“The next stage was to cultivate the organism,” Price said. “We put organ tissues from the dead into flasks with living cells from the liver we had biopsied. We did a series of these with blood, mucus, various discharges and mashed organs. Then we put them into an incubator which mimics the temperature of the human body. Within two days we had a thriving culture of virus. We got our first look at our monster.”
Price was silent for a few moments. I had the feeling that what he was telling me were things that he maybe hoped would die with him. Though he could be clinical to the point of cruelty at times, when he was telling me these things he was filled with pain.
“The virus?” I said finally.
“Yes. We put it in the beam…that is, under the eye of the electron microscope. We were looking at a filovirus very similar to Ebola or Marburg.”
Filoviruses, or “thread viruses,” are quite unique in the world of virology. While many viruses look like balls or plugs, the filoviruses are quite alien in appearance and resemble braided rope or coiling worms. Many think they look much like spaghetti. Price said that even to a microbiologist there is something invidious and evil about them and no one who has studied them has not felt it.
“What we had was Ebola, no doubt of it, but mutated from its ordinary state. A new strain, unspeakably deadly.”
Under the microscope was a sort of elongated viral body with dozens of slender threads looping from it. Like white worms or tentacles, he told me. They watched Ebola-X invade healthy cells with savage abandon, an unstoppable army of killer microbes. They would send out their thread-like tendrils, grab a cell, overwhelm it, on and on. Once they had infested a cell, they pretty much gutted it of nutrients and genetic material, forming inclusion bodies-crystalline blocks of pure virus-which were replicated viral broods getting ready to hatch and infest. The cell itself would be grotesquely swollen by this point, literally pregnant with virus. Each inclusion body moved outwards toward the cell wall, touched it, and exploded into hundreds of new viruses. These viruses then penetrated the cell walls, causing the cell itself to distort and bulge and finally burst…releasing newborn viruses to find more host cells where they drain them, multiply, and burst free again. The process begins again. An absolutely alarming geometric progression.
“Such a process is horrible when you think about it,” Price said. “Viruses making viruses ad infinitum, blocks forming, blocks exploding with hundreds of hatchlings, the host cell bursting, the viruses turned loose, traveling through the bloodstream and clinging to any available cell in a relentless amplification of the original virus.”
It was horrible, all right.
It was downright scary, in fact. I was starting to get ideas that left me cold and it all tied in with what I saw in my dreams and what Price was describing to me:
“I’ll never forget my first view of the thing,” he told me. “It was an absolute obscenity. I was always fascinated by the deadly beautiful horror of Ebola, but this mutated variety literally terrified me looking at it. You would have to see it, Nash, to appreciate what I say. That elongated body with dozens of serpentine white worms coming from it…like snakes, undulant vipers. I thought…yes…that first glimpse of it…I thought I was looking at the face of Medusa.” He wiped sweat from his brow. “I had the strangest feeling that nightmare was aware that I was watching it. That it was looking at me and knowing it was my master. It was pure evil and I knew it. I…dear God, just looking at it made me want to slit my wrists.”
Medusa.
I sat there for some time, just smoking my stale cigarettes, staring into the fire and contemplating the end of my own species. Because it was coming and there was no denying it now. The war had thinned the human population considerably, weakening what was left…and Ebola-X would now kick the race’s legs out from under it. It would exterminate us. And not as some mindless germ, but as a mutated, hideously evolved germ that knew exactly what it was doing and took grisly pleasure in the same.
Before I could stop myself, I blabbered it all out to Price. My dreams. The Medusa. What it looked like and what I thought it to be and how it was sweeping east to west and leaving well-picked graveyards in its wake.
“It’s unbelievable,” was all he could say. “And you think The Shape is leading you away from it…to some unknown destiny?”
“Yes. It wants us to get to Nebraska. It wants that very badly.” I shook my head. “Why Nebraska? Why not South Dakota or Wyoming or Montana? I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Well, there could be one reason,” he said. “The Creek.”
“The Creek?”
“Yes, Bitter Creek. At Detrick we called it ‘The Creek.’ The Creek is a Level 4 Biocontainment facility in Bitter Creek Nebraska,” he told me. “It was a research complex and storage facility. I’ve never been there, but I knew of it. We all whispered about it.”
I felt a chill up my spine. “And what…what is stored there?”
“Bioweapons,” he said. “Every nasty germ we’ve been genetically engineering is stored there. That’s the rumor. In the worlds of virology and microbiology, it’s like Area 51. It carries the same mystique.”
Bitter Creek.
I could feel The Shape warming to the idea of it. This was it then. The end was in sight. That’s where we were going. I would lead and the others would follow. Straight into the heart of darkness, straight into the valley of the shadow of death.
Straight into Hell.
BITTER CREEK, NEBRASKA
1
A storm hit us when we crossed the Nebraska state line. It started with rain and hail and fierce winds that tried to strip the Jeep right off the highway. Pretty soon it wasn’t just rain hitting us or chunks of hail the size of golf balls, but all manner of debris. The winds picked up anything and everything, creating a lashing, wet whirlwind of flak that made the Jeep shake and jerk like it was pushing through an artillery barrage.
If that was our welcome to the Cornhusker State, it wasn’t a very friendly one. I suppose my old pal Specs would have called it a bad omen.
Carl got us off I-80, cut through some farmland and pulled before a huge barn that seemed to be about as long as a football field. Covering our heads, we ducked inside. We were glad for the shelter.
There were cattle stalls up both sides with lots of hay and a concrete drive down the center. At one time, they must have had quite a few head of cattle in there.
Carl and Mickey and I watched the storm through the doorway.
It was really something. The rain was still coming down along with occasional barrages of hail. The sky was flat black, seamed with brilliant scarlet and indigo bands that seemed to flicker and expand like Northern lights. We could see bolts of lightening sweeping the countryside in the distance, just flashing and arcing like airstrikes. The thunder made the barn shake.
“Fucking storm beat the hell out of the Jeep,” Carl said. “She’s drivable…at least for now.”
“We just have to get to Bitter Creek,” I said.
“And where is that?”
“According to Price, it’s north, up in Boone County.”
Mickey nodded. “Okay. And what’s in Bitter Creek?”
“That’s what we have to find out,” I said.
I wasn’t about to tell them what I thought or felt or what Price said about the Level 4 facility there. No sense spooking anyone more than they already were. Because I could see it in their eyes: a combination of excitement and dread and there was no mistaking it. They knew we were nearing our destiny, that something very big was just around the corner.
“Maybe it’ll be paradise,” Mickey said with all due sarcasm. “Maybe it’ll be the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Carl pulled off a cigarette. “Sure, honey. And maybe it’ll be hell on earth.”
