If having your foster child here is going to be a distraction, if she causes trouble, there is no place for her here.”

  I didn’t like being talked about like I wasn’t there. “You need help to take care of Molly,” I said. “I can do that. Maybe I can make her life a little better.”

  “Can you? Will you?” Quinn put a hand on my shoulder and stared into my eyes like he was trying to hypnotize me. “You obviously disapprove of my using Molly in my research. I don’t care. If you’re going to work here, young lady, you must be fully committed to helping our efforts succeed. One screwup and you’re out. So, Jacqueline Kennedy, tell me now—are you in or out?”

  I shrugged his hand off and took a step back. Creep.

  But Quinn being a creep didn’t make him wrong about Eclipse. Was I in or out?

  I looked to Paula. She didn’t say anything, not even everything will be fine or you can handle it. No phony crap.

  Quinn tapped his foot, waiting for my answer. Molly kept her eyes on us, knowing how untrustworthy humans were.

  How far would I go to stop Eclipse? Far enough to help Quinn make a poor, caged chimp sick for the seventh time?

  I hated what Quinn was doing to Molly, but stopping Eclipse was the best way to help people and all the animals people cared for. I thought about Jamie, the kid who collapsed at the zoo. He hadn’t volunteered to be sick either.

  Besides, working here was the only way for me to stay with Paula and out of a teen home.

  I nodded. “All right, I’m in.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Basic primate behavior

  Quinn said he’d send in somebody named Rico to show me the ropes, then he and Paula left to study
phages or something.

  Molly was still tense, hunched in a corner of her cage with the dog beside her. I sat at the desk, my side toward Molly, leafing through the chimp-care procedures manual while making quick glances at the cage setup.

  Both the main cage and shift cage had doors big enough for a person to walk through. They were latched with strong sliders that clicked into place and locked with padlocks. That was common sense: the zoo’s procedures also required padlocks on any cage door that stood between an animal and freedom. A guillotine-style hatch between the two cages could be lifted by a lever at the front of the cage.

  The cage was small for a full-grown chimp, not to mention a dog, and bare of anything that might hold interest for an intelligent creature. The only “enrichment” was a small television, tuned to cartoons with the sound off, flickering from across the room.

  Disgusted, I switched to a nature channel. They might at least let her see forests and animals instead of stuff I wouldn’t let a three-year-old watch.

  Molly screeched loud enough to make me jump.

  “Oh, shut up, monkey.” A young man in the standard gray jumpsuit entered from the hall. “She does that every time somebody comes through the door.”

  Molly jumped and hooted, slapping her hands against the sides of her cage.

  Pudgy, dark-haired, the young man raised his voice to be heard over the noise. “I’m Rico Jones, Dr. Quinn’s lab trainee. You’re the new chimp-sitter?”

  Lab trainee. Here was a kid with an orphan’s wary eyes, but somehow he’d managed to break into real lab work. Good for him.

  “Jackie Kennedy.” I flashed my E-3 tat and got the orphan’s familiar wrist-turn in response. Rico was an E-2. No bracelet, so he must have been over eighteen.

  “Paula—Dr. Bardo—was training me to help her at the zoo.” He didn’t need to know that all I’d done was clean cages.

  “Yeah, Quinn told me she’d fostered you.” Rico looked me up and down, one eyebrow raised skeptically. “Some people have all the luck.” His meaning was clear—foster parents usually went for the cute, smart kids.