commotion, the monkey shrieking “Kra! Kra!” and the needle would sink in. This was turning out to be one of the hardest things he’d ever done in his career as a veterinarian.
More team members came into the building, Jerry assembled them in the hallway and said to them: “STOP EVERY FIVE OR TEN MINUTES AND CHECK YOUR NEIGHBOR’S SUIT FOR RIPS. BE VERY CAREFUL. MAKE SURE YOU TAKE REST BREAKS. I WANT YOU TO REST FOR TEN MINUTES EVERY HOUR. WHEN YOU GET TIRED, YOU GET CARELESS.” Every time he looked into a monkey room, he saw a room full of eyes looking back at him. Some of the monkeys rattled their cages, and the wave of noise swept up and down the room.
Jerry decided to set up a bleed area in a small room near the front of the building, right next to the offices. In the bleed area there was a shower with a drain hole in the floor. They would need to use the drain hole for washing down blood and for rinsing down objects with bleach. Every time blood went down the drain, they would pour bleach after it—they didn’t want this thing getting into Reston sewage system. They found a metal examination table on wheels and rolled it into the bleed area. Jerry divided the people into subteams: a bleed team (to work at the bleed table), a euthanasia team (to put monkeys to death), and a necropsy team (to open up the monkeys and take samples and bag the carcasses in biohazard bags).
They got an assembly line going. Every five minutes or so, Jerry Jaax would carry an unconscious monkey out of a room and down the corridors to the bleed area, holding the animal with its arms pinned behind its back. He would lay it down on the bleed table, and then Captain Haines, the Green Beret, would insert a needle into the animal’s thigh and draw off a lot of blood into various tubes. Then he’d hand the unconscious animal to Major Nate Powell, and he would give it an injection of T-61, the euthanasia agent. He’d put the needle right into the heart. When the animal was clearly dead, he would hand it to Captain Steve Denny, who did the necropsy. Captain Denny opened the animal with scissors and snipped out parts of the liver and spleen. The livers of these animals were gray, eroded, nasty looking.
Private Charlotte Godwin stood beside Captain Denny and handed him tools. She thought he looked nervous, jumpy, inside his space suit. He pulled a spleen out of a monkey. It was speckled with white spots, as hard as a rock, a biological bomb ticking with hot agent. After a while, he handed the scissors to her and gave her a chance to open up a monkey. It frightened her and gave her a big rush. She was doing a hot necropsy in Level 4, perhaps the most dangerous work in a space suit. This was a rocket ride, and it thrilled her. Her hands worked within a membrane’s thickness of a death worse than any death in combat. She found herself racing to finish the job. She noticed that the monkey’s eyes were open. It was as if the monkey was looking at her while she worked. She wanted to reach out and close the monkey’s eyes. She thought, Is my face the last thing they see?
INSIDE
Early Evening, Tuesday
The day wore on, and people began using up their batteries. They could see that the daylight was starting to go, because some windows at the ends of the hallways were getting dark. Jerry Jaax made people rest every now and then. They sat on the floor with blank looks on their faces, exhausted, or they loaded syringes with drugs. Meanwhile, Jerry went from person to person, trying to gauge the level of exhaustion. “HOW ARE YOU DOING? ARE YOU TIRED? DO YOU WANT TO GO OUT?”
Nobody wanted to go out.
The team inside the building maintained radio contact with Gene Johnson outside the building. He had supplied them with hand-held short-wave radios that operated on a military band. He hadn’t given them ordinary walkie-talkies because he didn’t want anybody listening to the talk, especially the news media, who might make a tape recording of the chatter. It seemed less likely that anyone would listen to these radios.
Something went wrong with one of the soldiers’ suits. She was a specialist named Rhonda Williams. Her blower cut off, and her suit began to go limp until it stuck to her sweaty scrub suit, and she felt contaminated air creeping around her. “MY AIR’S GOING OFF,” she shouted. She kepted working. She couldn’t leave her post. Her battery was failing. She discovered that she did not have a spare battery on her belt. All the others had used their spare batteries.
When Rhonda announced that her air was shutting down, it caused a commotion. Jerry wanted to evacuate her from the building. He ran down the hall to the air-lock door, where a soldier was stationed with a short-wave radio. Jerry grabbed the radio, and called Gene Johnson, shouting through his helmet, “WE’VE GOT A LADY WHO’S LOSING HER BATTERY.”
Gene answered, “We need to get a battery and send it in with someone. Can you wait?”
“NO, SHE’S COMING OUT. SHE’S LOSING HER AIR,” Jerry said.
Abruptly, the soldier by the door told Jerry that he had an extra battery. Jerry said over the radio: “WAIT —WE HAVE AN EXTRA ONE.”
The soldier ran down the hallway to Rhonda, grinned at her, and said, “YOUR BATTERY IS HERE.”
People started laughing. He clipped it to Rhonda’s belt.
She thought, Oh, my God, they’re gong to unlock my old battery, it’s going to stop my blowers. She said, “WAIT A MINUTE! MY AIR’S GOING TO GO OFF!”
“DON’T WORRY. IT’S JUST FOR A SECOND WHILE WE SWITCH YOU OVER,” he said. Rhonda was rattled and was ready to leave. She was wondering if she had caught the virus during the moments when her air pressure had been lost. Jerry decided to send her out with Charlotte Godwin, who seemed to be getting tired. On the radio, he said to Gene, “I HAVE TWO COMING OUT.”
On Gene’s side, a near panic was occurring. A television van had just showed up. Gene was appalled. He didn’t want the cameras to start rolling just as two women in space suits were extracted from the building. He said to Jerry, “We’re jammed. We can’t move them out. We’ve got TV cameras out here.”
“I’LL SENDING THEM OUT,” Jerry said.
“All right. Send them out,” Gene said. “We’ll give the cameras a show.”
Jerry pounded on the door of the gray area, and the decon man opened it. He was a sergeant. He wore a space suit. He held a pump sprayer filled with bleach, and a flashlight. Rhonda and Charlotte walked into the gray area, and the sergeant told them to hold their arms straight out at their sides. He played the flashlight over their space suits, checking for damage or leaks.
Rhonda noticed that he had a strange look on his face.
“YOU HAVE A HOLE IN YOUR SUIT,” he said.
I knew this was going to happen, she thought.
“WHERE DID YOU GET IT?” he asked.
“I DON’T KNOW!”
He slapped a piece of tape over the hole. Then he washed the two soldiers down with bleach, spraying it all over them, and pounded on the door that led to the staging room. Someone opened it, and they went out. Immediately the support team opened their head bubbles and peeled off their suits. Their scrub suits, underneath, were soaked with sweat. They began to shiver.
“There’s a television-news van out front,” Gene said.
“I had a hole in my suit,” Rhonda said to him. “Did I get the virus?”
“No. You had enough pressure in your suit to protect you the whole time.” He hurried them outdoors. “Get into the van and lie down,” he said. “If anybody asked you any questions, keep you mouths shut.”
They couldn’t find their clothes in the van. They rolled themselves up in some overcoats to keep warm and lay down on the seats, out of sight.
The television crew parked their van near the front door of the monkey house, and the reporter began to poke around, followed by a cameraman. The reporter knocked on the front door and rang the buzzer—no answer. He peered in the front windows—the curtains were drawn, and he couldn’t see anything. Well, nothing was happening in there. This place was deserted. He and the cameraman didn’t notice the white vehicles parked behind
