The radio crackled in her ear, then the lead epidemiologist, Dr. Grant Parson, spoke. “All researchers are to report to the central conference room for a summary meeting.”
Lisa placed a rubber palm on the plastic cage. “Keep hanging in there, little fella.”
She stood, unhooked her oxygen hose from the wall, and carried it with her through the air lock that led out from the in vivo animal-testing lab to the rest of the complex. Each lab was cordoned off from the other, both compartmentalizing the research and further limiting the chance of an outbreak spreading through the facility.
She stepped into the central hub. Every other hour, the lab’s scientists gathered in the room to compare notes and confer about their progress. To facilitate these meetings, a long table had been set up with additional monitors to aid in teleconferencing with researchers across the United States. A window behind the table looked out into the dark hangar.
She spotted a familiar face out there, standing at the glass.
She lifted an arm toward Painter and pointed to her ear. He wore a radio headpiece and dialed into a private channel.
“How’re you doing?” he asked, resting his hand on the window.
“We’re making slow progress,” she said, though she knew he was asking about her personal status, not an update on the research. She shied away from that and asked a more important question. “How’s Josh?”
She got regular updates from the medical staff, but she wanted to hear it from Painter, from someone who personally knew her brother.
“Still sedated, but he’s holding his own. Josh is tough… and a fighter.”
Painter was certainly right. Her brother tackled mountains, but even he couldn’t battle what couldn’t be seen.
“The good news is that it looks like the surgeons were able to salvage the knee joint,” Painter added. “Should help his recovery and physical therapy afterward.”
She prayed there was an afterward. “What about… is there any sign of infection?”
“No. Everything looks good.”
She took little comfort from this news. Josh’s contact with the agent had been via a break in the skin versus being inhaled. The lack of symptoms could just be due to a longer incubation period from that route of exposure.
A fear continued to nag at her.
Had I gotten his leg off in time?
Dr. Parson spoke up behind her. “Let’s get this meeting started.”
Lisa settled her gloved palm over Painter’s hand on the window. “Keep an eye on him for me.”
Painter nodded.
Lisa turned to join the other researchers. Some sat, others stood, all in their BSL4 suits. Over the next fifteen minutes, the head of each lab module gave an update.
An edaphologist — a soil scientist who studied microorganisms, fungi, and other life hiding in the earth — was the first to report. Anxiety fueled his words.
“I finished a full soils analysis from the dead zone. It’s not just the vegetation and wildlife that’s being killed. To a depth of two feet, I found the samples to be devoid of any life. Bacteria, spores, insects, worms. All dead. The ground had been essentially sterilized.”
Parson let his shock show. “That level of pathogenicity… it’s unheard of.”
Lisa pictured those dark hills, imagining the same shadow penetrating deep underground, leaving no life in its wake as it slowly rolled across the landscape. She had also heard about the inclement weather descending upon the Mono Lake Basin. It was a recipe for an ecological disaster of incalculable proportions.
A bacteriologist spoke up next. “Speaking of pathogenicity, our team has run through a gamut of liquid disinfection traps, seeking some way to sterilize the samples from the field. We’ve tried extremes of alkalinity and acidity. Lye, various bleaches, et cetera. But the samples remain infectious.”
“What about extreme heat?” Lisa asked, remembering Painter’s belief that they might have to scorch those hills to stop the blight from spreading.
The researcher shrugged. “We thought we initially had some success. We burned an infected plant to a fine ash — and at first it seemed to work, but after it cooled, it remained just as infectious. We believe the heat merely put the microbe into some type of spore or cyst-like state.”
“Maybe it takes something hotter,” Lisa said.
“Possibly. But how hot is hot enough? We’ve discussed a nuclear level of heat. But if the fires of an atomic bomb don’t kill it, the blast could scatter and aerosolize the agent for hundreds of miles.”
That was definitely not an option.
“Keep searching,” Parson encouraged.
“It would help if we knew what we were fighting,” the bacteriologist finished, which earned him many nods from his fellow scientists.
Lisa explained her own findings, confirming that they were likely dealing with something viral in nature.
“But it’s exceedingly small,” she said, “smaller than any known virus. We know Dr. Hess was experimenting with extremophiles from around the world, organisms that could thrive in acidic or alkaline environments, even some that could survive in the molten heat found in volcanic vents.”
She looked pointedly at the bacteriologist. “Then to make matters worse, we know Hess was also delving into the very fringes of synthetic biology. His project — Neogenesis — sought to genetically manipulate the DNA of extremophiles in an attempt to help endangered species, to make them hardier and more resistant to environmental changes. In this quest, who knows what monster he created down there?”
Dr. Edmund Dent, a CDC virologist, stood up. “I believe we’ve caught a glimpse of that monster. Under the newly installed electron microscope.”
All eyes turned to him.
“At first we thought it was a technical glitch. What we found seemed too small — unimaginably small — but if Dr. Cummings’s assessment concerning the size of the infectious particle is accurate, then perhaps it’s not a mistake.” Dent glanced to her. “If you’d be willing to join us…”
“Of course. I think we should also bring in a geneticist and bioengineer. Just in case, we—”
A loud klaxon sounded, drawing all their gazes to the window. A blue light flashed in the darkness, spinning in time with the alarm. It came from the patient containment unit.
Panic drew Lisa to her feet.
12
“Hold on tight!” the pilot called out.
The small Twin Otter plane bucked like an untamed stallion as it crossed high over the iceberg-choked Weddell Sea. The winds worsened as they neared the coast.
“These bastarding katabatics are kicking me in the arse!” the pilot explained. “If you’re feeling lurgy, I got airsickness bags back there if you’re going to chunder. Don’t go messin’ my girl up.”
Gray kept a firm hold on the strap webbing of his jump seat. He was belted in tightly along one side of the cabin. At the back, crates of gear and supplies rattled and creaked. He was normally not prone to motion sickness, but this roller coaster of a flight was testing even his mettle.
Jason sat across the cabin, his head lolling, half asleep, plainly unfazed by the turbulence. Apparently he’d had plenty of experience with this storm-swept continent. Instead, the kid seemed more afflicted by the twenty-four hours of long flights to get to the south end of the world.
At least this was their last leg.
Earlier today, just after sunrise — which was noon this side of the world, the beginning of their dark winter — they had flown from the Falkland Islands to the Antarctic Peninsula, landing atop a rocky promontory on Adelaide Island, where the British maintained Rothera Station. That flight had been aboard a large, bright red Dash 7 aircraft, with British Antarctic Survey emblazoned on its side. At Rothera, they had switched to this smaller Twin Otter, similarly painted, and set off across the Weddell Sea toward the Brunt Ice Shelf: a floating hundred-meter-thick sheet that hugged the far coastline in a region of East Antarctica called Coats Land.