C.J. Peters observed the comings and goings at the gas station. It gave him a sense of life and time passing, and he enjoyed the pleasant normality of the scene. Truckers stopped for diesel and Cokes, and businesspeople stopped for cigarettes. He noticed an attractive woman park her car and go over to one of the pay telephones, where she spoke at length to someone. He whiled away the time imagining that she was a housewife talking to a boyfriend. What would these people think if they knew what had invaded their town? He had begun to think that the Army might have to act decisively to put out this fire. He had been in Bolivia when a hot agent called Machupo had broken out, and he had seen a young woman die, covered with blood. North America had not yet seen an emergence of an agent that turned people into bleeders. North America was not ready for that, not yet. But the possibilities for a huge break of Ebola around Washington were impressive when you thought about it.
He wondered about AIDS. What would have happened if someone had noticed AIDS when it first began to spread? It had appeared without warning, secretly, and by the time we noticed it, it was too late. If only we had the right kind of research station in central Africa during the nineteen-seventies… we might have seen it hatching from the forest.
If only we had seen it coming… we might have been abe to stop it, or at least slow it down; …we might have been able to save at least a hundred million lives. At least. Because the AIDS virus’s penetration of the human species was still in its early stages, and the penetration was happening inexorably. People didn’t realize that the AIDS thing had only just began. No one could predict how many people were going to die of AIDS, but he believed that the death toll, in the end, could hit hundreds of millions—and that possibility had not sunk in with the general public. On the other hand, suppose AIDS had been noticed? Any “realistic” review of the AIDS virus when it was first appearing in Africa would probably have led experts and government officials to conclude that the virus was of little significance for human health and that scarce research funds should not be allocated to it—after all, it was just a virus that infected a handful of Africans, and all it did was suppress their immune systems. So what? And then the agent had gone on a tremendous amplification all over the planet, and it was still expanding its burn, with no end in sight.
We didn’t really know what Ebola virus could do. We didn’t know if the agent in the monkey house was, in fact, ebola Zaire or it was something else, some new strain of Ebola. An agent that could travel in a cough? Probably not, but who could tell? The more he thought about it, the more he wondered, Who is going to take out those monkeys? Because someone is going to have to go in there and take them out. We can’t just walk away from that building and let it self-destruct. This is a human-lethal virus. Who is going to sack the monkeys? The guys who work for the company?
He ha begun to wonder whether the Army should move in with a military biohazard SWAT team. His own term for this type of action was NUKE. To nuke a place means to sterilize it, to render it lifeless. If the hosts are people, you evacuate them and put them in the Slammer. If the hosts are animals, you kill them and incinerate the carcasses. Then you drench the place with chemicals and fumes. He wondered if the Army would have to nuke the monkey house.
Gene Johnson sat in the passenger seat next to C.J. Peters. His mind was somewhere else. His mind was in Africa. He was thinking about Kitum Cave.
Gene was very worried about this situation, not to say shit scared. He thought to himself, I don’t know how we are going to get out of this one without people dying. His worry was growing all the time, every minute. The U.S. military, he thought, is stepping into a crisis that is already full-blown, and if something goes wrong and people die, the military will be blamed.
Suddenly he turned to C.J. and spoke his mind. He said, “It looks inevitable that we’re going to have to take out all the monkeys. A Level 4 outbreak is not a game. I want to warn you about just how detailed and major an effort this is going to be. It’s going to be very complex, it’s going to take some time, and we have to be very fucking careful to do it right. If we are going to do it right, the gist of what I’m saying, C.J., is that we cannot have amateurs in key positions. We need to have experienced people who knows what they are doing. Do you understand what’s going to happen if something goes wrong?” And he was thinking: Peters—Peters—he’s never been in an outbreak this complicated—none of us has—the only thing like it was Kitum Cave. And Peters wasn’t there.
C.J. Peters listened to Gene Johnson in silence, and didn’t reply.
He felt that it was sort of irritating to get this kind of advice from Gene—when he’s telling you the obvious, telling you what you already know.
C.J. Peters and Gene Johnson had a stressful, complicated relationship. They had journeyed together in a truck expedition across central Africa, looking for Ebola virus, and a lot of tension had built up between the two men by the end of the trip. The traveling had been brutal, as hard as any on earth—roads didn’t exists, bridges were gone, the maps must have been drawn by a blind monk, the people spoke languages not even the native translators could understand, and the expedition had not been able to find enough food and water. Worst of all, they ran into difficulty finding human cases of Ebola—they were not able to discover the virus in a natural host or in people.
It was during that trip, perhaps as a result of the chronic food shortage, that C.J. had taken to eating termites. The ones that swarmed out of their nests. They had wings. Gene, who was more fastidious than C.J., had not been quite so eager to try them. Popping termites in his mouth, C.J. would make remarks like, “they have this extra… mmm…” and he would smack his lips, smack, smack, and you’d hear a mouthful of termites crunching between his teeth, and he’d spit out the wings, pah, ptah. The African members of expedition, who liked termites, had pushed Gene to try them, too, and finally he did. He placed a handful of them in his mouth, and was surprised to find that they tasted like walnuts. C.J. had spoken longingly of finding the African termite queen, the glistening white sac that was half a foot long and as thick as bratwurst, bursting with eggs and creamy insect fat, the queen you ate alive and whole, and she was said to twitch as she went down your throat. Although snacking on termites had amused them, they had argued with each other about how to do the science, how to search for the virus. In Africa, Gene had felt that C.J. was trying to run the show, and it irritated Gene to no end.
Suddenly a blue, windowless, unmarked van turned off the road and pulled through the gas station and parked next to them. The van parked in such a way that no one on the road or at the gas station could see what went on between the two vehicles. A man swung heavily out of the driver’s seat. It was Bill Volt. He walked over to the Army people, and they got out of their cars.
“I’ve got’em right back here,” he said, and he threw open the side door of the van.
They saw seven black plastic garbage bags sitting on the floor of the van. They could see the outlines of limbs and heads in the bags.
C.J. said to himself, What is this?
Nancy gritted her teeth and silently pulled in a breath. She could see how the bags bulged in places, as if liquid had pooled inside them. She hoped it wasn’t blood. “What on earth is all of that?” she exclaimed.