Emmy Laybourne: Dress Your Marines in White

Was he going to throw up or would he be able to type? James Cutlass wasn’t quite sure.

TEST REPORT: MORS compound

January 14, 2024

Dr. James Cutlass, assistant to Dr. Elizabeth Massey

U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases

Jesus Christ, he was quaking in his seat. His hands shaking. Just typing in the header put him back there in the steel-colored observation chamber, flooded with light from the bright, white test room.

James needed to write the report. They wanted it two Fridays ago. Hell, they wanted it the day after it all happened. But James had spent that day in his room with the covers pulled over his head like a four-year-old.

He needed to write the report and get it in by five o’clock and it was four o’clock now and to make it all worse Brayden and his friends were down in the rec room, shooting pool.

James wiped the back of his hand over his eyes. It wasn’t cool to cry, when your seventeen-year-old son was entertaining. Had some pretty girls down there too. It was never cool to cry in front of pretty girls.

All right, it was just a test report. Like one of the many, many he’d written up in the past. Except that this time a copy of his observations had been requested by the CIA. And this time, several of the test subjects were dead.

There, then, start at the beginning.

After extensive testing on other primates, Dr. Massey and department head Dr. Savic decided that testing on human subjects was a necessary step to demonstrate the strength of the compound to Colonel Davidson, General Green, and General Montez, in order to receive permission to begin experiments with storage and release mechanisms.

How could he type when the godforsaken music was so ever-loving loud? If music is even what you’d call it. Screaming to a beat? Grunting in time?

James crossed out into the hallway and opened the basement door. If it was beer he smelled, he ignored it.

“Bray!” James shouted. “Turn it down.”

“Sure, Pops!” his son called.

James cocked his head. The music didn’t go down. Not a bit.

“Now!” he hollered.

Then it dipped.

It had to be 100 percent rage now to get any response from his son at all. Brayden just lolled around, talking back and exuding attitude, until yelled at. They didn’t even bother talking to him in a low voice — it was yell or nothing with Brayden.

Susan had given herself nodes on her vocal chords and would need surgery eventually. Just from “communicating” with their son.

If he could do it again, no kid. And probably a different career. Why hadn’t he taken the gig at Merck? Anti-obesity was where the money was. Why wasn’t he where the money was? Why was he in Monument, Colorado?

Dr. Massey and Dr. Savic discussed the issue at length and decided that presenting all four subjects at the same time would make a more effective demonstration.

“It’ll knock their socks off,” Massey argued to Dr. Savic during the discussions leading up to the demonstration.

“I have no doubt about the strength of your presentation, Dr. Massey. But why risk any confusion by showing the reaction of all the blood types simultaneously. Why not show them one at a time?” Savic asked.

Dr. Janko Savic was a tall man — Serbian or Croatian, if there was a difference. He was cautious, humorless, and exacting. Just the qualities you’d expect to find in the head of USAMRIID, of course.

She waved his concern away.

“You separate them, it’s not nearly as effective a presentation. Not a tenth as impressive. What we want the brass to understand is how MORS affects a group of people. Not a series of individuals. All four at a time will really strike a graphic visual.”

“I have less concern for striking visuals than I have for the clarity of the demonstration.”

“Dr. Savic, with all due respect, do you want mass production funded or not?” Massey asked, her hands on her hips. She was notoriously combative and ambitious.

James had found it thrilling, at first, to be the assistant to a woman who cared not a shred about what people thought. She cared only for the success of MORS and her own rise in the lab. The thrill wore off a month or so later.

She went through a new assistant every four-point-eight months or so. James was a year and a half in, and he was going to stick it out until MORS was funded. There’d be a bonus then. And he deserved the bonus.

It had seemed like such a good idea at first — Monument. A small town in the foothills of a sunny, rocky forest preserve. Out of loud, ugly Manhattan where the snow turned gray the moment it hit the ground and even the moon hung smutty in the sky.

Brayden was flourishing here. Back in the city he’d been on the fringe — heavy into gaming and basically living online. Here he was on the football team and was with friends and girls at all times.

But every day James spent with Massey took something out of him. Some measurement of optimism and goodness, it felt like. Susan didn’t see or didn’t care. The move had not got him out of the doghouse. James would never be out of the doghouse with Susan. She liked being married to an a-hole and an a-hole he would forever be, in her mind. If he wasn’t an a-hole, then some of her misery was her own fault.

“I want MORS to be funded. However, we can’t risk a repeat of the leak in 2021,” Savic insisted.

April 2021. The biological-warfare compound MORS had accidentally leaked into a test room during a rival scientist’s presentation. Massey and Savic had both been there. The rival scientist had died and Massey had lost her husband, a doctor who had been the cocreator of MORS, in the leak.

James felt that loss must have been what fueled Massey’s determination to see MORS make it into production. She had to have some deep psychological attachment to the outcome. Otherwise… what was she?

“Of course not,” Massey said. “Least of all me. But that demonstration room was not properly prepared—”

And here Savic started to object, “Now just a moment—”

But Massey shouted over him, “For a class one biological-warfare compound and you know it!”

Her teeth were clenched. Dr. Savic’s knuckles were white on the handle of his cane. It was clear to James that she was going to win. It was also clear that neither of them had really recovered from the leak in 2021.

Massey took a deep breath and smiled her fakey smile. The one that was clearly an indicator of aggression and not affection.

“All I’m saying, Dr. Savic, is that the room was not sufficiently prepared to test MORS. If it had been, things might have gone more smoothly. Can we agree on that?” she asked.

“Yes.”

And so she put in her proposal for the demonstration to Colonel Davidson. It was highly unusual to test a warfare compound on human subjects. There were long months of paperwork and revised proposals and waiting. And planning.

Four test volunteers were recruited from the garrison at Fort Leavenworth. It is my understanding that each marine was offered a full pardon in return for his participation in the test.

He felt sick, thinking of her planning for the demonstration. The plans she shared with him with such excitement and flair — the bile was right there at the bottom of his throat.

They celebrated when they received permission to execute the demonstration. Massey sent Cha, her other assistant, out for a magnum of Dom Perignon.

“The safety gel is what makes it safe,” she said, pacing with a glass of champagne. “At the first sign of trouble, we push a button and the gel floods the room, coating everyone — in three seconds, the compound is suspended and the air is clean. It will be fine. Of course, it will. We know the gel works on MORS. It’ll be fine.”