Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(93)

And now—only a hundred yards away from where he stands—the bulldozers and dump trucks and concrete mixers and men in hard hats and orange reflective vests are building the five-million-dollar Pfizer extension of the research campus.

Neal’s team is presently working out of an old laboratory, the tile floor the sickly green of an old hospital ward and the benchtops—as everyone called the counters—black and impervious and covered in plastic-backed paper held down with colored tape meant to define territories. Upon them sit boxes of pipette tips, pipettes, Sharpie pens, personal centrifuges, a spectrophotometer, water baths, glassware, latex gloves, Kimwipes, inverted microscopes, safety glasses. Lab coats hang from hooks. Computer terminals glow in the corners. An industrial refrigerator—double sided, with an open glass front—hums next to a liquid nitrogen tank that registers –170 degrees.

Augustus helps adjust a decapitated dog’s head—a German shepherd—into a vise on the stainless-steel counter. The fur prickles through his latex gloves.

“Thank you,” Neal says. His oscillating saw whirs to life. It whines when pressed into bone, slowly circling the skull, which he then pulls off with the soft pop of a bottle top. He stares at the brain, blackened with prions like an old walnut.

Neal believes he is here to say hello, tour the lab, pick up another carton of Volpexx. And he is. But he is also here to convince the good doctor to join Chase in the Republic. “Privately as his medical assistant. Publicly as an emissary.”

“I need to be here to help with my family.”

“Last I checked, your lycan daughter enrolled in a rehab program. Sounds like she’s getting all the help she needs.”

“No.”

“You’ll pose for a few photos, give a few speeches. You’ll meet with Alliance Energy representatives—”

“No.”

“—who, may I remind you, are one of your corporate donors.”

“My work is here,” Neal says, though his voice has lost its resolve. They both know it: he is no longer needed in the lab. He has more than enough people to carry out every duty—thirty of them altogether—the secretaries, the professors, the postdocs, the grad students. But this is what he loves most—the work—his eye pressed to a microscope, the smell of formaldehyde scorching his nose and the talcum powder from the latex gloves whitening his knuckles.

“I don’t want to tell you what your work is,” Augustus says. “But I will if I must.” Neal always puts up a fight, but Augustus always wins, and these past few months the doctor has more often than not found himself behind a desk or on a plane or in a fluorescent-lit boardroom meeting with politicians, meeting with donors, meeting with faculty from other universities wishing to interface with their research.

Then there are the interviews, him stationed on a couch alongside Chase, thanking the governor for his support and trying to explain, in layman’s terms, some version of the following.

This is how you make a vaccine.

Step one: Identify the infection. In the case of rabies, it’s the dog frothing at the mouth, the bat that swoops down from the attic rafters and savages a hand reaching for a light switch.

Step two: Isolate the bacteria or virus. Kill the dog. Kill the bat. Cut off its head. Find the negri bodies, the black spots in its brain that look like rotten grains of rice.

Step three: Purify and replicate the virus. You have one bullet but you need to make more. Through the gene splicing of the DNA and RNA in your infected specimen, you build your arsenal.

Step four: Inject the virus into a healthy animal and see if you get the same symptoms.

Step five: Once the virus is confirmed, you know that within this gattaca, this particular pairing of DNA, is your killer.

But only a very small portion of this composition is actually dangerous. The rest is merely the shell, the snake that surrounds the venom. So in further replication you excise the venom and keep the snake. This is what is known as a live modified, and once injected into the body of a healthy specimen, it harmlessly mimics the virus. The immune system then launches an attack and retains a history of that attack so that it can never be invaded again.

Zoonotic diseases are infectious agents that affect both animals and humans. They come in the form of fungi, bacteria, viruses, parasites, and prions, and their names are familiar to the newspaper headlines: AIDS, anthrax, mad cow, E. coli. There are nearly fifteen hundred pathogens that can affect humans, and 61 percent of them are zoonotic, among them lobos.

Lobos is a prion infection. Prions are an infectious agent made up of misfolded proteins so similar to normal proteins that the immune system does not fight them off. They contain no DNA or RNA, so the standard practice of isolation and sequencing is not possible.

“So what are you doing?”

Neal smiles. “Top secret. Let’s just say I had a breakthrough a few months ago.”

Augustus only knows that it takes forever. He calls Neal regularly for updates, and he can hear the frustration in the doctor’s voice. He had to isolate different groups of mice—those with low antibodies and those with high antibodies—and gauge thousands of results. Then he had to redesign the vaccine so that it could be used on dogs and wolves. Now he is in the process of testing thousands more subjects, and once that is done, he will have to redesign the vaccine once more for humans. Then there will be the months lost, at least three, to manufacturing and packaging and distribution.