by Glenn Cooper
“You’ve come from Boston?”
“Not directly, but yes.”
“Why are you here?”
“I’ve got a potential cure. I need some help.”
“Is that so? Give me a minute, why don’t you?”
When he emerged, he had the appearance and aroma of a man living rough on the streets. A look of fear crossed his face when he saw that Jamie and the girls were not masked. He quickly produced a crumpled one he had been carrying in a pocket, throwing it on in a panic.
“The three of you need to put masks on,” he scolded, running down the hall and fetching some from a lab.
The girls had found a stress ball in one of the rooms they had searched previously and were tossing it back and forth down the hall, giggling. Jamie helped them don the masks and he put one on too.
“Who are they?” Bigelow asked.
“My daughters.”
“They seem—young.”
“You mean, they act young. They’re infected.”
He didn’t say he was sorry for their plight. He said, “Thought so.”
Jamie couldn’t tell if he had ever possessed reasonable social skills, or if he had lost them in isolation.
“I’ve got natural immunity,” Jamie said. “I’ve been with them continuously. I was exposed to dozens of patients.”
“Before the CDC packed it in, they were saying that about twenty percent of the population has natural immunity.”
“That data came from me.”
Bigelow’s bushy eyebrows elevated. “Did it?” He didn’t ask further questions. Instead he said, “I’ve been scrupulously careful. I am not immune.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve developed an antibody assay for the virus. My titer is zero. Coffee? I’ve got a limitless supply.”
Bigelow herded them into a lab down the hall where he lit a Bunsen burner with a sparker and set a beaker toward boil. Corporal Deakins begged off coffee and excused himself, telling Jamie he would check in later. Bigelow asked if the girls might remain in the hall, so he could remove his mask for coffee.
As he fussed with the grounds and filter, Bigelow seemed eager to talk about his own predicament. Jamie’s talk of a cure would have to wait. He was a Brit with a PhD from Oxford who had come to the NIH as a post-doc and had never left. He was, as he put it, the present and most probably the last chief of the Ebola vaccine division. In the early days of the epidemic, it had been all hands on deck at the institute, everyone working on the new virus, but the attrition started within a few days as staff became ill, or employees left to care for their families.
“I’m the last of the Mohicans,” he said. “My remaining two colleagues packed up over a week ago. Not me. I’m here till the bloody end. No family, you see. Not even a cat. Anyway, safer here than my flat by miles, I expect. And I found the key to the bigwigs’ wine stores they have laid in for their cocktail parties with congressmen and foreign dignitaries. So, something to do to while away the nights. Also, the work’s given me a sense of purpose which is worth something, isn’t it?”
“What have you been working on?”
“Well, as it happens, you’ve arrived at a critical juncture. I’ve been doing old-school vaccine development. Louis Pasteur would have been intimately familiar with the techniques, because they were his very own. I’ve been passing a clinical strain of the virus through successive rabbits—who, incidentally, have been eating better than we homo sapiens—and I now have a version of the virus that has been sufficiently attenuated, or weakened. It’s precisely how Pasteur made his rabies vaccine. I’m now ready to test it in a willing subject.”
“And who would that be?” Jamie asked.
“Why, me, of course. I’ll inject it into my thigh muscle and draw blood to see if it’s strong enough to produce decent antibody titers, yet weak enough to keep me dementia free. Now I have someone to draw my blood without drafting in someone from elsewhere on the campus. There are still scientists scattered hither and yon but I don’t like to venture out. Can you draw blood?”
“I’m a physician.”
“Excellent. What sort?”
“Neurologist.”
“Doubly excellent. You can document my mental status post-inoculation.”
“When were you planning on injecting yourself?”
“Presently.”
It was time for Jamie to insert himself more forcefully into the conversation. “Look, I’ll be happy to help you, but I’d like your help first—just in case.”
“In case the vaccine buggers my brain.”
“Something like that.”
“All right, Dr. Abbott. You’ve politely listened to me prattle on. Tell me about your putative cure.”
Jamie laid it all out, starting with his own role in the disastrous Baltimore study. He gave Bigelow a crash course in the biology of memory, how the abnormal CREB molecules were blocking long-term memory retrieval, and how his freeze-dried CREB variants needed to be spliced into the right adenovirus strains.
Bigelow had been refilling his coffee mug, sipping and nodding. Finally, he interjected, “And you believe this therapeutic virus would deliver its payload and displace the abnormal molecules sitting on these memory gates?”
“I do.”
“And memories might flood back?”
“Exactly.”
“It’s quite elegant—if it works. How would your new virus be administered?”
“A few drops into the nose. The virus starts dividing and does the rest. And here’s the beauty of it. It should be just as contagious as the FAV virus. It should spread to the already infected population by the same coughs and sneezes that infected them in the first place.”
Bigelow scratched his nose under his mask. “Hmm. It’s a far better way to treat a large population than my method of jabbing everyone. Furthermore, my method might prevent infection in the vulnerable but might not treat the already afflicted. But then again, your approach isn’t guaranteed to work and mine is true and tested. Hmmm. What to do?” He thought for a while and said, “Right! I’ll help you first. What do you need from me?”
“The correct strain of adenovirus, a functional molecular biology lab, and electricity.”
“The latter two, I have. The first, I don’t know. I’m not an adenovirus person, but I’ll have a rummage through the institute’s freezers for you. Meanwhile, there are unoccupied duty rooms with beds and facilities, and an adequately stocked kitchen. You look fatigued.”
“I can barely keep upright.”
46
When he awoke, Jamie momentarily experienced the kind of disorientation a patient might, emerging from a coma. It was pitch dark. He didn’t know where he was, or the time of day. He fumbled for a flashlight, and by its beam, his brain filled in the blanks. His door was open, the way he had left it so that he could hear the girls if they called for him from across the hall. He got up and raised the window shade. The sky was chalky gray. Was it getting lighter or darker? His watch said it was six, but that wasn’t entirely helpful.
He pulled his shoes on, checked on the girls, asleep, and cuddling each other, and did some quick ablutions in the rest room. Then he went down the hall toward a shaft of light coming from a lab. Bigelow was at a bench, scribbling in a notebook.
The scientist was chipper. “Oh, there you are! Risen from the dead. Coffee?”
“Love some. It’s the evening, right?” Jamie said.
“Wrong.”
“Christ, I slept all the way through?”
“You and your daughters.”
The coffee from the beaker was overcooked, but medicinal, and Jamie’s head began to clear.
“Corporal Deakins came around last night,” Bigelow said. “He wanted you to know. Apparently, there was a shooting just off campus involving two civilians camping at the perimeter. It’s getting bad out there.”
“Getting bad? Believe me, it’s already bad,” Jamie said. Just then, he realized that neither man
was wearing protection. “I better get my mask,” he said.
Bigelow looked up, cracking a cheerful smile. “There’s no need. I inoculated myself last night. At this point, I’ll be looking for exposures. When they awake, I’d like your daughters to breathe in my face.”
Jamie was quick to anger. “I thought you agreed to help me before you dosed yourself?”
“I did indeed, but here’s the thing: I spent most of the day searching for your adenovirus and I’m sorry to say, I failed. I went through all the working freezers in this building and was about to embark on a wider exploration at the other institutes on the campus when I came upon a current inventory of virus samples on the hard drive of one of my colleagues who was involved with respiratory pathogens. The inventory covers the entire NIH, and I’m afraid that your strain is not in Bethesda. That’s the bad news. There might be good news.”
“What’s that?”
Bigelow waved a sheet of paper. “I jotted it down for you. Your strain is nearby. It appears to be within the inventory of the US Army Medical Command facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Specifically, it’s in Freezer 178 at the Institute of Infectious Diseases, on sub-basement level 6.”
“Do you know if they have power?”
“We will run out of fuel. They won’t. Their repository of biological material and vaccines is frozen in what amounts to a doomsday bunker, powered by a nuclear battery.”
“How far is it?”
“Fifty miles, sixty at most.”
“Then that’s where I’m going.”
“Feel free, but only after you’ve kept up your part of the bargain.” He made his finger a pointer aimed at his own head. “You’ve got a patient, remember?”
“I can’t hang around forever.”
“I should have protective antibody titers in a week or so, and if my mind remains clear, then your work will be done. Now kindly perform a semblance of a baseline mental status exam—I won’t tell you how to do your job—so I can document my status over time. When the world emerges from this nightmare, I’ll need to publish the experiment. Could be Nobel Prize in it if Sweden survives.”
*
With time on his hands and the promise of some safe relaxation, Jamie took the girls for long walks within the protected, largely deserted campus. Occasionally, they encountered an army patrol that made them wait while they radioed Lieutenant Walker to confirm Jamie’s permissions. And every once in a while, an NIH employee came outside after seeing them from a window or bumped into them on a constitutional. All of them wanted to hear what was going on “out there.”
“She was a nice lady,” Jamie told the girls after a chain-smoking woman with a Russian accent left them. They had been at the facility for three days. Jamie had been preparing himself for this talk with the girls, and the time seemed right. They were rested and he was certain they felt safe. They were holding hands.
“Emma and Kyra, are you okay?”
They replied with the thumbs-up he had taught them.
“That’s good. Kyra, I want to talk about your mother.”
She looked at him blankly.
“Your mom.”
She repeated, “Mom.”
“You must be thinking, ‘Where is mom?’”
She pursed her lips and replied, “Mom isn’t here anymore.”
At times he was surprised by the way their language was improving by leaps and bounds. This was one of those times. “That’s right. She isn’t here anymore. I have to tell you something. She isn’t coming back for you.”
“Like Rommy?” Emma said.
“Yes, like Rommy. Does that make you sad, Kyra?”
“I’m not sad.”
It didn’t shock him. Her memory of Linda was only weeks old and during that time, Linda hadn’t exactly been a beacon of motherhood.
“I want Rommy,” Emma said.
Kyra said, “I want Rommy too.”
The dog had made a better impression.
“I’m Emma’s daddy. Emma is my daughter,” Jamie said. “I love Emma. And Kyra is also my daughter. I love Kyra too.”
“I love Daddy,” Emma said.
“I love Daddy too,” Kyra said.
So, it was official. Kyra was family. Paperwork was not required as the world was currently constituted.
They walked for a while in silence as he steeled himself for the next subject weighing on him.
“We ran away from the bad men,” he finally said. “Mr. Edison was bad. His son Joe was bad.”
“I don’t like Joe,” Emma said.
“Me too don’t like Joe,” Kyra said.
Ordinarily, Jamie would have taken the opportunity to correct the grammar, but there was a larger issue at hand.
“Did Joe hurt you girls?”
“Joe hurt me,” Kyra said.
“Joe hurt me too,” Emma agreed.
He pointed toward their crotches. “Did he touch you down there?”
They both responded loudly. “Yes!”
“Did he hurt you down there?”
“Yes!”
He tried to swallow the lump in his throat.
“Daddy killed Joe because he hurt my girls. Joe will never hurt you again.”
He held his arms wide open and enveloped them when they drew close.
*
He made cups of tea and left the girls in the small break room to look for Bigelow. He found him in his bedroom, expecting his usual loquaciousness. Instead he was deadly serious and taciturn.
They had been on a first-name basis the past couple of days, and after a few moments of awkwardness, Jamie asked, “Come on, Jonas, what’s going on?”
“I think I may have a problem.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’ve become forgetful.”
Jamie went into doctor mode, hiding his apprehension behind a well-worn shield. He took the edge of the bed and said, “Tell me about it.”
“This morning, I couldn’t remember the name of my ex-wife.”
“I didn’t know you were married. What’s her name?”
Bigelow scrunched his brow until he dug it out by brute force. “Janice.”
“Okay, good. What years were you married?”
Another long pause failed to yield the dates. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”
“Okay, did you notice any other memory lapses today?”
“It took me ages to find my lab notebook.”
“Where was it?”
“In the drawer where I always keep it, I think. I had to rifle through half the cabinets in the lab because I didn’t have a clue.”
“Tell you what, let’s run through our standard panel of memory recall tests.”
“Have we done this before?”
They had done the testing twice daily for the past three days. “We have, Jonas,” Jamie said gently.
He ran him through the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test in which he had, so far, gotten perfect 30 out of 30 scores. Today, he scored 20/30, with failures in short-term memory tasks, recall of complex sentences, and a few errors in subtracting numbers. It was the score of a mild to moderately severe Alzheimer’s patient.
“How’d I do?” Bigelow asked hopefully.
“How do you think you did?” Jamie asked.
“Not brilliantly.”
Jamie lied diplomatically. “A few more mistakes than usual, but I think you’re tired. Why don’t you skip our meeting with Lieutenant Walker and rest? I’ll check on you again this afternoon.”
“Did we have a meeting scheduled?”
*
Walker arrived at the vaccines institute punctually and went straight to the third floor. Jamie was waiting for him by the stairs. The lieutenant cautiously pinched his mask at the nose to make for a better seal and eschewed a handshake.
“Where’s Bigelow?” he asked.
Jamie motioned to one of the labs and said, “He’s not coming. Let’s talk in here.”
Walker followed him saying, “That sounds ominous.”
Walker had been apprised of Bigelow’s vaccination. Jamie told him about the recent changes to his mental status. It was hard to read the face of a masked man, but the narrowing of his eyes betrayed him.
“So, does he have it?” Walker asked.
“It’s hard to say.”
“Don’t BS me. Tell me straight. What are the odds?”
“I can’t give you a betting line, Lieutenant, but there is a chance the live virus he gave himself wasn’t weakened enough. He may be in the early stages of the illness.”
“So, here’s the layman in me talking. He’s probably fucked.”
“Time will tell, but yeah, he might be.” Walker knew about Fort Detrick. “It increases the urgency for me to get to Detrick. Were you able to get through to them?”
“I tried, but no joy. I radioed your request to speak to someone over there, but it went into an expanding black hole at the Pentagon and never came out.”
“Then look, in a couple of days—depending on what happens to Bigelow—I’m leaving for Maryland. I’d like an army escort if you can spare it, and a letter of introduction to whoever’s in charge of the facility.”
“I’m not sure I can spare men,” Walker said. “There’s been a rise in violence at our perimeter. A group of civilians tested the north gate last night and had to be pushed back. I’ll write a letter, but that might be the extent of my support.”
Walker’s walkie-talkie came to life. Corporal Deakins was in the lobby and needed to speak with him.
Deakins was huffing and puffing when he barged in.
“What’s going on, Corporal?” Walker asked.
Deakins looked at Jamie and said, “Sir, there’s a civilian present.”
“Go on, Corporal, it’s okay.”
“We just got a message from the Pentagon. The military and Secret Service details protecting the White House are stretched too thin to deal with the crowds. Early this morning, there was an incursion. They breached the fence, and a dozen civilians were shot. We’ve been given orders to immediately pull back from Bethesda and reinforce the White House.”
“Fuck me,” Walker said. “Get the men saddled up, Corporal. We leave in one hour. And send runners to each building letting any remaining staff know they’re on their own.”
