“Hemorrhagic viruses aren’t usually spread from animals to humans, Sam,” Suzanne said, forcing her voice to be patient. “At least, none that I’ve ever encountered before, and Díaz’s journal clearly states the disease began in the animals around the camp.”
“But…” Jakes began.
“Send for the lab,” Lionel said, cutting him off. “This shit could be damn near anything at this point! I vote we just run all of the tests for both viruses and bacteria and stop all this goddamn guessing and backbiting!”
Everyone gaped, not used to hearing the mild-mannered gentle giant speak so harshly.
He walked over to kneel over a decimated corpse with dried blood all over the face. “The only thing I’m fairly certain of is it’s not from a fungus or mycobacteria… at least not any that I know of could spread this fast or be fatal in such a short period of time as we see here, nor would they cause this much hemorrhaging.”
Mason left Joel to peer down at the corpse where Lionel was kneeling. If he’d needed any further convincing it wasn’t necessary now. The body of a young woman lay in a pool of dried blood. A swarm of black ants, so thick they covered her from head to toe, was feeding on her. All the signs of hemorrhagic shock were in evidence, a profusion of bleeding from every orifice.
“Send for the lab, Joel,” he said without looking around. “And notify CDC we’ve got an emergency hot zone of unknown proportions.”
Chapter 6
Mason Williams stood with his hands on his hips as he looked around the clearing, watching his team work. He took a deep breath. He was just about to put in motion events that would have a profound effect on Mexico — events that could not be undone once begun.
“Have them start the ball rolling with the Mexican government to get this area sealed off, and be sure you give this a Biohazard Level Four code. They’ll want to know if it’s airborne and we can’t give them an answer yet, so make certain the Mexican government understands how potentially dangerous this is. They have to give us a maximum perimeter until we give this bug a name and a source. No telling what the host will turn out to be, or even if it’s viral or bacterial, but it has to have something to do with unearthing Montezuma’s tomb or we’d have seen it here in Mexico before.”
“The worst thing they’ve ever had down here is the food,” Sam grumbled, opening his case to take out a scalpel and a pack of glass slides and petri dishes. “I don’t see how anybody can eat the spicy shit without developing either cast-iron intestines or colon cancer.”
Lauren stepped over to where she could look into Mason’s face mask while she talked to him, even though everyone in the team could hear her as well. “Mason, Díaz’s journal said the disease started in the animals. If that was true here, how are we going to get wild animals to obey a quarantine perimeter?”
He shook his head and raised his hand as if to run it through his hair, which was impossible in a Racal suit. “We can’t, Lauren. That’s why we need a really large perimeter and we hope the infected animals, if they are indeed the vector, get sick and die before they travel across it.”
“Yeah, and we hope like hell it’s not transmitted by birds, like bird flu is,” Suzanne said. “If it is, then we’re toast and any hope we have of containing this son of a bitch is dead in the water.”
“Luckily, I think that possibility is almost nil,” Jakes chimed in. “If it were transmitted by birds, I think by now we’d have heard of more deaths spread out all through the jungle from here to Mexico City.”
Mason sighed deeply. “I hope you’re both correct and we are able to keep the disease within the perimeter.”
“Here’s two more,” Shirley announced, bending over. “It looks like a boy and a girl. They have their arms around each other like they lay down together. I suppose they knew they were dying and tried to comfort each other.”
“Are you writing a fucking book or are you going to get us some samples to look at?” Sam asked impatiently while carving slices of decaying flesh from his corpse.
Mason looked toward the Aztec temple, trying to ignore the bickering. He knew it was because of the tremendous stress of finding so many young people dead from a horrible disease of unknown origin. Even though his team members were consummate professionals, finding so many young bodies on the site was going to be very difficult for them and they would all have to deal with it in their own ways.
He wondered what sort of killer had been unleashed when these archaeologists opened Montezuma’s hidden burial chamber. Was it viral or bacterial? A virus could not survive more than a few minutes outside a living host, making it harder to consider a viral source when Montezuma’s tomb had supposedly been sealed for hundreds of years.
While he was too pragmatic to believe in curses, he pondered the cause of so many unexplained deaths. If it had come from some source in the jungle, someone in medicine should have diagnosed it or reported its symptoms before now, prior to its sudden appearance at Tlateloco.
This was ultimately his Wildfire Team’s job, to identify microscopic monsters and to figure out how to stop them before they were able to cause widespread death and destruction.
Howard Carter hadn’t lived long enough to see what kind of demon he brought to the surface in Egypt. At the time no one understood invisible dangers, other than to blame “bad air” or “unhealthy humors” or “ancient curses” for unexplained illnesses.
Was the unearthing of Montezuma’s tomb the beginning of a far more lethal discovery? According to Dr. Sullivan, as many as thirty-two people may have perished here, if the entire archaeological team was found to have died, and that was not counting several Mexican laborers who were usually used for the heavy lifting and digging according to Lauren.
Mason turned around when he heard a soft groan. Lauren was bending over a body, reaching down to brush some of the ants off the face so she could make an identification.
He walked over and when he looked into her face he noticed a single tear coursing down her cheek.
“Are you okay?”
She looked at him and nodded. “Yes, I’m just saying good-bye to them as I make the IDs.” She hesitated and then she added, “When I come to one of the laborers, I’ll go through their clothing and see if I can find some sort of ID so we can at least give the Mexican government their names.”
He nodded his thanks for her extra effort and patted the arm of her Racal, trying to show her he understood how difficult this was for her, and then he turned and went to see how the other members of his team were making out.
He walked over to where Suzanne was kneeling to take samples from a body. When she finished and stood up he stretched his neck inside his helmet and looked into her eyes. “I’ve got a bad feeling on this one, Suzanne. I don’t rely on hunches or guesswork, but I can’t shake the sensation that we’re about to find something we hoped we would never see.”
“What’s that, boss?”
“A bug so hot that it will cause a pandemic that will spread across the North American continent like Grant going through Richmond — and will cause even more destruction than he did in his march across Georgia.”
After checking in with the other team members and finding no one needed his assistance, Mason walked over to the entrance to the temple and leaned his head into the stone door.
When he shined his flashlight into the darkness, he saw a four-foot-square tunnel carved into the wall of square stones. He eased in, bent down onto his knees, and crept slowly down into the tunnel opening.
He soon found it led into the bowels of the temple. He swept the walls and floor with his flashlight, making sure he didn’t crawl over anything sharp that would violate his suit.