by Mark Kelly
He wasn’t hungry, but nodded anyway. Mei would give him even more grief if he didn’t at least try to eat. He spooned up a mouthful of the thick yellow liquid and forced himself to swallow it.
“Sick of it yet?” Langdon asked as he sat down. “I know I sure am.”
Simmons couldn’t remember if it was the fourth or fifth day the lab’s kitchen had served potato leek soup. Both were in season, and without grocery stores or functioning supply chains, the cooks used whatever was available until it was no longer available and then they switched to the next crop.
“I think we should sneak into the kitchen tonight and burn the recipe,” he said to Langdon.
Langdon chuckled. “Judging by how it tastes, I’m pretty sure there is no recipe to burn.”
“Be nice, you two,” Mei said. “At least you have something to eat—lots of people don’t.”
Simmons nodded. As always, she was right.
Langdon leaned forward, his eyes serious. “We haven’t seen much of you this week, Tony. How are things going?”
Simmons looked across the table at the man who had given him the equipment and resources needed to develop a treatment against the pandemic bacteria.
“Not well. The last few days, it’s been one issue after another. We’re six weeks in, and if I’m optimistic, it’ll be months before we have anything to show for it.”
“That’s good isn’t it?”
Mei nodded in agreement and gave him a reassuring smile. “You didn’t think it would be easy did you?”
Truth be told, he was so focused on the work he hadn’t thought about the immensity of the task. Developing a treatment was like climbing a mountain; one foot after another with no looking back until you reached the top.
But he wouldn’t get anything accomplished sitting around here. It was time to get back to work. He wolfed down his food and sat upright.
“Professor Simmons…Professor Simmons.”
He groaned and looked up to see Emma running down the aisle towards him.
“What is it?”
“Beth needs you in the lab. She said to tell you the vacuum’s pump broke again.”
“Vacuum pump…not vacuum’s pump.”
Emma scrunched up her face. “Huh? What’s the difference?”
“You mean other than an apostrophe and the letter ’s’?”
“Tony…be nice,” Mei said, frowning at him.
Emma looked even more confused. She wrinkled her nose and pouted. “What are you guys talking about?”
With more patience than he thought he was capable of, he explained. “You said the vacuum’s pump broke. That’s not correct. It’s the vacuum pump that broke. I don’t know what a vacuum’s pump is, but the vacuum pump is the machine that removes air from the bioreactor’s chambers.”
Emma stared at him for a second with a blank look on her face. Then she burst out in laughter. “Ha…I wondered why Beth was so worried about a broken vacuum cleaner. It’s not like a little dirt is such a big deal, right?”
Simmons sighed. “Right…”
The corner of Mei’s mouth curled up as she fought to stop herself from laughing.
Langdon smiled and said, “Tony, If you’re heading over there, I’ll come with you and remind my daughter that she needs to eat and sleep too.”
“How about you?” Simmons asked Mei. “Do you want to join us?”
She shook her head. “Knowing you three, you’ll be there all night. I have to get up early tomorrow. I’m heading to Douglas in the morning to meet Samantha and Tom McNee.”
“Is something wrong?” Simmons asked, concerned. “Has there been another outbreak?”
A smile broke out on her face. “No, nothing bad—the opposite, actually. Now that the soldiers and critical staff have been immunized, General Leduc is helping us set up a small treatment clinic in Douglas.”
“That’s…ah…great news,” Simmons said hesitantly, unsure if it really was. Supplies of the natural biotherapeutic FMT treatment produced using material from Saanvi were limited, even more so in the last couple of weeks. He made a mental note to contact Leduc and find out what the problem was.
He pushed back his chair and stood. “I’d better get going. I’ve got to see a girl about a broken vacuum pump.”
Without thinking, he leaned over and kissed Mei on the top of her head. She looked up, startled, and he felt silly—like a thirteen-year-old boy stealing his first kiss.
“See you later.”
When they reached the lab, Langdon’s daughter, Beth, was bent over a workbench muttering to herself. She heard them enter and turned, a look of defeat on her face as she spoke.
“The vacuum pump is cooked. You just missed Sam. He said the bearings in the motor are fried.”
Sam Jensen was Langdon’s resident mechanical genius and using a mish-mash of re-purposed equipment, he had taken Simmons’s conceptual diagrams for the bioreactor and converted them into reality. But there were things that even genius couldn’t overcome.
Simmons groaned. “That was quick. What about alternatives? Did he have any ideas on anything else we might be able to use?”
She shook her head. “He said the pumps we scavenged weren’t designed for continuous operation, but we might get lucky and find one that lasts.”
Simmons doubted they would be so lucky. The last pump was brand-new, stripped from a refrigerator the salvage team found in a local appliance store. It was the third pump they had tried and none of them had lasted longer than a week.
“We’ll have to find another way,” he said and pulled out a swivel chair and plopped down in it.
It’s a wonder it even works at all, he thought, staring at the workbench. It was overflowing with beakers and flasks connected to each other with tubes and small pumps. Some of the flasks were wrapped in heating blankets, others sat on vibrating plates that mimicked the movement of the digestive tract. A series of temperature probes and pH meters measured key parameters.
“Professor Simmons, I still don’t understand why you need a vacuum pump,” Emma said. “Is it—like, to suck stuff up?”
He sighed and explained for what had to have been the third or fourth time. “Emma, most bacteria in the human gut are anaerobic, which means they can only live where there’s no oxygen. We use the pump to create a slightly negative pressure in the bioreactor. That has the dual benefit of removing air from the fermentation chamber and drawing in the nutrients the bacteria need to survive.”
“How did it get there?”
He frowned. “How did what get where?”
“The air?”
Her question didn’t make any sense. “There’s air everywhere, Emma. It’s what we breathe.”
“Geez, Professor Simmons, I know that, but can’t you just replace it with something else?”
“Replace what?”
“The air,” she said in an exasperated voice. “You said the bacteria can’t live in it.”
“It’s not that simple—”
He stopped as an idea jolted his brain. Maybe it was that simple.
“Emma, you’re a genius.” He jumped up and hugged her.
She gave him a confused smile. “Thanks, Professor Simmons. You’re pretty smart too.”
Simmons turned to Langdon. “Nitrogen—tell me you have a supply of nitrogen somewhere around here.”
Langdon nodded. “The water in the reactor’s cooling system is pressurized with nitrogen from a 500-gallon tank outside the reactor building. The tank wasn’t filled after the pandemic started, but I doubt that we’ve used much since then.”
“Do you have anything smaller?” Simmons asked. “I need a small tank. Something that can be wheeled in here. I’ll also need high-pressure tubing and regulators to transfer the gas.”
“There should be K-size cylinders in the maintenance garage,” Langdon replied. “The reactor technicians used to fill them with nitrogen from the big tank and then wheel the cylinders into the control room to purge moisture from the mon
itoring equipment.” He gave Simmons a puzzled look. “What do you want the nitrogen for?”
“To purge the bioreactor.”
Langdon’s eyes brightened. “Ah…I see where you’re going with this.”
“I should have thought of it before,” Simmons said, annoyed. “We’ve wasted so much time on those damn vacuum pumps.”
“Would someone tell me what’s going on?” Beth said, walking over to stand beside her father.
“Nitrogen, for all intents and purposes, is an inert gas,” Simmons explained. “That means it doesn’t react with most substances. Because of that property, it has a lot of different uses, one of which is purging moisture and oxygen from equipment like spectrometers. But it’s also used in food packaging to help preserve the contents.”
“How does that help us?”
He grinned. “What causes food to spoil?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “Lots of things I guess: mold, yeast, bacteria…”
“That’s all correct, but bacteria is the main culprit. Mainly aerobic, oxygen-loving bacteria to be exact. Food packaged in nitrogen lasts longer because the aerobic bacteria are oxygen deprived and can’t reproduce.”
I guess I must be stupid. I still don’t understand.”
“Trust me, you’re not stupid,” Simmons said. “I’ll give you one more hint. If the aerobic bacteria can’t grow because of the lack of oxygen, what types of bacteria will grow?”
“The anaerobic strains?”
“Exactly. And what type of bacteria are we trying to grow?” He wiggled his eyebrows and grinned.
She laughed. “Anaerobic bacteria. No way. That’s so obvious. Is it that simple?”
He nodded enthusiastically. “We’ll need to feed a continual but miniscule amount of nitrogen gas into the anaerobic fermentation chamber. It will displace the air, creating an oxygen-free environment which is exactly what we need to replicate the human gut. And we’ll be able to get it done without fussing around using pumps that are constantly breaking.” He ran his eyes over the bioreactor and sighed. “But we will have to take it apart and reassemble it from scratch first.”
“No problem,” Beth said. “I’ll start cleaning and sterilizing the equipment.” She uncoupled the flexible plastic tubes connecting the vacuum pump to the main fermentation chamber. A faint, uncomfortable sulfurous odor wafted through the air.
Emma wrinkled her nose at the smell. “It doesn’t look like there’s anything I can do to help—is there?” She sounded like she hoped the answer was no.
“There’s tons you can help with,” Beth said, pointing to the fermentation chamber. “Would you mind taking that over to the sink and dumping it?”
Eying the flask warily, Emma picked it up and held it at arm’s length. It was three-quarters full of a yellowish-brown liquid and sloshed as she walked. A small amount splashed onto her hand and she gagged.
“This is gross. I think I’m going to be sick. What is this?”
“Nothing now,” Simmons answered, “but when we get everything working, it will be the biotherapeutic Mei and the other doctors administer to treat infected patients.”
Emma scrunched up her face in disappointment. “This is the treatment? Geez, Professor Simmons, you made it sound like you were working on something high tech.”
“What do you mean high tech?” Simmons asked, feeling just a little bit insulted.
“You said there were peptides and epsilon-zeta toxin-antitoxins. I don’t know what any of that is, but the stuff I just dumped out smells like poop.”
“It is poop…well, not real poop, more like synthetic poop.”
“Whatever it is—it’s gross and smells bad.”
“Gross or not, it will save a lot of lives once we get things working.”
He pushed the swivel chair back under the workbench and spoke to Langdon. “Let’s go find Sam. I’d like to get the nitrogen system in place this evening so we can start another run in the morning.”
Langdon chuckled. “Mei was right.”
“About what?”
“That we’ll be here all night.”
12
Down the river
“Let’s call it a night,” Simmons said to Beth who was the only one left in the lab with him. Emma and Beth’s father had left a few hours earlier.
Simmons ran his eyes over the reconfigured but nonfunctional bioreactor. Langdon had been wrong—not about the nitrogen but about the amount. The reactor tank was nearly empty. Sam Jensen had confirmed the bad news after measuring the tank’s contents. At most, they only had a week or two of supply—barely enough to even get started.
They left the lab and took the stairs to the ground floor. Simmons could hear the wind howling outside. He placed his hands on the door and shoved hard. A blast of blustery fall air, cold and damp with sleet, blew into his face stinging his eyes and making it difficult to see. Squinting, he turned sideways and held the door open for Beth.
“Thanks…it’s miserable isn’t it?”
Miserable and soon to get worse, he thought. The cold front that had blown in from the north-west overnight was just the beginning.
In a few weeks, The snow would begin to fall. Some of it would melt during the warmer days, but most would remain and slowly accumulate over the course of the winter until the roads were impassable by even the most rugged four-wheel-drive vehicles.
And if the snow wasn’t enough of a problem, the temperature would add to their difficulties—first dropping into the twenties, then the teens and finally spending weeks below zero before it started to rise again.
All in all, they had nearly three months of hellishly cold and dangerous weather to look forward to. Getting well supplied before the winter would be critical—not only for the sake of the project, but for their own survival.
“Time for a few hours sleep. I’ll see you after lunch,” Beth said.
“It won’t be until after dinner,” Simmons replied. “I’m going to catch a ride down the river to the base to see General Leduc about finding a source of nitrogen.”
“Now? Why don’t you get a few hours of sleep and take the afternoon boat?”
It was tempting, he thought, but there was too much to do. He shook his head. “No, I’ll go this morning…besides, you know what they say, time enough for sleep in the grave.”
Beth groaned. “Dad used to say that whenever I told him I was too tired to do my homework.”
Simmons chuckled. “It’s as true now as it was then. See you later.”
“Bye.”
He watched her make her way down the path to the empty warehouse that had been converted into housing for the people who lived at the lab. When she was gone from sight, he turned and headed in the opposite direction.
The boat to the base was a forty-foot Sea Ray 400 cruiser that bobbed in the rough waters at the end of the dock. The boat had been liberated from an abandoned marina by General Leduc’s soldiers and served the dual purpose of river patrol and transport.
Despite the miserable weather, Simmons stood and watched two soldiers work the handle of a manual pump, shifting biodiesel from a fifty-five gallon metal drum into the boat’s fuel tanks. The sight washed away some of his feelings of failure. Because of him, they had biodiesel, and without it life for the survivors would be infinitely harder.
One of the men spotted him and shouted, “Why don’t you wait inside, sir, It’ll be another five minutes before we’re ready to go.”
Simmons waved in acknowledgement and opened the door to the boathouse.
“Morning, Tony,” a familiar voice said, surprising him.
“Mei, what are you doing here?”
She was standing against the wall at the back of the boathouse. She moved closer, a patient smile on her face.
“Did you forget our conversation from last night? I’m going into Douglas to set up the clinic. Since Sergeant Dines and her squad are helping me, it made more sense for me to meet them at the base rather than have them
drive all the way up here. What brings you out of your lab on a day like this?”
He told her about the work they had done reconfiguring the bioreactor. “It pains me to say it, but Emma deserves some of the credit. In her own clueless way, she’s the one who gave me the idea to use nitrogen in the anaerobic chamber.”
“Emma isn’t as dumb as you think she is, Tony. And she has a big heart.”
“I don’t think she’s dumb,” Simmons said defensively. “But she’s annoying and scatter-brained.”
“Either way, you need to watch what you say to her. She thinks the world of you. When we first met up in Washington, I was certain she had a schoolgirl crush on you.”
Simmons felt the blood rush to his cheeks. “That’s ridiculous. She’s not even nineteen. I’m more than twice her age.”
“It’s been known to happen,” Mei said, smiling.
“I wasn’t your professor, and you weren’t half my age.”
“I wasn’t talking about us,” she replied, disappointing him.
The door to the boathouse opened, and a soldier poked his head in. “Time to go. We’ve got the fuel loaded, and it’s just the two of you making the trip down river this morning.”
Simmons held the boathouse door open for Mei. She grabbed his arm as a hard gust of wind pushed her towards the edge of the dock.
When they neared the boat, one of the soldiers jumped onboard and pointed to the stern-side swimming platform that doubled as a boarding station. “It’s a little tricky in weather like this,” he shouted over the howling wind, “but step there.” He reached for Mei’s arm as she stepped off the dock and helped her onboard.
“You’re next,” he shouted to Simmons.
Emboldened by Mei’s success, Simmons shrugged off the hand that reached out to help him. He stretched out his leg at the exact moment a strong gust of wind pushed the boat away. The dark river churned a few feet below him and Simmons panicked. The soldier grabbed his arm and yanked. As Simmons landed, he knocked the man over and they both fell onto the wet swim platform.
The soldier jumped to his feet. Scowling, he patted the rear of his now wet green khaki pants.
