In fact, wasn’t much that guy didn’t have a theory on. From female orgasms to the mating cycles of katydids, Price had a very definitive opinion. He was one of those guys that were just too smart for their own good. I tried to argue with him about a few topics, but that was a mistake. He made me feel like a striped ape wallowing in my own shit. He was a professional debater and he took me off right at the knees, leaving me feeling stupid and annoyed and goddamn uneducated. Annoyed mainly, because he never seemed to see me as an equal, but as an object of amusement like a cute little puppy that had learned not to piss on the furniture, but hardly an intellectual equal.
And you would think that I would have been offended by that, but I wasn’t. I admired people like him. I really did. Often in blue collar people like me you get a sort of reverse snobbery where anyone with money or higher education becomes an object of ridicule. And, yes, sometimes it was warranted, but very often not. In Price’s case, it was not. He was highly intelligent and intuitive and if I were to have dismissed him out of some Neanderthal bias, then the only fool would have been me.
So I did not dismiss him.
I listened; I learned.
Price had a theory on the full moon bit, too, as I said.
And he gave it to me in the form of a lecture as always. He said that if you looked through the body of folklore and tradition concerning the moon-he had, of course-then you would see certain underlying principles that were intriguing. The moon, he said, had a history of inciting the human species. It drove men mad. It regulated the menstrual cycles of women. It was forever an object of religious importance. To many primitive societies, the moon was considered a goddess, the creator of time and space, the repository of human souls…those unborn and those awaiting reincarnation. This Moon-Goddess ruled the cycles of creation and fertility and death and this was why ancient calendars were very often based on lunar phases and the menstrual cycles of women which were very often identical in duration. The moon ruled not only the tides, but human and animal life, rebirth and procreation. That’s why Scottish girls at one time would only wed on a full moon and why certain crops could only be planted beneath its glowering eye. Witches were said to draw down the moon, to call up demons and familiars only on this blessed night.
But much of that was superstition and yet, he told me, there was a germ of underlying truth to it all. For the geomagnetic pull of the moon had a decided impact on all living things and their individual electromagnetic fields and maybe it was at these times of greatest influence-the full moon phase-that certain doors were open that might be closed on other nights. Maybe witches really did call down demons and nameless monstrosities and maybe those things were much like The Shape in origin and composition. The same geomagnetic force that made crops and women fertile, might also create an ideal environment for something like The Shape to physically manifest itself, exploiting cosmic and lunar energies to give itself substance.
Just a theory again, but I liked it.
Price was a smart guy, like I said.
I think he was dead right about not only the moon’s influence, but about the nature of The Shape itself. And I told him as much. Not that being right came as much of a surprise to him; he was usually right.
“It wants us to go west,” I told him. “It’s been pushing me in that direction ever since Cleveland. I don’t know why. But there must be something out there. Something…”
Price put his analytical mind on it and right away said, “Maybe it’s not pushing you towards something, but away from something.”
God, the guy was good.
There were other things I wanted to say to him. Things about my dreams, about The Medusa, but I wasn’t ready just yet. It was coming, though. I knew that much. Because The Medusa was out there, chewing its way through the ruined cities of men, picking the last meat off the last bones of humanity. And it was coming for us.
Knowing this, feeling death and plague gathering behind us, I said, “You worked in a lab back east, right? Tell me what that was like. Tell me what happened at the end.”
14
“As I told you,” Price said, “I was a biohazard specialist. My area of expertise was Level 4 hot agents, highly infectious organisms capable of causing pandemics. At research facilities like Fort Detrick, there were four levels of biohazard, you see, Biohazard Level 4 being the most dangerous. This is where we manipulate and study infectious diseases for which there are no vaccines: hantaviruses, dengue fever, hemorrhagic fevers, the Marburg and Ebola viruses, other hot agents that have been weaponized or genetically altered to increase their virulence.”
Price said that in order to gain access to a Biohazard Level 4 complex it was like going into outer space. You went through multiple airlocks in a self-contained Hazmat suit that looked very much like a space suit. So much that everyone called them this. You were decontaminated going in and out, subjected to chemical showers and ultraviolet lights, low-level radiation, scanned by mechanisms that could detect the presence of lethal bioorganisms. It was quite a process, apparently. Level 4 containment zones are kept under negative air pressure, he told me, so that if there is a leak, the air will not flow out into the world, but be sucked back into the hot zone itself.
After the bombs came down, there was one pandemic after another and everyone was scrambling to keep up with them. The team Price was part of-the Special Pathogens Branch-were interested in Ebola-X which had broken loose in Baltimore. They needed to study it before it was too late and this was no easy thing with the infrastructure of the country crumbling around them.
“But we had priority and we were under military jurisdiction,” he said. “We were ordered to begin a massive biocontainment operation. So this is what we did. To begin with, we needed specimens to work with. So a Biocon SWAT team swept down in full Hazmat and secured us some thirty people from an apartment complex. They were taken to the Slammer, which is a biologically secure facility, half hospital and half working laboratory.
“I was there during the op. Several of those we took-and we did take them, Nash, make no mistake on that, civil rights be damned-had already slipped into terminal comas. Many were bleeding out. The majority were obviously infected, but really just terrified.”
And it was only the beginning of their terror.
They were brought to the Slammer and each was sealed in biocontainment cells. Within hours, even the healthier individuals were beginning to crash. This new enhanced Ebola moved very swiftly, Price and the others soon learned. It was a pathetic sight to see human beings being destroyed in such a way, he said. Their eyes were staring out, glassy and brilliantly red, blood running from their noses, their faces transformed into rubber fright masks from massive destruction of facial connective tissue and the fact that their brains were degrading into a pudding of gray matter.
There was no time to lose.
Although blood and other tissues had been collected, they needed liver tissue collected at the moment of death. This was called an agonal biopsy. A biopsy syringe was inserted into the liver which, like the other organs, had begun to liquefy. And it is here, at the point of death, that the cadaver undergoes spontaneous liquefaction as necrotic organs and tissues literally melt and fluids drain free in copious amounts, the blood black as tar, all of it cooking hot with virus.
Within forty-eight hours, all the subjects were dead.
Price said it was interesting to note that Ebola-X-while mimicking ordinary Ebola or Marburg in that it attacks the skin, soft tissues, organs, etc. like some ferocious viral wolf-also mimics radiation sickness. They ran into a lot of that at Detrick. Subjects whose faces were splitting open from sores, whose hair and teeth had fallen out. It looked like exposure to toxic levels of radiation. But it was just the virus. He said all of the subjects became delusional as their brains were eaten away and more than a few became psychotic. And all of that-from the sores to the baldness and the rage-made me think of the Scabs. Maybe there was no connection.
Price went on, “We performed a series of autopsies and found exactly what we knew we’d find,” he said, his face sculpted by shadows. “The liver was yellow and liquefied, kidneys ruptured, intestines filled with blood and decayed. It was the same with all organs and connective tissue. They had gone necrotic and dissolved. Each cadaver was the same…biological waste as the result of extreme viral amplification.
