Cough (3 page)

In the name of science a lot of things could be explained. But in the name of humanity, at least as a human being, there were a lot of things Charles could explain yet could not forgive. Especially himself. The chimpanzee experiment using EC175 was top of the list. He had experimented with animals before. Nothing that had turned deadly.

He was left with a blood bath and the carcasses of seven chimpanzees. Four of them died quickly, the others were lingering and suffering and they had to put them down.

The cleanup involved a BSL four team and the lab had to be extinguished.

A part of him believed that the chimpanzees would be fine and would show only minimum effects. After all, while the markings showed that EC175 was partially manmade, it was still biologically part of the Paramyxoviridae family which included repository tract infections. Primates were genetically disposed to early immunity or high tolerance to viruses in the Paramyxoviridae family. So why would they be to EC175.

Rats weren’t affected, oddly enough. Cats and dogs were but only showed fatality in twenty percent of the cases.

They needed a test as close to human as possible. Even though Charles argues it wouldn’t be an effective test. Not like the discovery of the virus wasn’t test enough.

A year earlier, the same day he hired Emir, he received a call from the World Health Organization. Because of his work with viruses, they asked for his assistance.

A mysterious virus, one they couldn’t identify had broken out in grouping of remote villages in the Eastern Congo.

“Do you have a wife?” Charles asked Emir.

“No.”

“Children who depend on you?”

“No to that as well. My family doesn’t live in America.”

“Good. I need someone to come out in the field. And I prefer it to be someone who won’t be terribly missed if they die.”

Emir wasn’t horrified when Charles said that.

Charles was asked to bring a small team and it didn’t get any smaller than just him and Emir.

The World Health Organization has been on site for six days. In that time, eighty percent of two villages had been wiped out.

By the time it hit villages three and four, Charles saw a distinct pattern of infection.

Village one showed symptoms first. The town medical person stated everyone came down with it at the same time. Ninety percent of the village was ill and ninety percent of them died. Death occurred within thirty-six hours.

Three days later, Village two showed the infection. While it held the same communicability and infection rate, the fatality rate had lessened some. Charles attributed that to the way it was handled.

When village three became infected, again, it was three days.

The incubation rate was the same. It didn’t waiver. Three days from exposure to symptoms.

The virus hit like a common cold, all at once. The nasal and bronchial passengers inflamed and the mucus membrane secreted at a high and rapid rate. Within minutes, the inflammation of the passages was so intense, capillaries broke within the mucus membranes causing the victims to choke and drown in their own blood.

They literally coughed themselves to death.

No one, not even Charles could isolate the virus enough to create it in order to cure it. Samples were taken and secured, but nothing anyone had was pure form of the virus. What they extracted was a watered down version.

Where did it come from? What caused the villagers to all get sick at the same time?

Apparently they were all exposed to something at once. But what? Short of it being a test of a biological weapon, it was chalked up to a freak of nature.

One that started in the East Congo and ended there.

That was what the World Health Organization, CDC, Army and every other health specialist team believed. Except Charles.

He felt it had an origin and then he
knew
for sure it did.

In the final sweep, double checking the first village, making sure the few remaining survivors didn’t need anything, Emir came across a Smart Phone. It was on the table next to the bed of a man that had died.

The screen was broken, it was dead, but it was pretty sophisticated for an isolated village that didn’t even have electricity.

Emir showed it to Charles and the phone didn’t sit right with him. They returned to where Emir found it. After searching the hut, in a box under the cot, they found headphones, a charger, a bottle of whiskey and a pair of work boots. The boots had a manufacture stamp on the newer soles, clearly it was French. Yet, the tops of the boots, both of them were stained with blood.

They took one of the boots to the mobile lab and scraped off a sample of the blood.

Sure enough, traces of the virus were on the boot. It wasn’t a live specimen.

Where did they come from? It was possible the virus attached to the items when the village fell ill, but it was also possible the items came from the source.

The mother of the man, an elderly woman who didn’t get sick, did not speak English. Emir’s Kituba was sketchy at best, it was one of the languages he did not speak. After repeatedly trying in different ways to find out where her son got the items from, they got an answer.

Her hand floated on the air and she said a word that in English meant wreckage.

Hand motioning a plane … wreckage.

A plane?

She gave them direction, and after gathering supplies, lugging extra oxygen, weapons and suited up, they headed into the jungle.

Six hours into their walk they came across the first sign of wreckage. A plane seat.

Not far from there the clearing in the jungle, twisted and crushed trees and the crater exposed the rest of the small cargo plane.

The pieces were small and only items spewed across.

The dead man salvaged everything he felt was useful and left the most important thing behind.

The box. A metal box, no bigger than eighteen inches, dented and dinged had survived the crash. The only identifying marks on it were the number 175. No biohazard symbol, nothing to discern it from any other storage box.

Except the contents.

It was on its side with the lock broken and lid open. Three metal vial tubes, six inches long were just outside the open lid, with another eight inside the foam lined case.

The vials were sealed. All of them.

“I don’t need to be a scientist to know,” Charles said. “This is the source of our sickness.”

Emir picked up a vial. “They are sealed. You think they are leaking.”

“More than likely. Seven inside, three out. Slots of twelve. One is missing.”

“Back at the village?”

“Probably. Let’s get them back in the box, seal it. Got a number four bag?”

“Yeah,” Emir reached for utility belt.

“It should fit in a number four. That will keep it safe until …”

“Look.” Emir pointed.

Charles turned in the direction that Emir indicated. Another vial was four feet away. He hurried to it and lifted it. The seal had been pried off and the vial was empty. It was missing the actual sample. He looked about the ground, knowing it had to be there and it was. The silver sample rod that resembled a metal cotton swab.

With a heavy exhale, Charles faced Emir. “Our salvager had no idea what he found.”

“He probably thought it was empty.”

“We’ll take the rest back. Seal the box and bag it while I burn this one.”

“We need to hurry. The other teams are moving out.”

“No need.”

“I’m sorry.” Emir said. “Why don’t we want to hurry?”

“Because this is ours. It’s too big, too deadly to share. We will beat it first, then let the others know.”

“Is it right?” Emir asked. “Ethical.”

“About as ethical as finders keepers.” Charles smiled. “Let’s get moving.”

That day he believed he found his virology gold mine.

He was wrong.

It was going to be their secret. At least the secret of SAT. However, to contain it, to work on it, would take a lot of funding. Getting that funding meant letting the secret out, at least within the ranks of SAT and investors.

Finding and keeping that virus was the biggest mistake of his life and Charles decided after the chimpanzee experiment, it was one mistake he would immediately rectify … or die trying to.

There were two things that were for certain when it came to summer vacation. Less money and more aggravation. Less money because Macy worked less hours. It wasn’t a hard choice. She could either work less and clear Two seventy-five a week or work the same, pay a sitter for the boys and clear … two seventy-five a week. She opted to work less. If she was going to be poor, she figured she’d get quality time in with the boys while doing so.

The aggravation came simply by the increased number of people and teenagers that visited her place of employment. During the summer months her schedule was either lunch rush or double shifts when Rege had the boys.

“Welcome to Cluck-Clucks, can I take your order,” Macy spoke into the headset.

“Hold on,” the woman replied in the speaker.

“Take your time.”

“Not you. My call. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. Order when ready.”

“I’ll have the Cluck Crispy wrap, an order of Cluck fires and a six piece Cluckets.”

“Anything to drink.”

“What was that?” the woman asked.

“Anything to drink?”

“Oh, no.”

“Sauce for the Cluckets.”

“Why would I need a bucket?”

Silently, Macy groaned. “Seven ninety-eight, please pull around.” She lowered the headset, hit ‘send’ on the order and faced her manager who was sharing the small drive thru space as he stocked.

The woman who ordered pulled to the window. Macy prepared to tell the woman the amount again, but the women held up her finger to tell Macy to hold on because she was on the phone.

Seriously? Macy thought. The woman couldn’t hold off on her phone call. As irritated as Macy was, she smiled, waited and completed the financial portion of the transaction.

“I hate my job,” she said to the manager, George.

“No, you don’t.”

“Why am I on drive thru?” Macy asked and walked to the line to grab the food.

“You do well.”

“I really don’t know why I keep working here.”

George helped her bag the order. “Maybe it’s because we are flexible, let your kids hang here and you have a really cool boss.”

Macy smiled and shook her head. George wasn’t bad. Of course George was about three years out of high school.

“Take a break, you overdue for your ten,” George said.

“Thanks.”

After removing her headset, Macy grabbed a soda, her phone and stepped outside. She was going to check on the kids but then remembered they were at camp.

The message waiting on the phone surprised Macy. It shouldn’t have. It was from Rege, simply stating that she should consider asking for the time off and join him and the boys on vacation.

She didn’t take the request as a plea to rekindle their relationship, they were beyond that. He was just a nice guy, and Macy knew handling the boys alone was a lot.

She replied. ‘Your mom can’t go this year?’

Bleep.

‘Not this year.’

She responded by telling him she couldn’t. His reply … a single K.

Macy fumed. She hated that. One letter. As if she wasn’t worth the time to add the ‘O’. She always over thought the simple ‘K’ response. Was the person mad, annoyed or were they trying to play mind games by making her guess why they only replied with a ‘K’.

It was a pet peeve of hers and she wasted seven minutes of her break thinking about why he would just send a ‘K’.

There was nothing more that Macy would like than to go on vacation with the boys. She hadn’t taken them away or gone away with them since the divorce four years earlier. But Macy couldn’t. Not only wouldn’t George give her the time off, she just couldn’t lose a week’s pay.

Getting a break from Littlefield was a nice thought. The most excitement they had was when the Twist and Twirl ran out of chocolate ice cream.

Littlefield was boring and calm. How could it not be? It was far removed from everything, it would be nothing less than a major fluke for anything big to ever happen there.

Not even a half of bottle of scotch took Charles from the dark places in his mind. The thoughts were still there and they swirled as much as the bed did. He couldn’t get the Chimpanzees out of his mind, what he had done to them, what the germ truly was.

Not that he didn’t see it in full force back in the Congo, but to be the cause was another story.

It was real. Too real and not only was the virus deadly, it was something they should not have.

The true nail in the coffin on what he had to do was when Emir said to him. “We have a virus that even a terrorist would be scared to touch.”

With those words of wisdom from the young man, Charles believed he knew what he had to do.

Then again, he should have called Rupert while drunk.

“Charles, listen to me, you are inebriated.”

“I know.”

“You’ll think more clear in the morning.”

“We need to get rid of it. Destroy it.”

“You and I both know that would be foolish,” said Rupert.

“It would be foolish to keep it.”

“It would be foolish not to.”

The conversation went round and round until Charles hung up. He slept a few hours, enough to get some of the booze out of his system, took a cab back to the pub to get his car and then went to work.

It was seven in the morning and it surprised him that security stated, “Surprised you weren’t here this morning.”

Conrad made a similar comment.

Did something happen?

He made his way to his lab floor, Emir was the only one there.

“Did something happen earlier with the chimps?” Charles asked.

“No.” Emir shook his head.

“You look frightened, what happened?”

“I’ll tell you…” Rupert entered the room.

When his superior walked in, immediately Charles’ mind went to an accident with the virus or that perhaps the government found out they had it.

Rupert continued. “We didn’t know what you were going to do.”

“I’m sorry. Who is ‘we’?”

“Myself, the investors. Investors invest. They want to protect their investment. So fearful that you were going to destroy it, Dr. Beutel removed samples to take to his facility in Germany.”

Charles’ mouth dropped open. “Since when is a virus an investment.”

“When there is a cure.”

Like a madman, Charles laughed. “There is no cure. It’s an antidote, inoculation. You get it, you’re done.”

“If there is an outbreak, yes, there can be loss of lives, but think of the lives saved by inoculating other regions.”

“By the time this country get FDA approval and then mass produces, this virus will have wiped us into extinction.”

“This country.”

Charles groaned. “This is why you allowed him to take it to Germany.”

“He felt it was best.”

“What’s best is we destroy it. All of it. Emir, tell him.”

Emir replied. ‘It is too dangerous. We have been playing Russian roulette with it. An accident is inevitable and then how to we respond to the government when questioned about not registering it.”

“We say we invented it,” Rupert state without hesitation.

“No!” Charles barked. “We need to get rid of it.”

“That is impossible because you know as well as I do you found it in a box in the middle of the Congo. You think that is the only supply of it?”

“Heavens no,” Charles said snide. “Germany has it now too.”

“You know what I mean. Someone made it. Someone has it. If they do, they can use it or have their own accident. We are ready. We’ll be standing proud with a fight.”

“And an open hand to get paid.”

Hands in pocket, Rupert shrugged. “Humanity can’t feed the family.” He moved to the door. “Charles, I trust you. If you want to get rid of what we have here there’s nothing I can do to stop you. I only ask that you think about it.”

Once he had left, Charles turned to Emir. “What do you think?”

“If you asked me yesterday, I would say get rid of it. In light of the news it’s on its way to Germany, I say no. Hold it.”

Charles nodded in some agreement. Emir didn’t say it, but Charles knew what he was thinking because it was going through his mind as well. He’d continue to work on EC175 for the time being, because something about Dr. Beutel taking the virus, just didn’t sit right with him.