“You see the clinical signs,” Dalgard said, pointing to a monkey. “I feel pretty confident I can tell when a monkey is getting sick. They got a little bit depressed, they go off their feed, and in a day or two they are dead.”
Jerry wanted to look at all the monkeys in the monkey house. He and Captain Haines went back out into the corridor and went from room to room through the entire building. They found other monkeys that seemed depressed, with the same glazed expression on their faces. Jaax and Haines, both of whom knew a lot about monkeys, didn’t like the feel of this whole building. Something lived in here other than monkeys and people.
Nancy Jaax got ready to go inside. She changed into a scrub suit in the van, ran across the lawn, and entered the staging area. The support team helped her suit up. She gathered several boxes of syringes and went in with Captain Steven Denny. They walked down the air-lock corridor and came to the far door. She opened the door and found herself in the long corridor. It was empty. Everyone was down the hall in Room H. Jerry thought his wife looked like the Pillsbury dough boy. Her suit was too large for her, and it billowed around her when she walked.
Nancy noticed mucus and slime on the noses of some of the monkeys. That scared her, because it seemed so much like the flu or a cold, when it wasn’t. Dan Dalgard, wearing a respirator and a jumpsuit, selected four sick monkeys for sacrifice, the ones he thought looked the sickest. He reached into the cages and gave the monkeys their shots. When they crumpled and fell asleep, he gave them a second round of shots, and that stopped their hearts.
The room was jammed with people in space suits. They kept coming in pairs, and they milled around with nothing to do. One of them was Sergeant Curtis Klages. He turned to someone and said, “WELL, THIS IS A BIG CHARLIE FOXTROT.” That’s code for CF, which means “cluster fuck”. This is an Army operation that winds up in confusion, with people bumping into one another and demanding to know what’s going on.
Nancy happened to glance at the sergeant, checking his suit instinctively, and she saw that he had a tear across hip. She touched the sergeant’s arm and pointed. She reached down to her ankle, where she kept her extra tape, and taped the hole for him.
She removed the four dead monkeys from their cages, holding them by the backs of the arms, and loaded them into plastic biohazard bags. She carried the bags to the entry door, where someone had left a garden sprayer full of Clorox bleach along with more bags. She double-bagged the monkeys, spraying each bag with bleach, and then she loaded the bags into cardboard biohazard containers-hatboxes-and sprayed them to decon them. Finally she loaded each hatbox into a third plastic bag and spray it. She pounded on the door. “IT’S NANCY JAAX. I’M COMING OUT.” The door was opened by a sergeant standing on the other side, a member of the decon team. He was wearing a Racal suit, and he had a pump sprayer filled with bleach. She went into the air lock, pushing the hatboxes ahead of her.
In the darkness and in the whine of their blowers, he shouted to her, “STAND WITH YOUR ARMS OUT, AND TURN AROUND SLOWLY.” He sprayed her for five minutes, until the air lock stank of bleach. It felt wonderfully cool, but the smell leaked through her filters and made her throat sting. He also sprayed the bags. Then he opened the door to the staging area, and she blinked at the light and came out, pushing the bags ahead of her.
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.
