Hwang swerved the SUV into the oncoming lane, hit a howling mongrel dog, and caused the small trailer attached to the FOCO vehicle to careen wildly. Hwang and his seatmate Cho laughed.
“I don’t care about the dog, but I sure the devil care about the equipment!” Suk snarled from the back seat. He looked back to see the severely injured dog collapsing beside the road.
Suk was glad that CA13 from Santa Benito to Dolores had little traffic and that no one saw Hwang’s reckless escapades. Hwang liked to kill things, a trait that had been useful when the miguk, that American doctor, snooped into their business. Still, Suk had been surprised at how much Hwang enjoyed killing. As a microbiologist, Suk was fascinated by life; Hwang, on the other hand, was fascinated by death.
“How much farther?” Cho asked Suk.
Suk checked his GPS unit. “Just under an hour.”
“Pull over,” Cho snorted, “I gotta piss again.”
“For a fat man, you certainly have a small bladder,” Hwang snorted, “just like the size of some of your other body parts.”
Cho shoved Hwang who nearly lost control of the vehicle.
“Okay, okay. Pull over so he can urinate,” Suk shouted. He could hardly stand another day with these clowns. He often wondered who would win if they ever got into a fight. They’d tear each other apart like two rabid dogs. He shuddered to think about it.
Hwang eased the SUV and the trailer off the road onto a turnout, Cho jumped out.
“Should we leave him?” Hwang grinned, gunning the engine.
Suk ignored him and surveyed the surrounding fields of agriculture. This area in the northeastern corner of Guatemala was considerably flatter than the rest of the country and covered with large fields of maíze.
Cho climbed back in the SUV. “What’s the plan today?”
“I talked with the town’s mayor so they know we are coming,” Suk replied. “They’re welcoming us with open arms.”
“I suppose drilling a few wells helped,” Hwang said.
“Now that we are satisfied with the virus,” Suk explained, “we move into Phase 2—The Miasma Theory. At the other small villages, it was easy to infect everyone when we told them we were vaccinating them for the flu. They never knew we actually gave them nasal doses of the virus.”
“Sure didn’t help much with the flu,” Cho laughed.
“What’s miasma?” Hwang asked.
Suk was surprised he had grasped the word. “It means bad air. It was an ancient Greek theory that disease was caused by bad air. It was before we understood about microbes.”
“Huh?” It was Greek to Hwang.
“The people think we’re doing them a favor by spraying for mosquitos,” Suk explained. “In eight days, they will all have a very mild cold. We need to evaluate the effectiveness of aerosolization of the virus. That’s the plan.”
* * *
Professor Kwon worked under the isolation hood. The thick gloves of his hazmat suit made it difficult to work the pipette. He pried off the top of the blood vial as best he could, inserted the tip of the pipette into the blood, and withdrew one cubic centimeter of fluid.
Now that he understood the effectiveness the virus, there were two immediate goals—mass production of the virus and development of an effective vaccine.
He watched the blood droplets fall from the pipette into a small tube. Finding the virus had been no easy task. Kwon’s faith was in his own intelligence, but he had admitted to Pak how surprised he was by the discovery.
Kwon loved riddles and read extensively about the Maya civilization. He was fascinated by their gods. In their time, the Maya were one of the most advanced cultures on the planet, and Kwon admired their development of a written language and their mathematical and astronomical achievements.
As he watched the blood drip from the pipette, he thought about the difference between the Maya and the Aztecs, the other great civilization of the time. The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, while the Maya believed in blood offerings. The Maya were equally acquainted with the spiritual world, both the divine and the demonic.
So why would such an advanced culture pass into oblivion?
Kwon aspirated another cubic centimeter of blood into the pipette.
Theories abound as to the reason for their demise—meteorites, infectious diseases, war, over-population, and drought. But Kwon found it strange that such an advanced civilization that recorded every detail of its history had nothing to say of its downfall.
From what he understood of microbiology, his theory of extinction centered on an infectious disease. But his studies of the great epidemics told him populations did not simply disappear in one fell swoop. It took time—enough time for the great Maya to have recorded the devastation.
He knew that the Maya should have produced drawings and writings about a great sickness—pictographs of dead and dying people. But only one such image had ever been found.
In his many books about the Maya—books Pak had given him for his exemplary service—Kwon remembered when the inspiration struck him. He had been flipping through pages of logo-symbolic pictures and actual photographs of pictograph panels rescued from Maya temples. It was as if she jumped off the page—her presence was that palpable. He had been studying the gods and demons worshipped in the culture when he read about tzitzimimeh, a female deity, related to infertility and considered to be a demon. She was feared by midwives and pregnant women.
The demon deity was portrayed as a skeletal female figure with claw-like hands and feet, a snake-like object slithering between her legs, and an animal figure on her shoulder. She was Kwon’s inspiration. Surrounding her were heartbroken women and their babies—drawn head downward—indicating they were dead. The text in the book explained that tzitzimimeh was the demon that embodied the souls of barren women. It was the animal figure on her shoulder that fascinated Kwon the most—the animal looked like a ferret.
Could the Maya have died off by attrition, so the impact had never been depicted?
Kwon shrugged, finished inserting the blood and fastened a cap securely on the vial. Then he put the vial in a separate tray.
The ferret was key, and no one else would have understood.
Only a microbiologist would know that the ferret was the best animal model scientists had for carrying the influenza virus. But the influenza virus was not known to be associated with infertility or stillborn babies. The only virus that Kwon knew of that had any association with sterility was mumps. Kwon understood that both the mumps virus and the influenza virus were single-stranded RNA viruses that come from closely related orthomyxoviruses and paramyxoviruses.
There was one fact about the mumps virus he had forgotten until he happened to be reading one of his textbooks. A paramyxovirus follows the rule of six; that is, the total length of the genome is always a multiple of six. Kwon knew very little about the Bible, but had read parts of Revelation in his search for understanding epidemics and the end of the world. He nearly fell out of his chair when he realized that the mumps virus was 666 nanometers in length.
It was then the big revelation hit him. Maybe the Maya did not die all at once from an infectious disease, maybe they just died off. If a virus could cause sterility, how long would a civilization survive? Not long.
If a virus was the cause of the Maya demise, Kwon had to find the original virus. It wasn’t going to be easy. His own stores of biologic elements were full of the mumps virus, but the current mumps virus caused sterility in humans in about five percent of cases. The original virus must have mutated in order to survive and still keep its human host alive.
The only way Kwon could find the non-mutated virus was to search for it in Guatemala. Ancient blood was not easy to find, but if a remnant could be found anywhere, it would be in Tikal, the heart of the Maya kingdom. If he could find an animal that carried the virus, recovering it was possible. After all, the HIV virus was discovered in monkeys in Africa.
Kwon and his protégé Suk surmised the non-mutant mumps virus might be found in local ferrets. The HIV monkeys didn’t develop disease from that virus, and they thought it was possible that ferrets would not show ill effects from the non-mutant mumps virus.
As it turned out, Tikal was exactly where the virus was found. It was very much dormant and very much present. Its only mutation was that it was no longer contagious to humans. But that was easy to overcome; Kwon and his team supercharged its infectious nature.
A former student of Kwon’s, who had defected to the Netherlands, had recently mutated H5N1, the avian flu virus. He had combined it with the highly contagious H1N1 flu virus to create a doomsday virus. Kwon admired his student’s courage to publish the results in the journal Science, in an article titled “Airborne Transmission of Influenza A/H5N1 Virus Between Ferrets.”