“Where are you? Wanted to check in with this model.”
She frowned, wondering why he had taken the time to send her a text message when he could have just waited for her to return. Stopping in the hallway, she sent a quick reply.
“Went to cafeteria. On my way back. What’s up?”
She didn’t wait for a response; instead, she stepped into the elevator and pressed the number for her floor. The elevator deposited her onto her floor, and she walked into the lab. She found Charlie, his back to her, hunched over the microscope.
“Hey, Charlie. What’s going on?”
Charlie jumped, then turned. “What is this, Dr. Torres? Is this the same sample that was sent over from earlier?”
“Yes…” Dr. Torres replied.
“Did they say what it was?”
“What do you mean? They sent over a standard laboratory-required specimen size for examination and classification. If they knew what it was already, they wouldn’t have sent it.”
Charlie frowned, then nodded. “I know, I guess I’m just confused…”
“What? What is it?”
“Well, I don’t understand why you would have mounted both samples at once.”
Now it was Dr. Torres’ turn to be confused. “Both? What do you mean?”
Charlie plugged in the external monitor display to the microscope’s output line, projecting the image seen by the microscope onto a 40-inch HDTV hanging on the wall behind them. “Look,” he said, as he used a wireless computer mouse to draw a circle around one of the spherical objects on the screen. “This is your virus, right? The ‘Varicella Zoster’ strain, or whatever?”
She nodded.
“Well, when you continue to zoom in, you’ll see the standard components — nucleocapsid, lipids, different protein amalgamations, etcetera.”
Dr. Torres nodded again, trying to hurry him along.
“But then if you keep increasing the magnification…” he paused to reset the microscope’s magnification wheels, “you’ll notice that the interior structure of the virion is completely crammed with foreign bodies.”
“Foreign? How can they be? They’re part of the virus.”
“Right — but that doesn’t mean they always were. The virus certainly doesn’t look like it wants them in there, does it? They’re all bulging at the seams, thanks to these spirillum pushing everything around.”
Dr. Torres looked up sharply. “Spirillum? What are you talking about?”
He zoomed in even more. As the microscopic components of the viral organism came into focus, she saw the unmistakable spiraling of one of the common bacterial shapes. The twisted object grew as Charlie pushed the microscope to its limits; the screen suddenly appearing grainy and slightly out of focus.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
“You didn’t see this before?” Charlie asked.
She shook her head.
“So, then, I’m guessing there weren’t two different samples?”
Both scientists were speechless as they stared at the TV monitor. The fuzzy black and white image was unmistakable.
“No. No, Charlie. There weren’t,” she said. “We’re looking at some sort of herpesvirus that contains a living, breathing, bacterial infection.”
“That’s impossible,” Charlie said. “There’s no way for the virions to provide livable conditions for the bacteria.”
“I know,” Dr. Torres said. “But we’re dealing with something completely different here; something outside the realm of what either of us has studied before.” As she spoke and stared at the screen in front of her, Dr. Torres grew more and more confident that what she was looking at was, in fact, what she said it was.
Impossible or not, what they were looking at was a living bacteria fully functioning inside a virus.
Chapter Twenty
Dr. Malcolm Fischer gasped. Sucking in a huge breath of air, he tried to swallow. It was painful; somehow, something wasn’t right. He tried to look down, but had a hard time moving his head.
Weird.
He tried moving his hands instead. Nothing.
His fingers, maybe?
Nope.
Malcolm felt glued down, lying on his back. At least it was comfortable.
What do I have control over, then? he wondered.
He opened his eyes, blinking once, twice. He moved his eyeballs around; at least he could see.
He tried to make sense of his surroundings. Bright lights, fluorescent. The kind used in offices and commercial buildings. Whitish walls, some sort of sterile color.
That was it.
Okay, what does that mean? Malcolm tried to move his body. Anything. Nothing would give. It was as if he was —
Am I paralyzed?
He considered it a moment. He didn’t remember taking a fall, or any type of accident. Actually, now that he thought harder, he couldn’t remember of anything. There was…
A helicopter.
Oh, God.
The memory roared back into Malcolm’s mind in a flash. The students…
He remembered being forced into the chopper at gunpoint, being pushed down into a seat and strapped in, then the gentle upward motion of the pilot’s expert takeoff. They ascended only a few feet off the ground.
The gun.
The horrid sound of hundreds of miniature explosions rocking the gunman back and forth on the side-mounted machine gun.
The one he’d fired into the students. His students.
A seizure of pain overtook him, but he couldn’t tell if it was merely psychological. He closed his eyes again, breathing. Still, his hands and legs and arms, everything, was frozen in place.
Where am I?
Just then, he heard a beeping sound. It had grown louder — or had he just now noticed it?
He pushed his eyelids apart and tried to look for the source of the sound. As his eyes opened, the beeping grew more intense; quicker.
He heard footsteps. Running.
“…Patient experiencing some sort of shock. Possible reaction…”
Voices drifted in and out. They were in the room.
Who were ‘they?’
Malcolm was growing agitated. He wanted answers, and he wanted to be able to move.
“He’s awake!”
More footsteps.
Now he could hear multiple people — three? — moving around his bed.
I’m in a hospital. It must be. I’m paralyzed.
“He’s no longer comatose?” one voice asked.
“No, he’s got his eyes open.”
The voices were hurried; frantic.
“Okay, let’s get some acetaminophen into him; he’s probably going to be a little rough around the edges.”
“Got it. We’re keeping him up?”
“No, no. That’s just to hold him over until he goes under again. It shouldn’t be long.”
Malcolm heard a popping sound, followed by the smell of something bitter. Some sort of chemical. A bag of liquid was suddenly passed directly over his face. He saw a strange assortment of letters and numbers, then a few letters that his brain computed as words.
Global. D-something Global.
“Ok, right. DG headquarters is going to be here tomorrow morning, and we need to get him back down.” Another pop, followed by a sloshing sound, reached Malcolm’s ears.