And then, inexplicably, the clerk pulled some Kleenex from a box and handed a wad to Slater.
“What’s this for?”
“Pardon my saying so, sir, but you’re sweating.” He gestured at his forehead, and when Slater dabbed at his skin, the tissues did indeed come away damp.
“Thanks,” Slater said, “I guess I was in too big a hurry to get here.”
The clerk shrugged and, surveying the spooky vault, said, “That’ll be a first, sir.”
The Repository was huge, with several chambers interconnecting under brick archways, all of them retrofitted with rows of bright track lights mounted above microscope-equipped workstations. Long aisles were lined with endless rows of metal cabinets, each of them divided into drawers, no deeper than a deck of cards, containing the tissue and bone samples. Organized first by the pathology, then by the organic or anatomical origin, and then again by era, the samples had been gathered and sent to the archives from barracks and battlefields all over the world, and unless size was an issue, the oldest ones in any category were usually deposited in the bottom drawers of each section. It took Slater, who hadn’t been down in these archives for several years, a half hour just to find his way into the right corner of the right room. It was the last chamber in the chain, and like all the others he had passed through, no one else was in it.
Crouching down, he pulled out one drawer, checked the samples, closed it, and opened another. Here, he found what he was looking for. The last remains of Private Roscoe Vaughan, an artillery trainee at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, in 1918 … and the first known Army casualty of what had been dubbed, however inaccurately, the Spanish flu. Forty-three thousand others would follow him to the grave. Though it was little known, during the Great War, more of the doughboys had died from the flu than in combat.
All that was left of the private now was a block of paraffin, no bigger than a crouton, in which the Army surgeon, Captain K. P. Hedgeforth, had embedded slices of lung tissue he had taken from the dead soldier. Preserved in formaldehyde, the block had been dispatched to Washington and kept there in a little brown box on a shelf for nearly eighty years before its deadly secrets had been explored by AFIP scientists.
Slater took the cube, now in a glassine envelope, and several of the slides that had been prepared from its contents back at Camp Jackson, to the examining table at the far end of the room. All of this material had been declared utterly inert, and was used now solely for teaching and historical research purposes. But samples taken from it in 1996, then put through the polymerase chain reaction, had yielded enough information to enable the institute’s pathologists to reconstruct the entire genetic structure of the virus. Unlike this dead source material, the results of those molecular tests were now lodged, under the strictest security precautions, in little vials in a deep freeze in an undisclosed location nearly impossible to access, especially for someone with Dr. Slater’s compromised credentials. For him to get in touch with the origins of the epidemic whose victims’ graves he was about to desecrate, this musty archival material would be the closest he could come.
But something in his gut had told him that he needed to do it. Although epidemiology was often thought to be a cold-blooded discipline, one where its practitioners exercised objectivity and disinterested judgment in the face of appalling realities, Slater had never approached the job that way. He was a fighter, and in order to fully engage in battle, he needed some visceral sense of his enemy.
Though the electricians had done their best, the lighting at this spot was dicey; the brick ceiling was curved like a barrel, and the illumination from the lights mounted overhead was too bright in some spots and too weak in others. Slater found that he had to pull his stool first this way then that in order to keep the shadows from impinging on his work surface. Behind the walls, he could hear the muffled clanging of old pipes.
Private Vaughan had been a “well-nourished” young man, according to one of the documents he’d read that afternoon; another had called him “chubby.” He stood about five feet ten inches, and was, like most of the other infantrymen, eager to get to France before the fighting stopped. He had been trained, in the scrubby dunes around the camp, to maintain and deploy field artillery. But on the morning of September 19, 1918, instead of joining his platoon, he reported to sick bay, complaining of chills and fever. He was suffering from a dry cough, a dull headache, and his face was flushed. Although his heartbeat was regular, his throat was congested, and he said he was having trouble catching his breath. The doctor, who’d seen the flu before, consigned him to a cot.
But this was not like any flu the world had ever encountered.
Over the next few days, Private Vaughan got progressively worse. His fever rose, leaving him delirious much of the time and shivering under a pile of blankets that could never get high enough. His face took on a purplish tinge and his feet turned black. A secondary infection, pneumonia, set in, and his lungs began to fill with mucus. When he tried to speak, bubbles of blood broke on his lips, and while the doctors and nurses looked on in helpless horror, Private Vaughan slowly drowned in his own fluids. At 6:30 A.M. on September 26, he was declared dead.
Private Vaughan was the proverbial canary in the coal mine.
The Spanish flu, so named because it had cut a devastating path through Spain on its way to the New World, would eventually claim the lives of 675,000 American civilians. The body counts in other countries would be immensely higher. And before it had burned itself out, the fate of nations — and the planet itself — would be drastically altered. For those who thought the carnage of the First World War was the worst calamity humanity could endure, the Spanish flu proved them hopelessly mistaken.
Slater looked at the little cube of tissue-impregnated paraffin — once a chunk cut from a candle — and marveled at the devastation that it represented. Powering up the microscope, he slid one of the original slides, prepared by Dr. Hedgeforth, into view; the glass was so much thicker than current slides that he had to lift the eyepiece and do a bit of juggling to make it feasible.
He bent his head, made a few adjustments to the magnification, and observed a pale yellow background — a thin sliver of the paraffin — and in its center a dark smudge, like a crumb of burned toast on a pat of butter.
That smudge was a tiny piece of the private’s left lung, which had been so sodden and engorged with blood that Dr. Hedgeforth had said it looked like a slab of liver.
Even after all these years, the slides and candle wax gave off a whiff of formaldehyde, and the scent took Slater back to dissection labs and all-nighters in med school. As he studied the slides, and adjusted the magnification, he was able to bring out, in one of the last, a clearer view not only of the amorphous cells, faintly lavender and forever fixed in their positions, but fragments of the deadly virus that resembled bits of barbed wire. It was, he thought, like looking at an ancient battlefield — a place of death and destruction. You were looking back in time to something that had ended long ago but whose impression was even now unaltered. It was news from a world that had ceased to exist … news conveyed, in this instance, by a young soldier whose very essence had returned to the stars.
How long Slater stayed at it, he hardly knew. He lost himself in his research and his thoughts, the silence around him broken only by the occasional, distant clang of the heating pipes behind the old brick walls. In his own way, he was girding himself for combat. The enemy was right here, safely vanquished and preserved beneath the glass slide, but it was the same foe he would soon confront in the Arctic … though there, all bets would be off.