Dustin Thomason - 12.21

Chel looked up. “What are you talking about?”

Stanton pulled out his smartphone and showed her proof of the impossible: Aero Globale 126 was the flight that ended up in the Pacific Ocean.

“Is that some kind of coincidence?” Chel asked.

“They have to be linked somehow.”

“Volcy didn’t even get on that plane.”

“Maybe not,” Stanton said. “But what if he still brought it down?”

“How?”

His mind raced as the logic came into focus. Human error was the suggested cause, they’d said again and again on the news.

“Volcy got on the fi rst flight,” Stanton said. “Pilots fly regular routes back and forth. What if the pilot who crashed also flew the Mexico City-to-L.A. plane Volcy was on? Volcy could have come in contact with him or her on that leg.”

“You think Volcy gave the pilot whatever was contaminated?” Chel asked.

Only now Stanton was already considering another possibility—a vastly more terrifying one. These were the kinds of connections seen in clusters of TB. Or Ebola. If two men Volcy came in casual contact with both became infected in two different places, there was only one epidemiological possibility.

Stanton had a vertiginous feeling. “Volcy gets infected in Guatemala, fl ies from Mexico City, and crosses paths with the pilot. Maybe they shake hands on his way off the plane and the prion passes. Volcy meets up with Gutierrez. They make a deal, go their separate ways. A day later, the pilot gets sick. Then Gutierrez does too. A few days later, the pilot crashes the plane, then the next day Gutierrez crashes his car.”

“But what got them sick?” Chel asked.

“ Volcy did,” Stanton said, darting for the door. “Volcy himself.”

The boy was crying again, and now Stanton hurried for the stairs, yelling to Maria not to touch anything in her home.

EVERYONE WHO CAME IN PROXIMITY WITH ANY OF THE VICTIMS had to be contacted and quarantined. The CDC needed to make an announcement alerting the public, encouraging everyone in Los Angeles to wear masks. Flights had to be grounded, public events shut down. Almost no measure would be too extreme, Stanton believed, if they could prove that this disease with a one hundred percent fatality rate had become infectious.

Within minutes, the FAA had confi rmed that Joseph Zarrow, the pilot who brought down the Aero Globale flight, flew the Mexico City-to-L.A. leg four days earlier. Human error suddenly had new meaning. But the connections were still circumstantial, and before any real action would be taken, before they would cause the public to panic, Stanton needed scientific evidence that VFI spread from person to person through casual contact.

Shortly after five a.m., he stood gloved, gowned, and masked, working with his researchers beneath a protective hood in the lab. Stanton had woken his entire Prion Center team and summoned them in the middle of the night. He had just finished preparing the solution that he hoped would react with the prion, wherever it was hiding.

There were only a few ways an infectious agent could spread between humans via casual contact. Stanton suspected the vector was a fluid from the nose or mouth. He had to discover if it was transmitted by saliva, nasal mucus, or sputum from the lungs—and how VFI migrated from the brain into one of these organs.

With the test solution ready to go, he pipetted drops of secretion samples onto glass slides and added the reactant. Then, beginning with samples of Volcy’s and Gutierrez’s saliva, Stanton searched. He examined every slide, shifting them across left to right, up one half field of view, and finally right to left.

“Negative,” he told Davies.

They repeated the process with sputum. Coughed up from the throat and lungs, sputum transmitted a variety of illnesses, including life-threatening fungi like tuberculosis. But just like the saliva, the samples were completely negative.

“Like a common cold, then,” Davies said.

But as Stanton triple-checked every one of the slides he’d prepared from the nasal secretions, his anxiety grew. When he got to the last slide, he closed his eyes, confused. Like the others, the nasal secretions were all clear.

“How the hell is it spreading?” Davies said.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Jiao Chen said. “Our casual contact theory can’t be wrong.”

Stanton stood. “Neither can the slides.”

If they couldn’t prove how the prion spread, he wouldn’t be able to convince Atlanta that serious action must be taken to contain it. Was there a flaw in his logic connecting the men? If the prion was spreading through casual contact, it had to pass through a secretion. But the lab findings were unequivocal: None of the three they tested contained the protein.

The phone rang.

“It’s Cavanagh,” said Davies. “What do I tell her?”

The lab was tense as Stanton’s team of researchers waited for him to respond. They all wore masks over the lower half of their faces, but their eyes conveyed a mix of anxiety and exhaustion. They’d been working on little sleep since the day Volcy was diagnosed.

Jiao Chen removed her glasses and started to rub her eyes. “Maybe we’re doing something wrong with the preparations,” she said.

Besides Stanton, Jiao had slept the least of everyone here. And as she rubbed her eyes with her fingertips, something gnawed at him. Exhaustion subsumed his postdoc’s face as she slid her palms down her cheeks.

Stanton grabbed the phone. “Emily, it’s in the eyes .”

DISEASES THAT SPREAD through the eyes were so rare that even surgeons sometimes didn’t wear goggles when they operated. But when Stanton and his team sampled the lacrimal fluid—the fluid coating Volcy’s and Gutierrez’s eyes—they found prion concentrated almost as densely there as it was in the brain.

Contagion began when people with VFI touched their eyes. The prion got on their hands, then they shook someone else’s hand or touched a nearby surface. Humans naturally touched their faces more than a hundred times a day, and insomnia was sure to make things even worse: The more tired victims became, the more they yawned and rubbed their eyes. With victims awake around the clock, their eyes were almost never closed, and the disease had eight extra hours a day to spread. In the same way that common colds caused runny noses and then spread through mucus, and malaria caused drowsiness so more mosquitoes could feed on sleeping victims, VFI had built itself the perfect vector.

The CDC called everyone who could’ve come in contact with Volcy, Gutierrez, or Zarrow, and the results were harrowing. A stewardess, two copilots, and two passengers associated with Aero Globale, plus the proprietor of the Super 8 and three guests, were the first of the second wave.

By midday, they were using the word: epidemic .

The worst news came out of Presbyterian Hospital. Six nurses, two ER docs, and three orderlies had all been suffering from insomnia for the last two nights. A test for detecting prion in sheep’s blood, developed years before, turned out to be effective as a rough indicator for VFI before the onset of symptoms. Already they were getting multiple positive results.

Stanton was angry at himself for how long it’d taken him to realize the prion was infectious, and fearful that he might soon be counted among the victims as well. His own test results were pending, and he hadn’t had an opportunity to even try to sleep. He had permission to continue working until he knew for sure, as long as he wore a biohazard suit at all times.

Throngs of desperate people stood at the ER entrance when he returned to Presbyterian, fighting through the heat, discomfort, and bulkiness of his pressurized yellow suit. More than a hundred possible victims had already been identifi ed by symptoms, and the panic Cavanagh had predicted was unleashed after the CDC’s press conference. In normal times, one in three adults in America had insomnia. Thousands of panicked Angelenos were now flooding every hospital in the city, convinced they were sick.