“Now we stain our slide,” I said.
“I am very fearful. I am thinking… about Constantine’s experiments,” Dr. Sengupta said.
Constantine was a Texas researcher who worked on rabies in the 1960s and his conclusions scared the shit out of me. That’s because Constantine worked in a huge cave, Frio Cave. And on the massive vaulted ceiling of that damp place lived a colony of three million silver-haired bats. Bats that fled their home each dusk in clouds of winged movement, spread through a thousand square miles of landscape, and were susceptible to rabies. The strain they transmitted was particularly virulent.
Thirty seconds and the slide will be dry.
Constantine was curious, I knew, why there had been a few isolated incidents where hikers in remote areas — people who insisted they’d never been bitten by animals — came down with rabies.
They’d been in bat caves, he found.
Constantine’s theory was that under the right circumstances, rabies could travel in air.
To test this, he placed caged coyotes in that cave, beneath the squirming bats on the ceiling, so the coyotes ate and slept in that air saturated with bat guano and effluence. Half of the cages were built with iron bars, enabling bats to enter the gaps. For the rest, steel mesh covered the bars, stopping bats, but the mesh would admit airborne virus.
Constantine’s question was: Would the mesh stop rabies?
“All the animals died,” Sengupta said.
Eddie shook his head. He did not want to believe. “That was closed space, Ranjay, the air thick with bat shit. There’s no connection between transmission in the Arctic and coyotes trapped with three million bats. Yeah, Constantine proved aerosolization possible, but not here.”
I gingerly moved our slide to the microscope, careful not to cut myself. Rabies virus is big enough to show up on a high school lab student’s microscope. No extra-special equipment required.
“Maybe I should have my sons and wife leave town, go back to her mother’s, in Mumbai,” mused Sengupta.
I heard my heart beating. I envisioned the Harmons in their camp. I inserted the slide beneath the eyepiece. At that moment we all sensed ourselves standing at a border between a world we knew and a different, frightening one that might exist a moment from now.
“Bird flu,” I said, adjusting focus.
Same story. Mutation. Bird flu originated in winged vertebrates. They passed the disease on to pigs — dropped a seed into their food maybe, who knows — and the pigs sickened and transmitted the flu to humans.
But then, again, something changed, we knew. The middle stage disappeared. I envisioned it. Somewhere on a Chinese farm, in a fetid sty a thousand miles from Beijing, air filled with alterations, maybe a local factory dumped chemicals in the water, maybe the temperature rose just a little bit, or nature stepped in, but for whatever reason suddenly DNA mutated and that flu bypassed pigs as hosts and went directly from birds into humans.
You no longer needed a pig to get it. You could catch it from a heron on a rooftop in Paris. You could catch it from pigeons you feed bread crumbs to in Central Park.
“Host shift,” said Eddie.
“Mutation,” said Sengupta. “Evolution at its finest.”
I considered Barrow, the homes, and church sing-alongs, the value center, the high school — any town, every town, with a thousand places for a virus to move between hosts.
I took a seat on the stool. I watched bright light shine up through the slide. I peered down.
“Oh, shit,” I said, uttering the most eloquent exclamation of inadequacy on the planet.
My head was an anvil. What I saw in the eyepiece matched the photo on my screen. The bullet shapes were unmistakable. I was staring at a quivering mass of microbes, thick as bees in a hive, bumping and shifting as if trying to get out; the spiked coatings like defensive antenna on a mine in the ocean, or an armored dinosaur; and beneath that, I saw the shadow of the virus’s protective envelope or shield; and inside that, like explosive powder that Merlin had poured into his whale bomb, the killer: looping spiral DNA.
“Rabies,” I said.
Eddie gasped. “How the hell did George get it? He was nowhere near the Harmons.”
I turned away, heading down the hall for the freezers and the three Harmon bodies. Eddie and Ranjay trailed along. “George doesn’t even live in Barrow. He flew in a few days ago. The Harmons were in the field then.”
Sengupta said, “Then the starting place is in town?”
“Let’s wait and see what we find with the Harmons. Maybe they’ll be negative.”
An hour later we stood amid the three bodies, now all laid out on tables, a little party of the dead.
Stunned, despite the fact that I’d anticipated this, I said, “And not a single bite mark. Anywhere.”
I heard a droning sound over the quiet whoosh of our air-circulation system. Looking out the window, I saw the contrail of the afternoon Alaska Air Flight to Anchorage, and, from there, many passengers would board other planes, to New York, L.A., Paris, Hamburg, Moscow…
The contrail disappeared into the gray.
Sengupta said, “We must call the CDC in Atlanta. I have only two doses of rabies vaccine at the hospital. We will need more.”
I tried to think. I shut my eyes. I flashed to flu season in New York. People crowding subways and buses, coughing. Workers and kids coming home at night and going straight to bed. Patients flooding ER rooms, lining up in local pharmacies. Whole offices of workers short of help.
I looked out the window, southward, toward the lights of Barrow. Almost five thousand people there.
What we’ve got here — if it’s contagious — is much worse than a flu. It makes you angry. It makes you crazy. It kills you ranting and screaming, stark raving mad.
Sengupta laughed softly. “Just think. I wanted to come to the Arctic.”
“So the possibilities are…” said Eddie.
“One. Worst case. It’s evolved. It’s traveling in a new way. Mutation. Evolution. Aerosolization.”
“Two?”
“The starting point is in town, in a single location they all visited. Point source, not contagious.”
“Is there a three?”
“Intentional. Someone gave it to them. Kelley said Tilda Swann was tampering with their water supply. It was out in the open, in the airport supply area.”
Ranjay said, “Where would someone get a sample?”
“Like we did. Sick dog. Dead fox. Hell, anyone could walk into the freezer where our samples are kept,” I said.
Sengupta recoiled. He was not a soldier, trained to look for enemies. “That is crazy,” he said. “Why would someone do that? If you wanted to hurt someone, there are other ways, easier ways to do it. You are talking about a very, very insane individual.”
Eddie said, “You don’t think it’s a weapon, One!”
I knew from our unit files that in those old Soviet labs, across the Bering Sea, as recently as thirty years ago, scientists had tried to weaponize rabies.