The Anthrax Protocol

by James Thompson

  To make matters worse, she was quietly sobbing, caught in the grip of despair so deep, so intense that words could never have described it. At the edge of the jungle forest she leaned against a palm tree, fearing what her next few footsteps would reveal.

  In dormitory tents erected where shade offered some escape from central Mexico’s furnace-like heat and humidity, she knew she would find the bodies of many of her friends and former students. She could see some of them now, lumpy forms lying on canvas folding cots beneath tent roofs surrounded by mosquito netting. They were partially hidden in patches of mottled shade provided by leafy limbs where the jungle canopy thinned near the clearing’s edge.

  This was . . . had been Charlie’s camp. According to department records, thirty-one graduate students had accompanied Dr. Adams here this summer, students from every level in the archaeology program. She remembered their excitement when Charlie told them his initial expedition to this spot convinced him he’d found the fabled Aztec city of Tlateloco, and a massive stone temple where records found in an overlooked collection of four-hundred-year-old documents in Spanish archives hinted at the location of Montezuma’s burial chamber, a find that had eluded archaeologists and treasure seekers since the year 1521.

  Jungle growth so dense it was virtually impenetrable had hidden the temple for centuries, until chronicles written by Bernal Díaz del Castillo and sent by carrier ship to the King of Spain recording Cortés’s expeditions to the Aztec Empire were recently discovered in Madrid, pointing to Tlateloco as Montezuma’s final resting place.

  Thus the need for so many eager students this summer: to clear away the jungle, begin establishing grids for excavation, and painstakingly dig beneath the jungle floor looking for signs of streets and avenues and homes in the area around the temple. An uncounted number of local workers, Maya Indians and local fruit farmers who knew this jungle, were also all working from a grant given by a couple of foundations, with enough funding to hire workmen and sustain thirty-two members of the university archaeology team for two months.

  And now, after little more than three weeks working the site, they were all dead. Lauren still couldn’t quite make herself believe it and yet the evidence was here and undeniable no matter how much she wished it wasn’t so.

  Rotting corpses covered the entire area—the bodies of friends and associates, which she must identify without breaking down in utter despair, an almost impossible task. Her friends were lying among dead Mexican laborers who would most probably remain forever unnamed as few of them seemed to be carrying any identification on their persons.

  As she glanced around at the carnage surrounding her, she realized the fetid, ozone-laden recycled air she was breathing in her helmet was in fact a blessing—the smell of decomposition would have been so much worse, especially since much of it would have come from her friends.

  She remembered entries from the translation of Díaz’s journal that Charles had sent to her, of the explorer witnessing scores of deaths like these as he himself lay dying in a chamber beneath the temple.

  Lauren had only been able to glance quickly at four bodies, tasting bitter bile rising in her throat when she saw Bonnie Evans, half eaten by swarming ants, her gold chain with its tiny golden cross still around her neck. She wondered briefly if Bonnie had prayed for salvation when the first symptoms ravaged her body or if she cursed her fate when she saw her friends dying horrible deaths before her eyes.

  Knowing Bonnie as she had, Lauren felt certain her response to the horror would have been prayers, not curses. But her prayers, like everyone else’s in the group, had gone unanswered.

  Little Robert Conway lay a short distance away; a brilliant boy from Montana with the sweetest disposition, only a semester from graduation. He’d given Lauren flowers on her birthday and gotten a kiss on the cheek as a reward.

  Kelly Woods was lying in Robert’s arms when they died, and the sight of them embracing in death had almost been too much for Lauren. She remembered Robert had given Kelly his fraternity pin the week before they left on the expedition. She wondered briefly if it was still pinned to the inside of Kelly’s bra, a university tradition.

  Lauren had closed her eyes and said the names into her recorder, remembering who they were, how much they meant to her personally as students and as friends.

  She glanced over at Mason Williams as he bent over a body, wondering if he and his team were as affected by the stacks of bodies as she was, or were they as doctors used to seeing such sights and just looked upon her friends as interesting mysteries to be solved?

  Earlier, after hearing him and his team describe her friends’ bodies in graphic terms without the least amount of sympathy in their voices, she’d felt like screwing up all her courage and standing before him and telling him she would do what was necessary, not for him or for his damned team. But she would do her best because her friends deserved the very best she could do and she was damned if she’d let them or Dr. Adams down.

  She grinned to herself, wondering what he would’ve done had she told him that if she were not enclosed in a helmet she’d spit in his eye.

  She took a deep breath, trying to calm down. After all, he and his team had not really done anything wrong except to go about their jobs efficiently and professionally, and perhaps they were hurting at what they were seeing as much as she was but were just better at hiding their feelings.

  She hoped this was true, for she found she really liked the team, even the irascible Dr. Jakes.

  Now Lauren could hear members of Dr. Mason Williams’s party talking over their headsets, discussing blood and brain tissue and what they continued to call hemorrhagic shock. They talked about dead bodies in an almost conversational way, as if they were nothing more than objects.

  But the bodies here were much more than mere objects to Lauren, and the doctors’ apparent detachment was difficult for her to comprehend and made it hard for her to give them the benefit of the doubt about whether they really cared about the students.

  “These were people,” she whispered, gathering her strength and resolve before going to the tents to identify more corpses. “Why can’t those assholes understand these were real people . . . ?”

  “I suppose we should resent being called assholes,” a voice said through her radio headset. It was Mason who spoke to her.

  “Lauren,” he said gently, “please don’t mistake our professionalism for heartlessness. While we are working, we must maintain a distance from our patients lest we let our feelings influence our findings.”

  He hesitated, and then he added, “Believe me when I tell you that everyone here will grieve in his or her own way after we finish our work here today. There is no disrespect of the dead here, but we show our respect by finding out what caused their deaths and preventing it from killing more people across the world.”

  She glanced in his direction as he spoke, realizing his good looks had been a distraction. His deep blue eyes conveyed sympathy his callous demeanor belied when he talked about body parts and tissue samples like they were pieces of machinery.

  When they’d first met this morning in Atlanta she’d noted his sloppy manner of dress and only later, while they were talking, did she notice his angular jaw, muscular neck and arms, and his curious, catlike grace in his movements.

  He didn’t look like a doctor, at least not like the ones she’d known at the University of Texas. She’d immediately realized he had a strong chin and had smiled, remembering her mother always told her men with weak chins were weak-willed and shouldn’t be trusted and that she should endeavor to find a man with a strong masculine chin.

  Lauren shook her head, trying to put these thoughts out of her mind, realizing they were highly inappropriate given the circumstances. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot everyone could hear me.”

  “It’s okay, Dr. Sullivan. We understand what you are going through,” Lionel said. “In fact, I myself am more than a little pissed off! I don’t mind quite so much when our work brin
gs us into close contact with middle-aged or older dead people, but these young ones were just getting started living their lives and were cut down in the very beginning of their careers.” He took a deep breath. “So, yeah, we may sound and act professional on the outside, but I assure you, Lauren, my heart aches at your loss as much as yours does.”

  Lauren’s eyes teared up at Lionel’s confession.

  “Are you getting a little more used to wearing the Racal?” Suzanne asked in an obvious attempt to change the subject.

  “Not really,” she replied, glancing over her shoulder. Mason was standing under a canvas canopy a hundred yards away, setting up some type of apparatus at the end of a table. Seeing Williams and his team now, dressed in bright orange space suits, working diligently over decaying corpses, was like something out of a bad science fiction movie.

  “If you get dizzy again, lie down. But be careful not to tear your suit,” Mason said without turning to look her way. “A Racal is fairly durable but it won’t withstand sharp objects.”

  “In spite of what you must think about my earlier . . . hyperventilation, Dr. Williams,” Lauren spat, “I am not stupid. I remember everything Suzanne told me when she suited me up.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Lauren turned back to the group of tents and walked a short distance toward them. “Most of the students are over here. It’s where Charlie . . . Dr. Adams, set up camp for the students and about twenty-five yards farther on are the ones for the Mexican workmen.”

  She hesitated. “I haven’t had a chance to go inside the tents just yet. I can see them lying on their cots, even from here . . .” She fought back a sob, not wanting the others to hear her.

  “One of us can come over to assist you in a moment, Dr. Sullivan. Right now we’re all very busy,” Mason said, concern evident in his voice.

  “It’s okay. I can do it alone. I just need a few minutes to work up the nerve. I’ve never seen so much blood. It’s all over everything.”

  “Take all the time you need,” Mason said. “As you may have guessed by now, we expect to be here for a while. One of our portable laboratories is being flown in by chopper. This isn’t going to be easy, identifying the bug.”

  “I wish you’d stop calling it a bug,” she whispered, once again forgetting the others could hear her.

  “Here’s something!” Dr. Jakes exclaimed in his dry, caustic voice. “Meningorrhagia, hemorrhage into the cerebral meninges. I need another piece of that boy’s brain. Open his skull at the suprameatal triangle and I can see if the spinal meninges are affected.”

  “Dear God,” Lauren thought, leaning harder against the tree trunk when she heard Dr. Jakes talk about opening Robert Conway’s head, as though he was breaking an egg for an omelet. Lauren wished for a way to turn her headset off. Listening to this grim discussion of her friends’ body parts and brain tissue was only making her feel worse.

  Taking a moment to collect herself, she summoned all the courage she could muster and strode slowly to the nearest tent, pushing a veil of mosquito netting aside. She promised herself she would not look at the blood or the faces any longer than absolutely necessary.

  “Tom Butterfield. Sally Ann Higgins. I’m not quite sure who this one . . . it’s David Wong . . . his face is so badly swollen I hardly recognized him. Carla Jenkins. The boy lying on the floor is Timothy Greer, a second-year graduate student with a four-point GPA.” She gulped, “He had a four-point GPA. I know his mother. All these ants are making it more difficult to see who they are . . .”

  Lauren left the first tent to enter another.

  She coughed and swallowed stinging acid, grateful again for the filtered air, which smelled only of rubber and not the stench of death that she knew surrounded her like a fog.

  “In the tent on the right is Malcolm Collins. He was working on his dissertation this spring in Central American Indian studies. The blond girl beside him is Gertrude Wolf, a German student, a senior in the undergraduate program. The boy beside her is Wayland Burke, a kid from Wyoming who qualified for a Brinkman scholarship. I’m not sure about this one . . . I remember his face, but not his name. If I can, I’ll look in his luggage for his passport.”

  She knelt beside a bloodstained cot and gasped. “Maggots! Oh my God! Maggots are crawling out of his nose!”

  “Remain calm, Dr. Sullivan,” Mason said quickly from the center of the clearing. “Maggots are simply fly larvae. It’s to be expected in this heat. Don’t look too closely. All we need are their names.”

  She took a passport from a duffle bag beneath the cot and opened it. “Richard Willis. He was only twenty years old.”

  At least, Lauren thought, they were all beyond suffering now. Everything these bright young people had been or ever hoped to be was finished. Their hopes and dreams lay rotting here in the jungle, their bodies food for hungry scavengers and insects.

  She stood up and walked to a nearby tent. “I think this tent contains local workers Charlie hired.” She glanced inside. “There is a man curled into a ball on one of the cots. He looks to be a local Indian, possibly a Tarrahu-marra, by his red hair and light skin coloring.”

  Her worst experience was saved for last, when Mason told her a body was lying in the tunnel running underneath the temple. “Be careful, Lauren. This one might affect you more than the others,” he warned.

  Not understanding how anything could be worse than what she’d already seen, she took a flashlight and entered the tunnel. When she reached the corpse she gasped, and then she sat down in the tunnel and cried as quietly as she could.

  “It’s Charlie. Dr. Charles W. Adams, head of the Archaeology Department at the University of Texas in Austin. He has two grandchildren and a daughter living in Delaware. Someone must let them know right away.”

  She couldn’t look at Charlie any longer and stumbled past his body to the entrance into a rock-lined tomb. There she saw the mummified remains of Montezuma and his pet monkeys, for he was known to keep a number of animals as household pets.

  Several rotted wooden cages held decayed bodies of large lizards and snakes. Piles of hand-woven cloth, clay tablets, urns, and stone carvings were arranged in neat rows around his sepulcher.

  Lauren stood there for several minutes, her training as an archaeologist momentarily overriding her deep sorrow for what had happened to Charlie and his students. Suddenly she noticed a distinct feeling of apprehension developing within her despite the importance of such a monumental archaeological find as if some ghostly apparition was in the tomb with her now.

  She convinced herself it was merely her imagination and the horrors she witnessed here were working on her overactive mind. In order to take her mind off such superstitious meanderings, she examined Montezuma’s face in the beam of her flashlight, his twisted, wrinkled cheeks and distorted expression, the result of losing fluid from facial tissue and skin over time, exposing a row of yellow teeth that had been filed down to sharp points.

  It almost looked as if the Aztec ruler was smiling—an evil, wicked smile adding to Lauren’s deepening sense of foreboding.

  “There are no such things as curses,” she said to herself.

  * * *

  Dusk had begun to darken the sky above the jungle when the rhythm of a helicopter’s blades came from the east. Lauren was sitting on a canvas stool as far away from Mason Williams and his team members as she could, unable to watch any more of what was going on beneath their canopy, dulled by what she’d seen today, feeling drained to such a point she couldn’t cry any longer.

  In truth, she felt strangely removed from what was happening now as if this were all a bad dream, a nightmare from which she would soon awaken. The strain of the previous eighteen hours had taken its toll on her, and she sat as though in a stupor, not listening to any more of what was being said by the doctors simply because it was too horrible to comprehend.

  If she could, she would have turned her headset off to be spared the agony of hearing the doctors describe their gruesome dissec
tions of her friends. The bodies of Charles Adams and twenty-six students had been identified, leaving five unaccounted for. She’d also found nine local workmen among the dead. Mason told her they could expect to find the others somewhere in the jungle tomorrow morning, and when the last identifications had been made Joel would radio for a helicopter to take her to Mexico City, and then she could fly home to Austin.

  As promised, Mason had notified Dr. Cardenez and Dr. Matos of what they found here, along with an urgent request to have the Mexican Army establish a far-flung perimeter around the ruins at Tlateloco. They’d assured him it would not be too difficult as the few roads that traversed this part of the jungle were small and easily blocked.

  To the rest of the team, he continually voiced concerns about some Indian boy he had seen earlier running through the jungle, although no one else recalled seeing anyone alive here after the helicopter dropped them off.

  Now the Mexican Army helicopter hovered above the clearing, appearing as a huge, wingless iron bird with a silver box resembling a railroad car or double-wide modular home suspended below its belly on thick stainless steel cables.

  Lauren listened to Joel Schumacher direct the helicopter downward over the radio as the noise from whirling blades grew louder. Prop wash made the jungle grasses and vines dance with a life of their own as Joel called for the chopper’s slow descent.

  This was the mobile lab Dr. Williams had talked about before, and when Lauren saw it she was reminded of something belonging on a lunar landscape. Downdraft from the circling blades whipped everything in sight, blowing the roof off their temporary canopy, scattering odd bits of assorted gear in every direction on mighty gusts of wind as the lab building was lowered toward a small clearing away from the tents and equipment of the ill-fated expedition.

  “Tell them to send down the portable generator,” Joel said into his headset to someone aboard the aircraft. “And then lower the containers of gasoline and propane after everything down here is secured.”

  The lab settled gently onto a carpet of grass and the massive cables were released. Joel left his radio to join the others helping with guiding more crates and containers being sent down on thin steel lines.