The Anthrax Protocol

by James Thompson

  “And that’s what you think you’ve found here?”

  “In a BL Four we can study the filoviruses, like Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa, and also anthrax, dengue, and rabies. All organisms that are lethal and for which there are no effective treatments or vaccines. We don’t know what this bug is yet, but it looks to have almost one hundred percent infectivity and one hundred percent mortality, so that makes it right up there with the worst I’ve ever seen.”

  As Dr. Johnson and Dr. Matos entered the shower room, Mason asked her, “Would you like a quick tour? The lab is so small it won’t take long . . .”

  “Why not?” Lauren hadn’t wanted to leave the comfort of her chair, but when he asked so gently, with a curious quality to his voice, some inner urge gave her new energy.

  Mason took her through various rooms, almost all of which had strange, futuristic equipment with myriad dials, computer screens, and printers attached to the walls.

  “Since this is a so-called mobile lab, we try to make use of every nook and cranny to stuff as much diagnostic and communications gear in as we can,” he said as he opened a door to a tiny cubicle containing both a commode and a handheld shower hose.

  “I guess there’ll be no soaking in a luxurious hot bathtub to soothe my aching muscles,” Lauren said. She was amused when her remark appeared to embarrass him, as if it were somehow his fault things were so cramped. Or could it have been the mental picture of her soaking in a hot bath that had him flustered, she thought. Hmmm . . . she’d have to think about that.

  Mason cleared his throat. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to get you out of here and back to Mexico City before too long. Now that you’ve identified all the . . . all your friends, I’d like to get you out of the danger zone as soon as I can.”

  Lauren offered no reply. A part of her wanted to stay now until someone provided some answers to what had happened here, but another part wanted to fly away home and leave all the gruesome images of decaying corpses and lost friends far behind her.

  The problem, she knew, was she would never be able to get those scenes from her mind—no matter how far she flew or how long she lived.

  The last chamber he showed her was adjacent to the shower room. It had a metal door with thick, double-paned glass, and could only be entered from the room where the Racals hung. She peered through heavy glass at a row of empty orange suits, hanging like discarded carapaces of obscene insects after they had broken free.

  “That’s the laboratory where all of the tissue and blood samples will be examined and tested. That work has to be done while wearing Racals, since we have to assume the specimens are still infective.”

  He pointed to the ceiling where she could see several air vents. “The room is kept at negative pressure so that any bugs that escape into the air are sucked up through the vents and bubbled through a chlorine solution to kill them.”

  She could see several cot-like beds surrounded by monitoring equipment similar to what she’d seen in a hospital intensive care unit when her father died.

  “What are those for?”

  Mason seemed uncomfortable answering her question. “Those are for treatment and study of any hot zone survivors or for us in case one of us becomes infected by a hot-bug we’re investigating. We have almost everything we need to treat someone medically, short of doing major surgery.”

  “Have they ever been used?”

  “Yes.” He hesitated. “Just last year in Australia we had to take care of the wife and daughter of a horse trainer who had contracted a mutant strain of equine morbillivirus, a disease similar to measles in humans, but much more deadly.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They died. The entire family.”

  “How do you deal with . . .” she pointed through the glass at glass slides and vials of blood arranged neatly on a counter, “all this death?”

  He stared at her a moment before he spoke, and his eyes looked haunted. “In the only way any of us can. By focusing on all the possible deaths we may be preventing by what we do.” He thought for a moment, and then he added, “And on good days, we save more than we lose.”

  He ran his hands through his hair, though it did nothing to ease the unruliness. “Look, Lauren, I know you must think us doctors are unfeeling robots from the way we dispassionately discussed your friends out there, but it is simply not true.”

  He hesitated as if trying to find some way to explain it to her. “It’s kinda like surgeons who play rock and roll or classical music while they are doing intricate operations,” he said, his eyes serious, “or why cops make dark jokes when confronted with horrible traffic accidents. Some things are just too terrible to confront head-on and must be accommodated in individual ways so the horror doesn’t make us incapable of action.”

  “I know I’m not explaining this very well, but sometimes to cope with terrible things we must focus on mundane parts of our job in order not to be paralyzed with thoughts of what we are dealing with.”

  She glanced through the window in the wall at the test tubes and petri dishes containing specimens his team had collected earlier that day.

  “I think I understand, Mason,” she said. “It’s like when I’m unearthing ancient bones from a dig site, I don’t dwell on what those bones represent but only on the job I’ve got to do to make some sense of their current condition.”

  His gaze followed hers to the specimens in the next room. “We may be too late for Dr. Adams and his students, but there are fifteen million people in Mexico City a few miles away, and the only thing right now standing between them and what you’ve seen here today, is us.”

  “It must take a terrible toll on you.”

  “Sure. Dr. Jakes has been married three times, and Lionel has an ulcer the size of the Grand Canyon, and I’m so grouchy my secretary holds up a silver cross every time I enter the office.” He gave a dry chuckle. “I’m afraid it just goes with the territory.”

  Lauren felt too tired to laugh appropriately. “Charlie and these kids could have used a few silver crosses.”

  Mason nodded, “But even if they’d had them, it wouldn’t have helped. I’m afraid the only thing that is going to defeat this hot-bug is modern science, not ancient superstitions.”

  After a moment, he grinned, trying to lighten her mood. “Now, Doctor Lady, unless you want to miss our sumptuous dinner feast, we need to get back to the dining room.”

  “What are we having?” she asked, putting her hand to her stomach, which growled at the mention of food.

  He made a show of sniffing air. “Unless I miss my guess, Chef Lionel Johnson will soon be preparing his specialite du jour, MREs sautéed lightly in a microwave.”

  “MREs?”

  “Meals Ready to Eat, courtesy of the U.S. Army. Guaranteed to be slightly less than thirty years old. We should hurry. We won’t get dessert if we’re late.”

  “Dessert?”

  “Oreos with powdered milk.”

  They found Dr. Matos and Dr. Johnson in the kitchen, and Lauren thought she saw fear in Eduardo’s eyes. Although he was close to sixty he looked remarkably fit, graying slightly around his temples without any other pronounced signs of aging.

  “I have never seen anything like this in my entire life,” he said, speaking to Lauren. “I started to feel dizzy. Dr. Johnson said I had to come inside to drink electrolytes before we go back to the temple.”

  Suiting action to words, he took a drink from the paper cup in his hands.

  He glanced at her over the rim of the cup. “I must see Montezuma’s tomb, Lauren. I do not feel I can wait another day. Will you go with me?”

  She looked to Mason for approval.

  “After you’ve both eaten and consumed enough fluids,” he told them quietly. “We’ll be up all night working the specimens, so no one will be getting much sleep around here anyway, and the jungle can get quite cold at night so you won’t be bothered by the heat like you were earlier today.”

  * * *

  As the t
eam gathered around the table in the main room of the lab, Mason excused himself, saying he wasn’t hungry and wanted to get some of the cultures set up and cooking.

  Lauren dug into her MRE as if it were a thirty-dollar steak, finding, to her surprise in spite of what she’d seen, she was famished.

  She glanced at Suzanne, who was sitting next to her. “Suzanne,” she began.

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s the story on Dr. Williams?”

  Suzanne’s lips curled up in a half-smile. “Well, let’s see . . . he’s thirty-three years old, mountain bikes five miles a day unless we’re in the field, and he’s ex-military—did two years as a doc in the Navy.” She thought for a minute, and then she added, “I believe he likes to fish and bird hunt in his spare time, of which he has none.”

  Lauren raised her eyebrows. “You seem to know a lot about him.”

  Suzanne’s eyes turned wistful. “Yeah, seems I had a bit of a crush on him when I first came to work at CDC, but he’s married to his work and never gave me a second look.”

  She stared at Lauren. “Maybe you’ll have more luck than I did.”

  Lauren blushed fiercely. “But . . . I don’t . . . Hey, listen, Suzanne,” Lauren said, “Mason may be a handsome man, but I’ve just lost over thirty friends and a man I looked upon as a father and I’ve absolutely no interest in romance at this point in my life!”

  Suzanne sobered and waved her hand in the air. “That’s okay, I’m just kidding.”

  “What about you?” Lauren asked, as her breathing slowed to normal. “How did you come to work for the CDC?”

  “Well, I’m kind of a natural fit. I’m an army brat; my father was an army doc in Vietnam until Agent Orange ate all the flesh off of his body, and my brother was also an army doc until Saddam’s germ warfare in the Gulf War messed up his system so much he had to take a medical retirement.”

  “Saddam used germ warfare in the Gulf War?” Lauren asked around a mouthful of ham and beans.

  Suzanne smirked. “Oh, the army denies it, but I know what I saw when my brother came home—his body as broken as his spirit.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lauren said.

  Suzanne smiled grimly. “That’s the chance you take when you work for Uncle Sam, Lauren.”

  “What about Sam Jakes?” Lauren asked quietly to change the subject. “Do he and Shirley Cole really hate each other as much as it sounds like?”

  Suzanne chuckled. “Hell no. In fact, the old boy’s kinda sweet on her if you ask me . . . especially her baked goods. All that jawing back and forth is just for show. They’re really quite close.”

  Lauren was about to ask more when Mason stuck his head in from the lab and said, “Come on, troops, we don’t have all night. Eat your Oreos and get a move on; we’ve got bugs to grow and tissue to stain and lots of other fun stuff to do before we turn in tonight.”

  Chapter 10

  Guatemotzi was very afraid. Terrified. Watching these men wearing odd warriors’ costumes the color of naranja, the orange, was enough to frighten him by itself. But the curious rituals they had performed over the dead Americanos made him wonder if these men in orange might be Los Oráculos, messengers from the ancient gods sent from beyond the sun to see for themselves death had come to everyone who violated the Aztec temple, Chief Montezuma’s sacred place of eternal sleep.

  Perhaps these were not men at all, but creatures from the Spirit World his grandfather told him about so long ago—evil spirits with the shapes of men who walked among the living seeking out those who departed from the pathway sought by true believers. They had even arrived in the belly of a strange metal bird like the winged god of his ancestors, Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent.

  Every Americano is dead, Guatemotzi thought. Everyone who went in the sacred temple died in agony, writhing on the ground, bleeding, gasping for breath. Everyone . . . but me. I did not get sick like the others. I am alive and they are dead. I do not understand. Why would Los Dios spare me from the curse?

  Watching these warriors in orange suits from the trunk of a palm tree, Guatemotzi knew one of them had seen him. Would they come after him in the dark and hunt him down? If they were truly Los Oráculos they could see in the dark as if it were daylight and no place would be safe for him to hide.

  And what had they been doing to the bodies of the Americanos? Cutting them to pieces with small knives, opening their skulls and taking pieces of their brains! Did they intend to consume the body parts, as he had been told the priests of his ancestors did, or would they use them in some other ritual only the gods and priests knew about?

  And what of the giant silver box carried from the sky by the metal bird? It had windows. Were Los Oráculos planning to live inside this box? Or was it a huge coffin for the dead Americanos? How could he know such things, being only a boy from a small village in the mountains to the south?

  In early spring his father had warned him not to go to the North, not to leave their hidden village in Michoacán, for he said it was very dangerous in El Norte and a poor Indio boy like Guatemotzi would not belong in a world filled with automobiles and tall buildings and foreign gods and strange rituals of which he had no knowledge.

  The black-robed priests of a new god had come to his small village, teaching the children Español and telling them of the one true god, Jesus, who preached kindness and love. Strange teachings for a god, and much different from the gods his grandfather spoke of, who conquered enemies and took their wives and children for slaves and who ripped the beating hearts from their enemies and ate them to steal their strength and courage.

  This one true god seemed weak to Guatemotzi, who had been named for the last and strongest emperor of the Aztecs. His father had told him his name meant “one who has descended like an eagle when he folds his wings and drops like lightning onto his prey,” and symbolized aggressiveness and fierceness. This foreign god seemed no match for the ferocious gods of his ancestors.

  For this reason Guatemotzi had avoided the cities of the new god, keeping to the mountains and jungles, hoping to learn more about the world outside Michoacán without losing his life to its many dangers. He knew this timidity was not living up to his name, but he figured he’d have plenty of time to be fierce when he grew larger.

  He’d tried to explain to his father that he was only curious to see what other places were like, that he was not turning his back on his Indio heritage or his people by going away.

  He wanted only to visit the burial place of his ancestors’ emperor, Montezuma, whose daughter was the wife to the original Guatemotzi, and to pray and perhaps to see if the ancient gods were still alive, to see for himself if they had been driven off by this new god, Jesus.

  He was, after all, a full fourteen años, and his namesake had been the emperor who succeeded Montezuma and it was he who was killed when he wouldn’t reveal the location of the Aztecs’ gold treasury.

  With such a powerful and important heritage he was surely brave enough to be traveling on his own, even across the dangerous North. By avoiding the cities there was little risk, and when he met the jefe of the Americanos and the others digging in these ancient ruins, he’d been offered a job using a machete helping to clear away vines and carrying brush.

  The jefe had been a kind man, not like he expected from someone who came from the North, and the others were very gentle people who only wanted to dig for pieces of old pottery belonging to the Aztecs.

  The jefe was very interested to find that Guatemotzi was a descendant of Los Aztecas and to discover that he spoke the ancient tongue, Nahuatl. The jefe often took time to sit with Guatemotzi and ask him questions about the tales of the ancient days his people had told him. Jefe even knew about his ancestor and namesake, the original Guatemotzi, and told him many people thought he was even greater than Emperor Montezuma.

  Thus, Guatemotzi thought it fitting, to be able to help these kind Americans discover more about his people and their history . . . and they paid him so well! Six hundred pesos a d
ay only to cut vines and carry limbs to brush piles!

  It had seemed like a miracle to find such a wonderful job while wandering through the jungle, a gift from Dios Himself. When he came back to his village he would be a rich man who could be generous with his mother and father and sisters and brothers. But those were dreams he had before everyone started to die. . . . Before he stole part of the treasure.

  The bleeding was unlike anything Guatemotzi had ever seen. The sickness began all at once, striking everyone. And within hours many were dying. They needed doctors, curanderos, and when the jefe sent Julio—they called him Jules—in an automobile with no roof to find a doctor, Julio died on a jungle road to the city before he reached a curandero. A farmer brought him back to the camp in his burro cart and three days later, the farmer was dead from the same strange illness, the bleeding.

  What Guatemotzi still did not understand was why the sickness had spared him. He did not bleed now, nor had he bled when all of the others did. Were the gods of Los Aztecas saving him for some reason he could not comprehend?

  He watched the orange-clad warriors until it grew dark and then he left for a hidden spot near a mountain spring where he kept food the Americano named Fitzhugh had given him, stored in green pouches and metal cans that had to be opened with a special tool.

  While the food was tasteless and faintly unpleasant to smell, it was an alternative to hunting small game and Guatemotzi had few darts left for his blowgun, and he was unable to find the poisonous tree frogs from which he made the killing potion that would drop a deer in its tracks within only a few steps after the dart entered its flesh.

  He resolved to eat the strange-smelling food and conserve his darts for later, when he would eventually undertake the long journey south to his home village.