“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 team 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.”