Henry: Part I
I.
Centers for Disease Control
Atlanta, Georgia
The facility was located at the end of a long drive, gated at one end and separated from the main campus by a quarter mile of urban forest. It was incongruous with the rest of the city, and if one ignored the high fence, the armed guards and security cameras, it felt almost peaceful. The world’s most secure biosafety facility, Judith Liu thought – quite a notion considering the samples of smallpox, Ebola, and other diseases that lay hibernating in the locked freezers of the CDC’s official operations.
“We have fifty people who work inside the gates,” Doctor Paul Desmond said, “although no more than ten have access to the fifth floor. The staff – guards, janitors, cafeteria servers –rotate through the facility on a seven-day schedule and live here full-time during their work shifts. You, like the rest of our medical and scientific staff, will remain here for the duration of the study. You can schedule one weekend of leave each month, provided that you complete the medical screening before you pass through the gate. You must also remain on-call while you are outside of the fence, and this will limit how far you can travel during any such absence. Personally, I find it advantageous to remain here – wouldn’t you agree?”
“It makes sense,” she replied, though Judith found the setup repellent, a prison for scientists. “Where do they keep him?”
“The fifth floor.”
An elevator door opened, and the laboratory director waved her forward with a grand sweep of one arm. The control room was at the end of the hallway, a bare space with a desk, chair, and computer terminal and with solid concrete walls on three sides. The fourth side was separated from the containment room by a heavy glass partition and another door of solid steel, and Desmond pointed to the badge reader as Judith gaped at the enclosure that occupied the center of the room.
“The restricted area is accessible only via the coded badge around your neck, which you must wear at all times. And you understand the other rules?”
“Of course,” she said, frowning. “I worked the index case in New York –”
“You will find that processing bodies at the morgue is somewhat different than dealing with Henry.” Paul Desmond smiled as he swiped his badge, and the door slid inward, granting them access to the larger space. “Let us go and meet our patient.”
The room was dimly-lit, and the windows were blacked out with heavy shutters, but Judith noted the ultraviolet bulbs, recessed deeply into the ceiling, as they entered the room. The shutters were secured by mechanical tension, designed to swing open during any emergency, and the bulbs operated on an independent power supply. Built to flood the room with light if the containment is breached, she remembered, though the likelihood of escape appeared small – the enclosed pen was constructed of the same heavy glass as the control room windows. The enclosure was twenty feet long on either side and completely bare save for a heavy blanket in one corner and a heavy glovebox – Henry’s only real contact with the outside world – connected to one glass wall. She stepped closer. The occupant of the enclosure was pale and emaciated, with heavily bloodshot eyes reminiscent of scleritis, or perhaps severe petechial hemorrhaging.
“We keep him hungry,” Desmond said as he peered into the enclosure. “Feed him enough to survive, but not so much that he gains any real strength. His eyes are the most obvious feature, but if you get close enough to examine the mouth, you will note that the gums are fully receded, leaving the roots of the teeth exposed – perhaps that explains the legends about fangs. You’ll be sampling his blood twice per week – his higher brain functions are impaired by the progression of the disease, but any animal can be trained by the prospect of a food reward, and Henry understands how to present his arm. You’ll pass your samples to the biosafety lab on the fourth floor via the dumb waiter in the control room. Do you have any questions?”
“What’s his full name?” Judith asked.
“Just Henry.” Paul Desmond smiled with the benevolence of an indulgent parent. “His last name is classified, known only in the records of some top-secret computer server. What I can tell you, because it is semi-public information, is that he was an accountant in Cincinnati before he became ill. The route of transmission from your index case to poor Henry remains unknown. Let’s go over the rules again.”
“As we discussed, I’ve had the safety briefing –”
“Then bear with me,” Desmond cut her off, “while I repeat myself. Henry is docile in captivity but very dangerous, and one side-effect of the disease is his impact upon weak or pliable minds. We suspect that he gives off some variety of pheromone, one that we have been unable to isolate and characterize, and the effect upon the staff is almost hypnotic. You will not approach closer than three feet of the containment barrier, you will not study him alone, and most importantly, you will take no action to breach his containment.”
Judith nodded, glancing nervously into the enclosure. On the far side of the glass, Henry registered no awareness of her presence, but she had seen the aftermath of the New York cases, and she shuddered at the memory.
“If a breach does occur, the ultraviolets turn on automatically – strong enough to blister ordinary skin within minutes, instantly fatal to Henry. As a secondary precaution, a series of barriers will drop into place, prohibiting all egress from the building. Our dear patient would murder us all before help arrived, but saving our lives is less important than containment of the disease.” Paul Desmond chuckled, and there was something disquieting about that soft laugh. “The original safety protocol called for vents in the wall to release a lethal dose of Sarin gas in the event of a breach, but some bureaucrat in Washington vetoed the idea.”
“Really?” She asked, surprised. “The gas will kill him?”
“As far as we know, Henry is immune to everything save fire, catastrophic trauma, and ultraviolet light.” He paused, and added, “The gas was for us.”
II.
She waited in the control room at the beginning of her first real workday, staring through the heavy glass that separated her from the containment room and from the smaller enclosure that was Henry’s pen. Barely six months prior, the virus was unknown to the world, but the historical evidence, or folklore, hinted at something much older. Their throats were torn out, Judith recalled, and the world had been fortunate in one respect, for the maulings were generally fatal, and the savagery of the attacks hindered the disease’s progression. An unlucky few survived, quietly incubating the disease in their own bodies, then falling into a deep coma from which they emerged with their physical faculties largely undamaged (perhaps even improved, she thought with a twinge of disgust) but with their minds permanently impaired, the richness of their interior lives subsumed into a great, bloodthirsty Id…
“Dr. Liu?”
The man who watched from the open door was of medium height, with a rich beard that stood out against the neatly-razored skin of his skull, and Judith was taken aback: she had expected a slender graduate student, his fingers yet untarnished by the wielding of scalpel or syringe, or perhaps an army medic, all tattooed arms and war stories and teenage exuberance. What confronted her in the doorway was something else entirely – a circus strongman or prizefighter, newly retired but not yet gone to seed. She flashed a quick, nervous smile, which he did not return.
“You must be George Stone.” She extended her hand, and callused fingers encircled her own. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
“I doubt that. Desmond went over the rules with you?”
“Yes.” She added, “You don’t have to babysit me – I worked the outbreak in New York.”
“And I’m sure you had an outstanding record with the Medical Examiner’s office. Grab that UV light for me.” He pointed to the supply cabinet. “Did they tell you what happened to your predecessor?”
“No.” She drew a deep breath. “Was there an accident?”
“Let’s get our blood draw, and I’ll tell you when we’re finished.”
She placed the UV lamp onto a rolling cart, and they passed through the security barrier as Henry watched with no apparent interest from the far side of the enclosure. He had been awake for two hours but had barely moved, standing at the corner of his cell and staring with unblinking eyes at the door, and Judith wondered about his circadian rhythms – even in the depths of the lab, cut off from the normal cycles of daylight and darkness, he fell asleep like clockwork with the rising sun, covering his body with the heavy blanket and lying perfectly still sunset.
“Henry!” George rapped on the glovebox. “Time for your blood draw.”
The red eyes bored into her as Henry’s head slowly turned, but he remained fixed in place at one corner of the cell.
“Henry!” George barked, and she jumped at the sound. “Glovebox – now.”
“I don’t think he understands,” she stammered.
“Oh, he understands. Desmond spent a lot of time working with him, and he’s very well-trained. You can train anything, even a rat or a chicken, with the proper incentive.”
“Rats are actually pretty smart,” she replied.
“So is Henry. See how he’s watching you? Your arrival is a new stimulus in his environment, and he’s testing the water, trying to see how you’ll react. It’s hard to say how much is really going on between his ears, but he eluded capture for nearly three weeks, sleeping in his own attic, then hiding in the cellar of one of his victims. Fuck up, even once, and you might find out just how smart he is.” George laid a hand on the UV light. “Last chance, Henry.”
The sick man moved slowly forward, his eyes still on Judith. The glovebox was made of the same clear plexiglass as the cell and accessible to the outside world via an airlock on one end. The opposite side was open to the enclosure, and the patient slipped an arm through the aperture as Judith inserted her hands into the heavy gloves. Beside her, George maintained one hand on the base of the UV light as she secured the arm in place with a thick nylon strap. She slipped the needle into Henry’s cubital vein and watched as blood filled the sample tube. The liquid was an unhealthy brown, more suited to a cadaver than a living being, and Judith’s hands trembled as she withdrew the needle and loosened the strap around Henry’s arm. She placed the samples into the airlock, and the patient retreated to the far side of the room as another panel slid open in the wall.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“His food reward – two pints of oxygenated blood, freshly warmed to the temperature of a human body.” George gestured to the security door. “We’ll have to leave before he will eat – Henry’s an ambush predator, and he doesn’t like to feed when others are watching. When the sun comes up, we’ll find both bags in the airlock, sliced open and licked clean.”
She retrieved the vial from the airlock and placed it into the dumb waiter, and when the sample was on its way to the biosafety lab, George pressed a button on the control panel. The dim lights of the cell were extinguished, and he drew a curtain across the control room window.
“That should give him a little privacy,” he said. “Of course, the whole room is covered by infrared cameras, so he’s never out of sight, even when the room is dark. ‘The illusion of safety,’ Desmond calls it.”
Judith frowned. “You don’t like him very much.”
“Desmond?” George snorted. “A total prick, all Harvard-this, and Cambridge-that, and Johns Hopkins-the other… This disease is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the United States government, but once he has Henry in his clutches, Paul Desmond sees a Nobel Prize with his name written all over it. A man with delusions of grandeur if I’ve ever seen one.”
“You said you’d tell me about my predecessor,” she said quietly.
“Ah, yes.” A mirthless grin appeared beneath the beard. “Odd for them to leave that out of the safety briefing. The last doctor in your position was a guy about your age, newly-minted medical degree from UCLA and a residence in a Level 1 trauma center in Chicago. Six weeks ago, Henry grabbed his arm when he reached into the glovebox a little too eagerly, and his radius and ulna were snapped clean in two. He was a half-second away from having his arm bitten off, but I got the ultraviolet light up just in time and smoked Henry with one good blast. He howled like a banshee and let go, and the whole room smelled like burned toast for a week. They put his arm back together, more or less, and he signed a hefty stack of nondisclosure forms, but I’m sure he got an equally hefty severance – enough to retire on if he’s lost his taste for the sight of blood.”
“Jesus,” she shuddered.
“Yeah.” George glared at the curtain that barred the view of their prisoner. “If it were up to me, they’d burn the whole place down with him still inside.”
III.
Judith blinked her eyes several times as she stared at the printout from the lab, forcing back the tendrils of exhaustion that wormed their way into her brain. Nothing. Henry’s blood was certainly unhealthy – she had seen better lab results in the blood of terminal leukemia patients – yet Henry continued to soldier on, rising and feeding and sleeping with the regularity of a metronome. But no circulating pathogen. She was working twelve, sixteen, twenty-hour days, for isolation of the virus would place its discoverer among the immortal ranks of Salk and Pasteur, and Desmond was pushing the team to its limits in a single-minded determination to be the first – to plant a flag upon the biological North Pole of medical science. Office gossip alleged that he had already picked out the binary nomenclature, a Latin variant of his own name – yet the causal agent remained stubbornly resistant to isolation.
No circulating pathogen in the blood, she thought, but no one has checked the saliva. Judith could not fathom how they would collect a sample from their patient, with his diminished mind and raging hunger, but Desmond had spent plenty of time around Henry, and perhaps he would come up with an idea. She made a mental note to raise the subject in the morning meeting and checked her watch – five hours until she had to be back at work. She took the elevator downstairs and set the alarm before half-falling onto the cot in her dorm, almost instantly asleep.
IV.
Morning meetings were held on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and in her old job at the Medical Examiner’s office, Judith had always relished the back-and-forth discussions as an opportunity to learn, to share information, to show off on occasion. These meetings were different, for all discussions were led by Desmond, and the content of each was tightly controlled. Medical doctors and biochemists spoke addressed their assigned tasks in opaque terms and coded phrases, and one scientist who mentioned sleep cycle earned a sharp rebuke. When her turn came, Desmond shut down her own summary at the first mention of saliva.
She was in the cafeteria, guzzling her third cup of coffee, when her phone pinged an incoming text. My office. Ten minutes.
The office of Paul Desmond was oddly spare, a windowless third-floor room outfitted with little more than a desk and filing cabinet, and the heavy door stood open to admit her. He was reading from a tablet, and he did not look up as she entered, so Judith stood in front of his desk, shifting her weight from one foot to another as she waited for him to finish.
“Do you know what I was doing in the early days of COVID?” Desmond read from the tablet as he spoke, pausing occasionally to inscribe a note in the margins of whatever arcana occupied his attention. “The CDC was panicking, certain that we were in for a re-run of the Spanish Flu – perhaps fifty million deaths, or a hundred, or a billion – and I went directly to Wuhan, risking my own life as I carried on the proud tradition of the men who went to Zaire during the first Ebola outbreak, or who traveled the globe – Fire Island, San Francisco, Haiti, Africa – in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Do you remember those days?”
“No sir.”
“Of course not.” He looked up now, fixing her with a basilisk stare. “Where did you go to medical school?”
“Vanderbilt.” The question was rhetorical, for he had gone over her academic record in detail during the interview, and she winced as heat spread over her cheeks.
“That’s right – you applied to Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Berkley, but you ended up at Vanderbilt. A perfectly fine school, I’m certain, but not quite the same as Harvard. You are privileged to sit in a room with the world’s most eminent infectious disease specialists, but you seem to have forgotten your place in our little pecking order – you speak, or remain silent, at my pleasure. Do you understand?”
“I understand.” A trickle of sweat ran down her temple and touched the fringe of her left eye, and she blinked to clear her vision.
“That’s good.” Paul Desmond looked up from the tablet, and when he smiled, that smile was somehow worse than the verbal lashing that preceded it, for the grin held the predatory edge of conspiracy, or of a con man finding his mark. “I don’t want the others to hear what you have to say. Tell me again about the index case from New York – the first bodies that you saw in the Medical Examiner’s office.”
Judith stammered out the results of each autopsy, still rattled by his change in demeanor as she recalled the corpses that made their way to her examination table. They had used fire in the early days, and long hooks to pull the infected into the sunlight, and the bodies arrived with charred skin and cooked internal organs, their degraded tissue revealing nothing more interesting than accelerated putrefaction. Desmond took in her recitation with interest, interrupting periodically with a question or observation, and when she finished, he let the silence hang until she began to grow uncomfortable.
“You forgot one thing,” he said softly, “the single factor that attracted my personal interest. Tell me about the other sample.”
“The other sample?” Judith’s eyes slowly widened in recognition. “Oh Jesus – so much has happened, and I had completely forgotten…”
“Small keys are easily misplaced,” he replied, “but when used properly, they can unlock the strongest doors. The police pulled one of your patients into the sunlight, and in the ensuing struggle, skin cells, muscle tissue, and other biological material – I heard that it was part of a lung – were left behind inside the darkened apartment. Some quick-witted soul must have had an idea of what they were dealing with by that point, because they conveyed samples of the unexposed material to the medical examiner, careful to keep them out of the sunlight. Do you recall your findings?”
“I divided the samples into three batches and exposed the first to ultraviolet radiation, where the cells died almost immediately.” Judith drew a deep breath, remembering the charred, sticky mess in the petri dish. “The second batch proved more robust, although they died slowly over time.”
“As cells tend to do when they are not fed,” he replied. “And the third batch?”
“We fed the third batch with small amounts of human blood. I considered subdividing those and trying different species of animal blood, but human blood is readily available from every hospital in the city, and our culture was already small –”
“And the cells survived,” Desmond replied. The unsettling grin, which had faded, returned, and spread across the face like a malignant ray of sunshine. “One might even say that they thrived.”
“They did more than that.” Judith began to speak more quickly. “Even a well-fed lab culture will eventually wither and die, but these cells remained healthy, and they appeared to survive for an indefinite period as long as they were fed.”
“As long as they were fed,” Desmond slowly nodded. “As long as they received human blood, they were immortal.”
“Yes,” she said. “Like cancer cells.”
“And that is why I shut you down in the morning meeting.” Paul Desmond sat in contemplation, long fingers steepled beneath his chin. “Do you understand what we are dealing with? The CDC management waxes rhapsodic about novel diseases and undiscovered pathogens, while a cellular mechanism for immortality lies right under their noses, just waiting to be discovered. I intend to discover that mechanism, Doctor Liu, and I want no competitors – but I need collaborators. A contribution on your part would open all kinds of doors for your career.”
“And you think the answer is in his saliva?”
“Why not? The pathogen has to manifest itself in some manner, but Henry is so dangerous that no one has tried to collect a saliva sample – until now. That will be your next assignment.”
“How?” she stammered. “If he’s as dangerous as you say, I don’t know how we can get a sample.”
“Work with him,” Desmond replied. “Henry shows few outward signs of intelligence, but I think you’ll find that he understands more than you realize. The assignment might require you to break a few safety rules, but you’ll be proceeding on my authority – and no one needs to know as long as nothing goes wrong. Do you understand?”
Judith nodded. She understood perfectly. Fuck this up, and you’re on your own.