up, ready to swipe it at the monkey. But where was it? He could not see very well. His faceplate was covered with sweat, and the light was dim in the room. He might as well have been swimming underwater. He edged slowly forward, keeping his body away from the cages on either side, which were filled with hysterical, screaming, leaping, bar-rattling monkeys. The sound of monkeys raising hell was deafening. He was afraid of being bitten by a monkey if he came too close to a cage. So he stayed in the middle of the room as he went forward, while Sergeant Amen followed him, holding a syringe full of drugs on a pole.
“BE CAREFUL, SERGEANT,” he said. “DON’T GET BITTEN. STAY BACK FROM THE CAGES.”
He edged his way from cage to cage, looking into each one, trying to see through it toward the shadowy wall behind. Suddenly he saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, and he turned with the net, and the monkey went soaring through the air over him, making a twelve-foot jump from one side of the room to the other.
“GET HIM! HE’S OVER HERE!” he said. He waved the net, slammed it around over the cages, but the monkey was gone.
He walked through the room again, slowly. The monkey leaped across the room, a huge, tail-swing leap. This animal was airborne whenever it moved. Jerry waved his net and missed. “SON OF A BITCH!” he shouted. The monkey was too fast for him. He would spend ten or fifteen minutes searching the room, squinting past the cages. If he found the monkey, the monkey would leap to the order side of the room. It was a small monkey, built for life in the trees. He thought. This environment favors the monkey over us. We don’t have the tools to handle this situation. We are not in control here—we are along for the ride.
Outside the building, Colonel C.J. Peters stopped by to observe the operation. He was dressed in Levi’s and a sweater, along with sandals and socks, even thought it was a cold day. With his sandals and mustache, he appeared to be a sixties type or some sort of a low-grade employee, may be a janitor. He noticed a stranger hanging around the front of the building. Who was it? Then the man started to come around the side of the building. He was obviously after something, and he was getting too close to the action. C.J. hurried forward and stopped the man and asked him what he was doing.
He was a reporter from The Washington Post. “What’s happening around here?” he asked C.J.
“Well—aw—nothing much is happening,” C.J. replied. He was suddenly very glad he had not worn his colonel’s uniform today—for once, his bad habits had paid off. He did not encourage the reporter to come around to the side of the building and have a look in through the window. The reporter left shortly afterward, having seen and heard nothing of interest. The Washington Post suspected that something funny was happening at the monkey house but the reporters and editors who worked on the story couldn’t quite get to the bottom of it.
“This monkey knows nets,” Jerry shouted to the sergeant. The monkey was not going to let himself be caught by some fool of a human wearing a plastic bag. They decided to leave him in the room overnight. Meanwhile, the surviving monkeys were becoming increasingly agitated. The teams killed most of the monkeys this day, working straight through until after dark. Some of the soldiers began to complain that they were not being given enough responsibility, and so Jerry let them take over more of the hazardous work from the officers. He assigned Specialist Rhonda Williams to duty at the euthanasia table with Major Nate Powell. The major had a drugged monkey on the table, holding its arms behind its back in case it woke up, while Rhonda uncapped a syringe and gave the monkey a heart stick-plunged the needle into the chest between the ribs, aiming for the heart. She pushed the plunger, sending a load of drugs into the heart, which killed the monkey instantly. She pulled the needle out, and a lot of blood squirted out of the puncture wound. That was a good sign; it meant she had punctured the heart. If she got blood on her gloves, she rinsed them in a pan of bleach, and if she got blood on her space suit, she wiped it down with a sponge soaked in bleach.
It was awful when she missed the heart. She pushed the plunger, the poison flooded the animals’s chest around the heart, and the monkey jumped. It doubled up, its eyes moved, and it seemed to struggle. This was only a death reflex, but she gasped and her own heart jumped.
Then Colonel Jaax put her to work at the bleed table with Captain Haines, and presently she began drawing blood from unconscious monkeys. She inserted a needle into the animals’ leg vein and drew the blood. Their eyes were open. She didn’t like that. She felt they were staring at her.
She was bleeding a monkey when suddenly she thought its eyes moved, and it seemed to be trying to sit up. It was awake. It looked at her in a daze and reached out and grabbed her by the hand, the one that was holding the syringe. The monkey was very strong. The needle came out of its thigh, and blood spurted out. Then the animal started pulling her hand towards its mouth! It was trying to bit her hand! She screamed: “GRAB HIM, SOMEBODY, PLEASE! HE’S GETTING UP!” Captain Haines caught the monkey’s arms and pinned it to the table, shouting, “WE HAVE ONE THAT’S AWAKE! NEED KETAMINE!”
The needle, in coming out of the monkey, had cut the monkey’s leg vein. Immediately a ball of blood the size of a baseball formed in the monkey’s leg. It just got bigger and bigger, the blood pouring under the skin, and Rhonda almost burst into tears. She pressed her hands on the blood ball to stop the internal bleeding. Through her gloves, she could feel the blood swelling. A ball of Ebola blood.
A soldier hurried over and hit the monkey with a double load of ketamine, and the monkey went limp.
During the crisis, Peter Jahrling spent every day wearing a space suit in his lab, running tests on monkey samples, trying to determine where and how the virus spreading, and trying to get a pure sample of the virus isolated. Meanwhile, Tom Geisbert pulled all-nighters, staring at the cellscapes through his microscope.
Occassionlly they met each other in an office, and closed the door.
“How are you feeling?”
“Tired, but otherwise I’m okay.”
“No headache?”
“Nope. How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
They were the discoverers of the strain, and it seemed that they would have the chance to give it a name, provided they could isolate it, and provided it didn’t isolate them first.
Jahrling went home for dinner with his family, but later he had read his children their stories and put them to bed, he returned to the Institute and worked until late. The whole Institute was lit up with activity, all the hot labs full of people and operating around the clock. Soon he had stripped nude in the locker room, and he was putting on his scrubs, and then he was wearing his space suit, feeling sleepy, warm, and full of dinner, as he faced the steel door blazzed with the red flower, reluctant to take another step forward. He opened the door and went through to the hot side.
He had been testing his and Geisbert’s blood all along, and he wondered if the virus would suddenly show up in it. He didn’t think it was likely. I didn’t stick the flask close to my nose. I kind of just waved my hand over it. They used to do that all the time in hospital labs with bacteria. It used to be standard procedure to sniff cultures in a lab—that was how you learned what bacteria smelled like, how you learned that some kinds smell like Welch’s grape juice. The question of whether he, Peter Jahrling, was infected with Ebola had become somewhat more pressing since the animal caretaker had puked on the lawn. That guy had not cut himself or stuck himself with a needle. Therefore, if that guy was breaking with Ebola, he might have caught it by breathing it in the air.
Jahrling carried some slides containing spots of his own blood serum into his closet, shut the door, turned out the light. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness, and had the usual struggle to see anything in the microscope through his faceplate. Then the panorama swam into view. It was the ocean of his blood, stretching in all directions, grainy and mysterious, faintly glowing with green. This was a normal glow, nothing to get excited about, that faint green. If the green brightened into a hotter glow, that would signify that his blood was inhabited by Ebola. And what if his blood glowed? How would he judge if it was really glowing? How green is green? How much do I trust my tools and my perceptions? And if I’m covinced my blood is glowing, how am I going to report the results? I’ll need to tell C.J. May be I won’t have to go to the Slammer. I could be bicontained right here in my own lab. I’m in Biosafety Level 4 right now. I’m already in isolation. Who can I infect here in my lab? Nobody. I could live and work in here if I go positive for Ebola.
Nothing glowed. Nothing reacted to his blood. His blood was normal. Same with Tom Geisbert’s blood. As to whether their blood would glow tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, only time would tell, but he and
