The support team peeled off her suit. She was drenched with sweat. Her scrubs were soaked. Now it was freezing cold. She ran across the lawn and changed into her civilian clothes in the back of the van.
Meanwhile, people loaded the bags into boxes, and loaded the boxes into the refrigerator truck, and Nancy and a driver headed off for Fort Detrick. She wanted to get those monkeys into Level 4 and opened up as fast as possible.
Jeery Jaax counted sixty-five animals in the room, after the four that Nancy had removed. Gene Johnson had brought a special injector back from Africa. Jerry used this device to give shots to the monkeys. It was a pole that had a socket on one end. You fitted a syringe into the socket, and you slid the pole into the cage and gave the monkey a shot. You also needed a tool to pin the monkey down, because monkeys don’t like needles coming at them. They used a mop handle with a soft U-shaped pad on the end. Captain Haines held the mop handle against the monkey to immobilize it, and Jerry ran the pole into the cage and hit the monkey’s thigh with a double dose of ketamine, a general anesthetic. They went through the room from cage to cage, hitting all the monkeys with the drug. Pretty soon the monkeys began to collapse in their cages. Once a monkey was down, Jerry gave it a shot of a sedative called Rompun, which put it into a deep sleep.
When all the monkeys were down and asleep, they set up a couple of stainless-steel tables, and then, one monkey at a time, they took blood samples from the unconscious monkeys and gave them a third injection, this time of a lethal drug called T-61, which is a euthanasia agent. After a monkey was clinically dead, it was opened by Captain Steve Denny. He took samples of liver and spleen, using scissors, and he dropped the samples into the plastic bottles. They bagged the dead monkeys, loaded them into hatboxes, and piled the hatboxes along the corridor. Dan Dalgard, meanwhile, left the room and remained in an office at the front of the building for the rest of the day.
By late afternoon, all the monkeys in Room H had been put to death. Behind the building, through the trees and down the hill, children ran in circles around their playhouse. Their shouts carried far in the December air. The mothers and fathers arrived in cars and picked them up. The team exited from the hot zone in pairs, and stood around on the grass in their civilian clothes, looking pale, weak, and thoughtful. In the distance, floodlights began to light up the monuments and buildings of Washington. It was the Friday evening at the end of the week following Thanksgiving, the start of a quiet weekend that precedes the Christmas season. The wind strengthened and blew paper cups and empty cigarette packs in eddies around the parking lots. In a hospital not far from there, Jarvis Purdy, the monkey worker who had a heart attack, rested comfortably, his condition stable.
Back at the Institute, Nancy Jaax again stayed up until one o’clock in the morning, dissecting monkeys with her hot-zone buddy, Ron Trotter. When they had suited up and gone in, there had been five monkey carcasses waiting for them in the air lock.
This time, the signs of Ebola were obvious. Nancy saw what she described as “horrendous gut lesions” in some of the animals, caused sloughing of the intestinal lining. That sloughing of the gut was a class sign. The intestine was blitzed, completely full of uncoagulated, runny blood, and at the same time the monkey had massive blood clotting in the intestinal muscles. The clotting had shut off blood circulation to the gut, and the cells in the gut subsequently died—that is, the intestines had died—and then the gut had filled up with blood. Dead intestine—this is the kind of thing you saw in a decayed carcass. In her words, “It looked like the animals had been dead for three or four days.” Yet they had been dead only for hours. Some of the monkeys were so badly liquefied that she and Trotter didn’t even bother to do a necropsy, they just yanked samples of liver and spleen from the dead animal. Some of the monkeys that were dying in Room H had become essentially a heap of mush and bones in a skin bag, mixed with huge amounts of amplified virus.
December 4, 0730 Hours, Monday
Monday arrived cold and raw, with a rising wind that brought a smell of snow from a sky the color of plain carbon steel. In the shopping malls around Washington, Christmas lights had been hung. The parking lots were empty, but later in the day they would fill up with cars, and the malls would fill up with parents and children, and the children would line up to see Santa Clauses. Dan Dalgard drove to the primate building, one more commuter in a sea of morning traffic.
He turned into the parking lot. As he got closer to the building, he saw a man was standing by the front door near the sweet-gum tree, wearing a white Tyvek jumpsuit. It was one of the monkey caretakers. Dalgard was furious. He had instructed them not to come out of the building wearing a mask or a protective suit. He jumped out of his car, slammed the door, and hurried across the parking lot. As he got closer, he recognized the man as someone who will be called Milton Frantig. Frantig was standing bent over with his hands on his knees. He didn’t seem to notice Dalgard—he was staring at the grass. Suddenly Frantig’s body convulsed, and liquid spewed out of his mouth. He vomited again and again, and the sound of his retching carried across the parking lot.
A MAN DOWN
As Dan Dalgard watched the man spill his stomach out onto the lawn, he felt, in his words, “scared shitless”. Now, perhaps for the first time, the absolute horror of the crisis at the primate building washed over him. Milton Frantig was doubled over, gasping and choking. When his vomiting subsides, Dalgard helped him to his feet, took him indoors, and made him lie down on a couch. Two employees were now sick—Jarvis Purdy was still in the hospital, recovering from a heart attack. Milton Frantig was fifty years old. He had a chonic, hacking cough, although he didn’t smoke. He had been working with monkeys and with Dalgard at Hazleton for more than twenty-five years. Dalgard knew the man well and liked him. Dalgard felt shaken, sick with fear and guilt. Maybe I should have evacuated the building last week. Did I put the interests of the monkeys ahead of the interest of the human beings?
Milton Frantig was pale and shaky, and felt faint. He developed the dry heaves. Dalgard found a plastic bucket for him. Between heaves, interrupted by coughing speels, Frantig apologized for leaving the building while wearing a jump suit. He said he had just been putting on his respirator to go inside a monkey room when he began to feel sick to his stomach. Perhaps the bad smell in the building had nauseated him, because the monkey room weren’t cleaned as regularly as usual. He could feel he was about to vomit, and he couldn’t find a bucket or anything to throw up into, and it was coming on so fast that he couldn’t get to the rest room, so he had run outdoors.
Dalgard wanted to take Frantig’s temperature, but nobody could find a thermometer that hadn’t been used rectally on monkeys. He sent Bill Volt to a drugstore to buy one. When he returned, they discovered that Frantig had a fever of a hundred and one. Bill Volt hovered in the room, almost shaking with fear. Volt was not doing well—“almost spastic in his terror,” Dalgard would later recall, but it wasn’t any different from the way Dalgard felt.
Milton Frantig remained the calmest person in the room. Unlike Dalgard and Volt, he did not seem afraid. He was a devout Christian, comfortable with telling people that he had been saved. If the lord saw fit to take him home with a monkey disease, he was ready. He prayed a little, remembering his favorite passages in the Bible, and his dry heaves subsided. Soon he was resting quietly on the couch and said he felt a little better.