The children sat at the kitchen table, eating instant oatmeal. She told them that she would be working late, so they would be on their own at suppertime. She looked in the freezer and found a stew. It would do fine for kids. They could defrost it in the microwave. She watched from the kitchen window as they walked down the driveway to the bottom of the hill to wait for the school bus… “This work is not for a married female. You are either going to neglect your work or neglect your family” were the words of a superior officer long ago.
She cut a bagel for herself, and brought along an apple, and ate them in the car on the way to Reston. By the time she arrived at the monkey house, Jerry had already suited up and gone inside. The staging room was crowded, warm, loud, confused. The experts on the use of space suits were giving advice to team members as they suited up. Nancy herself had never worn a Racal field suit, but the principles are the same as with a heavy-duty Chemturion. The main principle is that the interior of the space suit is a cocoon housing the normal world, which you bring with you into the hot area. If there were a break in the suit, the normal world would vanish, merging with the hot world, and you would be exposed. She spoke to the soldiers as they suited up. “Your suits are under pressure,” she said. “If you get a rip in your suit, you have to tape it shut right away, or you’ll lose your pressure, and contaminated air could flow inside the suit.” She held up a roll of brown sticky tape. “Before I go in, I wrap extra tape around my ankle, like this.” She demonstrated how to do it: she wound the roll around her ankle several times, the way you tape up a sprained ankle. “You can tear off a length of tape from you ankle and use it to patch a hole in your suit,” she said. “A hundred chancy things can happen to rip your suit.”
She told them about Ebola in monkeys. “If these monkey are infected with Ebola, then they are so full of virus that a bit from one of them would be a devastating exposure,” she said. “Animals that are clinically ill with Ebola shed a lot of virus. Monkeys move real quick. A bite would be a death warrant. Be exquisitely careful. Know where your hands and body are at all the times. If you get blood on your suit, stop what you are doing and clean it off right away. Don’t let blood stay on your gloves. Rinse them off right away. With bloody gloves, you can’t see a hole in the glove. Also, one other thing. You really don’t want to drink a lot of coffee or liquids before going in. You will be in your space suit for a long time.”
The batteries that pressurized the suit had a life span of six hours. People would have to leave the hot area and be deconned out before their batteries failed, or they would be in trouble.
Jerry Jaax and Captain Mark Haines felt their way down the dark corridor, toward the door that led into the hot zone. They opened it and found themselves standing at the junction of two corridors, bathed in a cacophony of monkey cries. The air-handling equipment still wasn’t working, and the temperature in the place seemed as if it was above ninety degrees. Jerry’s head bubble fogged up. He pushed the bubble against his face to rub the moisture off the faceplate, and now he could see. The walls were gray cinder block, and the floor was painted concrete.
Just then, he noticed a blur of motion on his left, and he turned and saw two Hazleton workers walking towards him. They weren’t supposed to be in here! The area was supposed to be sealed off, but they had come in by another route that led through a storeroom. They wore respirators, but nothing covered their eyes. When they saw the two men in space suits, they froze, speechless. Jerry could not see their mouths, but he could see their eyes, wide with astonishment. It was as if they had suddenly discovered that they were standing on the moon.
Jerry didn’t know what to say. Finally he said, “WHICH WAY TO ROOM H?”—shouting to be heard over his blowers.
The workers led him down the corridor to the infected room. It was at the far end of the hall. Then they retreated to the front of the building and found Dan Dalgard, who had been sitting in an office, waiting for the Army to come in. He showed up at Room H moments later, wearing a respirator, to find out what was going on. Jerry looked at him as if he was insane. It was as if you went to a meeting with someone, and the person showed up naked.
Dalgard was not happy with the space suits. Apparently he had not realized how the Army would be outfitted. Dalgard gave them a tour of Room H, feeling exceptionally nervous. “Looks like we have some sick monkeys in here,” he said. Some of the monkeys went berserk when they saw the space suits. They spun in circles in their cages or cowered in the corners. Others stared at the humans with fixed expressions on their faces.
“You see the clinical signs,” Dalgard said, pointing to a monkey. “I feel pretty confident I can tell when a monkey is getting sick. They got a little bit depressed, they go off their feed, and in a day or two they are dead.”
Jerry wanted to look at all the monkeys in the monkey house. He and Captain Haines went back out into the corridor and went from room to room through the entire building. They found other monkeys that seemed depressed, with the same glazed expression on their faces. Jaax and Haines, both of whom knew a lot about monkeys, didn’t like the feel of this whole building. Something lived in here other than monkeys and people.
Nancy Jaax got ready to go inside. She changed into a scrub suit in the van, ran across the lawn, and entered the staging area. The support team helped her suit up. She gathered several boxes of syringes and went in with Captain Steven Denny. They walked down the air-lock corridor and came to the far door. She opened the door and found herself in the long corridor. It was empty. Everyone was down the hall in Room H. Jerry thought his wife looked like the Pillsbury dough boy. Her suit was too large for her, and it billowed around her when she walked.
Nancy noticed mucus and slime on the noses of some of the monkeys. That scared her, because it seemed so much like the flu or a cold, when it wasn’t. Dan Dalgard, wearing a respirator and a jumpsuit, selected four sick monkeys for sacrifice, the ones he thought looked the sickest. He reached into the cages and gave the monkeys their shots. When they crumpled and fell asleep, he gave them a second round of shots, and that stopped their hearts.
The room was jammed with people in space suits. They kept coming in pairs, and they milled around with nothing to do. One of them was Sergeant Curtis Klages. He turned to someone and said, “WELL, THIS IS A BIG CHARLIE FOXTROT.” That’s code for CF, which means “cluster fuck”. This is an Army operation that winds up in confusion, with people bumping into one another and demanding to know what’s going on.
Nancy happened to glance at the sergeant, checking his suit instinctively, and she saw that he had a tear across hip. She touched the sergeant’s arm and pointed. She reached down to her ankle, where she kept her extra tape, and taped the hole for him.
She removed the four dead monkeys from their cages, holding them by the backs of the arms, and loaded them into plastic biohazard bags. She carried the bags to the entry door, where someone had left a garden sprayer full of Clorox bleach along with more bags. She double-bagged the monkeys, spraying each bag with bleach, and then she loaded the bags into cardboard biohazard containers-hatboxes-and sprayed them to decon them. Finally she loaded each hatbox into a third plastic bag and spray it. She pounded on the door. “IT’S NANCY JAAX. I’M COMING OUT.” The door was opened by a sergeant standing on the other side, a member of the decon team. He was wearing a Racal suit, and he had a pump sprayer filled with bleach. She went into the air lock, pushing the hatboxes ahead of her.
In the darkness and in the whine of their blowers, he shouted to her, “STAND WITH YOUR ARMS OUT, AND TURN AROUND SLOWLY.” He sprayed her for five minutes, until the air lock stank of bleach. It felt wonderfully cool, but the smell leaked through her filters and made her throat sting. He also sprayed the bags. Then he opened the door to the staging area, and she blinked at the light and came out, pushing the bags ahead of her.