“Go home, Nancy,” he said.
“I’m not going to do that,” she replied.
The dead monkeys began coming in after lunch. A truck would bring them twice a day from Reston, and the first shipment would end up in Nancy’s air lock while she was suiting up. Usually there would be ten or twelve monkeys in hatboxes.
The rest of the monkeys that came out of the monkey house—the vast majority of them, two or three tons’ worth—were placed in triple biohazard bags, and the bags were decontaminated, taken out of the building, and placed in steel garbage cans. Hazleton employees then drove them to an incinerator owned by the company, where the monkeys were burned at a high temperature, high enough to guarantee the destruction of Ebola organisms.
Some of the monkeys had to be examined, however, to see if and where the virus was spreading inside the building. Nancy would carry the hatboxes into suite AA-5 and work on the monkeys until after midnight with her partner and a civilian assistant. They hardly spoke to one another, except to point to a tool or a sign of disease in a monkey.
Thoughts about her father and her childhood came to Nancy that day. Years earlier, as a girl, she had helped him during plowing season, driving his tractor from afternoon until late at night. Moving at a pace not much faster than a mule, it plowed furrows along a strip of land a half a mile long. She wore cutoff shorts and sandals. It was loud and hot on the tractor, and in the emptiness of Kansas she thought about nothing, drowned in the roar of the engine as the sun edged down to the horizon and the land grew dark and the moon appeared and climbed high. At ten o’clock her father would take over and plow for the rest of the night, and she would go to bed. At sunrise, he would wake her up, and she would get back on the tractor and keep on plowing.
“SPONGE,” she mouthed to her buddy.
He mopped up some blood from the monkey, and Nancy rinsed her gloves in the pan of green EnviroChem.
Her father died that day, while Nancy worked in the hot suite. She flew home to Kansas and arrived by taxi on Saturday morning at her family’s plot at a graveyard in Wichita just as the funeral service began. It was a cold, rainy day, and a tiny knot of people holding umbrellas huddled around a preacher by a stone wall and a hole in the earth. Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax moved forward to see more clearly, and here eyes rested on something that she had not quite anticipated. It was a flag draped over the casket. He had been a veteran, after all. The sight broke her down, and she burst into tears.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, Thursday, December 7, the last monkey was killed and bagged, and people began deconning out. They had a bad time trying to catch the little monkey that had escaped; it took hours. Jerry Jaax had entered the room were it was hiding and spent two or three hours chasing it in circles with a net. Finally the monkey got itself jammed down in a crack behind a cage with its tail sticking out, and Sergeant Amen hit the tail with a massive dose of anesthetic. In about fifteen minutes, the monkey became still, and they dragged it out, and it went the way of the other monkeys, carried along in the flow of material.
They radioed Gene Johnson to tell him that the last monkey was dead. He told Sergeant Klages to explore the building, to make sure that there were no more live monkeys in any rooms. Klages discovered a chest freezer in a storage room. It looked sinister, and he radioed to Johnson: “GENE, I’VE GOT A FREEZER HERE.”
“Check it out,” Johnson replied.
Sergeant Klages lifted the lid. He found himself staring into the eyes of frozen monkeys. They were sitting in clear plastic bags. Their bodies streamed with blood icicles. They were monkeys from Room F, the original hot spot of the outbreak, some of monkeys that had been sacrificed by Dan Dalgard. He shut the lid and called Johnson on the radio:
“GENE, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE WHAT I’VE FOUND IN THIS FREEZER. I’VE GOT TEN OR FIFTEEN MONKEYS.”
“Aw, shit, Klages!”
“WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH THEM?”
“I don’t want any more problems with monkeys? No more samples! Decon them!”
“I ALSO FOUND SOME VIALS OF SEDATIVE.”
“Decon it, baby! You don’t know if any dirty needles have been stuck in those bottles. Everything comes out of this building! Everything comes out!”
Sergeant Klages and a civilian, Merhl Gibson, dragged the bags out of the freezer. They tried to cram the monkeys into the hatboxes but they didn’t fit. They were twisted into bizarre shapes. They left them in the hallway to thaw. The decon teams would deal with them tomorrow.
The 91-Tangos shuffled out through the air-lock corridor, two by two, numb and tired beyond feeling, soaked with sweat and continual fear. They had collected a total of thirty-five hundred clinical samples. They didn’t want to talk about the operation with each other or with their officers.
When the team members left Fort Detrick, they noticed that Gene Johnson was sitting on the grass under the tree in front of the building. He didn’t want talk to anyone, and they were afraid to talk to him. He looked terrible. His mind was a million miles away, in the devastated zone inside the building. He kept going over and over what the kids had done. If the guy has the needle in his right hand, you stand on his left. You pin the monkey’s arms behind so it can’t turn around and bite you. Did anyone cut a finger? So far, it looked as if all the kids had made it.
The decon team suited up immediately while the soldiers were coming out of the building. It was now after dark, but Gene Johnson feared Ebola so much that he did not want to let the building sit untouched overnight.
The decon team was led by Merhl Gibson. He put on a space suit and explored the building to get a sense of what needed to be done. The rooms and halls were bloodstained and stewn with medical packaging. Monkey biscuits lay everywhere and crunched underfoot. Monkey feces lay in loops on the floor and was squiggled in lines across the walls and printed in the shapes of small hands. He had a brush and a bucket of bleach, and he tried to scrub a wall.
Then he called Gene on the radio, “GENE, THE SHIT IN HERE IS LIKE CEMENT, IT WON’T COME OFF.”
“You do what’s best. Our orders are to clean this place up.”
“WE’LL TRY TO CHIP IT OFF,” Gibson sad.
The next day, they went to a hardware store and bought putty knives and steel spatulas, and the decon team went to work chipping the walls and floor. They almost suffocated from the heat inside their suits.
Milton Frantig, the man who had thrown up on the lawn, had now been kept in isolation at Fairfax Hospital for several days. He was feeling much better, his fever had vanished, he had not developed any nosebleeds, and he was getting restless. Apparently he did not have Ebola. At any rate, it did not show up in his blood tests. Apparently he had a mild case of flu. The C.D.C. eventually told him he could go home.
By day nineteen after the whiffing incident, when they hadn’t had any bloody noses, Peter Jahrling and Tom Geisbert began to regard themselves as definite survivors. The fact that Dan Dalgard and the monkey workers had so far shown no signs of breaking with Ebola also reassured them, although it was very puzzling. What on earth was going on with this virus? It killed monkeys like flies, they were dripping virus from every pore, yet no human being had crashed. If the virus wasn’t Ebola Zaire, what was it? And where had it come from? Jahrling believed that it must have come from Africa. After all, Nurse Mayinga’s blood reacted to it. Therefore, it must be closely related to Ebola Zaire. It was behaving like the fictional Andromeda strain. Just when we thought the world was coming to an end, the virus slipped away, and we survived.