“Next, Geist in Engineering. He’s the only one there cleared for Plainville. I posted him separately, but he won’t cooperate unless it comes from you, I need him to brew up something for Stephen. Tell him it is of the highest priority. I’ll also need a nurse with minimum fifty hours full-barrier experience and a strong constitution. We’re avoiding Hartsfield International Airport for obvious reasons, so have a medical helicopter ready for transport at DeKalb Peachtree.”
“Peter. What do I tell people?”
“Whatever you want, just so long as it’s not the truth. I don’t want to see anyone when we land on the roof of Building Seven. When we go down through the corridors to B4: no one standing in doorways, no teary spectators. No displays, I don’t want to see anyone inside the lab except a security detail, two of my people to help load Stephen inside, and the nurse. And one last thing.”
Bobby was scribbling frantically. “Yes?”
“Once these orders are issued, you are to surrender to Quarantine Services. I want every visitor to Building Sixteen since Stephen got back from Orangeburg traced and shuttered up. You’re all going to have to sit out at least seventy-two hours.”
Bobby nodded without protest. He may even have seen this coming. Maryk signed off and sat back against the wide hull. He watched Stephen’s gaunt body rocking with the motion of the plane inside the shimmying plastic walls of the pod. Maryk called the pilot and instructed him to remain twenty miles out to sea during the trip down the eastern coast. Stephen Pearse was a biological time bomb. The microbial spread from a plane crash on land would wipe out every organic form of life in North America within a few days’ time.
Maryk never took an indeliberate, step. He collapsed his tablet and closed his eyes and performed a quick self-diagnosis. No cascade. Not yet.
Admittance into a B4 laboratory is an exercise in biological humility. It is a passage from the microscopic carnage of the everyday human environment into a vessel of absolute atmospheric control.
Maryk jacked in his tablet and keyed in his code and the steel latch of the first steel door gave way under his hand. The first room was quiet and small inside with colored pipes running overhead. Air moving into B4 was purged through high-efficiency particulate air filters and exposure to ultraviolet light and high heat sources. Each successive room was negatively pressured so that air flowed into the lab and preserved containment.
Maryk glanced at the computer screens monitoring the unit. All indications were green. He moved past two small windows to a facing oval door and the door opened inward with a breathy shush.
He changed into a dull green surgical scrub suit and cap and white cotton socks at the lockers. The third room was small and blue and humming with virus-killing ultraviolet light. The piped ceiling was low and the deep indigo light made Maryk’s white hair glow.
Bright blue biological space suits hung from a steel rack inside the fourth room. Maryk bypassed them for a white metal cabinet and pulled on a simple gauze face mask and a pair of goggles. He changed gloves and taped them sealed as the sound of the rushing air grew louder.
The last room was a chemical shower stall illuminated by one dim ultraviolet bulb. Steel spray nozzles nosed out from the walls and a steel grate covered the floor basin. Biohazard warnings and safety checklists glowed on the last door. Laboratory suits were mandatory for admittance. Maryk wore only surgical scrubs, gloves, light face gear, and cotton socks. He threw the latch and stepped over the threshold into airtight B4.
The lab room was a wide gray rectangle. A central work table of sealed glass cabinets had been removed to make room for Stephen’s gurney. He was laid out flat and unmoving with IV feeds running to both arms and an oxygen mask over his drawn face.
The nurse stood inside a blue lab suit between a tray of instruments and the monitors near Stephen’s head. Her lab suit was hooked to a lime green air coil hanging from tracks that ran along the ceiling, Biological space suits were artificially ventilated for comfort during long stretches in B4.
Her eyes widened inside her hood when she saw Maryk. He had avoided B4 since his first year of training due to his claustrophobia. At that time he had been made to wear a full suit. For decades no human being had freely breathed the air he breathed now. Formaldehyde and bleach tinctured the enclosed atmosphere. Maryk did not smell Stephen yet.
He stepped into a pair of yellow rubber boots inside the doorway. He went past a walk-in freezer around the far left corner to check on the connecting animal room and saw that the monkey cages had all been removed. Biohazard Containment had caulked and gabbed epoxy over the screw holes and scrubbed much of the paint clean off the walls. BioCon was reliably meticulous in its work. The shelves and the wide floor space between were jammed with lab machines and equipment rolled in on movers’ casters. In one corner lay the discarded Kurt pod.
Maryk performed the first and most obvious procedure on the long counter between the freezer and the door. It was a standard presumptive PCR test confirming the presence of the Plainville virus in Stephen Pearse’s blood.
Maryk returned to the gurney and faced the nurse across Stephen. Her face within the bowl of her suit hood was small and serious. She pointed out a stainless steel rack. “Mistake,” she said. Words were at a premium inside her howling suit. “They sent down your blood instead of Director Pearse’s.”
All BDC personnel submitted blood and other bodily fluids to be banked for research. On the rack near Maryk hung chilled plastic packs of blood labeled MARYK.
“There is no mistake,” he said and set about his work.
The biological process of Plainville was a marvel to behold. The virus infiltrated the body’s immune system by flipping certain protective T cells against the body’s own armed forces. It hijacked the cells’ reproductive systems and forced them to breed hundreds of thousands of Plainville viruses. This torrent of new viruses overloaded the immune system and eventually triggered an autoimmune response whereby T cells sent to root out invaders went haywire and turned their attack upon healthy organs. The body’s frenzied defensive reaction to Plainville caused the most symptomatic destruction.
Maryk worked to improve Stephen’s vital functions before going after the disease itself. He put Stephen under and excised kernel-sized vascular growths and two grossly inflamed lymph nodes and deposited them into a steel pan. He pared samples for biopsy. He opened Stephen’s abdomen and the tumors he found were already deeply invasive and metastatic. He went after the most conspicuous masses and scraped away as much as a thimbleful at a time. The largest gripped Stephen’s pancreas like a baby’s fist. His liver was the color of tapioca pudding and his spleen was inflamed and clogged with curdled blood. There were dead spots on his kidneys, lungs, and intestines where his circulation had failed. His appendix was bloated and threatened to rupture and flood the abdominal cavity with bacteria-rich pus. Maryk removed it.
Maryk went after Stephen’s internal bleeding aggressively until the machine choked on the sludge. He repaired abscesses and wrapped damaged arteries and plugged leaking veins with surgical gel before closing. Plum-colored bruising flushed the stitching.
He examined scans of Stephen’s brain. There were visible lesions in the thinking center of the right prefrontal cortex, the cognitive behavior and motor planning region of the prefrontal lobe, and the emotional behavior center of the anterior cingulate. But the virus had not yet blitzed the brain stem. Maryk introduced minimal cytokines locally to the brain to excite the immune cells in a bid to preserve Stephen’s mind. He required more powerful ammunition but had not yet received his from Engineering.