He knew what I meant, his eyes growing wider. I uttered a single word then. The word has terrified humans for two thousand years.
“It’s a one-hour test,” I said. “We can do it right now. At our lab. After we leave, disinfect this room.”
Ranjay backed from the bed slightly, not because he feared the corpse. He feared the idea.
“But you never get four people with it, never, that has never happened,” he said. “I’ve seen this, yes, in India. Many cases. But you never get a group!”
“You’re right,” I repeated. “Quite right. So far.”
NINE
“It cannot be possible,” Ranjay said.
The twenty-five million dollar U.S. Arctic Research Center was a concrete tower sitting on the tundra, a half mile from the base and satellite farms, jutting up like those old forts forming the French Marginot Line before World War Two. Inside were labs assigned to scientists. The amenities were first class but security stank. When it came to the Arctic, Congress didn’t take the Arctic seriously.
I remember meeting a Senate aide on a fact-finding mission up here once. He’d asked me if the Eskimos spoke English and shops accepted U.S. dollars.
“This is the U.S.,” I’d responded, and watched the man’s cheeks color. “That was a joke,” he replied.
Now, in our lab, I said, “Here goes. We test for rabies.”
George Carling lay naked, under a sheet, in a bright light that would have driven him crazy before he died. I smelled formaldehyde and a more corrupt whiff from the man on the table, who had been alive hours ago.
Eddie, Ranjay, and I wore aprons, gloves, plastic visors. Sengupta shook his head, but looked distraught. “We considered this possibility, and discarded it.”
“But we didn’t test for it, Ranjay.”
“Because you never get cases together, never a cluster. Never!”
The Harmon bodies waited in a walk-in freezer, down a long, lab-lined hall.
“Rabies, one hundred percent fatal,” said Eddie morosely, watching me unwrap an enormous hypodermic, World War One size, more wicked-looking sword than needle. “Ebola deaths, ninety percent. Plague can be treated. Rabies? Hydrophobia? Once the symptoms hit, good-bye.”
I bent over the body. I probed with my gloved index finger at the base of George’s powerful neck. His feet hung upside down over the end of the table. The flesh was yellowish in death, even paler under the light.
Rabies, I knew, was a Lassa virus, a zoonotic brain infection named after Lyssa, Greek goddess of mad dogs. The Greeks understood rage enough to give it a god. By the twenty-first century, rabies had been shut down as a major killer in developed countries, but still killed fifty thousand around the world each year, usually in poor nations, jungle countries, where bite victims could not reach or afford the painful series of shots that could — only if administered before symptoms appear — halt the disease.
“Rabies kills one by one,” Ranjay argued. “If it spread the other way, my God”—he shuddered—“you’d have millions of fatalities.”
I found the spot where spine flowed into brain, a nerve highway or, if I was right, the road by which the virus had migrated to George’s skull, taken root, and spread back to set fire to his thinking, burn along his nerve endings, shut down speech, and, in the end, with a swiftness defying the usual timetable, stop his heart.
“The symptoms were there,” I said. “Come on, Ranjay, a laundry list of what we heard on Kelley’s recordings.”
Rabies is one of the most hideous diseases in the human imagination; the basis of vampire and werewolf legends. The virus infects through an animal bite, although, on rare occasions, it has sickened lab workers who got it in their eyes or mouth. Rabies transforms a pet into a salivating killer. It lives in superstition. I think we were all fairly terrified now.
“I grant this. Yes, Joe, water becomes disgusting. I had a case, a farmer, peaceful man, screaming as they brought him in because it was raining, that water hurt. But for five people to have it… no, impossible.”
Eddie said, “Plus, he died too fast.”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t mosquito-borne encephalitis. Or West Nile. Negative on herpes variations. The guttural noises. He thought he was speaking English.”
I inserted the needle into the mass of muscle and flesh, the brain stem. I drew back on the plunger, watching the hypo fill with a dark gray mix of blood and brain tissue. “Of course, none of our dipsticks were positive. Rabies doesn’t hide in blood. We came here to look for mutations. Then maybe we found one but refused to see it.”
“Too bad Clay Qaqulik blew his brains out,” said Eddie. “Can’t test it.”
“Even if George tests negative, we’ll do the others.”
Just weeks ago the research center had been packed with scientists from around the world; its hallways a mélange of languages: Swiss German from the glacier people, Norwegian or English from the ocean currents people, German-German from the Max Planck Institute’s climate people.
The locks on the doors were old-fashioned number punchers, there were no eye scans or fingerprint panels. The walk-in labs had key locks, and inside freezers, areas were assigned by rack and shelf space. Preserved samples ranged from algae to whale livers, the only security a few yellow-and-black BIOHAZARD stickers on crates, vials, shelves.
“Good thing the bodies were refrigerated,” Dr. Sengupta mused. “Because we are at the tail end of the period when the virus can be detected after death.”
Eddie shook his head. “You’re imagining things, One. That cabin’s been the site of research for decades. Who knows what the hell someone dumped there. Occam’s razor. The most likely explanation is probable.”
I slid out the needle and injected most of the extracted fluid into a five-ounce sample bottle, which Eddie sealed. This would remain our primary sample, which Eddie walked into the freezer down the hall. The place was so deserted that I heard his footsteps receding. George’s tissue would be stored beside our collection taken over the summer; toxoplasma from a four-year-old we treated for anemia in Point Hope — victim of a parasite normally found in cats farther south, but recently beluga whales have tested positive for it. So have people eating their dried meat. Stored rabies from Arctic foxes. And the prize, a disgusting foot-long tapeworm, diphyllobothriasis, normally found in Pacific Ocean salmon, but they’ve been moving north as oceans warm.
“This is all we need, another 1348,” Eddie said. He’d returned.
I moved to the microscope table and dripped a single drop of George’s fluid onto a glass slide.
Thirteen forty-eight, I knew — using a tongue depressor to thin the sample, so light could pass through it — was the red-letter date for plague researchers. It was a year when the smartest physicians on Earth did not even dream that microbes existed, and when infected fleas somewhere in central Europe boarded a sailing ship in the fur of a few black rats. By the time they scurried ashore in Marseille, the crew was dying of a new disease. And the fleas kept biting: a baby in a market, a husband and wife as they made love in a hut, a swineherd, a nobleman. Rank and money made no difference. They all began to die.
“Now we air dry the slide. Ten more minutes,” I said.
Bubonic Plague was what those terrified Europeans called the dark buboes that erupted in those medieval groins and armpits, that had victims coughing black blood and dying by the thousands. And then the disease got worse. Something changed in its DNA. It went from being transmittable through flea bites, into a killer that floated in air, lived in human breath, murdered if you kissed a girl, if a stranger coughed on you, if you took a steam with a friend, if you shook a hand and picked a food particle off your teeth. Bubonic Plague exploded into the catastrophic Pneumonic Plague, the Black Death, which rampaged across a continent and slaughtered one out of four people. Graveyards were overwhelmed. Societies collapsed. Armies of flagellants marched across Europe, through villages of the dead and dying; parades of half-naked, half-starved supplicants, praying, whipping themselves, crying for God, blaming the suffering on human sins.