Chapter 9
Lauren felt weak, as if her blood sugar had suddenly dropped. She had been gazing at familiar faces ravaged by decomposition and predators without a break almost since they arrived—identifying corpses while the doctors were setting up equipment, and worst of all, cutting, probing, and otherwise desecrating the bodies of her friends and colleagues.
She was emotionally wrung out, physically exhausted, and feared she was also becoming dehydrated. It was impossible to eat or drink while enclosed in a Racal and she had sweltered inside the space suit all afternoon, sweat running down her face, stinging her eyes, and irritating her skin. She lost count of how many times she swiped at her faceplate with a gloved hand, trying in vain to wipe salty perspiration away.
At least she was no longer crying—both her tear ducts and her grief had suffered overload from the enormity of the tragedy she found in Tlateloco. She felt emotionally numb and sat there on a box staring off into space trying to distance herself from all that was going on around her as if that might assuage her grief at all she had seen. She felt if she could only isolate her feelings of loss and grief and somehow put them outside herself she might just survive this hellish mission.
She was startled when Mason put a hand on her shoulder. The Racal hood prohibits peripheral vision and she hadn’t seen him approaching as she sat beside an escoba palm tree in the coming darkness, apart from the others and their grisly experiments on the dead, illuminated by portable halogen lamps.
“Dr. Sullivan, we’ve finally managed to get the mobile lab set up. If you’re ready, I’ll walk you and Dr. Matos through the procedure to enter and get out of your suits.”
“Is it air-conditioned?” she asked hopefully, watching Eduardo in his orange protective gear standing at the base of the Aztec temple with a flashlight, probing its stones with the beam.
Mason nodded to her inside his hood, and in dim light from the generator lamps she noticed a smile and how it changed his appearance. His temples crinkled when he grinned, softening his ice-blue eyes, making him look like a small boy playing Starship Trooper in his orange space suit.
He was handsome, in a bookish way, she thought. She sighed and struggled to her feet, crediting her feelings to some strange hormone flux, some inner chemical assault brought on by physical stress and exhaustion, not to mention dehydration and extreme hunger.
He led her toward the silver laboratory brought in by the helicopter, sitting at the edge of the clearing a short distance from the tents and cots that contained the bodies. “The procedure is really quite simple,” he said casually, “although it can be a bit frightening and . . . embarrassing the first time you experience it.”
She tripped over uneven terrain once in the half dark and said, “Just so it’s air-conditioned.” And then she thought, what does he mean by embarrassing?
“We’ll enter through a door at this end of the lab. The first chamber is quite small, only room for two of us at a time. Once inside, stand still with your arms outspread. I’ll pull a chain and we’ll be showered with three different solutions—phenolic acid, bleach, and water. That should disinfect us and kill any germs clinging to the outside of our suits.
“Once the shower stops, we’ll enter a larger inner chamber where we’ll help each other out of our Racals, which we’ll hang up on special hooks on the wall to your left.”
“That sounds simple enough.” She said it without really thinking about the procedure he described.
Mason cleared his throat, and his voice changed pitch slightly. She glanced at him and could see his cheeks flaming red.
“Then we have to remove all our clothes and shower again in a mild chlorine solution and then we will change into scrub suits. The clothing we wore under the Racals will be put into sealed plastic bags to be burned later in case of inadvertent contamination.”
She hesitated. “You mean ALL of our clothes?”
“Yes. Of course,” he added quickly, “I’ll turn my back and face the other way.”
Lauren heard someone chuckle over her headset and she knew some of the other doctors were listening to their conversation with more than clinical interest.
Mason said, “I apologize for this, but the Cytotec BL Four isn’t engineered for privacy, only for safety from infection.”
He addressed Dr. Johnson quickly, as though wishing to change subjects. “Lionel, bring Dr. Matos to the lab and take him through the procedure step-by-step.”
Lauren smiled to herself, liking Dr. Williams for having the grace to be apologizing for their situation, to be worried about her dignity even in the face of what was going on around them. In truth, she wasn’t too concerned. She was, after all, an adult and he was a doctor. But then why, she wondered, was her pulse suddenly beating faster at the prospect of disrobing in a small room with him?
“I’ll bring Dr. Matos,” a distant voice replied. “I suppose if you’re the boss, you get the best assignments.”
Another soft chuckle came from a different member of the group.
The disinfecting shower was a little scary at first, with a spray of chemicals splattering against her face mask. Lauren had fewer concerns about disrobing in front of Mason with both their backs turned. However, when they stepped into a shower that was barely big enough for both of them, all thoughts of modesty were banished. For his part, he tried his best to keep his eyes focused on the wall of the shower and not her naked body.
Once the shower stopped, she put on a pair of green scrub pants and a sleeveless top.
“Ready?” he asked, still with his back turned.
“My word, Doctor, but you’ve got a cute butt,” she said mischievously.
“What?” he exclaimed, pulling a towel tight around his waist.
She laughed, trying to relieve the pressure of what she’d been through all day. “Just kidding, Dr. Williams, just kidding. I kept my gaze averted like a good little girl.”
He turned and saw that she was already dressed in her scrubs. Whirling a finger in a circle, he smiled and said, “Then please turn back around while I dress. I am very shy, you know.”
She grinned and dutifully turned her back. “But, I’ll bet it is cute, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know, not being able to see myself from behind,” he answered with a chuckle.
Once dressed, he opened a tightly sealed door leading into a room where everything seemed miniaturized: a small table and chairs, a sink, and a refrigerator like the ones found in travel trailers.
She was immediately aware of the wash of cold air against her skin and heard the hum of air-conditioning coming from the roof.
“This is better,” Lauren sighed, sinking into a tiny plastic chair at the table, resting her chin in her palms as she watched Mason open the refrigerator. Even as tired as she was she found herself noticing his good looks again, and the ease with which he seemed to accomplish any task. He had, she realized, economy of movement. Everything he did was accomplished without any wasted motion.
Mason prepared a large pot of coffee, “a doctor’s lifeblood” he called it, and placed a tall bottle of Gatorade on the table. “Try to drink some of this,” he said, offering her a paper cup. “The heat and sweating inside a Racal causes you to lose a lot of sodium and potassium. This electrolyte solution will replace it and hopefully keep you from having muscle spasms and cramps later.”
“I won’t need much encouragement to drink the whole thing,” she said, filling the cup to the brim and taking a swig. “By the way, Dr. Williams, what does the name Cytotec BL Four mean?”
“First,” he said, turning to look at her over his shoulder as he fussed with the coffee machine, “I think it should be Mason and Lauren from now on. We don’t stand much on formality here in the lab,” he added in a matter-of-fact way.
“The quarters are too small and, as you’ve already seen, personal privacy is almost nonexistent.”
Lauren smiled weakly and nodded her agreement. “It’s Mason and Lauren, then,” she said, gulping more fluid, aware of a slight tremor in her hands, probably from exhaustion and the dehydration he mentioned earlier and not from any excitement to be in such close quarters with a very attractive man.
“As for the name, it comes from the term Cytology Technologies, the company that manufactures the lab and equipment we use to do studies on tissue and blood samples,” he continued, interrupting her reverie. “The BL Four stands for Biohazard Level Four, the highest level, meant for study of the most infectious, dangerous organisms in the world.”
“And that’s what you think you’ve found here?”
“In a BL Four we can study the filoviruses, like Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa, and also anthrax, dengue, and rabies. All organisms that are lethal and for which there are no effective treatments or vaccines. We don’t know what this bug is yet, but it looks to have almost one hundred percent infectivity and one hundred percent mortality, so that makes it right up there with the worst I’ve ever seen.”
As Dr. Johnson and Dr. Matos entered the shower room, Mason asked her, “Would you like a quick tour? The lab is so small it won’t take long . . .”
“Why not?” Lauren hadn’t wanted to leave the comfort of her chair, but when he asked so gently, with a curious quality to his voice, some inner urge gave her new energy.
Mason took her through various rooms, almost all of which had strange, futuristic equipment with myriad dials, computer screens, and printers attached to the walls.
“Since this is a so-called mobile lab, we try to make use of every nook and cranny to stuff as much diagnostic and communications gear in as we can,” he said as he opened a door to a tiny cubicle containing both a commode and a handheld shower hose.
“I guess there’ll be no soaking in a luxurious hot bathtub to soothe my aching muscles,” Lauren said. She was amused when her remark appeared to embarrass him, as if it were somehow his fault things were so cramped. Or could it have been the mental picture of her soaking in a hot bath that had him flustered, she thought. Hmmm . . . she’d have to think about that.
Mason cleared his throat. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to get you out of here and back to Mexico City before too long. Now that you’ve identified all the . . . all your friends, I’d like to get you out of the danger zone as soon as I can.”
Lauren offered no reply. A part of her wanted to stay now until someone provided some answers to what had happened here, but another part wanted to fly away home and leave all the gruesome images of decaying corpses and lost friends far behind her.
The problem, she knew, was she would never be able to get those scenes from her mind—no matter how far she flew or how long she lived.
The last chamber he showed her was adjacent to the shower room. It had a metal door with thick, double-paned glass, and could only be entered from the room where the Racals hung. She peered through heavy glass at a row of empty orange suits, hanging like discarded carapaces of obscene insects after they had broken free.
“That’s the laboratory where all of the tissue and blood samples will be examined and tested. That work has to be done while wearing Racals, since we have to assume the specimens are still infective.”
He pointed to the ceiling where she could see several air vents. “The room is kept at negative pressure so that any bugs that escape into the air are sucked up through the vents and bubbled through a chlorine solution to kill them.”
She could see several cot-like beds surrounded by monitoring equipment similar to what she’d seen in a hospital intensive care unit when her father died.
“What are those for?”
Mason seemed uncomfortable answering her question. “Those are for treatment and study of any hot zone survivors or for us in case one of us becomes infected by a hot-bug we’re investigating. We have almost everything we need to treat someone medically, short of doing major surgery.”
“Have they ever been used?”
“Yes.” He hesitated. “Just last year in Australia we had to take care of the wife and daughter of a horse trainer who had contracted a mutant strain of equine morbillivirus, a disease similar to measles in humans, but much more deadly.”
“What happened to them?”
“They died. The entire family.”
“How do you deal with . . .” she pointed through the glass at glass slides and vials of blood arranged neatly on a counter, “all this death?”
He stared at her a moment before he spoke, and his eyes looked haunted. “In the only way any of us can. By focusing on all the possible deaths we may be preventing by what we do.” He thought for a moment, and then he added, “And on good days, we save more than we lose.”
He ran his hands through his hair, though it did nothing to ease the unruliness. “Look, Lauren, I know you must think us doctors are unfeeling robots from the way we dispassionately discussed your friends out there, but it is simply not true.”
He hesitated as if trying to find some way to explain it to her. “It’s kinda like surgeons who play rock and roll or classical music while they are doing intricate operations,” he said, his eyes serious, “or why cops make dark jokes when confronted with horrible traffic accidents. Some things are just too terrible to confront head-on and must be accommodated in individual ways so the horror doesn’t make us incapable of action.”
“I know I’m not explaining this very well, but sometimes to cope with terrible things we must focus on mundane parts of our job in order not to be paralyzed with thoughts of what we are dealing with.”
She glanced through the window in the wall at the test tubes and petri dishes containing specimens his team had collected earlier that day.
“I think I understand, Mason,” she said. “It’s like when I’m unearthing ancient bones from a dig site, I don’t dwell on what those bones represent but only on the job I’ve got to do to make some sense of their current condition.”
His gaze followed hers to the specimens in the next room. “We may be too late for Dr. Adams and his students, but there are fifteen million people in Mexico City a few miles away, and the only thing right now standing between them and what you’ve seen here today, is us.”
“It must take a terrible toll on you.”
“Sure. Dr. Jakes has been married three times, and Lionel has an ulcer the size of the Grand Canyon, and I’m so grouchy my secretary holds up a silver cross every time I enter the office.” He gave a dry chuckle. “I’m afraid it just goes with the territory.”
Lauren felt too tired to laugh appropriately. “Charlie and these kids could have used a few silver crosses.”
Mason nodded, “But even if they’d had them, it wouldn’t have helped. I’m afraid the only thing that is going to defeat this hot-bug is modern science, not ancient superstitions.”
After a moment, he grinned, trying to lighten her mood. “Now, Doctor Lady, unless you want to miss our sumptuous dinner feast, we need to get back to the dining room.”
“What are we having?” she asked, putting her hand to her stomach, which growled at the mention of food.
He made a show of sniffing air. “Unless I miss my guess, Chef Lionel Johnson will soon be preparing his specialite du jour, MREs sautéed lightly in a microwave.”
“MREs?”
“Meals Ready to Eat, courtesy of the U.S. Army. Guaranteed to be slightly less than thirty years old. We should hurry. We won’t get dessert if we’re late.”
“Dessert?”
“Oreos with powdered milk.”
They found Dr. Matos and Dr. Johnson in the kitchen, and Lauren thought she saw fear in Eduardo’s eyes. Although he was close to sixty he looked remarkably fit, graying slightly around his temples without any other pronounced signs of aging.
“I have never seen anything like this in my entire life,” he said, speaking to Lauren. “I started to feel dizzy. Dr. Johnson said I had to come inside to drink electrolytes before we go back to the temple.”
Suiting action to words, he took a drink from the paper cup in his hands.
He glanced at her over the rim of the cup. “I must see Montezuma’s tomb, Lauren. I do not feel I can wait another day. Will you go with me?”
She looked to Mason for approval.
“After you’ve both eaten and consumed enough fluids,” he told them quietly. “We’ll be up all night working the specimens, so no one will be getting much sleep around here anyway, and the jungle can get quite cold at night so you won’t be bothered by the heat like you were earlier today.”
* * *
As the team gathered around the table in the main room of the lab, Mason excused himself, saying he wasn’t hungry and wanted to get some of the cultures set up and cooking.
Lauren dug into her MRE as if it were a thirty-dollar steak, finding, to her surprise in spite of what she’d seen, she was famished.
She glanced at Suzanne, who was sitting next to her. “Suzanne,” she began.
“Yeah?”
“What’s the story on Dr. Williams?”
Suzanne’s lips curled up in a half-smile. “Well, let’s see . . . he’s thirty-three years old, mountain bikes five miles a day unless we’re in the field, and he’s ex-military—did two years as a doc in the Navy.” She thought for a minute, and then she added, “I believe he likes to fish and bird hunt in his spare time, of which he has none.”
Lauren raised her eyebrows. “You seem to know a lot about him.”
Suzanne’s eyes turned wistful. “Yeah, seems I had a bit of a crush on him when I first came to work at CDC, but he’s married to his work and never gave me a second look.”
She stared at Lauren. “Maybe you’ll have more luck than I did.”
Lauren blushed fiercely. “But . . . I don’t . . . Hey, listen, Suzanne,” Lauren said, “Mason may be a handsome man, but I’ve just lost over thirty friends and a man I looked upon as a father and I’ve absolutely no interest in romance at this point in my life!”
Suzanne sobered and waved her hand in the air. “That’s okay, I’m just kidding.”
“What about you?” Lauren asked, as her breathing slowed to normal. “How did you come to work for the CDC?”
“Well, I’m kind of a natural fit. I’m an army brat; my father was an army doc in Vietnam until Agent Orange ate all the flesh off of his body, and my brother was also an army doc until Saddam’s germ warfare in the Gulf War messed up his system so much he had to take a medical retirement.”
“Saddam used germ warfare in the Gulf War?” Lauren asked around a mouthful of ham and beans.
Suzanne smirked. “Oh, the army denies it, but I know what I saw when my brother came home—his body as broken as his spirit.”
“I’m sorry,” Lauren said.
Suzanne smiled grimly. “That’s the chance you take when you work for Uncle Sam, Lauren.”
“What about Sam Jakes?” Lauren asked quietly to change the subject. “Do he and Shirley Cole really hate each other as much as it sounds like?”
Suzanne chuckled. “Hell no. In fact, the old boy’s kinda sweet on her if you ask me . . . especially her baked goods. All that jawing back and forth is just for show. They’re really quite close.”
Lauren was about to ask more when Mason stuck his head in from the lab and said, “Come on, troops, we don’t have all night. Eat your Oreos and get a move on; we’ve got bugs to grow and tissue to stain and lots of other fun stuff to do before we turn in tonight.”