Geisbert were climbing out of the incubation period.
At eleven o’clock at night, he decided it was time to go home, and he entered the air lock and pulled the chain to start the decon cycle. He was standing in gray light in the gray zone, alone with his thoughts. He couldn’t see much of anything in here, in the chemical mist. He had to wait seven minutes for the cycle to complete itself. His legs were killing him. He was so tired he couldn’t stand up. He reached up with his hands and grabbed the pipes that fed chemicals into the shower, to hold himself up. The warm liquid ran over his space suit. He felt comfortable and safe in here, surrounded by the sloshing noises of virus-killing liquids and the hiss of air and the ruffling sensation across his back as the chemical played over his suit. He fell asleep.
He jerked awake when the final blast of water jets hit him, and he found himself slumped against the wall of the air lock, his hands still gripped around the pipes. If it hadn’t been for that last jet of water, he would not have woken up. He would have slid down the wall and curled up in the corner of the air lock, and probably would have stayed there all night, sound asleep, while the cool, sterile air flowed through his suit and bathed his body, nude inside its cocoon, at the heart of the Institute.
Specialist Rhonda Williams was standing in the main corridor of the monkey house, afraid she would end up in the Slammer. There was no sound except the roar of air in her helmet. The corridor stretched in both directions to infinity, strewn with cardboard boxes and trash and monkey biscuits. Where were the officers? Where was Colonel Jaax? Where was everybody? She saw the doors leading to the monkey rooms. Maybe the officers were in there.
Something was coming down the corridor. It was the loose monkey. He was running toward her. His eyes were staring at her. Something glittered in his hand—he was holding a syringe. He waved it at her with gesture that conveyed passionate revenge. He wanted to give her an injection. The syringe was hot with an unknown agent. She started to run. Her space suit slowed her down. She kept running, but the hallway stretched on forever, and she couldn’t reach the end. Where was the door out of here? There was no door! There was no way out! The monkey bounded toward her, its terrible eyes fixed on her—and the needle flashed and went into her suit… She woke up in her barracks room.
DECON
December 7, Thursday
Nancy Jaax awoke at four o’clock in the morning to the sound of the telephone ringing. It was her brother, calling from a pay telephone at the hospital in Wichita. He said that their father was dying. “He’s very, very bad, and he’s not going to make it,” he said. Their father was in cardiac failure, and the doctor had been asking if the family wanted him to undertake extreme lifesaving measures. Nancy thought only briefly about this and told her brother not to do it. Her father was down to ninety pounds, just skin and bones, and he was in pain and miserable.
She woke up Jerry and told him that her father would probably die today. She knew she would have to go home, but should she try home today? She could arrive in Wichita by afternoon, and he might still be alive. She might be able to have a last farewell with him. She decided not to fly home. She felt that she couldn’t leave her job in the middle of Reston crisis, that it would be a dereliction of her post.
The telephone rang again. It was Nancy’s father calling from his hospital room. “Are you coming home, Nancy?” he asked. He sounded wheezy and faint.
“I just can’t get away right now, Dad. It’s my work. I’m in the middle of a serious outbreak of disease.”
“I understand,” he said.
“I’ll see you at Christmas, Dad.”
“I don’t think I’ll make it that long, but well, you never know.”
“I’m sure you will make it.”
“I love you, Nancy.”
“I love you, too.”
In the blackness before dawn, she and Jerry got dressed, she in her uniform, he in civilian clothes, and he headed off for the monkey house. Nancy stayed at home until after the children had awaken up, and she fixed them some cereal. She sent the children off on the school bus and drove to work. She went to Colonel C.J. Peters and told him that her father was probably going to die today.
“Go home, Nancy,” he said.
“I’m not going to do that,” she replied.
The dead monkeys began coming in after lunch. A truck would bring them twice a day from Reston, and the first shipment would end up in Nancy’s air lock while she was suiting up. Usually there would be ten or twelve monkeys in hatboxes.
The rest of the monkeys that came out of the monkey house—the vast majority of them, two or three tons’ worth—were placed in triple biohazard bags, and the bags were decontaminated, taken out of the building, and placed in steel garbage cans. Hazleton employees then drove them to an incinerator owned by the company, where the monkeys were burned at a high temperature, high enough to guarantee the destruction of Ebola organisms.
Some of the monkeys had to be examined, however, to see if and where the virus was spreading inside the building. Nancy would carry the hatboxes into suite AA-5 and work on the monkeys until after midnight with her partner and a civilian assistant. They hardly spoke to one another, except to point to a tool or a sign of disease in a monkey.
Thoughts about her father and her childhood came to Nancy that day. Years earlier, as a girl, she had helped him during plowing season, driving his tractor from afternoon until late at night. Moving at a pace not much faster than a mule, it plowed furrows along a strip of land a half a mile long. She wore cutoff shorts and sandals. It was loud and hot on the tractor, and in the emptiness of Kansas she thought about nothing, drowned in the roar of the engine as the sun edged down to the horizon and the land grew dark and the moon appeared and climbed high. At ten o’clock her father would take over and plow for the rest of the night, and she would go to bed. At sunrise, he would wake her up, and she would get back on the tractor and keep on plowing.
“SPONGE,” she mouthed to her buddy.
He mopped up some blood from the monkey, and Nancy rinsed her gloves in the pan of green EnviroChem.
Her father died that day, while Nancy worked in the hot suite. She flew home to Kansas and arrived by taxi on Saturday morning at her family’s plot at a graveyard in Wichita just as the funeral service began. It was a cold, rainy day, and a tiny knot of people holding umbrellas huddled around a preacher by a stone wall and a hole in the earth. Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax moved forward to see more clearly, and here eyes rested on something that she had not quite anticipated. It was a flag draped over the casket. He had been a veteran, after all. The sight broke her down, and she burst into tears.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, Thursday, December 7, the last monkey was killed and bagged, and people began deconning out. They had a bad time trying to catch the little monkey that had escaped; it took hours. Jerry Jaax had entered the room were it was hiding and spent two or three hours chasing it in circles with a net. Finally the monkey got itself jammed down in a crack behind a cage with its tail sticking out, and Sergeant Amen hit the tail with a massive dose of anesthetic. In about fifteen minutes, the monkey became still, and they dragged it out, and it went the way of the other monkeys, carried along in the flow of material.
They radioed Gene Johnson to tell him that the last monkey was dead. He told Sergeant Klages to explore the building, to make sure that there were no more live monkeys in any rooms. Klages discovered a chest freezer in a storage room. It looked sinister, and he radioed to Johnson: “GENE, I’VE GOT A FREEZER HERE.”