Bat out of Hell

by Alan Gold

  But how to off Jim? And in a way that couldn’t be traced back to Stuart? A car crash, maybe? Or a drug overdose at a faculty party? Or most likely, the unintended victim of a robbery—shot through the heart while the merciless killer was escaping after stealing an iPad or a pair of Nike shoes. He’d be the casual victim of mankind’s insatiable lust for consumerism. And at his funeral, Stuart would deliver a heartfelt eulogy, a paean against the barbarism that was stalking the dark alleyways of humanity’s unnatural urban existence.

  He breathed deeply. He’d have to work it out before he bought a cheap telephone from some backstreet dealer and contacted the black kid who called himself No Slimeball. But was Noah Simball the right person? Was it too close to the killing of the old Jew in Miami, and the secretary of health in Washington? Probably, but Noah was as expendable as anybody else was, and Stuart’s options were getting fewer by the day. So to protect himself and WEL, Noah would likely have to be killed afterward. Now that would be more difficult because, unlike Jim, Noah had street smarts. He would be no easy mark. And Stuart would have to do it himself.

  He sighed again and stood to leave the park. Life was getting harder and harder, when all Stuart wanted to do was to put an end to mankind’s destruction of all that was right and good in the world.

  ***

  A thousand miles east of Wisconsin, in the Roosevelt Room opposite the Oval Office in the White House, Debra Hart was clearing her throat as she prepared to deliver what she knew would be a devastating report for the president and his most senior advisors. The sixteen chairs around the huge mahogany table were occupied by health and security officials, cabinet officers, the president and the vice president, and the president’s chief scientific advisor. Seated around the walls were the deputies of the officials seated at the table, ready to take notes or to provide their boss with details, or facts. The thirty-four people in the room knew that they were in for a preliminary report from Debra’s task force, but as with most preliminary reports, it almost certainly prefigured the final report that was probably weeks away.

  Debra waited for the president to stop speaking before she announced what she knew would be utterly depressing. Nathaniel Thomas had been filling in his colleagues on the state of play with the terrorists who were threatening the fabric of the nation, who were determined to spare nobody’s life in order to prevent the species extinction that was probably inevitable.

  “So that, ladies and gentlemen, is about it. Professor Chalmers is our prime suspect, and I’m preparing to sign an order under the domestic terrorism provisions of the USA Patriot Act to arrest and incarcerate Chalmers while our law enforcement agencies sift through every square inch of his life since the day he was born. But now we’ll hear from Doctor Debra Hart and the initial report of her task force into the identification and eradication of this deadly virus.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President. Unfortunately, though, it’s not one virus, but many. And that makes it all the harder to control. In the past seven weeks, six laboratories in the United States and five overseas have been undertaking intense scientific analyses of the viruses extracted from the bodies of culled bats, birds, rats, mice, and insects, as well as the bodies of the victims of this modern plague. The good news . . . the only good news . . . is that the deadly pathogens, the viruses, seem to be exclusive to the populations of bats that have been found in the vicinity of the fatalities. We’ve found no abnormal, mutated, or new viruses in the bodies of other animal forms.

  “But that’s where the good news ends. Because each of the deadly outbreaks seems to have been caused by a different virus that, for reasons we don’t fully understand, has undergone mutation. And, unfortunately, because the mutations come from different virus strains, finding a way of fighting them will be incredibly difficult. It’s likely that prevention is the only cure.

  “Let me explain the science. One common structure of a virus is the icosahedral or quasi-spherical virus. It’s a solid object built up of twenty identical faces. The most elementary type of icosahedral virion is one where each of the triangular faces is made up of three identical capsid protein subunits, so that makes sixty subunits per capsid. Now some of these capsids have mutated and their external protein sheaths have developed new surface features that enable them to invade different cellular structures inside the human body. Think of it as a lock and key system, where the viral capsids have produced new keys that enable them to unlock the external membranes of particular cells, thereby gaining access so they can release their genetic material and instructions into a host’s cell. The injected genetic material then goes about recruiting the host’s enzymes that make more of the virus particles that then break free of the cell and infect new cells. But the rapidity of attack is unprecedented. My view is that the mutant RNA . . .”

  She stopped talking when she heard the president clearing his throat. Looking around the table, she realized that she’d lost most of the non-scientific audience in the science.

  “Sorry. Let me put it in nontechnical terms. The lyssavirus, which in its usual form causes numbness, muscular weakness, and sometimes a coma, which ultimately leads to death, has suddenly changed its capsid structure, the protein coat that covers all the RNA. What that means is that this change has made it much more aggressive as an invader of key cells in the human body, such as the blood, the liver, the brain, and others.

  “It has mutated into a very aggressive form that causes brain swelling, internal bleeding, organ failure, and death within hours. Same story with a similar lyssavirus, the Lagos bat virus that up till now hadn’t killed anybody but in some bat colonies has mutated with a slightly differentiated but new protein coat and has become, in effect, an incredibly aggressive offspring virus and is now causing deaths through uncontrollable hemorrhagic fever in Nigeria. Like I said, this is especially where bat populations are unable to find fruit due to the destruction of forests for their wood, and arable land has been turned into biofuel production; this and aerial spraying of insecticides has caused a massive reduction in the flying insect population which is also part of the bats’ diet.

  “The Melaka virus from Malaysia, which only used to cause respiratory problems and was probably linked to the avian flu virus, is now causing deaths where bat populations are under pressure from their jungle habitats being converted into fields of palm oil plants. When they come into contact with humans, their excretions are deadly. And in Britain, the virus that caused that terrible outbreak at the school in North London was a mutant variant of the SARS virus; again, it was structurally and morphologically slightly different from the types of viruses found in British bats, but that difference in capsid structure was enough to enable the virus to eat its way into a whole new set of cells in the human body.

  “And the bats from Ramapo Mountain State Forest that killed those poor children in upstate New Jersey were suffering from a deadly variant of the Marburg virus. I won’t go on, but as a last example, the vampire bats on the banks of the Orinoco River in South America have a form of rabies that we haven’t seen before, and it is devastatingly potent.

  “It’s as if, in these bat populations that are affected, all the usual suspects, all the normal standard nasty viruses for which bats carry antibodies that don’t affect them, have suddenly turned deadly. And it seems to have happened at the same time and throughout the world. We’re getting reports almost every week of another unusual outbreak. But the key issue here, Mr. President, is that the viruses that are causing these human population deaths are in almost every case different. There’s no common pathogen. It’s not like the flu pandemic in the First World War, or the AIDS epidemic where HIV could be isolated. These are all different strains.

  “I’ll hand around a report that I’ve prepared that goes much deeper into the science, along with the electron microscopy that identifies each of the viruses . . . we’ve pictured the normal virus against the mutant variant and identified the structural differences that are causing the problems, but you’ll see that
each of the viruses we’ve identified is different. It’s as if the normal bat viruses have been given an injection of testosterone,” she said.

  Her assistant, Professor Daniel Todd, stood and handed around a thick folder of their findings to each of the people at the table. They opened it and flicked through the pictures.

  The president said, “We’ll read these later with great interest, Debra, but meantime, what’s your conclusion about how to deal with these outbreaks? And what can we do to prevent them happening again?”

  She swallowed. Here came the crunch, which she’d discussed at length with the president before the meeting, and now would come as a bombshell to his advisors.

  “Sir, I don’t think we’ll find a cure for ten, fifteen, maybe thirty years. Not even with every scientific lab in the world devoting itself to this problem. We can’t solve the problem by finding a cure. The situation is too urgent. And the antiviral drugs we’ve created so far to fight diseases like the flu are going to be useless against these viruses. It’s going to take years and years of pharmacological research to find a drug that might, just might, be useful against one or two of these new strains of virus.

  “So the only solution is both prevention and direct action against the carrier, the bats. We can’t inoculate the US population against an enemy that constantly mutates, even if inoculation against viruses worked.”

  “It works against smallpox,” said Damien Close, the president’s scientific advisor. “Jenner used cowpox to inoculate. Smallpox killed five hundred million people in the twentieth century, but today it’s been totally eradicated.”

  “True,” said Debra, “but Jenner worked in the nineteenth century and we didn’t eradicate smallpox until 1980. We just don’t have that long, Doctor Close.”

  “What have you determined to be the reason that these viruses are mutating and, to use your language, seem to be on testosterone?” he asked.

  “We’re only in the earliest stages of working on a hypothesis, but it’s pretty clear from the mammalian biologists we’ve contracted around the world, people who specialize in bat populations, that due to very recent and very dramatic alterations in the environment where certain bat populations live, their bodies are responding to a sudden increase in stress by the exponential augmentation of their viral loads. Not every bat population . . . most are normal; but where there’s a conjunction between the human world and the animal world, where there are great stresses on local bat populations due to the circumstances I’ve mentioned, or others yet to be defined, these traumatized bat colonies are reacting by the viral load in their blood going through the roof.

  “Where you once had only an occasional outbreak of Ebola or SARS in isolated populations that found themselves in close proximity to humans, now you’re having established populations suddenly endangering people in towns and villages in parts of the world where bats have lived in close relationships to people for millennia.”

  “But what’s causing it? What’s suddenly happened?” asked the vice president.

  “Sir, we can only guess. But if there are two things that seem to have happened globally and at the same time, it’s the alteration to the world’s climate temperature regulation mechanism caused by effects yet to be fully understood. There’s debate, of course, as to whether or not global warming is caused by the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That’s not an issue I can deal with, but what’s apparent is that weather patterns are changing. Record high and low temperatures, unprecedented snowfalls and droughts, glaciers melting, and cyclones and tornadoes at record levels from elevated sea surface temperatures. I’m not a climatologist and I have no knowledge of whether it’s anthropogenic or natural, but the climate is certainly changing worldwide and bats are hypersensitive to ambient and seasonal temperatures.

  “Then there’s the change in ten thousand years of agriculture brought about by modification of fruit and other crops that have altered the use of natural land for farming, and more recently altered farming land by converting it to the production of biofuels for the automotive industry. In brief, in certain populations of bat colonies, the atmospheric temperature is changing too rapidly for them to adjust, their food supplies are shrinking, and their habitat is getting more constrained. It’s a perfect storm for some bat populations, and they’ve reacted to the stresses by what’s happening in their bloodstreams.”

  “You keep saying ‘some’ bat populations, Debra,” said the president. “So it’s not all bats throughout the world.”

  “No sir, not as far as we can tell. I’ve had analyses done of the bloods of hundreds of stable bat colonies, and most don’t seem to have experienced an alteration in the virus content or count in their bodies. But where there’s friction between certain colonies under stress and a local human population, or where severe weather patterns have messed around with the food supply, that’s where we have trouble. That’s why these outbreaks are still isolated. But they’re no longer confined to jungles or forests. Now they’re wherever human populations reside. That’s why we’ve seen it happen in the center of London, New Jersey, and other places. And with more and more bat populations seeking to live in human habitats like parks or botanical gardens in major cities where there’s a ready food source, well . . .” She left the rest of her sentence unspoken.

  Again, the vice president, a former World Bank economist until he became governor of Montana and then ran for president, only to be offered the vice presidency as running mate to President Thomas, asked, “But why bats? What is so special about bats that make them so damnably dangerous, as opposed to birds or fleas or rats or mice?”

  Debra turned to Daniel, who stepped forward to the end of the table and replied, “I’m Daniel Todd. I specialize in bats at Harvard University. What you have to understand is the special niche that bats fill in the scheme of things. Firstly, their antiquity; they derive from an ancient ancestor that is hundreds of millions of years old, which has enabled them to adapt to and survive in conditions that would have killed later arrivals. Bat species are about fifty million years old, and the only mammals that have adapted to flight. Some mammals today glide, but bats are the only ones to actually have proper flight ability. Long, long ago, they diverged from other mammals by congregating in caves and the tops of forests, so they’ve had eons to coevolve with viruses that became symbiotic. Because they’re not avian, this has given them the ability to isolate themselves in out of the way roosts, trees, belfries, and other places. And in this isolation, they’ve been able to harbor and adapt to viruses and make themselves immune to them.”

  “But how did the viruses get into the bats in the first place?” asked the vice president.

  “Sir, you’ve got billions of viruses in your body. And bacteria. All living things, plant and animal, bacteria and fungi, have viruses in them. Few cause problems, but sometimes, they mutate, or a foreign and dangerous virus, like the common cold or flu is introduced, and it’s a week in bed with whiskey and orange,” said Daniel.

  The VP smiled and looked at the president for permission to continue questioning. A nod enabled him to ask, “But why suddenly? Okay, you’ve said that global warming and changes in food distribution patterns, but it’s all a bit sudden, isn’t it, for these things to be happening at the same time, all over the world?”

  Daniel nodded, everybody strained forward to listen, so he said simply, “I agree. It’s a bit sudden. There have been species jumps throughout history, although we didn’t know about it. For instance, the virus level in bats is usually quite low so direct transmission to humans would have been fantastically rare, except for the instances of rabies and bats biting people and infecting them directly. But the transmission of, say, the Hendra virus from bats to horses would have been a bit more common because they’d have deposited the virus through mucus or feces or urine onto horse food. The horse would have concentrated the virus at much higher levels, and then infection in humans who tended the horse would have been pretty certain.


  “On the other hand, the SARS virus transmits from bats to a carrier, mutates, and when it crosses the species into humans, it changes again through its genetic structure and becomes very dangerous, often fatal,” he said.

  “Which means that hosts have to be either amplifiers to concentrate the virus or adapters to change it from relatively benign to dangerous,” said Damien Close, the president’s scientific advisor.

  Daniel nodded. “That’s right, Doctor Close.”

  “And would you acknowledge that even though bat viruses have probably been jumping species for a long time and even into humans, the spread from human to human is extremely rare?” said Damien Close.

  “Yep. I’ll acknowledge that. But that’s not the problem we’re dealing with here, sir. It’s that once these new virulent viruses are in the amplifying or adapting host, the danger isn’t so much them spreading from human to human; they’re so dangerous that just infection, ingestion, or touch can kill. That’s the problem. But we’ve seen in London and here that when people are infected, they’ll become the source of new infections, because after the school kids went to that petting zoo and fell ill, the parents became infected and quickly died when they were attending to their sick children.”

  The table remained silent as it absorbed the implications of what Daniel and Debra had said. Everybody knew in general terms what had been the undercurrent of discussions for weeks, but now that the facts were on the table, the cold reality was shocking. Global warming and the annihilation of traditional farming structures to meet the demands of the biofuel industry, or the demands of the World Bank for indigenous people to plant cash crops to repay debt instead of their traditional food crops, were issues that had to be faced as an international emergency.