and he took her ID badge and read every bit of information on it. He also had her remove her glasses for him.
She knew what he saw. A rather average-looking woman with curly red hair. In her ID photo, it looked darker, almost auburn. Her eyes were wide-set and the exact same warm brown color as her mother’s had been. Jane herself had no real memory of her mother’s eyes, but her father had mentioned it often enough when she’d been a girl.
Finally, she entered a holding area that contained the space suits. She went to her stall and pulled on the one that had her name emblazoned on it.
She exited the room and walked a short distance to the decon—decontamination—showers, which brushed over her. Then she pressed her thumb to a keypad and the door opened. “Welcome, Dr. Miller.”
The computer voice reminded her a little of the Star Trek computer. Maybe it was the space suits, but she always felt as if she’d left this world and was on a journey to another one when she stepped into the lab.
Small windowed doors lined the hall. Jane didn’t bother reading name tags or signs of what the scientists inside were working on. She kept moving until she reached her lab. Her area of expertise was Ebola, and she’d recently finished working with a new strand of the virus that had shown up in the Sudan.
Ebola was reliable and she knew what to expect. But this thing her father had sent—it was a mystery. The puzzle was still a jumble in her mind and on her microscope slide. But she felt in her gut that she was getting closer to figuring everything out.
She swiped her badge through the scanner and the door unlocked. She walked inside, hitting the light switch with her elbow. Her lab looked like every other one on this level. Long countertops lined the walls and a small office area was in the back. She could just make out her Johnny Depp poster, which hung on her large bulletin board next to the Dilbert cartoons that her college roommate, Sophia, had sent to her.
There was a sophisticated replicating machine on the end of the counter and a freezer to keep samples at the proper temperature until she was ready to use them. The freezer currently held samples of her father’s blood as well as the blood of a Yura tribesman.
The Yura were a tribe native to the Amazon. Some of them lived in Bolivia, but her father had spent the last few years with a group who lived near Manu in Peru’s Amazon basin. Their lifestyle had changed little in generations save for the introduction of modern weapons such as rifles. They still lived off the bounty of the rain forest and whatever the Amazon River and its tributaries provided.
Jane had been working with the blood samples as well as medication her father had sent and monitoring the effects of the primitive treatment.
She took the clipboard from the wall and wrote Blood samples from South America and the day’s date. She didn’t mention the Yura tribe or Dr. Rob Miller. Three damned months and finally she was getting closer to finding an inoculation that worked. She’d decided to mutate the local remedy her father had sent, a powder made from bark and leaves, to see if that would work. Today she’d find out.
The powder from the bark wasn’t a treatment. A treatment in the world of viruses was a way of stopping the virus. Kind of like a cure. But because of the nature of infectious diseases, virologists didn’t use the word cure. As soon as it was uttered, a new mutation would show up.
She’d noticed that the bark wasn’t a treatment after she’d administered a dose of the powder to the infected blood sample. It slowed the activity of the virus, but the virus returned to full strength one week later.
Jane had used her blood samples to start a colony of the mystery virus in the petri dishes. An application of the bark powder had initially slowed the spread of the virus through the petri dish, but within a week, the virus was flourishing.
The leaf used to make the remedy was related to the coca plant, which was used in the making of cocaine. Jane suspected that the side effects were more than just relief from pain.
There were no real healing properties in the plant. This meant that anyone using this remedy wouldn’t live. They’d alleviate the symptoms for a time, and wouldn’t be in pain while the disease spread throughout their body, but the virus would win in the end.
“Hey, Jane,” a man said, from her doorway.
Jane glanced up to see Tom Macmillan, another scientist who worked on her floor. What the hell was he doing here? She didn’t want anyone in her lab on the off chance it would get out that her father was involved in her current project.
Tom was an expert who worked with E. coli. He’d spent four years working in a monkey house in Africa, studying the multigenerational effect of the disease.
“What’s up, Tom?” she asked. Everyone was really too busy to ever just hang out and chat in the labs.
“This came for you. Since I was coming back to start work, I told Angie I’d bring it.”
Jane reached for the package and saw the same angular handwriting that had been on the last package from her dad. Her heart stopped for a second. The situation with the Yura must be escalating if he’d sent something else.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked.
Jane debated for a second, but being evasive would only raise his suspicion. “Some samples I was asked to consult on by a virologist currently living in Peru.”
“Infectious?” Tom asked. He was a little geeky, but sexy in his own way. Tall and lanky, he wore horn-rimmed glasses that looked good on him. His eyes were hazel and changed color sometimes with his moods.
Right now his eyes were the swirling gray-green of the Atlantic when a hurricane stirs through—excitement, she realized. He stared at the clipboard in her hands.
He loved it when they got a new disease. And he wasn’t the only one. There was a reason why they all worked back here, away from the public. Why they spent so much time in the lab. They all were obsessed with watching life change in their petri dishes. There was nothing quite like taking a potentially big biological threat and reducing it to nothing.
“Oh, yeah. I’ve been trying to find a treatment. This must be some new blood samples.”
“Want some help?” he asked. He rubbed his gloved hands together as he stepped into her lab.
“Don’t you have your own work to do?” She was reluctant to involve anyone else in this project until she had a firmer grasp on what her dad had sent.
“Yes, but I needed a break. I’m missing something and staring at the strand I’m working with isn’t helping. Maybe solving your problem will help me,” Tom said.
“Solving my problem? Tom, you do have a God complex.”
“Ha. Stop teasing me. I know you’ve been working around the clock in here. You need some fresh eyes.”
He was right. She went to her office and returned a minute later with the note from her dad.
“This is all I’ve got to work with,” she said, handing the note to him. “So far I’ve analyzed the viral strain and it is definitely lethal. I tried all common treatments but they didn’t work. Yesterday I mutated a strain of the local remedy—a powder from this tree—and let it incubate. I’m ready to test it.”
Tom
